Gold of the Ancients

by Graham Warren

  She had addressed her comments to Rose, but it was Alex who spoke. “May I answer this?” Rose nodded. “I think, Emmy, the answer is contained in what you just said.” Emmy looked confused, so Alex enlightened her. “As you said Nefertiti wants us dead. Nobody would disagree with you because she does. Whether we like it or not, it’s a fact we have to live with. The question has to be; why would she want my mother dead? Babs denied the very existence of ancients. She posed no threat to anyone, least of all any ancient. This tells me Rose is right; Nefertiti is not behind this.”

  Emmy conceded the point. They went on to discuss everything. They even took it as far as looking at each event in isolation. Alex and Emmy came up with different scenarios, sometimes quite fanciful scenarios, but everything came back to why Babs was murdered and how did this relate to the attack on them. Even the papyrus from Lower Egypt, they considered, could have been a red herring, so for now, they discounted it.

  After an hour or so the general consensus of opinion was that the murder of Babs had been ordered with the primary aim of stopping Quentin from going to Luxor, rather than to Egypt, or more specifically Cairo. They were also of the opinion that the assassin did not have to be able to read in order to kill. He only had to have enough understanding, perhaps fear of his situation, for him to destroy the last mention of his name, thereby not only removing himself, but also his family, from the afterlife. What they could not agree on was why, after his successful attempt to kill Babs, had he made a second attempt on their lives. They could also not agree on who wanted them dead at this moment in time, because, having discounted Nefertiti, they had no idea who did!

  The unexpected death of a wife should have been enough to stop anybody from flying anywhere. Only those who had an intimate knowledge of Quentin would have known that the combined deaths of Babs, Alex and Emmy would still not have been enough to stop him from flying to Egypt, his beloved Egypt. Things just did not make sense.

  For once even Rose had no answer as to what was going on, though she did offer a few thoughts. There was, however, no time to discuss these because Chuck announced in a very broad American accent, and with a not to be messed about attitude, that they needed to get ready to vacate the ‘bird’ as they would be over the drop zone shortly. A look of ‘what the hell do you mean drop zone’ instantly appeared on the faces of Alex and Emmy. Alex was well aware that just before they had reached Egyptian airspace the pilot had dropped altitude. He presumed they were flying under the radar because this flight was anything except authorised. This was an AFSOC flight after all. Now as he looked out of the cabin window he saw they were amazingly, frighteningly, close to the ground. If it was not for the speed they were travelling, Alex would have thought they had already landed.

  “Are we about to land?” Emmy asked in the hope of reassurance, after she had peered over Alex’s shoulder.

  “Yes, you are, but we are not,” Chuck said through a malevolent smile.

  Alex looked beyond Chuck, to the bulkhead that separated them from the cockpit. He read the black writing with a red drop shadow which had been very carefully painted onto the brushed grey metal: ‘Never interrupt somebody doing something you said couldn’t be done’. The quotation was attributed to the aviator Amelia Earhart. From somewhere in the back of his mind, from a book he had read a few years previously, he remembered that she had lost her life in the late nineteen thirties while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. He thought that in this instance it might have actually been a good idea if somebody had interrupted her from doing something that couldn’t be done. He also wondered why there was this urge to use quotations by famous people, rather than come up with something original. He decided that if he lived beyond today, he would come up with an original quote of his own and write it on a wall somewhere. He then thought of his name, Alex Cumberpatch, as the signature underneath. He liked Alex, though he was less than delighted with Cumberpatch. He thought that Marie Curie, Albert Einstein or Emelia Earhart each sounded far better than Alex Cumberpatch.

  “Okay,” Rose smacked her hands together. She gained the attention she required. “Both of you into the buggy. I will be driving. Emmy, you are beside me. Alex, in the back, please.”

  “It will be one hell of a bumpy landing as the desert below is the White Desert. All small rocks, not nice golden sand. Best that you sit on these.” Chuck offered each of them what looked to be an empty hot-water bottle. A red light flashed three times. “Roger that,” Chuck said as he hit a large yellow button before twisting an even larger red handle from vertical to horizontal. Alex did not get chance to read all of the warning signs before the back of the plane opened up and the extremely hot air of the desert rushed in. “I strongly suggest that you take your seats, or this buggy will be leaving without you.”

