Land of the Gods

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“No! Stay where you are!”

The command echoed around the jungle. Gradually, Hawke noticed at least two dozen heavily camouflaged men break though the tree line surrounding them. Each was holding a submachine gun.

“And drop your weapons!”

He signaled to the others to lower their guns and take a step back, raising their hands as they did so. The leader of the small army walked over to them, a pistol in his hand and a cruel smile on his lean, sweaty face. He stared at Hawke before turning to the skeleton lashed to the tree trunk. “I see you met Ibrahim. How’s he doing? He’s not very talkative these days.”

“Most people with a crossbow bolt through their eyes aren’t.”

“Bring them back to the base!”

Hawke held Razak’s eyes as his goons cuffed their hands behind their backs and ordered them to march through some long grass and into some trees to the east. The walk was short but hot and tiring. When they arrived, they saw a small clearing with some military tents dotted around.

“Welcome to my field HQ.” Razak gestured for Hawke and the others to step inside one of the tents. “Please, come out of the heat and away from the mosquitoes.” He turned to a man at his side and ordered that he remove their cuffs. “You’re not going anywhere in this jungle, that’s for sure.”

Lea scowled at him. “You can’t do this to us,” Razak.”

He slipped his hands in his pockets and strolled to where the mosquito mesh draped down to the ground. “Am I supposed to be impressed that you know my name? Many people do. Ibrahim over there certainly did. He tried to sleep with my daughter. Big mistake.”

“You should be in prison, you psycho!” Zeke said.

He laughed. “Men like me do not go to prison — we’re too busy searching for rings.”

Hawke caught the fear in Lea’s eyes. “What did you just say?”

“Oh, you thought I believed there was just one ring?” There was a smugness in his voice, and a fiendish sparkle in his eye. He was clearly delighting in toying with them. “Please, you’re not so conceited to think that only the great ECHO team know the value of these rings?”

“I don’t understand,” Lea said. “The Codex was…”

Hawke gripped her arm. “Don’t tell him anything. He’s fishing.”

Razak’s smile faded. “I don’t go fishing, Englishman. Neither am I as stupid as you seem to think I am. You think you can break into my apartment or raid my plantation without me knowing about it? Without knowing who you are and what you want?”

Now, for the first time he brought his hand out of his pocket and held it up in front of their faces. They all saw it at once, sparkling dully in the diffused light of the tropical thunderstorm.

“The ring!” Lexi said.

Lea couldn’t take her eyes off it. “My God…”

“My Gods,” Razak emphasized, and then laughed again. “When I was a young man I inherited this rubber plantation from my father. As you can see, it’s a very substantial property and we are a very wealthy family and if you know your commodity prices then you will know that the price of rubber has gone up considerably in the last twenty years.”

“This is fascinating,” Ryan said. “I wish I had a notebook.”

“Silence!” Razak snapped.

“Don’t be too angry with him,” Scarlet said. “He’s always had a thing about rubber.”

Razak smacked his hand down on the table and brought the laughs to an abrupt end. “If this is amusing you perhaps one of you would like to see how young Ibrahim died, first hand?”

A man with a crossbow stepped forward, pulled a string back on his weapon and slotted a sharpened bolt down in the flight groove.

Razak waited for silence. “I thought not… As I was saying, the price of rubber is better now, but when my father died I was a very young man and back then the price of our commodity was flatlining, as you say.”

“What’s the point of this lecture?” Hawke said.

Razak ignored him. “I decided to expand the business and go into palm oil.”

“So you love orangutans as much as I do, then,” Lea said.

“Spare me, please,” Razak looked at her with contempt. “You couldn’t go fifteen seconds without using a product made with my palm oil. It’s a fascinating substance, but it requires the clearing of vast amounts of land in order to plant the oil palms. We started work the day after my father’s funeral, clearing some jungle in the north of the property, and that’s when we found it.”

“The ring?” Reaper said.

Razak gave a deep belly laugh. “No, not the ring. We were digging a meter-deep irrigation ditch along the border of the field when we found a strange blue sphere.”

Hawke and Lea exchanged a glance.

“Yes, you heard me correctly. It was deep in the earth, so it was naturally covered in soil and mud. At first, I thought it was simply a strange rock. Then I thought it must be a meteorite, but when we cleared the mud away we saw it was a perfect sphere, and made of something similar to glass, and more than that, when I touched it, a faint bluish glow started to pulse deep inside it.”

He turned and faced his beloved jungle, shaking his head in disbelief at his own memory.

“And then the very earth under my feet shook. We all felt it. It was an immediate reaction to my touching the sphere, and when I touched it again there was another earthquake right under our feet. I dropped the thing out of fear and shock, and when it hit a rock on the ground without sustaining any damage, I knew it wasn’t glass.”

“Did it have any symbols on it?” Ryan asked.

Razak spun around. “No, it was smooth like glass. I already told you that. What do you know about symbols?”

“Nothing, I…”

A smile crept over the Malaysian’s face. “I know about these symbols.”

“How?”

“You think I’m stupid? You think I just stopped digging when we found the sphere?”

“What else did you find?” Hawke asked.

