The Pharaoh's Secret

53

Renata continued to drive like she was on the track at Sebring until the tunnel began to narrow and debris filled the road. She slowed and tried to crawl over it, but the gap between the ceiling and rubble on the floor became too tight and the ATV couldn’t pass through.

She looked back and flipped the gearshift into reverse.

“Easy,” Kurt said, seeing that she was about to stomp on the gas again. “I think we’ve lost them.”

A quick look back proved that to be true. No lights were coming up behind them. Renata shut off the engine and the darkness and silence melded into one.

“They’re not the only ones who’re lost,” she said dejectedly. “We’re never going to find a way out of here. I don’t even know where we are in relation to where we started.”

“We’re not lost,” he said in a cheery tone. “We’re just locationally deficient and directionally challenged at the moment.”

Renata stared at him for a second and then burst out laughing.

“Locationally?” Joe said.

“Good word,” Kurt replied. “Look it up.”

Renata released the brake and allowed the ATV to roll back down the slope to the flatter ground of the tunnel floor.

Joe hopped out. “I’ll see what’s beyond the rock pile.”

With the ATV parked and pointed back down the hall, Kurt climbed down and walked around to the front. “You did a fantastic job. Where’d you learn to drive like that?”

“My father taught me,” she said. “You should have seen some of the mountain roads I took before I even had a permit.”

He smiled. “Maybe you can show me once we get done with all of this.”

By now, Joe had reached the top of the rock pile. He was lying flat on his stomach, shining his flashlight into the chamber beyond. “Well, this is interesting,” he said.

“Have we found the way out or not?” Kurt asked.

“I think we’ve found the motor pool,” Joe replied.

Kurt’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Come look,” he said. “You’re going to want to see this for yourself.”

Kurt and Renata made their way up onto the pile and crouched down beside Joe. Adding their lights to his, they saw a large open room filled with odd-looking automobiles. The machines had long, low hoods, no roofs, and they sat on huge wheels and tires that were almost as high as the hoods and trunks. Jerry cans and tools were strapped to the sides and heavy machine guns were mounted between the front and back seats.

“What are they,” Renata asked, “Humvees?”

There was a slight resemblance. “More like, Humvee ancestors,” Joe said. “These things look like they’re left over from World War Two.”

Kurt was the first to move. Ducking under the gap and climbing down the rock pile into the next section of the cave. “Let’s take a look.”

The open space was the size of a small aircraft hangar. Seven of the oddly shaped vehicles were parked inside. In places, the walls had been shored up with concrete. And steel poles, with flat panels on top and bottom, were arranged sporadically throughout the room to hold up the ceiling.

There was an aggressive look to the design of the vehicles. The sloped hoods and huge tires made it clear that these were machines designed for off-road conditions and traveling across soft sand. They looked fast standing still. The armor plating over the back end of the vehicle was louvered and vented to allow air to cool the rear-mounted engine.

Kurt crouched beside one of the vehicles and rubbed the dust from its side. It was painted a tawny color, a standard desert brown. More rubbing revealed numbers and then a small flag. Green, white and red, with a silver eagle at the center. It was the tricolor of Italy. The silver eagle marked it as the war flag.

“They’re Italian,” Kurt said.

“They are?” Renata replied in surprise.

A second flag caught Kurt’s eye. It was a field of black with an odd design at the center — a bundle of sticks with an ax attached to it. At the top of the ax was the head of a lion.

Renata crouched beside him and added her light to his. “Flag of the Fascists,” she said, recognizing it. “These belonged to Mussolini.”

“Personally?” Kurt asked.

“No,” Renata said. “What I mean is, they’re part of an Italian military unit and, as Joe suggested, from World War Two.”

“Saharianas,” Joe shouted from the other side of the car.

“Gesundheit,” Kurt said.

“That wasn’t a sneeze,” Joe said. “It’s what they called these cars. They’re for long-range reconnaissance. They were used all over North Africa. From Tobruk to El Alamein and everywhere in between.”

“What are they doing this far to the east? The Italian Army never got close to Cairo.”

“Maybe these cars were part of an advance team,” Joe said. “That’s what they were designed for: scouting and reconnaissance.”

They looked through the room for other clues, finding spare parts, empty jerry cans, weapons and tools.

“Over here,” Renata said.

Kurt and Joe found her in a corner behind two of the cars. A body, dressed in Italian Army fatigues from the era, lay in front of her. It was resting on a dusty bedroll.

Dried and desiccated by the desert environment, the face was incredibly gaunt and the skeletal hand, still covered by leathery skin, rested on the butt of a pistol. A small pile of ashes and partially burned papers lay next to the body.

Kurt searched through the half-burned papers and found one with some legible writing on it. It was written in Italian, so he handed it to Renata.

“Orders,” she said. “Looks like he was destroying them.”

“Can you make anything out?”

“‘Harass and disrupt,’” she said, shining her light on the faded paper. “‘Create chaos prior to…’ That’s all I can read.”

