The Tomb of Eternity

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

When they got to the airport they saw Vetrov’s A380 parked on the apron, glistening white in the hot sun, but with the addition of several dozen armed soldiers crawling all over it. Arafa had delivered on his promise to Eden. In addition to the men guarding Vetrov’s plane, there were around twenty soldiers waiting for them, headed up by Captain Koura, a short, lean man with a serious moustache.

The sight of Vetrov’s aircraft in quarantine had sent up a cheer among the group, but it was short-lived. Koura explained that witnesses had already told him how Vetrov, Kodiak, Mazzarro and a team of his best men had left the airport hours earlier in three heavily armed Kazan Ansat choppers which he had transported to the desert himself in his Airbus. Koura explained that the witness had claimed Vetrov had gone south with what he described as a small army. Hawke was unfazed.

They wasted no time in their pursuit of him, powering away from the airport and heading south in half a dozen ageing Mil Mi-8s which had once belonged to the Egyptian Air Force but were now mothballed in a hangar at Luxor International Airport. Just a few minutes after taking off there was no longer any sign of civilization below them at all as they headed out into the desert — just endless sand dunes to every horizon.

In the lead chopper, banter was light but good-natured as they raced low across the south of Egypt and then gained altitude as they crossed the Ethiopian border and slowly flew up into the mountains. Hawke’s mind was clear and he was ready to fight, as were the others. Scarlet looked like she could skin a live grizzly bear — she was obviously thinking about Karlsson, but refused to talk about it.

“I’ll let this do the talking,” she said when asked, and pointed to the Heckler & Koch MP5 she was holding between her thighs.

They arrived at the site — a vast plateau of elevated ground deep in the Highlands. It was a scrubby landscape at lower altitudes, but up here the mountainsides were covered in a thick, lush rainforest and a dense, steamy mist hung in the air.

Hawke looked out across the terrain from the chopper and was filled with something approaching despair. Endless forest stretched everywhere he looked, obscured here and there by the low cloud and he half expected to see a dinosaur plodding through the jungle. The place was as isolated as anywhere he had seen on earth, and there was an ominous feeling of despondency inside the chopper.

Hawke thought about Vetrov and how his insane hunt for the elixir had led them all to this forgotten corner of Africa. He thought about how Vetrov had gotten so much further than the others — so far in fact it looked like he could beat them to it and seize the ultimate power for himself. Inwardly he was shocked by all the things that had happened to him over the last few weeks and could hardly believe what he’d learned about the world in that short space of time, but there was no time for speculation now. Now was the time for focus and fighting.

Beside him, Ryan studied the landscape carefully on a couple of Apps as the chopper moved deeper into the mountains, looking out for a lake he had seen in the Osiris Palette. When he found it, it was just a matter of correlating its location with several of the closest peaks until the rough location was found.

Then he saw it — the Semien Mountains came into view — an ancient World Heritage Site often called the Roof of Africa.

There at last was a fifteen thousand foot-high peak rising high above the misty clouds and stretching into the blue African sky.

“We’re almost there!” Ryan said, the excitement rising in his voice. “That’s Ras Dashen, the highest mountain in Ethiopia and the tenth highest in the whole of Africa… plus this place still has Egyptian wolves, leopards and the Masai Lion.”

Scarlet scoffed. “Thank you for that totally fucking useless piece of information, boy.”

“I take every opportunity I can when it comes to enlightening you, Cairo. I’m even hoping to get your IQ into double digits one day.”

She scowled at him. “No one calls me Cairo!”

Hawke smiled as they began to descend into the jungle. He pulled a compass from his pocket and set it on the map.

“What’s that?” Ryan said.

“It’s a compass, mate. Never seen one?”

“Of course, but we’ve got this.” He held up his iPhone.

“Sure we have. But when the battery fails in this humidity or you drop it in a steaming pile of Masai lion dung, we’ll still have this.” Hawke waved the compass in his face and smiled. He checked his weapons and secured his pack and then gave the order to the pilot to tell the other choppers to get ready for disembarking. This was it.

