by Jack Du Brul
“When he planned his revolt against Murad II, he made certain he took the alembic with him.”
Cali summed up, saying, “And having the alembic allowed him to hold off Murad’s army for so long?”
“I don’t get something,” Mercer interrupted. “If Alexander used it for so long and Skenderbeg used it too, how much plutonium ore can there still be in it? It might be big but it isn’t bottomless.”
“There is very little,” Ahmad said, “but it doesn’t matter. The alembic isn’t used to disperse the radioactive dust.”
“Then how does it work?”
“There are two chambers within the alembic. When the mechanism is turned on, the shield separating them is moved and the two samples of ore are allowed to interact. Unlike the raw plutonium found in Africa and the barrels of it here, Alexander’s alchemists had refined it somehow, changed it in such a way that rather than emit weak gamma particles that are unable to penetrate human skin, the alembic belches deadly swarms of alpha and beta particles that sicken in seconds and kill in minutes.
“It was an insidious weapon that Skenderbeg employed only when absolutely necessary but Alexander used to wipe out entire armies. There are accounts of fifty thousand enemy soldiers killed in a single night when his spies activated the alembic in their encampment. When the siege of an ancient city called Qumfar wasn’t going as planned, Alexander opened the alembic outside the city walls and left it there for a week. When he returned, every man, woman, child, and animal within the walls was dead. A scribe wrote that their skin had blackened and peeled off their bodies, that some were so covered in blisters that they weren’t recognizable as human. He said many mothers had slit their own children’s throats to ease their suffering before turning the blades on themselves.”
Cali said, “When something is so heavily irradiated it would remain radioactive for weeks, months even.”
Ahmad shook his head. “I am an historian, not a nuclear engineer. I can only tell you what I know of the alembic. Perhaps Alexander’s scientists did something else to the ore so that the effects were short-lived. I do not know.”
“Or perhaps the town was severely nuked,” Mercer said. “And that is why today there is no such place as Qumfar.”
“Could also explain why Alexander died so young,” Cali added.
“All I know for certain,” Ahmad said, “is that in the wrong hands the alembic is much more dangerous than the ore Feines made off with today.”
“What happened to the alembic?”
“Upon his death Skenderbeg’s generals knew that they would eventually lose to Murad’s army. Even with the device, the driving force of their revolt was dead and it was only a matter of time before the soldiers lost their will to fight. Rather than risk the alembic falling into Ottoman hands they decided to honor both their leader and his namesake and do what Alexander’s men had wanted. That is, return the alembic to his tomb.”
“And did they?”
Ludmilla approached with plates of powdered egg and coffee from what little supplies survived the helicopter crash. It was the first food Mercer had seen since the flight from Germany to Samara, and while surplus Russian rations were far from Cordon Bleu, he and Cali attacked it with relish.
“So did they return the alembic to Alexander’s tomb?” Cali asked around a mouthful of egg.
Ahmad turned to her and said brightly, “Oh, most certainly.”
“Do you know where it is?”
Ahmad didn’t reply to Mercer’s question for several seconds. “You would have died in Africa if we hadn’t shown up. In Atlantic City too. You managed to find Chester Bowie’s crates and make certain that Poli Feines didn’t get them, but it was a close thing, no?” Mercer nodded. “And just now you came here to secure the last of the ore mined by the Soviets and yet Feines escaped with two barrels and there are many dead. Dr. Mercer, even if I knew where Alexander’s tomb was hidden I would not tell you.”
“You don’t know where it is?”
“No, Miss Stowe. I do not. Every schoolchild learns it’s someplace in Egypt, supposedly, but we have kept its location secret by not knowing it ourselves. The Janissaries thwart anyone interested in finding it long before they get close.”
“How do you know when they’re close?” Mercer asked, irritation in his voice.
“There are certain signs along the way. How do you think I knew about Feines?”
“How?”
“He made the same mistake you did, Doctor, only he made it earlier. I am the world expert on Skenderbeg. Anyone interested in him must first come to me. And just as I took over from my mentor, in time young Devrin here will become the gatekeeper of Skenderbeg’s secrets, and anyone interested in following the lore of his alembic will have no choice but to contact him.”
“So Poli called you?”
“We even met,” Ibriham Ahmad admitted.
Mercer was outraged. “What were you thinking giving him enough information to lead him to the mine in Africa?”
“Alas, he was already in possession of that information, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. No, I tried to send him off in the wrong direction but he was more resourceful than I anticipated. That was why when we learned he had hired a local rebel leader to get him to the Central African Republic we made sure we were there to stop him. Of course he escaped and so he began to track the two of you.”
“How did he already know about the mine?”
“Because my mentor made a mistake.” There was a trace of bitterness in his voice, but also a touch of understanding. “He divulged secrets to a student, a beautiful and fiercely independent woman whom he met while on an archaeological dig in Palestine in the 1920s. She was the daughter of an enlightened businessman who indulged her passion for learning. She was to be the love of my mentor’s life and he wanted her to know all his secrets so that their son could continue on in his role. He told her all about Alexander and how when he returned from the deserts of Egypt he carried a devastating weapon that gave him the power to pronounce himself God. He told her how Alexander believed the weapon was made of adamantine, the mythical metal used to forge Prometheus’s chains. He even told her that after Alexander’s death one of his most loyal generals returned to the African village to erect a stele commemorating the great victories he won because of the alembic.”
