The Vault of Hercules

Chapter 7

The revelation took a load off of Purdue's mind. He felt reassured by it, although blood was not always thicker than water, as his relationship with his late twin sister attested. Still, he hoped that Donkor and Adjo were closer friends than he and his sister had been.

“We wait here,” Adjo said, gently setting down his side of the box.

From beneath the ledge they could hear the engine straining up the hill. Purdue thought to call his pilot so to get ready for a lift out of Ethiopia to expedite matters. From his bottom left pocket of his utility vest he pulled his minute, streamlined tablet, which was barely larger than a match box in its store form. He let it lay on his open palm and with his other hand he brushed his index finger and thumb across the gadget, enlarging it as he did so until it was the size of a cell phone.

Bullets began to rain on them just as Purdue called up the coordinates of his position. “Down!” Adjo shouted and they both fell to their bellies. Purdue memorized the coordinates and dialed out to his pilot while covering his head with one hand, as if that would avert an R-1 round from penetrating his skull.

“Why is he shooting at us?” Purdue bellowed over the din of the attack.

“It’s not my brother, Effendi! It’s the lady you spoke to earlier today outside the tent camp! Look, it's her people!” Adjo panicked. He was worried about his brother's fate and what may have befallen him. Suddenly Adjo cried out, as two slugs ripped through his flesh, staining Purdue's clothing with Egyptian blood under the eye of the setting sun.

“Adjo! Adjo, can you hear me?” Purdue howled as the engine drew nearer. But Adjo had stopped moving.

“Sphinx-1, come in! Sphinx-1, do you copy?” Purdue wailed desperately as he watched Adjo's blood meander through the sandy mounds around his head. His own face was wet with perspiration and covered in sand, and the dust had turned his trademark white hair to brown.

Cutting the engines for a minute, Purdue could hear his hunters shout orders in Italian and Amharic. He feared that his nerves would kill him while he perked his ears for any sign that they were nearby. They would not be able to see the stolen relic, because Purdue had placed it too far in from the edge of the ledge. That was as far as anyone could observe it from the road. “Sphinx-1! Larsen, I swear to Christ, if you’re off shagging some young slut from ground staff again, I’ll kill you!” he threatened as softly as he could into the mic of the device.

Now the pursuers were quiet. So were their vehicles, leaving Purdue no way to determine where they could be. He dared not move. Either he would be detected or he would compromise his safety without Adjo's guidance.

“This is Sphinx-1,” the loud crackling voice came over the speaker of the tablet, jolting Purdue’s heart with its sudden broadcast. “Sphinx-1 copying. Go ahead.”

Purdue rapidly slammed his hand over the speaker to dampen the sound, although the damage had been done already. He whispered hard into the microphone, “Switch to silent mode. Over.”

The blue LED background of the tablet turned red to signify that all vocal communications would be sent in text format. Purdue's eyes combed the immediate vicinity before he spoke again. “Larsen, I'm in deep shit here. I’m sending you my position, but be advised of hostile fire. I repeat, hostile fire. Do you copy that?”

He waited for a few seconds before red lettering appeared on the screen. It was Larsen's voice recording coming through as a written message, something Purdue had installed on all his communication devices with his staff for just such an incident. “Roger that. On my way. ETA ten minutes. Over and out.”

Ten minutes, Purdue thought to himself. I'll be dead in five, I'm sure.

Concerned about his position, Purdue carefully inched forward. Bit by bit he progressed, still listening for voices or radio contact, wondering if his own communication had been intercepted. With the impending dark, it would become exceedingly difficult for Purdue to make it onto the helicopter without plummeting over the ledge. And transporting the wooden relic would prove nearly impossible, not because of its average weight, but because of its shape. Shaped like a short coffin, it was very difficult to carry the box by himself, but it had to be done. It had cost Adjo his life, and probably that of his brother's too. And now it had almost got him killed as well. Purdue thought leaving it behind after the price his men had had to pay to help him steal it would be ridiculous and insensitive.

He discerned Medley's voice among the audible discussions that ensued beneath him on the winding mountain road. Purdue and Medley had always been at loggerheads, but he still found it shocking that she would be chasing him with gunfire. Medley had always been more of a ‘war of the wits’ kind of competitor. It was hard to imagine her as a gun-toting tyrant, as she had apparently become. Maybe, Purdue thought, it was the influence of her mafioso husband that had turned her into a bully.

“Here,” Purdue heard a man's voice report in a very heavy accent. “Up here is where he hit the Arab. We did not see them flee, so we think our bullets did their work on them both.”

“Right, then let's get up there. I want the Ark,” Purdue heard Medley say. He didn’t know what to do. If he as much as moved, they would discover him. However, staying would seal his demise. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel and rock as they climbed the steep slant up to the ledge. Medley and three men moved swiftly up to where the so-called Ark was last seen.

One of the men with her suddenly yelped in pain from some sort of impact and fell down the slope next to her.

“What the hell just happened?” she shouted, but the man did not answer. In the light of her flashlight she could see the awful evidence of a crushed skull and a bloody rock lying next to him. Before Medley could convey her next orders, her men scattered in panic, protectively pulling her with them. Thundering down the mountain slope in the dark the tumbling rocks fell, propelled higher and faster each time they hit the slope with force and velocity. A few men were struck, some fatally, by the apparent rock fall they could not outrun in time. So fierce was the danger, they didn’t have a chance to glance back up where Purdue was sitting at the top of the chaos he’d started by dislodging one large round rock that had been holding a few more together in the bed of sand.

Causing the deadly tumbling of geological canon balls onto his enemies was all he could do to mar their discovery of him and his claimed prize. It was, after all, his life at stake, so he’d had to find a way to combat them and buy time for his pilot to arrive and rescue him. It was a successful strike, for now.

Like a sight from a Biblical tale of mercy, the sharp spotlights of Sphinx-1 appeared in the evening sky. Purdue's ears had not heard such a sweet melody in a long time as the clapping of the rotor blades echoed in the valley below where the three vehicles of Medley's people had been decimated by rocks. Larsen took care not to give them a clear shot at his craft, landing it on the other side of the summit just above Purdue. Larsen's co-pilot came out to Purdue to assist him in getting the wooden relic on board the craft before Medley could alert the local authorities about their presence.

As the helicopter lifted off, Purdue looked down to where its lights were illuminating the terrain. It broke his heart to see Adjo's bloody body left in the long grass like an animal carcass, knowing that he would never see the money he’d been promised to benefit his family.