As they descended closer to the edge of the plateau they had chosen as the most appropriate landing zone, Hawke noticed there was still no sight of Vetrov’s choppers or any of his men — or Mazzarro.

“Are you sure this is right?” Hawke asked Ryan.

“Joe, it’s me. I don’t make mistakes.”

“Modest,” Lexi said, strolling past them with an assault rifle over her shoulder and an ammo belt slung around her waist. “I like that in a nerd.” She strapped herself in and prepared for the landing as the chopper swung violently to the left and executed a sharp descent to make the landing site. As it touched down, Hawke unbuckled his seat belt and swung open the door. He ordered the others to get out and as they assembled at the edge of the clearing the other choppers in their contingent touched down all around them.

The gradient of the slope meant they had to land the chopper half a kilometer from the entrance to the tomb. They hiked through the rainforest, sniping at one another with the occasional barbed comment, but it was all just to relieve the tension. There was a heavy feeling of anticipation in the humid air as they drew closer to the long-awaited site.

“I can’t believe we’re finally here,” Lea said.

“Sure,” said Scarlet. “Just one problem — where the hell is that Russian psycho?”

She was right. They knew that Vetrov had left Luxor before them, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Maybe Mazzarro led him to another location to protect the source?” Lea said.

“Or maybe your ex-hubbie led us to the wrong location,” Scarlet said, looking over at Ryan.

“Maybe their chopper got a flat tire and or they had to stop for sandwiches,” Hawke said. “Or maybe we should just shut the hell up and get going?”

They made their way through the jungle at the speed of the slowest man, who, as usual was Ryan Bale. Hawke was in the lead, followed closely by Scarlet and Lea, with Lexi bringing up the rear. Snowcat stayed back with Ryan, ostensibly on the grounds of protecting him, but Hawke thought maybe there was another reason as they chatted to each other up the hill. Captain Koura and his men were marching behind them in the distance, fanning out with guns raised ready for firing. They were professional, active soldiers but they knew the local terrain no better than Hawke’s crew.

Then they saw it.

It reminded Hawke immediately of some kind of ruined Aztec temple, only the architecture was somehow different. They were looking at two stone columns that had obviously once supported a beam of some kind and formed what once would have been a grand entrance to the tomb. Now, they were broken down into rubble and covered in wild coffee plants and fallen gum leaves.

“Oh my God,” Ryan said, approaching the ruins slack-jawed. “It’s like the Lagunita temple… this is amazing.”

“The what now?” Lea said.

“Lagunita — it’s a massive set of ruins in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. We’re talking about an entire palace that was lost in the Campeche jungle for two thousand years.”

Scarlet laughed. “How can these nerds not have found an entire palace after hundreds of years of explorations? Idiotic.”

“Not really — in jungle that thick you could be as little as a few hundred feet from an entire lost city and never even know you’d walked past it.”

Scarlet raised an eyebrow. “You mean there could be more of these places?”

“More?” Ryan offered a low, condescending laugh. He liked it when people relied on him for information, especially Scarlet Sloane. “I guarantee there are literally countless palaces and temples lost in those jungles, just waiting to be discovered.”

“Just waiting to be looted, you mean,” Scarlet said with a smirk.

“If you’re of that mindset,” Ryan said haughtily. “Others would see it as an opportunity to fill museums and extend knowledge.”

“Yeah, right,” she replied. “If you ask me, they just sound like giant cash machines, sitting around waiting to be emptied.”

“Well, Cairo,” Hawke said. ‘No one did ask you, and now we know why.”

“Bloody SBS.”

“Hey, James Bond was a Navy man, just remember that.” He turned to Ryan and they both looked up at the ruins. “Crazy, but you’re right — it really does look like some kind of Aztec temple.”

“Not crazy at all,” Ryan replied, taking his jacket off and fanning his face. “There are certain legends which claim it was the same people who built all these temples thousands of years ago — that one ancient antediluvian mega-civilization spanned the entire globe.”

Hawke shook his head. “Leave it to you to give me nightmares.”

