The Heretics Treasure

Chapter Fifty-Two

The sun climbed, and the hellish heat returned. Neither of them had any appetite for food, but Ben made sure they kept themselves nourished with dried fruit and meat to keep up their energy levels. After a few more hours they stopped among the rocks and thorny shrubs to rest and drink in what little shade they could find. The bottled water was lukewarm, but nothing had ever tasted so good. Ben wrapped his Bedouin scarf around his head to keep the sun off, and Kirby imitated his example. Then Ben sat down and spent a few minutes studying the map and making his calculations from the GPS locator on his phone.

‘So, where are we?’ Kirby asked.

‘Cutting southwest, past Lake Nasser and about level with Abu Simbel.’

Abu Simbel,’ Kirby echoed. ‘The great temple of Ramses II.’

Ben nodded. ‘More importantly, it means we’re close to the Sudanese border. Things are going to become more interesting. If we don’t get shot by border patrols, there’ll be rebels out looking to kidnap us. Couple of juicy white men like us are worth a good ransom.’

Kirby paled, but didn’t reply. Ben folded up the map and stood up. There was the faintest breeze, and he pulled back the hem of his headgear to let it ruffle his hair and cool his scalp. He clambered up a sloping flat rock and surveyed the landscape. It was almost Martian in its aridness, and completely empty. He wondered about Kamal. And about Zara. He’d never have let Kirby see it, but he was as close to despair as he’d felt for a long time.

A yell from the Toyota burst his thoughts and made him turn around suddenly. He looked down and saw Kirby bent over in pain with his hand clamped between his knees.

He ran over. ‘What’s wrong?’

Kirby’s face was pale as he showed him his trembling hand. It was bloody.

‘What happened?’

Kirby looked sheepish. ‘I got a thorn.’

‘For God’s sake. Sit down.’

Kirby did as he was told, and Ben inspected his hand. ‘OK, hold tight. This’ll hurt.’ He grasped the end of the thorn, and yanked it out sharply.

Kirby let out a yelp. Ben examined the inch-long thorn to make sure he’d got it all out, then tossed it away, grabbed Kirby’s wrist and had a look at the bloody puncture wound.

Kirby yanked it away. ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll wrap a bit of tissue round it.’

Ben shook his head. ‘Even a trivial wound can get badly infected in this climate.’

‘What are you going to do? I didn’t see you buying any disinfectant.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Ben walked to the Toyota, spent a moment rummaging around in the back, then returned with the jar of honey.

‘You see any hot buttered toast around here?’ Kirby muttered. ‘What use is honey to me?’

Ben unscrewed the lid, dipped a finger in the warm honey and started smearing it over Kirby’s wound. ‘So the professor finally admits that he doesn’t know everything there is to know about ancient Egypt.’

‘Give me a break.’

‘Best antibacterial known to man,’ Ben said. ‘The Egyptians knew it thousands of years before we ever started fucking about with penicillin.’ He screwed the lid back on. ‘Now you can wrap it up with a tissue. And try not to play with thorns again, all right?’

The long, weary trek continued. Sometime in the late afternoon they crossed over the unmarked border and became illegal immigrants into Sudan. No sign of army patrols. No sign of anything except sand and rock and the relentless sun. Another endless stretch of bumping, jolting, creaking drive as they slowly cooked inside the pizza oven of the Toyota. Another freezing night, as they lay listening to the howls of jackals across the rocky valleys.

Then it was another whole day of driving as Ben ploughed doggedly onwards. Whenever they stopped for rest and water he was sitting down with his phone and fine-tuning his calculations. Whereas Wenkaura’s expedition had headed due south and then west, Ben had cut from point A to B directly to form an isosceles triangle. The geometry was hard to pinpoint, but going by the fairly precise co-ordinates from the ancient map, he was sure he was close now. The treasure site was near. He could almost feel it.

But where could it be?

Late in the afternoon they hit a wadi, a dry river bed that had probably remained unchanged since prehistoric times. Its winding path snaked between increasingly high rocky banks that before long had grown up into the walls of a canyon either side of them. There was no turning off. Ben gritted his teeth and kept going.

Up ahead, the canyon path bore around to the right. Ben turned the bend, and braked to a halt.

Kirby had been dozing again. ‘What’s happening?’ he slurred, sensing that they’d stopped.

Ben didn’t reply.

Three hundred yards away up the canyon, a high rocky ridge dominated the skyline. Its top was flat and smooth and silhouetted black against the sky. Cut into the horizon, as symmetrical as the V-notch of a gun rearsight, was a perfect cleft. Ben studied it for a moment, shielded his eyes and looked up at the golden disc of the sun. It was dropping fast as evening drew on, and its line of arc was heading right for the cleft. In a few more minutes, it would be exactly positioned in the V-notch.

It was a stunning, perfect, completely accurate physical representation of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the word ‘horizon’. Now he knew he’d been right that day in Claudel’s study. Wenkaura had meant to convey more than just an abstract symbol.

‘Jesus, Kirby, I think we’ve found something.’

‘What?’

‘Look.’

Kirby looked, frowned, and understood. ‘Holy crap. That’s it. That’s got to be it.’ Not taking his eyes off it, he opened his door and stepped down from the car. ‘That’s our landmark. The heretic’s treasure is right here in front of us. It’s somewhere inside that ridge, or under it. There’s got to be a cave or something.’

He started walking towards it, as if hypnotised by the spectacle.

‘Stop,’ Ben called after him. ‘Wait.’

‘What now?’ Kirby said dreamily.

Ben pointed. ‘Look there.’

Fifty feet away, directly between them and the ridge, was a crater hollowed in the sand. What had once been some kind of desert creature, maybe a fennec fox, lay ripped to pieces around the hole. The badly mutilated corpse was still fresh, a cloud of flies buzzing over it. Around the remains of the dead animal, scattered across the crater and for a wide radius around it, were fragmented shards of dark metal.

‘Landmines,’ Ben said.

‘Landmines?’

‘This place has been a war zone for years. They have a habit of getting left around.’

Kirby turned and scurried back to the car on the tips of his toes, clambered back inside and slammed his door, breathing hard. ‘Shit. This is very, very bad.’

‘This is Africa.’

‘Where the hell could they be?’

‘Anywhere,’ Ben said. ‘Everywhere. They could be all around us, and we’d never know until we step on one.’

‘Then what?’

‘You really need me to tell you that?’

‘This is all we need,’ Kirby groaned. ‘After all this way. Can we get round the edge?’

Ben shook his head. ‘The canyon walls are too steep. Perfect spot for a minefield. There’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to dig them out, one by one, and hope we don’t hit any big ones.’

Kirby gulped. ‘Big ones?’

‘Twenty-five kilos of high explosive in a solid metal casing,’ Ben said. ‘Not the easiest things to handle in loose sand. And they become unstable after a few years. Nasty tendency to go off in your face.’

‘This is just intolerable,’ Kirby whined.

Suddenly the canyon was filled with the sound of engines and crackling gunfire. Ben and Kirby piled out of the Toyota and scrambled for cover.