by Wilbur Smith
This spur was enough for Nogo. He stood over his men as they laboured around the base of the stele, digging in clouds of dust, levering the paving slabs out of their mooring. Finally they freed the foundation of the stele and between them lifted the stone out of the position in which it had stood for nearly four thousand years.
Only once it was free did they realize the weight of the stone. Although slender, it was a solid half-ton weight. Nahoot went back into the qiddist and, ignoring the rows of squatting monks, pulled down a dozen of the thick woollen tapestries from the walls and had the troopers carry them back into the maqdas.
He wrapped both the stele and the coffin in the heavy folds of coarse-spun wool. It was tough as canvas, and afforded the men who were to carry it a secure handhold. Ten of the burly troopers were able to lift and carry the stele, while three men were able to handle the wooden coffin and its desiccated contents. This left seven armed men free to provide an escort. Then the heavily burdened procession moved out through the ruined doorway of the Holy of Holies into the crowded central qiddist.
As soon as the assembled monks realized what they were carrying away with them, a shocked babble of voices, of lamentations and exhortations, rose from the squatting ranks of holy men.
‘Quiet!’ Nogo roared. ‘Silence! Keep these fools quiet.’
The guards waded forward into the mass of humanity, clearing a passage for the treasures they were plundering, laying about them with boot and rifle butt, shouting at the monks to give way and to let the staggering porters through. The hubbub rose louder, the monks encouraging each other with their howls of protest, whipping themselves into a frenzy of religious outrage. Some of them leaped to their feet, defying the commands bellowed at them to remain seated. They crowded closer and closer to the armed troopers, clutching at their uniforms, chanting and whirling about them in a challenging display of mounting hostility.
In the midst of this uproar, suddenly the spectral figure of Jali Hora reappeared. His beard and robes were stained with blood, his eyes were crazy, bloodshot and staring. From his battered lips and ruined mouth issued a long, sustained shriek. The ranks of dancing monks opened to let him through, and he rushed like an animated scarecrow with his skirts flapping around his thin legs straight at Colonel Nogo.
‘Get back, you old maniac!’ Nogo warned him, and lifted the muzzle of his assault rifle to fend him away.
Jali Hora was far past any earthly restraint. He did not even check, but ran straight on to the point of the bayonet that Nogo was aiming at his belly.
The needle-pointed steel stabbed through his gaudy robes and ran into the flesh beneath them as easily as a gaff into the body of a struggling fish. The point of the bayonet emerged from the middle of his back, pricking through the velvet cloak, all pinkly smeared with the old man’s blood. Spitted upon the steel, Jali Hora wriggled and contorted, a dreadful squeal bursting from his bloody lips.
Nogo tried to pull the bayonet free, but the wet clinging suction of the abbot’s guts held the steel fast, and when Nogo jerked harder, Jali Hora was tossed about like a puppet, his arms flapping and his legs kicking and dancing comically.
There was only one way to free the blade of a bayonet that was trapped like this. Nogo slipped the rate-of-fire selector on the AK-47 to ‘Single Shot’. He fired once.
The detonation of the shot was muffled by Jali Hora’s body, but was yet so thunderous that for a moment it stilled the outcry of the monks. The high-velocity bullet tore down the entry track of the blade. It was moving at three times the speed of sound, creating a wave of hydrostatic shock behind it that turned the old man’s bowels to jelly and liquidized his flesh. The suction that had held the bayonet was broken, and the blast of shot hurled Jali Hora’s carcass off the point of the blade, flinging it into the arms of the monks who were crowding close behind him.
For a moment longer the strained, unnatural silence persisted, and then it was shattered by a higher, more angry chorus of horror from the monks. It was as though they were compelled by a single mind, a single instinct. Like a flock of white birds they flew at the band of armed men in their midst and descended upon them, intent on retribution for murder. They counted no cost to themselves, but with their bare hands they tore at them, hooked fingers clawing for their eyes, seizing the barrels of the levelled rifles. Some of them even grasped the blades of the bayonets with their naked hands, and the razor steel sliced through flesh and tendons.