  Rose saw the look which told her that they were both happy for the buggy to leave without them. “Get in now,” she shouted over the sound of rushing air, and they did. “Sit on it and then twist the top like this.” They watched as her ‘hot-water bottle’ self-inflated. “It will cushion the impact. Now belt up and then grab the straps above you.” There were leather straps hanging down from the roll cage. “Not like that, Emmy, or you are likely to break your wrists upon landing, like this.” Rose showed them how to hold on with their fingers rather than put their hands through the loops. “There is a lot of metal in here. We do not want to make contact with any of it upon landing. The last thing we need right now are broken body parts.”

  Alex had a much more horrific picture in his mind. He pictured pieces of themselves leaving a red gash in an otherwise white desert. “Have you ever done this before?” he asked, only for his voice to be eaten up by the swirling air. “Have you done this before?” he shouted.

  Rose started the powerful diesel motor before she turned back to look directly at Alex. “No, but the theory is sound.”

  A green light came on and stayed on. The sound of the plane changed dramatically as the motors slowed and the airspeed dropped. Even above the noise of the plane’s engines and the rushing hot air they did not fail to hear the sound of hydraulic clamps being released. The buggy moved slowly backwards.

  “Hit button A once you are clear of the bird, button B once landed, and do not forget the tyres.” Chuck raised a rather large boot and kicked the buggy away from him with all of his might. It now moved backwards at an ever increasing rate.

  Alex suffered from a fit of hysterical laughter, which was only slightly lower in volume than Emmy’s screams. Chuck had both lived up to his name and his position, as he had not only chucked them out of the plane, he had also ejected them. Alex experienced a totally weightless state as he surreally watched the plane, and his comfort zone, fly away from them.

  Rose hit button A. Immediately the screams and hysterical laughter were halted. Alex closed his eyes in a successful attempt at stopping his eyeballs from leaving his head. The parachute had been deployed, not above them, but behind them. Their harness type seatbelts dug in hard as they slowed at an alarming rate. The buggy was obviously not equipped with airbags or they would have deployed by now.

  They were no longer flying, they were falling, and they were not falling smoothly. Rising hot air was buffeting the buggy. The White Desert came up to them with alarming speed. Their initial contact with the ground was so hard that their ‘hot-water bottles’ burst, each making the sound of a giant whoopee cushion, though nobody laughed. They were airborne, they landed, and then they were airborne again. This repeated itself over and over again. At one point they landed on a particularly large rock, which not only sent violent shudders through the buggy, it caused the buggy to lurch to the right with a violence that told Alex he was about to die. He held on even tighter, which until that moment he would have thought impossible.

  The upward bounce diminished the tipping effect of hitting the rock and they landed again the right way up. Several more bounces followed, though each bounce was far less violent than the previous one. They were slowing dow
n, they were on the ground, and more importantly, they were still alive.

  Rose smacked button B much harder than was actually necessary. Though it had only been Alex and Emmy who had screamed, Rose was obviously extremely relieved at their safe landing. The parachute detached and clamps on the wheels released. Rose shifted the automatic gearbox into low-all-wheel-drive. Moving forward just enough to be clear of the bent and twisted slide that the buggy had been attached to they saw the Lockheed MC-130 coming back towards them. Rose flashed the headlights three times. There were four where headlights should be and six, well oversized spotlights, attached to the roll cage. Nobody on the plane could have missed the signal. They were down safe and sound. The pilot rocked the wings in acknowledgement as he flew low overhead. Everything was lost in a fog of white dust, but nobody cared as they were more than relieved to still be alive. They were chocking to death from the dust kicked up by the plane, but they were alive.

  Chapter 10

  -

  Danger in the Desert

  “Are you really sure this will work?” Emmy asked as they unloaded the buggy.

  “After what has happened to me, to us, in the last couple of years, I am not sure of anything anymore. What I can say,” Alex said through grunts due to lifting a large picnic table down from the roll cage, “is that if he is in the vicinity, I am fairly positive this will work.”

