The Pharaoh's Secret

5

A few miles away, a brooding figure sat in a small Zodiac boat, one that he’d stolen from the doomed freighter. Ammon Ta had escaped the ship by making his way aft to the boat, complete with a radio that the freighter’s crew normally used to inspect the hull.

He’d been no more than a hundred feet from the ship when the blast occurred. Far too close. He should have been killed by the concussion wave, if not incinerated completely, but the dull thud of the explosion had only startled him. The ship hadn’t been obliterated as he’d expected.

Something had gone wrong. His immediate instinct was to reboard the ship, and despite the initial explosion, the freighter was still running flat out and the little boat he’d commandeered was too slow to catch up.

There had been little he could do but watch the ship continue on until it ran aground and finally exploded in the manner he’d intended.

Even then, things didn’t go quite right. Instead of destroying the cryogenically cooled serum, the fire and explosion had atomized it, creating a killing fog as effective as any nerve gas. He watched helpless as the fog spread to the west, engulfing the island. His attempt to hide what he and his superiors were doing had now been broadcast to the entire world.

As if to prove it, he’d overheard a call for help over the runabout’s radio. It came from a doctor trapped with a number of patients in the island’s main hospital. He heard clearly as she referenced seeing a cloud of gas before quarantining herself and several others.

He made a fateful decision. On the chance the doctor was still alive, he needed to eliminate her and any evidence she might have gathered.

He reached into his pocket, withdrew a prepackaged hypodermic needle and pulled the top off with his teeth. After a quick tap with his finger to make sure there were no bubbles in the syringe, he jabbed it into his leg and pressed the plunger down, injecting himself with an antidote. A cold sensation ran through his body with the medicine and for a moment his hands and feet tingled.

As the feeling subsided, he restarted the Zodiac’s motor and made his way toward the island, angling along the coast until he found a safe spot to go ashore.

Without delay, he began a brisk hike across an empty beach and then up a staircase cut into the rock and onto a narrow road above it.

The hospital was two miles away. And not far from that lay the airport. He would find this doctor, kill her and the other survivors and then make his way to the airport, where he could steal a small plane and depart for Tunisia or Libya, or even Egypt, and no one would ever know he’d been there.