They moved closer to the ruins and finally saw what they were looking for — the entrance, but it was nothing more than a fissure in the rainforest floor. At first it looked like a simple mess of tree roots and a shallow ditch, but Ryan assured them it was the location. His explanation about how it lined up with the circumpolar stars and the peaks of three specific mountaintops was barely heard by the others as they lowered their ropes into the ground and cracked open the glow-sticks.

Hawke felt the excitement grow, but he was determined to keep a lid on it. They weren’t there yet, plus they still had no idea where Vetrov and his men were. It had been a long slog from London via Zaugg’s insane vanity and the tortured mind of Sheng Fang, but now they were here and they had to end this the right way. “Ryan — call Eden and Alex back at Luxor and tell them we’ve arrived and that we’re going in.”

Ryan pulled out his phone. “Sure thing.”

Then, after a short briefing with Koura who divided his men into several sub-units, including five to guard the choppers, Hawke led the first team into the mountain, forcing their way through the narrow slit in the rock and lowering themselves into the hole one by one.

They reached the bottom of the hole and began to shine their torches around.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Lea said, shining her flashlight along the crumbling shaft ahead of them. It seemed to twist downwards, and the stark halogen light of the torch picked out every detail in the face of the rock, carved out thousands of years ago by long-dead men, probably the slaves of whoever had given Poseidon and Osiris the map.

“Neither do I,” Scarlet said. “But I hardly think the ancients were going to leave the source of all their power just lying around for any old nob, dick or fanny to pick up. This is the challenge, so let’s get on with it.”

Hawke smiled and they made their way along the winding tunnel until coming to an artificial man-made arch which opened onto a large cave.

He stared at the enormous cavern in front of them. It was a natural space, formed by the rainfall of millennia as its cumulative power dissolved the limestone which towered all around them. All over the bottom of the cavern was a spectacular man-made labyrinth, receding into a silent darkness too overwhelming for their tiny glow-sticks and flashlights to penetrate.

Lea stood next to him and gasped. “Would you look at that, Joe Hawke! It’s incredible…” Her voice trailed away into the eerie silence of the cavern.

He turned to look at her as she spoke and saw she was totally captivated by the immense sight before them. “Yes, it is,” he said quietly.

Scarlet walked over to them and pushed some chewing gum inside her mouth, tossing the foil to the tunnel floor. “Looks like the same crap we saw back in Osiris’s tomb,” she said dismissively. “But is there any gold in here, that’s what I want to know?”

Hawke rolled his eyes and sighed. “Still worried about your retirement, Cairo?”

She nodded, missing the note of sarcasm in his voice. “I’m still way off retirement levels, Joe. I wonder what price I could sell the water of life for?”

“I don’t know but it looks like you’re in luck,” Lea said.

Hawke looked at her. “Eh?”

“What’s that over there?” she asked, pointing to where something sparkled in the darkness. “Gold, right?”

Hawke looked at where she was pointing and saw something sparkling vaguely in the distance. “Could be gold,” he muttered. “Diamonds, maybe.”

“Diamonds?” Scarlet said, raising her eyebrows and spitting out the gum. “Even better.”

“Let’s get over there to those pylons,” Hawke said.

“I don’t see any pylons,” Lea said.

“Right in front of you!”

“Oh sorry… I was looking for those things with wires that make your TV work.”

Hawke rolled his eyes. “I mean those two enormous stone towers over there at the entrance to the tomb.”

“And how the hell did you know they’re called pylons, ya big fool?” said Lea, slapping his shoulder.

“How’d you think?” he said, and laughed, jabbing his thumb back at Ryan. “Someone told me…”

They walked down the broad stone steps carved in the side of the cavern, careful not to slip on the smoothness worn into them by thousands of years of use. As they went, it grew colder and damper, and the eerie silence seemed to wrap around them like a cloak the deeper they went.

At the ground level they walked through a miniature version of the giant pylon at the entrance to the Karnak Temple back in Luxor, but this one was covered in the same hieroglyphics as the map.

