King Solomon's Curse

23

Nina and Eddie reacted in shock at the detonation. Brice, however, had clearly expected it to happen, but not known exactly when. He flinched — then recovered and ran for the windows.

Eddie’s revolver tracked him—

Something smashed down on the building with such force that the ceiling split apart. Brice dived behind the altar, Eddie whirling to shield Nina from flying debris. More impacts came from outside as falling stones hit the bottom of the cavern.

The Yorkshireman looked up — to see Brice vault through a window. ‘Nina, you okay?’

‘Yeah,’ she gasped. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling, broken stone scattered beneath it. She saw the remnants of a carved eagle on one piece of rubble. ‘Oh my God, they blew open the palace roof!’

Eddie ran to the window. The darkness outside had been pierced by an eerie shaft of grey light — picking out Brice running for the mine. He raised his gun, but the other Briton leapt into the excavations as he fired. The bullet shattered against the vein of greenish stone with an almost musical clang. ‘Shit!’

Nina hurried to him, but the escaping spy was not her greatest concern. ‘Eddie, listen!’ The Mother of the Shamir glinted in the first natural light to reach it for thousands of years — and its constant, unsettling hum changed.

Growing louder.

‘We should get the hell out of here,’ she said, alarmed. ‘Remember what happened to Zhakana when they dug this place out? I think it’s going to happen again!’

‘Brice is still down there,’ Eddie snapped.

‘Yeah, and we’ll be stuck here with him if we don’t move. That thing’s charging up, just like the Shamir — only it’s way bigger!’

He got her point, reluctantly retreating. A voice reached them as they emerged into the chasm. ‘Nina! Eddie!’ shouted Howie.

Nina looked up to find the young man on a bridge. ‘Get up to the surface!’ she cried. High above him, she saw an elongated hole had been blasted in the palace’s vaulted roof.

‘Those rocks took out my drone!’ Howie told her.

‘You’ve got the recording, haven’t you?’ demanded Eddie.

The American held up his laptop. ‘Yeah, but—’

‘Guard it with your fucking life! It’s the only proof of what’s been going on here! Now move!’

Clutching the computer, Howie ran up the bridge. ‘We’ve got to get up there fast,’ Eddie told Nina as they hared up the stairway. ‘If they rope down from that hole, they’ll be able to attack from both sides — shit!’ The sharp retort of an explosion echoed down from above. ‘That was a grenade! They must’ve called in reinforcements.’

‘What, so now we’re even more outnumbered?’ Nina said unhappily. ‘Great!’

The sound of gunfire reached them — Kalashnikovs on single shot against similar rifles on full auto. Another grenade exploded, the detonation ringing through the tunnels. Now the militia had explosives, it would take more than a few boulders to form a defensible position — and Eddie wasn’t even sure if there was anywhere inside the palace that could be defended.

They had to try, though. He and Nina hurried across the lowest bridge. He glanced down — and saw Brice climbing from the mine. He couldn’t spare the time to take a shot at him, though. ‘Buggeration and fuckery!’

Nina looked to see what had drawn his ire. She spotted the British agent — but then saw something else, newly revealed in the light from on high. A faint mark on the rock, perfectly level, ran all the way around the chasm’s walls just above the upper tier of buildings. Water, she realised; the residue of flooding, long-drained. But had it escaped naturally over time, or…

The thought was interrupted by another gunshot — from overhead. Howie yelped in fright as a bullet struck the cliff near him.

Silhouettes appeared in the hole in the roof. More shots cracked downwards. ‘Whoa!’ Nina gasped as a round whipped past. ‘Now what do we do?’

‘Get into cover,’ Eddie said. They reached the next ascending ledge cut into the rock face, the overhang partially shielding them. He flattened himself against the wall and sidestepped upwards, Nina following. ‘Dunno how the fuck we’ll—’

He broke off as a rope dropped from the hole and uncoiled into the buildings below. It fell still — then juddered as someone began to climb down it.

Eddie leaned out to see a militia man with an AK slung over his back making a clumsy descent. A second rope made the long fall from the hole’s other end. ‘That bastard Brice,’ he growled as he continued upwards. ‘He was just buying time for them to plant the explosives and get ready for an assault!’

A shout came from the uppermost ledge. ‘Eddie!’ cried Ziff. ‘Nina! They’ve broken in!’

‘Yeah, I noticed!’ the Yorkshireman shouted back. ‘You got ammo left?’

‘Yes!’

‘So bloody use it!’