For a short while it seemed that the soldiers would be overwhelmed and smothered by the sheer weight of numbers, but then those troopers carrying the stele and the coffin dropped their loads and unslung their weapons.
The monks crowded them too closely for them to swing the rifles, and they were forced to hack and stab with the bayonets to clear a space around them in which to do their work. They did not need much room, for the AK-47 has a short barrel and compact action. Their first burst of fully automatic fire, aimed into the monks at belly height and point-blank range, scythed a windrow through them. Every bullet told, and the full metal jacket ball whipped through one man’s torso with almost no check, going on to kill the man behind him.
By now all the troopers were firing from the hip, traversing back and forth, spraying the packed ranks of monks like gardeners hosing a bed of white pansies. As one magazine of twenty-eight rounds emptied they snapped it off and replaced it with another, fully loaded.
Nahoot cowered behind the fallen pillar, using it as a shield. The roar of gunfire deafened and confused him. He stared around him and could not credit the carnage he was witnessing. At such close range the 7.62 round is a terrible missile, which can blow off an arm or a leg as efficiently as an axe-stroke, but more messily. Taken in the belly, it can gut a man like a fish.
Nahoot saw one of the monks hit in the forehead. His skull erupted in a cloud of blood and brain tissue, and the gunman who had shot him laughed as he fired. They were all caught up in the madness of the moment. Like a pack of wild dogs that had run down their prey, they kept on firing and reloading and firing again.
The monks in the front rows turned to flee and ran into those behind. They struggled together, howling with agony and terror, until the storm of bullets swept over them, killing and maiming, and they fell upon the heaps of dead and dying. The floor of the chamber was carpeted with the dead and the wounded. Trying to escape the hail of bullets the monks blocked the doorway, plugging it tight with their struggling white-clad bodies, and now the troopers standing clear in the centre of the qiddist turned their guns upon this trapped mass of humanity. The bullets socked into them and they heaved and tossed like the trees of the forest in a gale of wind. Now there was very little screaming; the guns were the only voices that still clamoured.
It was some minutes before the guns stuttered into silence, and then the only sound was the groans and the weeping of the wounded. The chamber was filled with a blue mist of gunsmoke and the stink of burned powder. Even the laughter of the soldiers was silenced as they stared around them, and realized the enormity of the slaughter. The entire floor was carpeted with bodies, their shammas splashed and speckled with gouts of scarlet, and the stone paving beneath them was awash with sheets of fresh blood in which the empty brass cartridge cases sparkled like jewels.
‘Cease firing!’ Nogo gave the belated order. ‘Shoulder arms! Pick up the load! Forward march!’
His voice roused them, and they slung their weapons and stooped to lift their heavy, tapestry-wrapped burdens. Then they staggered forward, their boots squelching in the blood, tripping over the corpses, stepping on bodies that either convulsed or lay inert. Gagging in the stench of gunsmoke and blood, of bowels and guts ripped wide open by the bullets, they crossed the chamber.
When they reached the doorway and staggered down the steps into the deserted outer chamber of the church, Nahoot saw the relief on the faces of even these battle-hardened veterans as they escaped from the reeking charnel-house. For Nahoot it was too much. Never in his worst nightmares h
ad he seen sights such as these.
He tottered to the side wall of the chamber and clung to one of the woollen hangings for support; then, heaving and retching, he brought up a mouthful of bitter bile. When he looked around him again, he was alone except for a wounded monk who was dragging himself across the flags towards him, his spine shot through and his paralysed legs slithering behind him, leaving a slimy snail’s trail of blood across the stone floor.
Nahoot screamed and backed away from the wounded monk, then whirled and fled from the church, along the cloisters above the gorge of the Nile, following the group of soldiers as they carried their burdens up the stone staircase. He was so wild with horror that he did not even hear the approach of the helicopter until it was hovering directly overhead on the glistening silver disc of its spinning rotor.
