The Babylon Idol

Chapter 52

All Ben could do was brace himself for the gunshot. About one second after Bozza squeezed the trigger, every soldier at the checkpoint would respond with a concentration of gunfire that no one inside the RV would survive.

When it came, the blast was stunning, like a massive clap of thunder. Beyond any gunshot Ben had ever heard before. The whole coach rocked violently on its suspension, as though a powerful percussion wave had slapped into it from outside. Windows shattered and cracks appeared all over the windscreen as Groppione ducked behind the steering wheel and covered his head with his arms. Bellini tumbled out of his seat and hit the floor. Ben felt Anna tighten up with sudden terror next to him.

After an instant’s confusion, he realised what had happened. Bozza hadn’t fired the shot. The blast had come from outside. The scene he could see through the RV’s now-cracked windscreen was one of total carnage. The Turkish officer and a dozen of his soldiers had been laid flat by the explosion. Several of them were torn apart. Blood was everywhere. Body parts were still falling from the sky. Separated limbs were strewn across a circle fifty feet in radius. Not just human ones. Pieces of goat lay twitching with the fur singed and smoking. Then the screaming began as dozens more injured men at the edges of the blast circle realised the horror of the damage done to them.

At the centre of it all, what was left of the Toyota farm truck was a black, torn shell engulfed in roiling fire. Surrounding vehicles had been blown over onto their sides by the massive shockwave, flames belching from their scorched insides. Nothing at all remained of the wiry little Arab guy who had been reaching inside his garb for his papers — and pulled out a remote detonator switch instead, triggering what the military called a VBIED, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive device — what everyone else called a car bomb. Twenty or thirty pounds of Semtex cleverly stashed where few soldiers would think or care to search, under a pile of stinking goat bedding in the back of the truck, had done their work.

The result was a slaughterhouse. Ben had been close to car bombs before, but never close enough to see the immediate aftermath from a ringside seat. The checkpoint instantly fell into wild chaos. Some soldiers tried to drag the mutilated survivors away from the flames. Others simply ran, fearing secondary blasts if the fuel tanks of burning vehicles exploded. Some began firing off their weapons in confusion at some unseen enemy hidden in the black smoke that was billowing up and blocking out the sunlight.

Usberti surveyed the scene with an air of unflappable calm, then said, ‘Groppione, drive on.’

Groppione was too stunned to speak. He slammed the selector back into drive, put his foot down, and the coach went lurching through the mayhem. It had taken some shrapnel from the blast, but they were still in the game. A soldier ran in front of them, yelling and waving his gun. Groppione just accelerated towards him and he dived out of the RV’s path.

‘Keep moving!’ Usberti commanded. ‘We do not stop for anything!’ The diesel engine grunted and rasped. Groppione drove blindly through the smoke and flames, rolling over wreckage and crushing dead bodies and severed limbs. Then the smoke cleared to reveal the path ahead, which the explosion had carved out of the busy checkpoint. Groppione accelerated harder, and they were through and away, picking up speed. Through the back window, Ben saw soldiers chasing them on foot, shouting, raising their rifles. A crackle of shots sounded over the roar of the diesel. Bullets smacked into the tail of the RV. But the soldiers had more to worry about, and quickly gave up the chase to return to their shattered checkpoint.

Massimiliano Usberti looked as proud as if God Almighty himself had come down and parted the Red Sea to let him through. ‘Faith, men. Faith. The Lord is with us.’

Groppione said, ‘Amen to that.’ Starace closed his eyes and sank his chin to his chest in a moment of reverent prayer. Bozza said nothing, and neither did Ben, though for other reasons. If there was a God up there, Ben was thinking, and if He had any influence at all on what happened down here below, then He truly did move in mysterious ways. Or, if Usberti was just lucky, then given what plans his good fortune might allow him to carry out, that in itself could be taken as pretty good proof that there was no God up there after all.

Or, maybe God wasn’t such a good guy.

Ben and Anna sat close together on the leather sofa. The cuffs were constantly chafing and biting his wrists, and there was no way he could sit that didn’t hurt, but he was concerned only for her. ‘Are you okay?’ he mouthed silently. She tried to smile. She nodded. ‘I’m okay,’ she mouthed back.

Soon, all that could be seen of the border checkpoint was a tower of black smoke far behind them as they rolled onwards into Syria, due south. The sun was beginning to set in the west, casting its pale rays through the Perspex window behind Ben and Anna. Sand and dust were blown in ever-shifting waves across the RV’s path by the wintry wind. Warm air whispered through the heating vents. The road went on, and on, through the arid landscape. If the soldiers had radioed ahead to alert other units to the presence of a large, suspicious vehicle in the vicinity, there was no sign of it. They drove past a burned-out tank that sat lopsidedly at the roadside, its armoured flanks perforated and charred black, alone in the desert like a silent monument to the men who had died there. And the thousands more who would before this senseless war passed into history to join all the other senseless wars that men had fought since the dawn of time.