Mercer suppressed a smile. While he wasn’t sure what made him think the stele he’d seen was important, he was glad that he’d asked Booker Sykes to photograph it. If it was put in place after Alexander’s death there was a chance, albeit a slim one he admitted, that it might contain information on Alexander’s fabled tomb. He said casually, “Cali and I recalled seeing the stele just before the attack.”
“Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“Old oblique obelisks aren’t my thing.” Ahmad smiled at Mercer’s wordplay, not knowing that Mercer was trying to distract him away from the subject. “Besides, we didn’t take a close look.”
“Oh, too bad, it was in marvelous condition. I had never seen it before. The hieroglyphics were barely weathered and were quite easy to make out, though I confess I don’t know how to read any of them.”
Mercer’s heart sank. “Was?”
Ahmad gave him a look usually reserved for recalcitrant students who thought they could pull one over on him. “My dear doctor, do you think I would leave it behind for the next Poli Feines to discover? I had no choice but to destroy it. I do feel bad about desecrating such an important antiquity if that makes you feel any better.”
“No,” Mercer said miserably. “It doesn’t.”
Central African Republic
“So what do you think, Book?” Sergeant Paul Rivers asked out of the corner of his mouth.
Booker Sykes didn’t take the low-light binoculars from his eyes as he surveyed the ruined town of Kivu. “That I’m pretty lucky one of my ancestors wasn’t the fastest runner in his village. I’d hate to have been born in a shit hole like this.”
The two of them
had come ahead, leaving Sergeant Bernie Cieplicki to guard their truck a few miles shy of Kivu. Although Caribe Dayce had been the greatest threat to the region, his death had done little to quell the unrest. Small bands of armed teens roamed Kivu and the surrounding villages, drunk off their asses or so stoned they could barely see. And that had made it easy for Sykes and his small team to arm themselves.
On the road up from Rafai they had been stopped at an impromptu checkpoint by four kids looking to shake down anyone foolish enough to be traveling in the strife-ridden area. The checkpoint was at a spot where the trees crowded close to the road, so vehicles couldn’t turn around. They’d forced the Americans out of the truck, and while one of them covered them with his AK-47 the others began to rifle the four-wheel drive Sykes had bought in the capital, Bangui, with cash Mercer had given them for the mission.
Sykes had prepared for this; actually he’d hoped for it, because he wanted weapons for when they got deep into the bush.
The kid watching the Delta Force commandos was probably sixteen or seventeen, with deep-set bloodshot eyes and an insolent mouth. He held his assault rifle with casual indifference. While the three men he was covering were big, it was his experience that bullets trumped size every time. He was more interested in the cartons of cigarettes and other items Sykes had loaded into the truck for just such an ambush. Everything he’d brought was chosen deliberately to make the gunmen want to probe deep into the back of the battered Cherokee.
“Hey, hey,” one of the kids rummaging in the cargo compartment called excitedly. He emerged with a brand-new soccer ball and as Sykes had predicted he bounced it on his knee for a second and gently kicked it toward the kid guarding them.
Sykes watched the teen’s eyes, and the instant they flickered from the captives to the approaching ball, he and his men went into motion. Sykes lunged forward, grabbing the AK by the barrel and thrusting the weapon skyward. Bernie Cieplicki had been folding a tightly rolled magazine. Inside it was a six-inch-long nail that had been ground down so one end was as sharp as a needle. He whipped the magazine forward, sending the nail through the air like a dart. It hit the gunman who’d found the soccer ball in the shoulder, embedding half its length in his flesh. Had Cieplicki felt the situation warranted it, he could have sent the nail through the kid’s eye and into his brain. As it was, the teen cried out, startled by the sudden agony.
Paul Rivers, who at six four was the biggest of the commandos, shot past the wounded African and used all his weight to slam the Jeep’s rear door. The two teens inside hadn’t even begun to react to the attack. The impact of the heavy door, plus Rivers’s weight, broke three of the four legs dangling over the bumper.
With the gun pointed harmlessly in the air, Sykes struck the teen in the jaw with his elbow. His eyes fluttered and he dropped unconscious. Bernie leveled the gunman with the dart in his arm with a roundhouse kick to the side of his head.
The counterattack had taken four seconds.
Before continuing on, Cieplicki, who was the team’s medic, pulled the nail from the African’s shoulder, swabbed the wound with antibacterial ointment, and bandaged the puncture. There wasn’t much he could do for the broken legs except fashion some splints and give the two kids morphine injections to knock them out for a couple of hours. The teen Book had decked wouldn’t need drugs to remain unconscious.
Booker Sykes checked over the weapons with ill-disguised contempt. The assault rifles were serviceable, if dirty. What he hated was the gun itself. Liberal groups back in the States loved to point out how the United States was the biggest arms exporter in the world. And in absolute dollars that was true, but what they failed to mention was that the billions of dollars’ worth of arms were generally aircraft like AWACs and F-16s or warships past their prime, weapon systems that invariably were never used beyond training and coastal interdiction missions.