Gotthold von Schiller stood outside the front door of the Quonset hut, with Utte Kemper waiting a pace behind him. The pilot had radioed ahead while the Jet Ranger was in flight, so all was in readiness to receive the precious cargo it was carrying. The helicopter raised a cloud of pale dust from the landing circle as it sank down to the earth. The long tapestry-covered load it carried had not been able to fit into the cabin, and was strapped across the landing skids of the aircraft. The instant that the skids kissed the ground and the pilot cut back the throttle, Jake Helm led out a team of a dozen men to loosen the nylon retaining straps and lift the heavy bundle down. Between them the gang of overall-clad workers carried the stele to the hut and eased it through the door. Helm hovered close at hand, issuing terse orders.
A space had been cleared in the centre of the conference room, the long table pushed back against the wall. With extreme care the stele was laid there, and minutes later the coffin of Tanus, the Great Lion of Egypt, was laid beside it.
Brusquely Helm dismissed the gang and closed and bolted the door behind them as they left. Only the four of them remained in the room. Nahoot and Helm crouched beside the stele, ready to unwrap the woollen tapestry. Von Schiller stood at the head of it, with Utte at his side.
‘Shall we begin?’ Helm asked softly, watching von Schiller’s face the way a faithful dog watches its master.
‘Carefully,’ von Schiller warned him in strangled tones. ‘Do not damage anything.’ He was sweating in a sheen across his forehead, and his face was very pale. Utte edged protectively closer to him, but he did not glance in her direction. He was staring fixedly at the treasure that lay at his feet.
Helm opened his clasp-knife and cut away the tasselled cords that secured the covering. As he watched, von Schiller’s breathing became louder. It rasped in his throat like a man in the terminal stages of emphysema.
‘Yes,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘that’s the way to do it.’ Utte Kemper watched his face. He was always like this when he made another significant addition to his collection of antiquities. He seemed on the verge of a seizure, of a massive heart attack, but she knew he had the heart of an ox.
Helm came to the top end of the pillar and carefully opened a small slit in the cloth. He eased the point of the blade into this opening, and then ran it slowly down towards the base, like a zip fastener. The blade was razor-sharp and the cloth fell away to reveal the inscribed stone beneath it.
The sweat burst out like a heavy dew on von Schiller’s skin. It dripped from his chin on to the front of his khaki bush jacket. He made a small moaning sound as he saw the carved hieroglyphics. Utte watched him, her own excitement mounting. She knew what to expect of him, when he was caught up in this paroxysm of emotion.
‘See here, Herr von Schiller.’ Nahoot knelt beside the obelisk and traced the outline of a broken-winged hawk with his finger. ‘This is the signature of the slave, Taita.’
‘Is it genuine?’ Von Schiller’s voice was that of a very sick man, wheezing and gusty.
‘It is genuine. I will guarantee it with my life.’
‘It may come to that,’ von Schiller warned him. His eyes were glittering with the hard brilliance of pale sapphires.
‘This column was carved nearly four thousand years ago,’ Nahoot repeated stoutly. ‘This is the veritable seal of the scribe.’ He translated glibly and easily from the blocks of figures, his face shining with an almost religious rapture: ‘“Anubis, the jackal-headed, the god of the cemeteries, holds in his paws the blood and the viscera, the bones and the lungs and the heart that are my separate parts. He moves them like the stones of the bao board, my limbs serve him as counters, my head is the great bull of the long board”—’
‘Enough!’ von Schiller commanded. ‘There will be time for more later. Go now. Leave me alone. Do not return until I send for you.’
Nahoot looked startled and scrambled to his feet uncertainly. He had not expected to be dismissed so abruptly in the moment of his triumph. Helm beckoned him, and the two of them went quickly to the door of the hut.
‘Helm,’ von Schiller called thickly after him, ‘make certain that nobody disturbs me.’
‘Of course, Herr von Schiller.’ He glanced enquiringly at Utte Kemper.
‘No,’ said von Schiller. ‘She stays.’
The two men left the room, and Helm shut the door carefully behind them. Utte crossed the room and turned the key. Then she faced von Schiller with her hands behind her and her back pressed to the door.
Her breasts were thrust forward, firm and pointed. The nipples showed clearly through the thin cotton blouse, hard as marbles.
‘The costume?’ she asked. ‘Do you want the costume?’ Her own voice was tight and strained. She enjoyed this game almost as much as he did.