“Looks like we did it,” Lea said.

Hawke smiled. “At bloody last.”

“And we beat that bastard Vetrov to it as well,” Lexi said, her voice quiet as she brought up the rear. “He has to be lost in the jungle somewhere.”

Maria clicked her tongue in disapproval. “Don’t divide the pelt of a bear until he’s dead…old Russian proverb.”

“Eh?” Hawke said.

“Don’t count your chickens till they’ve hatched, darling,” Scarlet said.

“Oh…”

They followed what looked like some kind of main boulevard through the labyrinth, stopping occasionally to shine a torch down a silent side-street, not seen for thousands of years, or longer.

But then they stopped in their tracks.

“Bloody hell!” Lea said.

Hawke shared the sentiment as he raised his flashlight from their level on the ground slowly up the wall in front of them and illuminated another pylon. This one was carved into the far side of the cavern and covered in similar glyphs. Thanks to Ryan, Hawke recognized the one at the top — it meant eternity.

“This obviously marks the end of the labyrinth,” Scarlet said.

“And the start of something else,” Hawke said, shining his torch through a small archway at the base of the pylon.

“And I think we all know what,” Lexi said, the excitement in her voice obvious to everyone.

Like the others, Hawke’s mind was racing with a mix of elation and anxiety. He had already uncovered the truth about his wife — not only that the hit in Vietnam was intended for her and not him, but that she was in fact a Russian double agent codenamed Swallowtail. Worse, he had discovered that she was killed by none other than the British Foreign Secretary who officially had ordered the murder on grounds of national security, although in reality he knew it was something to do with this group calling itself the Athanatoi.

Now, the journey which had started out in the British Museum was also coming to an end — or so he thought. He was finally about to come face to face with the source of eternal life — the elixir of eternity that Hugo Zaugg, Sheng Fang and now Maxim Vetrov had all sought at any cost to human life — and all failed to find. Their failure had been eclipsed by the success of him and his team. Part of him couldn’t wait to walk through into the tomb, but another big part of him wanted to blow up the entrance and bury it forever.

Without saying another word, they moved slowly forward and stepped through the ornately carved arch. They were met with a small fountain built into a natural recess in the cold rock-face. It was covered in the same ancient hieroglyphs that had led them to this place. It was so beautiful it looked like something from another world, but at the same time there was something simple about it.

“The glyphs are so intricate,” Lea said, her voice almost a whisper.

“But it looks sort of pre-historic,” Ryan said, leaning forward and pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“Whatever it looks like…” Lea said, “…we bloody well found it!”

The others directed the beams of their torches toward the fountain and illuminated it. In the vast space it looked almost insignificant.

Hawke was stunned. Water trickled from the top of the fountain which was shaped into the face of what looked like some kind of god, and shimmered in the torchlight, mesmerising him. So this is what it was all about.

“What is that stuff?” Lea said. Her words drifted into the half-light and once again the only sound was that of the water falling from the lower tier of the fountain and splashing on the circular marble reservoir that formed the base.

“It looks like it’s flecked with something — gold maybe, but it seems brighter somehow.”

Hawke studied the water and saw it had gold and silver sparkles within in it. At first it looked like it was simple regular water reflecting their flashlights but closer inspection showed that the sparkling was coming from within the water.

Ryan leaned in to touch it, but Hawke reached for his arm and stopped him.

“Wait! We don’t know what it really is or what it does yet, mate. Best off leaving it alone.”

“Agreed,” Ryan said. “But we should get a sample.”

Hawke frowned. “All right, go ahead — but be careful.”

He watched as Ryan leaned forward with a small vial and gently collected a sample of the water.

“We need to report this to Eden,” Lea said. “He’s going to want to know about this — believe me. He’s spent his life searching for this, and he deserves to know.”

“But only I am deserving of it!”

The voice was shrill and loud and came from the entrance to the chamber.

They spun around to see Maxim Vetrov and Kodiak standing a few yards from them, flanked on either side by several men, all aiming suppressed submachine guns at them.