The Heretics Treasure

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Cairo-Aswan night train

As the train rumbled through the darkness, carving its path between the Nile corridor and the desert, Ben sat pensively on the top bunk of the double sleeper compartment he was sharing with Kirby. He could hear the historian’s soft, rhythmic snores coming from the lower bunk, mingling with the steady clatter of wheels on tracks. He was still fully dressed and, even though his body was crying out for sleep, he just couldn’t turn off his restless mind.

It was less than an hour since the night express had departed from Cairo, but it felt like weeks. Time was dragging so slowly that it seemed to him almost as if it were being deliberately cruel. Seven days to complete his task, and the third day would soon be dawning. With nothing to do but sit and fret for the next few hours, the gnawing inactivity brought him face to face with his darkest thoughts and fears.

He reflected on the events of the last couple of days. He’d come a long way, but there was an even longer road ahead of him and no way of knowing what he was going to find at the end of it. Was he getting close now? The fact was, he just couldn’t say. That was the worst thought of all.

Suddenly galvanised into action, he clambered down the bunk’s ladder, grabbed his wallet and left the compartment. Out in the narrow, neon-lit corridor that ran along the right side of the sleeper car, he passed a uniformed guard and a guy in plain clothes who had the look of a policeman about him. Ben’s eye picked out the shape of the concealed pistol on his hip. There was probably a separate security car at the front of the train with three or four more plainclothes detectives posted to protect the tourist passengers from terrorist attacks.

A few yards further down the corridor, Ben’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he fished it out.

It was Paxton, and he got straight to the point. ‘Have you found it?’

‘I know where it is,’ Ben replied, keeping his voice low.

‘Well done. You’re making good progress. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’

‘If it’s even there,’ Ben added. ‘If it really exists, and if it hasn’t been looted away to nothing by Sudanese militia or Bedouins, or anyone else who might have stumbled on it any time during the last thirty-odd centuries. You’re taking a big gamble on that.’

‘You’d better hope you find it,’ Paxton said. ‘You know what’ll happen if you come back empty-handed.’

‘What if I do find it? How the hell do you expect me to transport it all by myself? I wouldn’t get halfway back up the Nile.’

‘You let me worry about the logistics. Your job is to locate the treasure, make sure it’s safe and bring me proof and co-ordinates. I’ll take care of the rest.’

‘You don’t think a truck convoy full of gold is going to draw attention?’

Paxton chuckled. ‘I have ways of moving things around unnoticed, Benedict. It’s what I do. Leave that part to me.’

‘And when I bring you the proof, you’ll release Zara?’

‘I’m a man of my word. You honour your end, and I’ll honour mine.’

‘A man of scruple. A shining example to us all.’

The amicable tone dropped from Paxton’s voice. ‘Don’t test me. I expect to hear from you soon, with the news I want. Remember you’re on the clock, Benedict.’ He ended the call.

Ben put his phone away and walked on down the length of the swaying, juddering train towards the restaurant car. It was closed, but he’d been more interested in the adjoining bar that he knew remained open through the night.

There had been just a thin smattering of passengers gathered on the station platform in Cairo to board the night train, and so Ben wasn’t surprised to find the bar empty. The white-jacketed attendant had dark circles under his eyes, and served the double Scotch he asked for without a word. He sat there for a while, lost in thoughts that he hoped the drink would help to chase away. He wasn’t sorry when he sensed a movement behind him and turned to see another passenger wander into the bar. He was about thirty-five, dressed in a denim shirt and pressed jeans. He perched himself on one of the fixed stools, glanced amicably at Ben and asked the barman for a beer. He sounded Canadian, maybe from Toronto. Ben remembered him from the railway station where he’d been boarding the train with his wife and young son.

It wasn’t long before they were engaged in the kind of easy, loose, noncommittal dialogue fellow travellers fall into to pass the time. The man’s name was Jerry Novak, and he was a computer salesman touring Egypt with his wife, Alice, and their boy, Mikey, who was seven. For the purposes of the conversation, Ben was a freelance travel journalist checking out the Cairo-Aswan rail route for a magazine.

Drinks finished, they bade each other goodnight, and Ben started making his way back to his sleeping compartment. As he walked from carriage to carriage, he sensed that the train had slowed right down to a crawl. Up the corridor from his compartment, he met the guard coming back, accompanied this time by two plainclothes cops.

‘Is there a problem with the train?’ Ben asked the guard as he passed them.

‘Nothing to worry about, sir. We are experiencing minor engine trouble. Engineers are waiting at the next station, and we hope to be able to resume normal progress presently.’

Back in the compartment, Kirby was still fast asleep on the bottom bunk. Ben clambered quietly up to the top and lay back on the narrow mattress, frustrated at the slow pace of the journey.

Time passed, the luminous hands of his watch ticking slowly around. The train seemed to take forever to crawl to the next station and it was a long time before they got moving again. He could hear the voices and clinking tools as workmen fixed the engine problem. Eventually the whine of the diesel started up again, and the carriages gave a jerk as the locomotive took up the slack and moved off. The rumbling clatter grew as the train picked up speed again and Ben lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the vibration of the wheels on the tracks pulsating through the bunks and the thin plywood partition wall next to him.

Sleep escaped him for a long, long time. Then, as the first fiery streaks of dawn began to light up the sky, he closed his eyes and felt himself drift. His body rocked gently with the motion of the train. His breathing was slow and shallow, his eyes closed. In his dreams, he was far away.

The air was cool and tangy and the sea sparkled under the sun. He was standing on the polished white wood deck of a yacht. Warmth on his face. The whisper of the blue-green waters lapping at the hull.