‘Yes, the costume,’ he whispered.
She crossed the room and disappeared through the door into his private quarters. As soon as she was gone von Schiller began to undress. When he stood mother-naked in the centre of the room, he threw his clothing in a heap into one corner and turned to face the door through which she would return.
Suddenly she stood in the doorway, and he gasped at the transformation. She wore the wig of tight Egyptian braids and over it the uraeus, the golden circlet with the hooded cobra standing erect above her forehead. The crown was genuine, as old as the ages – von Schiller had paid five million Deutschmarks for it.
‘I am the reincarnation of the ancient Egyptian Queen Lostris,’ she purred. ‘My soul is immortal. My flesh is incorruptible.’ She wore golden sandals from the tomb of a princess, and bracelets and finger rings and earrings from the same tomb. All were authentic royal relics.
‘Yes.’ His voice was choking, his face as pale as death.
‘Nothing can destroy me. I will live for ever,’ she said. Her skirt was diaphanous yellow silk, belted with gold and precious stones.
‘For ever,’ he repeated.
She was naked above the waist. Her breasts were big and white as milk. She cupped them in her own hands.
‘These have been young and smooth for four thousand years,’ she purred. ‘I offer them to you.’
She stepped out of the open golden sandals and her feet were slim and neat. She parted the frontal split in the yellow skirts and held it so that her lower body was exposed. All her movements were slow and calculated. She was a clever actress.
‘This is the promise of eternal life.’ She placed her right hand on her dense honey-coloured pubic bush. ‘I offer it to you.’
He groaned softly and blinked the streaming sweat out of his eyes, watching her avidly.
She undulated her hips, slowly and lewdly as an uncoiling cobra. She moved her feet apart and opened her thighs. With her fingers she spread the lips of her vulva.
‘This is the gateway to eternity. I open it for you.’
Von Schiller groaned aloud. No matter how often repeated, the ritual never failed. Like a man in a trance he moved towards her. His body was thin, dried out like a thousand-year-old mummy. His chest hair was a silver fuzz, the skin of his sunken belly was folded and wrinkled, but his pubic hair was dark and thick as the hair on his head. His penis was huge, out of all pro
portion to the skinny old frame from which it dangled. As she moved slowly to meet him it filled out and hung at a different angle, and of its own accord the wizened foreskin peeled back to reveal the massive purple head beneath it.
‘On the stele,’ he grunted. ‘Quickly! On the stone.’
She turned her back to him and knelt upon the stone, watching him over her shoulder as he came up behind her. Her buttocks were round and white as a pair of ostrich eggs.
Helm and his men worked late that night in the Pegasus workshop, making the wooden crates to house both the stele and the coffin securely. At dawn the next day they were loaded on to one of the heavy trucks, cushioned with thick rubber matting and strapped down on to specially fitted cradles.
At his own suggestion Nahoot rode in the back of the truck, which would take just over thirty hours to cover the long and arduous journey to Addis Ababa. The Pegasus Falcon was standing on the airport tarmac when the dusty truck trundled out through the security gates and parked beside it.
Von Schiller and Utte Kemper had made the journey in the company helicopter. General Obeid was with them. He had come to wish them au revoir and Godspeed.
While the wooden crates were loaded into the jet, Obeid spoke to the waiting Customs officer. He stamped the documents clearing the two cases of ‘Geological Samples’ for export, and then discreetly retired.
‘Loaded and ready to start engines, Herr von Schiller,’ said the uniformed Pegasus chief pilot, saluting.
Von Schiller shook hands with Obeid and clambered up the boarding ladder. Utte and Nahoot Guddabi followed him. The rings under Nahoot’s eyes were even darker and deeper than usual. The journey had come close to exhausting him entirely, but he would not let the wooden cases out of his sight.
The Falcon climbed up into a bright clear sky over the mountains and headed northwards. A few moments after the pilot extinguished the Seat Belt panel, Utte Kemper thrust her lovely blonde head through the cockpit door and asked the chief pilot, ‘Herr von Schiller would like to know our ETA.’