Chapter Fifteen
On the other side of the massive door, Annja followed a short tunnel that led to a much larger chamber, which the flashlight’s beam couldn’t quite span. When she panned upward, the beam reached twenty feet and disappeared against the blackness.
Burris stumbled to a stop beside her. “How far down do you think we are?”
She estimated the distance they’d come and the angle of the descent. “Maybe three hundred feet.”
“Didn’t realize it was that deep.” He took a long breath and let it out. The light reflecting on his face revealed his worried expression. “So what are we looking for?”
“The tower in the shadow of the tower.”
“Sounds like something out of a fortune cookie.”
Annja moved forward, flashing her light around. “The inscription was written for someone who already knew what they would be looking for. It’s not a Wikipedia entry.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
An image blurred through the flashlight beam. Annja backtracked, searching for what she thought she’d seen, moving slowly now.
That’s when she saw the low stone pedestal with the tower on top of it. The pedestal had been cut from a stalagmite jutting up from the cave floor, shaping it into an eight-foot square only two feet off the ground.
The eight-foot ziggurat took up most of the pedestal. It had been carved from stalagmite, as well, and the craftsmanship was incredible. Annja felt certain if she’d measured the sides that they would have been in perfect mathematical proportion.
“Oh, man,” Burris whispered. “That’s...that’s...”
“Pretty incredible, isn’t it?” Annja placed the saddlebags nearby and fished out her digital camera and six emergency flares. She snapped the chemical flares to activate them, then placed them on the floor away from the ziggurat so the various surfaces caught the cool blue light.
Moving slowly, she photographed the tower from every angle, stopping to stare at a particular spot where a series of cracks seemed unnatural—almost like they were a guidepost of some sort. She quickly studied another area when Burris came over to see what had caught her attention. No point in giving everything away.
“What was this?” Burris asked. She didn’t know if he’d seen the crisscrossing of hairline cracks or not. “A model of the real Tower of Babel?”
“Maybe.” Annja took another shot. “Or maybe it was a reminder of the original tower.”
“It was made after the original tower,” a deep voice boomed.
Startled, Annja turned and discovered Rafik Bhalla and a small army of armed men in the cavern with her and Burris. As Annja stared at them, they turned on flashlights and filled the space with light. She blinked against it.
“Don’t move, Creed.” Bhalla held up a hand. “I won’t let my men kill you—unless they have to.” He smiled coldly. “Your friend there, I don’t have any feelings for. He doesn’t have your mind or your skills. His fate is immediately in your hands.”
Annja placed the camera on the stone pedestal and held up her hands. “Don’t shoot him.”
“I am glad you feel that way. Things will go much better if we all get along, I think.” Bhalla came forward, flanked by four of his men whose rifles never wavered from Annja. “I respect you a great deal, Ms. Creed. I am quite familiar with your exploits, both on television as well as in your archaeological works.” He stopped a short distance away from her and clasped his hands behind his back, staring at the tower. “It is quite beautiful, is it not?”
“It is.” Slowly, Annja put her hands down, trusting that Bhalla wasn’t going to shoot. At least not right away.
Bhalla stared at the model. “It was made by a small group of the
corepiscopea
, the first among the priests, of my church generations ago. They wanted to remember the power of God’s wrath, and to protect the secret of the tower. So this place vanished into myth and gradually disappeared almost altogether. I found it three years ago quite by accident—I was looking for something else. But it didn’t give me the secret of the tower. For that, I needed a brick that was reputedly from the original tower. I deciphered most of the inscriptions on the model here, you see. I’ve been searching for it for a long time, and had only just found it when I lost it to you. I mean to have it back.”
“What secret are you talking about?” Burris demanded to know.
Bhalla sneered at the California shock jock and then dismissed him to address Annja. “While doing my research at the church, I found an old scroll that recounted a most fascinating story about the young prince that helped build the Tower of Babel. Do you know the story?”
“No.” Despite her present situation, Annja was intrigued.
The man studied her for a moment and then his eyes took on a faraway look as he began to speak. “The young prince was disenchanted by his father’s pursuit of reaching heaven to speak directly in God’s ear. The prince felt the king was overstepping himself, to use present-day vernacular. So he prayed to God to take mercy on him and his people when the tower was destroyed. Since the prince was so devout and beloved of God, God placed the power of tongues into a device belonging to the prince, and He commanded that the device be forever hidden from the eyes of men.”
Annja felt as if she was back in the orphanage, listening to the nun during storytelling hour. But she didn’t want to interrupt Bhalla, and took the opportunity as she listened to assess his men’s numbers and how well armed they were. And what options she had.
“God scattered all the men of the Earth at that time, but he did not want to lose the First Language, the language that he had given Adam and Eve to speak in the Garden of Eden.” Bhalla glanced over at her. “In all your travails, you have not come across this story?”
“No,” she said, envisioning her sword in the otherwhere, ready to call it up at a moment’s notice.
“I thought it might be on my brick.”
“It’s not your brick,” Burris interrupted heatedly. “I bought that brick and I’m sharing it with—”
One of the guards rammed the butt of his weapon into Burris’s stomach, dropping him to the stone floor in a gasping heap. Burris cursed and tried to get to his feet only to be knocked down again.
“Stay down, you idiot,” Annja said.
Burris held up a hand in surrender. “Okay. I’m good. I’m just gonna sit here.”
“The brick is mine,” Bhalla said. “The man I purchased it from was betrayed. Therefore, I was also betrayed.” His dark eyes reflected the blue light of the flares as he gazed at Annja. His voice was harder and colder when he said, “Now, Ms. Creed, I want my brick.”