“Skirmisher’s orders.”

Renata handed the burned papers back to Kurt and picked up a small book that sat beside the pile of ash. She opened it. A personal journal. Most of the pages had been ripped out. What remained was blank except for a good-bye note to someone named Anna-Marie.

“‘The water is almost gone. We’ve been here for three weeks now. We have no word, but we must assume that the English have turned Rommel back. Some of the boys want to go out and fight anyway, but I sent them home. Why should they die for nothing? At least soldiers get to surrender. If we’re caught, we’ll be shot as spies.’”

“I wonder why they expected to be shot,” Joe said. “He looks like regular Army to me.”

“Maybe because they were so far behind enemy lines,” Kurt said.

“So how did he send them home?” Joe asked. “And why leave the cars here?”

Renata leafed through the rest of the papers. She found nothing to answer that.

“Does it say any more?”

“His handwriting is barely readable,” she said. “‘Spitfires pass over daily… So far, they haven’t found me, but I cannot hope to flee without being spotted. I’ve blown the tunnel. The English will not have our steeds. It’s too bad. We could have made a difference. We should have brought less fuel and more water. Throat closing now. Nose and mouth bleeding. I would use my pistol to end this agony, but that is a mortal sin. If only I could sleep and not wake. But each time my eyes close, all I do is dream of cold water. I wake as parched as ever. I shall die here. I shall die of thirst.’”

She closed the notes. “That’s the last entry.”

Kurt took a deep breath. The mystery behind the hidden base and the antique off-road vehicles would have to wait. They had their own problems, and the soldier’s letter, in Kurt’s mind, had laid them bare.

“The good news is,” he announced, “there must be an exit nearby for them to have gotten these vehicles in here. The bad news is, our valiant friend apparently caved it in to prevent the English from finding it.”

“If we could find the exit, maybe we could tunnel our way out,” Renata said.

“Possibly,” Kurt said. “But, suddenly, I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

They both looked at him like he was crazy.

Kurt nodded to the body of the Italian soldier. “He was worried about Spitfires. We have to worry about something similar. If you notice, our pursuers seem to have given up the chase. I can think of only two reasons for that. Either there’s no way out of here or there is an exit and Shakir’s men are waiting beside it like the wolf licking his chops outside the rabbit hole.”

Joe offered a solution. “There are plenty of weapons, ammunition and explosives here. If we could get one of these things running and use the explosives to blast our way out, we might be able to fight through the blockade. If they are waiting on the other side, they’re expecting us to show up in that two-seat ATV, not a heavily armored rolling gunship.”

“That would be a nice surprise to throw at them,” Kurt said. “But we’ve wounded them pretty badly already. They know we have the Black Mist. And that means they’ll throw everything they have at us. They don’t really have a choice. Your friend Edo said they have a private army. That could mean tanks, helicopters, airplanes — who knows? But even with one of these armored cars at our disposal, we won’t stand a chance.”

Joe nodded thoughtfully.

“Beyond that, I’m thinking about the situation in Libya,” Kurt said, continuing. “Whole cities going thirsty. Hundreds of thousands without water. Many of them are going to suffer and die exactly like this soldier did.”

“Not that any death is good,” Renata said. “But to die from lack of water is excruciating. Organs shut down, eyes go dark, but the body lingers as it tries to hold on.”

Kurt nodded. “If we go back the way we came, bringing some of these explosives with us, maybe we can blow the pipeline or shut off the pumps.”

Joe seemed to like it. But, then, he would follow Kurt anywhere. “They’ll never be expecting it, that’s for sure.”

“What about getting the samples to a lab?” Renata asked.

Kurt said, “Brad Golner said something about another lab. So even if we manage to find the exit, blast our way out and run Shakir’s gauntlet, we still have to get this toxin to the medical team before it breaks down.”

Renata added to that thought. “Even if we get it to a lab in time, there’s no guarantee that examining it will tell the research team how to counteract it. The best we could hope for is to isolate the offending compound and start a series of trials. I’d call it a miracle if that took anything less than a few months before we had an answer.”

“And based on your earlier guess, the victims of Lampedusa have only a few days left at most,” Kurt said.

She nodded. “Some are probably dead already.”

Kurt suspected as much. The young and old, the weak and sick. They always went first.

“So it’s back into the lions’ den?” Joe said, summing up. “Take them by surprise?”

Kurt nodded.

“I’m in,” Joe added.

“It’s a long shot,” Renata said. “But it sounds like the only real shot we have.”

Kurt thought it more of a calculated risk than a long shot. “We have one thing going for us,” he said. “If most of their men are waiting for us topside, then that leaves only a skeleton crew down below.”

“Give me a few hours and we’ll have two things going for us,” Joe said.

“Two things?”

“The element of surprise and a Sahariana of our own.”

Kurt grinned. If the statement had come from anyone other than Joe Zavala, he’d have told him not to waste his time. But Joe was a virtuoso with anything mechanical. If the Sahariana could be made to sing again, Joe was the man to do it.