Meanwhile here was the ubiquitous AK-47. There were more than a hundred million of them scattered around the globe, and nowadays you could buy one in bazaars and souks in most third world countries for as little as fifty bucks. They had considered buying arms in Bangui but knew it would take too long to establish contacts with dealers.
Booker had faced the AK on four continents and believed it had caused more death and more misery than just about any single weapon since cavemen started bashing one another with clubs. Nuclear bombs had killed a hundred and sixty thousand people at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Men with AKs had caused the deaths of ten times that number in Africa alone.
So where were the protesters decrying how Russia and her old satellite states had flooded the world market with AKs with no regard as to who used them? But let the American government try to sell a couple of KC-135 aerial refueling planes to Taiwan and everyone screams warmonger.
It pissed him off.
They left the inept highwaymen loosely bound, and with a couple of cartons of cigarettes and enough food to see them through a few days, and continued on toward Kivu. Dusk was settling as they approached and rather than risk driving into an unknown situation, Booker ordered Cieplicki to stay with the truck while he and Rivers reconnoitered the town.
“About the town, smart-ass,” Rivers said to his captain. In Delta, rank had little meaning.
“Looks quiet enough,” Book rumbled.
The hotel where Cali had stayed was deserted, its Lebanese owner having fled with his family. A couple of youths lounged on the veranda. All the liquor from the bar and the food from the restaurant had long since been stolen, so they simply sat at a table and watched the sluggish river roll by, showing interest only when part of the bank fell into the waters from the constant erosion. A pair of men were working on Cali’s abandoned Land Rover. From what she’d told Book back at Mercer’s house, all it had needed were tires and he was surprised it was still here. He dialed up the binoculars’ resolution and noted the dark patch under the truck’s high chassis. Someone had either drained the oil or more likely put a few rounds into the engine block. He spotted a few families trying to put their lives back together, and an old woman sat at the entrance of her mud hut with a squealing infant in her arms. Book imagined the child’s mother had probably been raped to death.
God, he hated Africa, because the cycle would never be broken.
“So how do you want to play it, Capt’n? Drive right on through now or wait?”
“Mercer said the village we’re looking for is another two hours up the road. I don’t see any cars or trucks down there that look like they can follow us, but I’d rather pass through when it’s oh-dark-thirty so they don’t even know we’re in the area.”
“Roger that.”
Booker had wanted to bypass Kivu altogether but the only road cut right through the town center. He did a comm check of their tactical radios and sent Rivers back to the truck with orders to approach the town at three A. M. He’d make sure nothing changed in the desolate village, then meet them before they entered.
Booker Sykes couldn’t remember how many nights he’d spent watching over villages such as Kivu. Places in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and a dozen other countries he’d just as soon forget. But somehow knowing that this mission was connected to Philip Mercer made it all the more important.
He didn’t know what to make of Mercer. Without a doubt he was the smartest, shrewdest man Book had ever met. He handled himself well in any kind of fight despite the fact he’d never been in the military. At heart he was a loner but people seemed to gravitate toward him, finding in him a calm strength that few knew existed. And Booker was well aware of the way Cali Stowe looked at him even if Mercer himself was blithely ignorant. He knew Mercer was still grieving over Tisa Nguyen, but the boy was going to miss out on someone pretty special if he wasn’t careful.
Mercer was a close friend of the deputy national security advisor yet hung around blue collar guys like Harry White. He had a ton of money but didn’t possess an ounce of ego or pretension. Booker hadn’t figured out what made Mercer tick, what
drove him to get involved when other people ran. He suspected Mercer himself didn’t really know, and that was just as well. Sykes didn’t delve too deeply into why he joined the military and then volunteered for its most dangerous missions, because if he found the truth he probably couldn’t do his job anymore.
Without electricity Kivu shut down as the sun sank lower to the west. The rebels on the hotel veranda grabbed up their weapons and climbed to the room they’d commandeered. The woman with the baby entered her little hut. She lit a lantern but only let it burn long enough to feed the child and tuck it into a makeshift crib. The single street through town and the small square were deserted by nine o’clock.
Yet Booker stayed with his plan, and as insects fought their way past his barrier of DEET repellent and feasted on his blood he sat motionless on a small bluff along the road and watched Kivu sleep.
He called Rivers at a quarter to three to tell him everything was set, and retreated a hundred yards up the road. The instant he heard the Jeep’s engine over the din of insects and nocturnal animals, he radioed Rivers to kill the engine. He loped another hundred yards away from Kivu to where the Jeep Cherokee sat silently.
Wordlessly Booker and Paul Rivers moved to the back of the four-wheeler while Bernie Cieplicki stood at the open driver’s door. Together they began to push the two-ton truck along the dirt road. True to his role as the team prankster, Bernie Cieplicki made Sykes and Rivers provide the bulk of the horsepower while he merely steered.
They passed though Kivu as silently as wraiths and continued down the road for another two hundred yards. Sykes and Rivers were lathered in sweat and blowing like draft horses.