The Israeli took the hint, aiming at the first of the descending men. He hesitated when he found his target, the Congolese completely defenceless as he lowered himself, but the sight of both the Kalashnikov on his back and a savage machete hanging from his belt brought home the threat. Ziff fired, sending the man screaming to the rocky ground far below.

The second man hurriedly wound his rope around one wrist before fumbling for a pistol with the other. Ziff took aim — only to duck behind a wall as someone on the roof sprayed shots at him.

One shattered a cask of oil, splashing its contents across the ledge — and igniting them. The archaeologist gasped, scrambling out of cover to escape the flaming liquid.

The man on the rope brought up his handgun—

Two bullet holes burst open in his chest as Paris rushed from the passageway, his rifle propped in the crook of his right arm. The militia man tumbled after his late comrade, smacking on to the roof of a building below.

Ziff found less fiery cover. ‘Good shot,’ he told his rescuer.

The scruffy little man gave him a dark smile. ‘I’m left-handed.’

Fortune emerged from the passage, firing two shots at the ruptured roof. One struck a sagging block at the hole’s edge — and the other a man lying on top of it, smashing his shoulder. He shrieked, flopping face down as his arm gave way — and the jolt caused the lead sheet supporting the stone to split. The carved block fell away, the wounded man following it into the darkness below.

The other Insekt Posse around the opening hurriedly withdrew as more stones ground ominously against each other. ‘They’re pulling back!’ Fortune shouted.

The documentary team arrived behind him. Rivero was still filming, Lydia equally unwilling to abandon her own equipment. ‘That’s not gonna help us!’ the cameraman objected. ‘There’s no way out of here!’

Eddie halted at the end of a bridge, assessing the situation. The militia above had retreated, but would come back the moment they realised the remaining blocks were holding in place. ‘Fortune! How many behind you?’

‘At least ten,’ the African replied.

‘How long before they catch up?’

Even from a distance, he could see Fortune’s gold-tinted smile. ‘It could be some time. We reset the traps.’

‘At least two guys got squashed in the first one,’ Paris added.

‘Best thing to do to an Insekt,’ said Eddie. ‘But if we can’t go back that way, I don’t have a fucking clue how we’re going to get out. Short of climbing those ropes,’ he gestured at the two dangling lines, ‘and it’s a long-arse climb!’

‘Eddie, wait,’ Nina said urgently. ‘There might be another way out!’ She pointed at the bottom of the chasm. ‘The drainage tunnels come out on the cliff, above the river — the waterfalls are fed by them.’

‘Maybe, but there’s one little problem — they’re full of water! And the waterfalls are fifty, sixty feet high. The fall’d kill us.’

‘I think there are more tunnels, higher up.’ She indicated the tide mark. ‘There, you see?’

Eddie peered down. Beyond the upper tier of buildings was a patch of blackness that could have been a tunnel entrance — or nothing more than a shadowed recess. ‘If it’s higher up in the cave, it’ll come out even higher on the cliff.’

‘I know, it’s a risk. But if we stay in here, sooner or later we’ll run out of bullets — and then they’ll massacre us.’

‘Okay, we’ll try it,’ he reluctantly said, before shouting: ‘Get down to the village! There might be a way out through the drainage tunnels!’

‘Might be?’ wailed Lydia.

‘You can bloody stay here if you want! But it’s the only chance we’ve got.’

‘He is right,’ Fortune said firmly. ‘Everyone, across the bridge. Quickly!’

Panting, Howie reversed direction. ‘Great, just… ran all the way up here, now gotta… run all the way back down!’

‘What about Brice?’ Nina asked Eddie as they hurried back. ‘He’s still down there.’

Her husband hefted the revolver. ‘If I see him, I’ll shoot him. Pretty simple.’

Fortune took up the rearguard position as his group headed downwards. ‘I can hear them in the tunnels,’ he warned. ‘They must have made it through the traps — if any were with Mukobo when we first came down, they would know how to beat them.’

‘If we got a couple of ’em, that’s still a help,’ Eddie called back to him as they crossed another bridge. ‘The less we have—’

Another explosion ripped through the palace’s roof.

Everyone ducked as gritty debris showered them, stone blocks plummeting past to explode on the cavern floor. Eddie looked up at the new rent overhead. The Insekt Posse reinforcements had this time planted their explosives with considerably less precision. The hole was bigger and more ragged than its predecessor, a loose block slowly bending the lead beneath it before falling away.

But this did not deter the militia. Ropes were hurled through the second opening. A third line also dropped from the original hole, armed figures crouching at its edge to cover those about to descend. ‘There’s more coming — go, go!’ cried Eddie.