‘So are you going to tell us where we’re going, Usberti?’ Ben said at last.

Usberti was sitting on his throne with its leathery back to them, so that all they could see of him were his feet and elbows. He swivelled round to face them. ‘To a place where your talents will be put to good use, Benedict,’ he replied. ‘I told you I had a purpose for you. That is the only reason I have chosen to keep you alive, for the moment.’

‘That’s very gracious of you,’ Ben said, staring at him. ‘Whatever it is, I hope I don’t disappoint.’

‘I know you will not.’ Usberti smiled, then turned his gaze on Anna. ‘And neither shall you, my dear Professor. Your own skills will soon be brought to bear, now that our quest nears its end.’ He rose from his chair and walked down the length of the RV towards where they sat side by side, steadying himself against the lurch and sway of the vehicle. ‘I suppose the time has come for me to reveal to you what your late associate was kind enough, shortly before his demise, to reveal to me.’

‘You could even have let him tell us himself,’ Ben said. ‘It would have saved you the trouble. And saved him some grief.’

‘No trouble,’ Usberti said nonchalantly. He waved Starace away, then lowered himself onto the sofa opposite them. ‘In the bitter winter of 1923 an expeditionary team of Austrian archaeologists led by one Hans Von Grüber came across a mysterious discovery, high on a rocky plateau. It was just a few hours’ horse ride across the Syrian Desert from what was then the largely abandoned excavation project at Karkemish. Their find was a set of inscriptions carved into the face of a sheer sandstone cliff, near to what they believed to be the remains of an ancient fortress. The location was extremely hazardous to access, so much so that two of their team fell to their deaths in their attempts to investigate the inscription. Von Grüber and another of his colleagues survived, however, and despite the difficult conditions they were able to record detailed transcripts of their discovery. Von Grüber later compared it to the inscriptions at Mount Behistun in Iran, discovered ninety years earlier. But while the Behistun carvings were of Persian origin, celebrating the glories of the Emperor Darius, these by contrast were writings in an obscure cuneiform language. Moreover, while the Behistun carving is a magnificent work of art crafted by skilled sculptors using the best quality mason’s chisels, the Karkemish inscriptions were relatively crude and appeared to have been made by someone in a hurry, with an implement such as a dagger or sword point.’

Anna was listening intently. This time, she didn’t interrupt Usberti to tell him he talked too much. The look of hostility on her face hadn’t softened, but her curiosity was getting the better of her.

‘Von Grüber returned to his home city of Graz in early 1924, severely afflicted by pneumonia contracted during his expedition, whereupon the transcript of the carvings was placed on display at a private historical and art collection in Berlin. Sadly, the building that housed the collection was flattened, along with so many others, in 1945 when the British and Americans bombarded that city with over seventy thousand tons of bombs. The only existing physical record of Hans Von Grüber’s discovery was among the many artefacts lost forever. Von Grüber himself had died twenty years earlier; having never recovered from his sickness he succumbed within months of his return from Syria. But in a letter written shortly before his death to a colleague, one Professor Claude Desmoines of the Sorbonne, he described the clifftop inscriptions near Karkemish and expressed his fervent and unshakeable belief that they constituted some form of map. More correctly, a set of directions which, accurately translated, could direct the seeker to unearth a great treasure. Von Grüber wrote, “Beneath every footstep in Syria may dwell the legacy of ancient civilisations, undiscovered wonders and, for the seeker who will risk all to find them, riches beyond imagining.” Like so many ancient mysteries yet to be solved, neither the nature nor the precise location of that treasure have ever been determined.’

‘It’s incredible,’ Anna said in a low voice. ‘It could really be true.’

To Ben, the idea of carving a treasure map on a cliff face seemed a little baffling. But then, he wasn’t an archaeologist. Carving stuff on rocks and stones seemed to have been the thing in those days. Plus, he supposed that if you were a desperate bandito hiding out in the hills with enemy soldiers closing in all around you, and you found yourself bereft of a convenient piece of papyrus to use as notepaper on which to scratch out your last message to your gang, you might not have any other choice.

‘There is more, my dear Professor Manzini. I told you that Kavur had recently been in contact with a fellow archaeologist. Dr Serge Munoz of the Joint International Syrian Expedition is a highly respected authority; he is also, like your late colleague and, I believe, you yourself, an expert on ancient cuneiform languages. He claims to have seen not only a copy of Von Grüber’s 1924 letter but a rare pre-war photograph of the Berlin exhibits themselves, which he was able to partially decipher. Following his discussion with this Dr Munoz, Kavur became convinced that the clifftop inscriptions near Karkemish almost certainly point to the exact whereabouts of a fabulous buried secret.’

Usberti’s eyes gleamed. He went on:

‘Thanks to you and Signor Kavur, who alone among historians have traced the path of the exiled Muranu dynasty from Babylon, there can be little doubt that we stand on the brink of finding the great lost treasure of Nebuchadnezzar.’