  “How positive is ‘fairly positive’?” Emmy asked as she desperately searched for the cover to the portable gazebo she had just erected. She had found the bag with the frame in it quite easily, erected it quite easily, and also quickly, but now the unrelenting sun was getting to her. She needed to be in the shade and she needed to be in the shade right now. As they had travelled across the desert to Amarna they had experienced the pleasure of a warm breeze and protection from the direct sun by the picnic table tied to the roll cage above them. Right now she was well beyond light perspiration, she was sweating, and she was sweating profusely.

  “Do you know, that is what I love about you? Even when you are rattled, frustrated, or even really hot, you have a calmness about you. You are not at all like Kate, well slightly, but—”. Alex was halted by a pebble that Emmy half-heartedly threw at him. “See, you are like Kate. You both resort to violence.”

  “Why don’t you shut up and help me to find the cover to the gazebo!”

  “This one?” Alex had leaned into the buggy and was now holding up the bag containing the cover for Emmy to see.

  “Yes, that one,” she said as she swiped it from his hand.

  Alex thought he noticed a half-smile, and quite contentedly he carried on removing items from the buggy.

  Only a few more minutes passed before they were sitting in the shade and drinking cool, rather than cold, tamar-hindi. The flask was good, though nothing would keep drinks really cold in the intense heat they were faced with. The table in front of them was laden with untouched food.

  “Nothing is happening. Do you think we are in the right place?”

  “If we were any closer we would actually be in Amarna.”

  “I find that part a little scary. Being told that Nefertiti is too weakened to attempt to hurt me is one thing. Convincing myself that it is true, when I am this close to her city, is quite another.”

  “I can see that, but never fear, I will not let her harm you.” His hand moved as if it were holding a sword.

  “You and whose army,” Emmy thought, though she also thought Alex to be quite chivalrous.

  Alex took a sip of tamar-hindi and peered at Emmy over his glass. He considered her to be quite perfect. Her perfection was enhanced, not that it needed enhancing, by the flashes of sunlight which rode in their multitudes, just behind her, upon ripples of blue along the River Nile. Emmy looked back at him and was expecting, hoping, to hear words of love. “Do you know, Emmy,” he started very slowly, much to her excitement, but then said rather quickly, “I haven’t the faintest idea what got into Rose.” The moment was gone. Emmy wanted to throw her tamar-hindi at him, but that was not her way. “She was unusually evasive, though I haven’t got the faintest idea why.”

  Emmy thought, “Sometimes you do not have the faintest idea about anything. And this is one of those times.” He was alone with her on the banks of the River Nile. They had a feast spread out before them. “For the sake of the ancient gods, kiss me,” she thought, but no, he wanted to talk about Rose being evasive. Emmy knew that he did like her, really like her, when they were last in Egypt, yet they had spent more than a year together in England and there had not been so much as a kiss. He did want to kiss her, he was going to kiss her, until his father turned up at the British Museum, yet here he had all the time in the world and he had not kissed her. She knew that he was more than fond of Kate, yet he also disliked Kate. He had been in love with Kate, perhaps without knowing it he still was. Perhaps he knew that he was and did not want to say. Emmy remained conflicted.

  The only thing they both knew for certain was that they knew nothing for certain. Nothing was as it appeared either in their non-existent relationship or with recent events. They had left Rose back at Luxor, though not in Luxor, which in itself was peculiar. They had thought that they would be going straight to the Winter Palace. The hotel close to Luxor Temple and run by the family. Rose had advised them not to let anyone know they were in Egypt, yet, even when pressed on the subject, she had failed to give them any reason as to why she offered this advice. They had both wanted to meet up with Ramses, Nakhtifi, and Henuttawy, Emmy’s ancient relative and her absolute double. Alex had also wanted to get to know his ancient relative, Aryamani, much better, and to introduce Emmy to him. There were many others, of course, but they had both known then, as they did now, that for Rose to issue the advice she did there was a reason, even if at this moment in time it remained an unknown reason.