Nina looked down at the terraces as they hurried deeper. ‘I think there’s more than one drainage tunnel,’ she said. ‘So which do we take?’

Gunfire above. Eddie glanced up to see Paris return fire at an attacker on the roof as the militia started to descend from the second hole. ‘The nearest sounds good!’ More men lowered themselves from the first set of ropes. ‘Fortune, hurry up or they’ll cut you off!’

Fortune fired at the rappellers, one falling with a scream that was abruptly truncated as he hit the cave floor. ‘Running low on ammo!’

‘Me too!’ added Paris as he sent a couple of shots at the other opening.

‘Some extra mags down here!’ Eddie shouted, pointing at the bodies below. He and Nina crossed the last bridge and headed as quickly as they could for the first tier of buildings.

Movement below it: Brice, at the Shamir chamber’s entrance. The Yorkshireman halted sharply to take aim—

Nina, unprepared for his sudden stop, ran into him as he pulled the trigger. The Magnum round blasted a chunk of stone from the wall beside the British agent. His countryman reacquired his target and fired again, but Brice had already darted into the opening. ‘Bollocks! Not your fault,’ Eddie quickly reassured her as he moved again.

‘Are you going to go after him?’ she asked.

‘No time.’ It would be touch and go whether everyone reached the terrace before the rappelling militia touched down.

He jumped the last few stairs to the cavern floor. The village spread out before them, a ghostly maze in the shafts of half-light. ‘Where’s the nearest drain?’

Nina had hoped the drainage tunnels — if that was what they were — would be evenly distributed, but the closest she could see was above the next tier down, unreachable without scaling the rock face. ‘Dammit! It’s on the other side of the village.’

‘Come on.’ He ran for one of the narrow alleys between the little structures.

‘That one’s closer!’ said Nina of another.

‘A guy fell over here,’ Eddie countered. They raced along the confined street. It zigzagged, the dwellings seemingly not constructed to any orderly plan, but he soon saw what he had hoped for. ‘There!’

The broken corpse of one of the Insekt Posse was slumped over a roof, his lower jaw mashed grotesquely up into his mouth. Nina grimaced as Eddie dragged him to the ground. A rapid check of the rifle on his back proved it had withstood the fall far better than its owner. ‘Take this,’ he said, giving Nina the golden revolver as he hefted the AK.

A burst of bullets fired from above struck nearby rooftops like deadly hailstones. Eddie and Nina flattened themselves against a wall, then ran again. A side alley gave them a glimpse of the lower level — and the men on the ropes descending towards it.

‘Eddie, keep going!’ cried Fortune, trailing his group across the final bridge. More shots came from the palace’s roof, Paris and Ziff firing back to force the snipers to retreat. ‘We will be right behind you!’

‘So will they,’ Nina said in alarm. More figures dropped from the roof, descending spider-like on their lines.

As if that were not bad enough, now gunfire came from a new direction. The Insekt Posse had made it through Solomon’s challenges. ‘Shit, we’re gonna get swarmed,’ Eddie said. ‘We’ve got to find that way out!’

The alley opened out into a small square. A stone bowl surrounded by oil casks sat in its centre, other streets angling out of it. ‘Which way?’ asked Nina.

‘Think there was another dead guy down here,’ Eddie said, heading for one passage.

Nina started after him, but stopped as she heard Howie shout her name. She turned to see the young man breathlessly enter the square, still clutching the laptop. ‘Wait, wait!’ he gasped.

‘We can’t!’ she replied. More rifle shots echoed down the cavern, a round ricocheting off a nearby building. ‘Come on!’

She followed Eddie, Howie in her wake. The light from the first hole in the roof made it easier to negotiate the confined alleyways — but it also made them easier to see from above. Bullets smacked against stone—

A high-pitched cry from behind — Lydia. ‘Jesus, she’s hit!’ shouted Fisher.

‘It just clipped her arm!’ Ziff quickly responded. ‘She’s okay.’

The New Zealander replied with a screech of both pain and anger. ‘That’s easy for you to say!’

‘Move, quickly!’ Fortune snapped. ‘Eddie, we are almost at the bottom.’

‘So are the militia!’ warned Paris.

Eddie scrambled on to a nearby roof. He spun to take in the whole cavern — and did not like what he saw. The first wave of Insekt Posse coming from the palace roof had just reached the ground, with more on the way, and the group descending from the tunnels were now on the second bridge. The expedition was outnumbered at least four-to-one — and outgunned by a much greater ratio. ‘Get to the tunnels!’ he yelled as he jumped back down. ‘Get out of here — just run!’