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

Razak looked at the SBS man with something approaching respect. “When the earthquake had subsided, I ordered my men to go down another three meters. They found nothing, so I ordered them to use the digger again and go down two more meters, and that’s when they found it.”

“They found what?”

“The crossbows.”

Lea felt her blood run cold. She looked at her friends and they were clearly having the same reaction.

“That’s right, five meters under the floor of the Temenggor rainforest we found a cache of high-technology crossbows with heat-seeking bolts, and they were covered in strange symbols.” He locked eyes on Lea and his jaw tightened. “Care to explain that?”

She lowered her head. “I don’t know what to say…”

“Then, let me try.” Razak took a seat behind his desk and casually sipped his teh tarik, or pulled tea. He sighed with satisfaction and set the glass back down on the desk. “We didn’t stop digging when we found the crossbows, naturally. We kept on going, not just deeper but wider, and that’s when we started finding other things — shields, tridents and other ancient weapons, but not like weapons from our ancient time. These all had strange technologies that made them sharper, faster… somehow intelligent. Far ahead of anything we have created even with today’s latest digital technology… Are you certain you won’t have some of the tea?”

“No thanks,” Lea said. “I’m too gripped by your little story.”

“Eventually we found a tomb covered in these strange symbols, and in that tomb, we found a sarcophagus, and in there we found a skeleton.” He paused a beat, clearly anxious at the memory. “Beside the skeleton we found a stack of journals, and on that skeleton, I found this ring.”

“Wait,” Lexi said. “Am I really here?”

“You’re really here, Lex,” Scarlet said.

Razak sighed and drummed his fingers on his desk. “We worked hard to translate the symbols on the tomb. I nearly bankrupted the family business finding and paying experts to translate and decipher them, but it was worth it.”

“Whose tomb was it, Razak?” Hawke said.

“Pangu’s.”

Ryan’s eyes widened. “The Chinese creator god?”

Razak nodded.

“But why was he here in Malaysia?”

“According to the journals, he was seeding a new civilization here.”

“From China?”

“No, not from China. Pangu wasn’t from China, he just seeded the Chinese population. That’s why he was their creator god. After starting the Chinese civilization he ranged down through southeast Asia and seeded more civilizations there.”

Lea felt like she was drowning in questions. “So if Pangu wasn’t from China then where was he from?”

“From the Citadel, of course,” Razak said.

Lea gasped. “You know about that, too?”

“I do. According to the manuscripts, Pangu lived there like all the other creator gods around the world. They lived in this Citadel, the capital of the world’s first civilization in what they called the Land of the Gods. It was an antediluvian culture that existed long before our current history books even date the start of humanity.”

“Sounds like you’re bang up to speed, darling,” Scarlet said.

Razak ignored her. “When we had finally finished translating the manuscripts, I was able to work out that the most valuable thing we discovered was this ring.” He held it up again. “After a great deal of deciphering and translation, it became clear that this was just one of eight rings, each one belonging to a creator god or goddess, and that when all put together, they would somehow reveal the location of the Citadel.”

“Sounds like you’re good to go, Razak and won’t be needing us,” Lea said, turning to leave. “Bye then!”

“Stay where you are!”

“Sorry…”

“But yes, I am good to go except for the fact the Citadel remains undiscovered. Can you imagine the kind of technology, weapons and knowledge that would exist in such a place if a simple jungle field in a place like this contained the treasure and weapons we found?”

“I’m beginning to form an idea,” Hawke said.

“When I find the Land of the Gods I will have control of all of these magnificent treasures and be the most powerful man on the planet. Perhaps even more powerful than the President of the United States with all the military at his command.”

Hawke stepped forward. “You’re not the only one searching for this Citadel, Razak.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a cult of immortals run by a man named Wolff.”

“I have not heard of him.”

“He calls himself the Oracle, and he claims to be thousands of years old. He thinks things like your little ring are his birthright and he’ll kill anyone to get to them.”

“He won’t kill me,” Razak said confidently. “If he gets in my way I will sweep him aside, however old he is. I didn’t spend my entire life searching for these rings to give up now.” He paused and scratched at his neck before turning to Hawke. “You realize I cannot of course let you live?”

“Spoilsport,” Scarlet said.

He laughed sarcastically. “Maybe, maybe not. I see it more as pest clearance. Now, it’s time for your executions,” he said casually. “Competing against this Oracle for the rings is one thing, I don’t need to be fighting another army at the same time. Lim! You and Rafizi are to take this thieving scum outside into the jungle and kill them. They seem to know so much about these weapons, it’s only fitting that they should be executed by them, so use the ancient crossbows.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lim raised a sleek, white and silver crossbow and ordered them outside the enormous tent.

Hawke studied the weapon, but he had never seen anything like it before.

“Move!”

They stepped outside. Away from the fans, the humidity soon enveloped them again and Lea felt the sweat forming all over her body.

“I said move, scum!” Lim pushed the crossbow’s cocking stirrup in the small of her back and nudged her forward toward the center of the clearing.

“Hey! Get off me!”

“Shut up!” Lim snapped. “And say your prayers because your death is only seconds away.”