  From the time Rose had started off across the White Desert in the buggy, heading towards Luxor, she had spent far too much time talking about the buggy tyres. A subject which was not that interesting to start with. All it boiled down to was that they automatically adjusted themselves to the correct pressure. Chuck had mentioned the tyres to remind Rose that it was best to drive off immediately in order to get them up to working temperature. This way the self-inflate system would be far more accurate. They had been left deliberately underinflated so that they did not burst upon landing.

  When Rose’s conversation about tyres had eventually dried up, Alex asked her to expand upon the thoughts she had had just before they left the plane. Rose was disinclined to do so. Alex soon stopped asking, because every time he did the buggy hit every imaginable bump and pothole. This had had Rose’s desired effect of stopping the conversation dead in it tracks.

  “How long do you think we have to wait here?” Emmy asked with more annoyance in her voice than she had intended.

  “Give it another half an hour,” Alex said as he looked at his mobile. There was no signal, but it still told him the time. “If nothing happens by then, I will bring out my secret weapon.” He rubbed his hands and gave a mad scientist type of grin. Emmy failed to be impressed.

  “Amarna is much larger than I thought it was.”

  “It is, isn’t it,” Alex agreed. He had taken the buggy to the far north of Amarna, before returning to the south of the ancient city, to where they were now sitting. When they had last been in Amarna, in ancient Amarna, they had not exactly been looking around the city as tourists. From the ruins they had seen today it was obvious that there was a massive area of the city they had been totally unaware of.

  They discussed recent events, but the conversation did nothing more than go around in circles.

  “So this is your secret weapon, more lunch!”

  “Yes,” Alex said with little conviction as he took the lid off of a particularly large food box, which he had lifted from beneath the table. Emmy’s arm extended to reach in and take a sandwich. “Not these, try those.”

  “But those look nicer … and fresher.�
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  “Trust me when I say you would not want to eat these if you knew what was in them.”

  “Then why did you bring them?”

  Alex looked around and started to wonder why he had brought them. He did not have to wonder for long.

  “Look … over there … there is someone over there.” Emmy pointed towards the horizon. Alex’s head spun around. Initially he was unable to make out anything. Once his eyes adjusted to the glare of the desert he was disappointed to see just one person, but then, as the person approached, it turned into two people, then three.

  “I knew it. Why did I start to doubt myself? Cairo has always been able to find his way to food and those,” he said as he pointed to the sandwiches which he had denied Emmy, “are Mrs Inky’s special bulls’ head sandwiches. If Cairo was anywhere in the area I knew he would follow his stomach.”

  “Don’t you mean his nose?”

  “I know exactly what I mean.”

  Emmy could not disagree and they both waved.

  Cairo, Ropet and Sanuba waved back. They then waved much more frantically as they started to run towards them.

  “They are really pleased to see us.”

  Alex was unsure as to why they were so exceptionally pleased to see them. The waving looked to be rather manic. Instinct took over and Alex dropped to the ground as he spun around. There was a whoosh as a man, a very large man, swiped the air with a heavy wooden club, exactly where Alex’s head had been a split second earlier. The man had used so much force that his failure to connect with his intended target caused him to lose balance. He fell over Alex and hit the sand with an almighty thud. Alex heard Emmy’s screams, but he did not have enough time to even glance her way, let alone to help her. He stood, lifted a picnic chair and slammed it down onto fallen assailant with all of his might. Alex lacked power and it was only a foldup chair, so there was little of substance to really hurt his assailant. It did, however, do enough for Alex to be able to keep him on the ground for an extra few precious seconds, because every second Cairo, Ropet and Sanuba were closing rapidly. Alex now looked across to an equally large man, who was also dressed in the rags of a desert traveller, a bandit. He was dragging Emmy towards a small boat on the river. Scratching, kicking, and actually connecting where it hurts most, Emmy was not giving up without a fight. She was significantly slowing his progress, though there was no way she was going to be able to get away without assistance. In a millisecond Alex weighed up all the options and he ran, as he had never run before … towards Cairo, Sanuba and Ropet. He heard Emmy scream “No,” but he did not turn back, he did not slow his step, he ran away from her.