He heard a voice, and turned slowly to see where it was coming from.

Standing at the end of the deck, the endless expanse of water behind him, was Harry Paxton. He wore a friendly smile, and his old military battledress from Makapela Creek.

In front of him, her back clasped tightly to his body, was Zara. She was struggling against his grip, eyes full of fear. Against her right temple was the muzzle of the pistol Paxton was holding.

Ben started running towards them, shouting ‘No! Let her go!’ But his voice was weak and, the faster he ran, the further Paxton and Zara seemed to shrink away from him, until the deck stretched out between him and them for hundreds of yards.

Then it seemed to slope upwards more and more, so they appeared far above him. He clambered desperately up it, sliding back, struggling onwards, sliding back again, shouting ‘No! No!’ as he saw Paxton’s finger tighten on the trigger.

The shattering gunshot made Ben jerk upright in his bunk and crack his head on the low ceiling of the sleeper compartment.

Only a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. Kirby was thrashing and yelling in a startled panic on the lower bunk as more shots rang out, followed by a burst of automatic fire. Suddenly a line of holes was punched across the bodywork of the carriage. Thin beams of sunlight streamed in.

Ben hurled himself down from his bunk. Still dazed from the nightmare, he staggered to the window and ripped up the blind. Out in the dawn light, about sixty yards away from the tracks where the scrub grass met the edge of the desert, four dusty 4x4 vehicles were bouncing and bucking at high speed over the sand, blowing up clouds of dust in their wakes and keeping pace with the train as it sailed along.

Eight men inside, and they weren’t tourists. The lead vehicle was a black Nissan Patrol with spot lamps and bull bars. Behind it was a rusty Dodge SUV. The other two vehicles were what the army called ‘technicals’-big open-backed off-road pickup trucks with.50-calibre heavy machine guns mounted behind their cabs. Both of the fearsome weapons were manned by gunners wearing masks and dark glasses. Both were swivelled towards the train.

Ben saw flame spit from their muzzles and threw himself to the floor as they strafed the carriages a second time and bullets punched through the flimsy bodywork, zinging everywhere. Broken glass blew inwards, and suddenly there was a stinging, sand-laden wind roaring through the compartment.

Kirby was gibbering in horror, pressed flat to the floor. Ben jumped up, grabbed his arm, tore open the sleeper door and hauled him roughly out into the corridor. They crawled rapidly on their bellies as more bullets chewed the carriage to pieces and debris and shards of metal flew around them.

Up the corridor and in the next carriage, Ben could see passengers screaming and running in panic. In the heaving, swaying space between carriages one of the plainclothes cops was clutching an MP5 and firing out of a window at the attackers.

As Ben watched, more gunfire blasted through the train and the cop was thrown back by multiple bullet strikes. Blood hit the wall behind him. His weapon went spinning to the floor as he collapsed.

Ben ran back inside the compartment to grab the canvas holdall from the luggage rack. Glanced through the shattered window just in time to catch a glimpse of the front passenger inside the black Nissan. For one split second they locked eyes.

Kamal.

Then one of the pickups drew up level between Kamal’s vehicle and the train, and Ben lost sight of him. But there was something else to worry about in the back of the wildly swinging, bouncing truck. Ben recognised the familiar shape of the weapon that was swinging around to bear on the train. A Soviet RPG-7 anti-tank weapon, its distinctive conical snout lining up on its target, ready to launch a high-explosive missile straight into its flank.

Ben ripped open the zipper of the holdall and wrenched out his FN rifle. He raced to load a 40mm grenade into the launcher tube under the stubby barrel, every muscle and nerve in his body screaming move, move. Ignoring the sixty-mile-an-hour sandstorm that was lashing through the broken window, he poked the rifle out through the jagged glass and quickly acquired the weaving, bouncing truck in his sights. Through the scope he could see the gunner’s face screwed up in concentration as he readied himself to fire.

A broadside duel to the death. It was just a question of who could shoot first. Within a fraction of a second, the FN’s laser rangefinder was sending data to the fire control system computer. Distance to target flickered up on the LCD display. The elevation diode in the sight reticule flashed red. Ben tilted the muzzle up a few degrees and the diode turned green and he fired.

The FN flashed and boomed. Before the RPG could let off its missile, the 40mm grenade blew the truck into a rolling fireball. It skidded, overturned. Bounced end-to-end across the sand, spewing wreckage and flames. Kamal’s Nissan veered away sharply, and for a tiny second Ben thought he saw the terrorist’s hate-filled face glaring at him through the dust and smoke.

He dashed out into the corridor. The train was slowing down again. Either the driver was dead or he was acting out of blind panic. In the next carriage, passengers were screaming and yelling, one of the guards trying and failing to control them. Ben caught a glimpse of another familiar face among the chaos. It was Jerry Novak. Beside him was his wife, looking almost catatonic with terror. Novak was clutching his little son to his chest, trying to shield him with his body. His horrified gaze landed on Ben standing there with the rifle. Ben shouted at them to stay down as he ran up the corridor to where the dead cop lay, hauling Kirby along with him.

He glanced out of the shattered window, too late to react to what he saw next.

Fifty metres from the train, the black Nissan was drawing level again. The rear passenger was aiming another RPG out of the window. There was a blast of smoke as the missile burst from the weapon. Ten metres into its parabola, the missile’s rocket motor engaged. The high-explosive round snaked through the air leaving a white vapour trail, and Ben could only stare as it closed on the train.

Then it hit.