* * *
Wearing night-vision goggles, Garin moved quickly down the tunnel. He carried a Heckler & Koch MP3-SD5 in his hands and wore pistols in shoulder leather and at his hip. His security troops ran after him.
His security network had locked onto Bhalla and followed him to Damascus. Getting into Syria had been a little difficult, but Garin was selling weapons to the Syrian military as well as the Arab Spring rebels. Tape had been cut, palms had been greased and Garin had landed in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains by helicopter only minutes after Bhalla and his people had arrived at the hidden cave.
Spotting the flashlight glare ahead and around a corner, Garin held up and signaled his team to fall into place behind him. He peered around the corner.
Sixty feet away, four men stood in front of a hole in the wall that looked too uniform to be a tunnel mouth. Flickering blue-tinted light gleamed from inside the doorway.
Spinning around the corner, Garin opened fire on full-auto. The silenced 9 mm rounds chopped into the four men and took them down, killing them before they had time to cry out in warning.
Garin swapped out magazines and charged down the tunnel. He hadn’t heard any gunfire from the other end of this tunnel, so he felt certain Annja would still be alive. Although, as Garin knew, life could be taken just as quickly with a blade. Annja, like Roux, could be a thorn in his side and a definite roadblock to certain plans he had, but he didn’t want anything to happen to her.
Bhalla on the other hand...
Stepping through the blood of the dead men, Garin slid into the doorway, following the machine pistol into the room with his finger on the trigger. When he heard Annja’s voice, he relaxed a little, but he maintained a murderous focus and grinned at the thought of killing Bhalla.
Chapter Sixteen
“I don’t have the brick.” Annja stared into Bhalla’s eyes. She reached for the sword in the otherwhere, grabbed the hilt and prepared to yank the weapon into the cave.
Bhalla returned her gaze full measure for a moment, then addressed his men. He spoke in English so she could understand. “If she does not produce the brick in the next moment, kill this man.”
Burris looked up at her. “Give him the brick.”
“I don’t have it,” Annja said as earnestly as she could. “I didn’t want to bring it all the way out here.”
“What? You didn’t say anything about that. You’re going to get me—” Burris struggled to sit up and the guard standing over him promptly kicked him in the face. Groaning, Burris fell onto his back, bleeding from his nose.
Bhalla stared at her. “Where is the brick?”
“Back in Damascus.” Annja’s grip on the sword felt solid and certain. “I hid it while Burris was sleeping. He doesn’t know where it is.”
“Then I do not need him, do I?” Bhalla turned to his guards and started to speak.
Gleaming brightly in the light of the flares and the combined flashlights Bhalla and his men carried, the sword filled Annja’s hand. She swept the blade through the man standing over Burris, cutting him from left shoulder to right hip.
The dead man fell to pieces.
Still on the move, Annja swung backhanded at the next guard and cut through his neck. As he stumbled back, dropping his weapon and grabbing for his throat to stop the blood, muzzle flashes filled the cave near the entrance and a moment later the thundering roll of gunfire echoed within the confined space.
Bhalla extinguished his flashlight and stepped backward into the shadows behind the model tower, disappearing almost at once.
The last guard standing nearby swept his weapon toward Annja. She ducked low as she charged. Bullets cut through the air just above her head as she grabbed the sword hilt in both hands and drove it through the guard’s Kevlar and into his chest.
Face-to-face with the dying man, Annja lifted her foot and kicked away his weapon, then kicked him free of her blade. She searched for Burris in the flickering light of the muzzle flashes and the bouncing flashlight beams, but he wasn’t where he’d been.
Crouching, Annja surveyed the cave and tried to figure out what was going on. Evidently another group of thieves had followed Bhalla to the cave and intended to kill the man.
“Annja!”
Even with all the confusion in the cave, she recognized the voice immediately as she took cover behind a nearby stalagmite. Bullets slammed into the thick rock and flying chips stung her face and neck.
“Garin?” She spotted him then in the swirl of lights.
Garin moved so
fast
, wading through Bhalla’s men as if they were in slow motion. Every move he made was fluid, simple, and there was no hesitation as he killed his opponents. He stepped over the body of his latest victim toward Annja just as one of his men crumpled to the ground with shattered night-vision goggles and his face bloody.
In the next moment, a fusillade of withering fire stuttered across the ground and drove Garin behind a boulder twenty feet away. He crouched with his back to the big rock and calmly changed magazines in his weapon. There was just enough light for Annja to see the smile on his face. It wasn’t for her, she knew that. It was the smile he wore whenever he was in battle.
“Quite the party you have here.” Garin spoke in German.
“Not my party.” Annja replied in the same language.
“Do you know how to get out of here?”
“The same way we got in.”
Garin looked around. “There must be another way. Bhalla and his men are fleeing somewhere. My men are covering the door, and yet our opposition grows steadily less.”
Annja had noticed that, too. She shifted around the stalagmite and studied the battlefield inside the cave. The two forces had polarized. Garin’s team held the front of the cavern, but Bhalla and his men had pulled to the rear. They’d left a trail of dead men.
She looked at Garin. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve got an old score to settle with Bhalla.” Garin peered around the boulder, then spoke rapidly in what Annja thought was Czech or another Eastern European language.
Immediately, Garin’s men stopped firing.
Garin turned to Annja. “Keep your head down. It’s about to get very loud.” He set his back to the boulder and braced himself.
Annja wrapped herself into a ball and put her hands over her ears, but even with that, the sudden explosions seemed to ricochet off the inside of her skull.
Garin and his team lunged to their feet at once, firing into the shadows at the other end of the cavern. Bullets sparked from the cave walls, but there was only a little return fire.
On the other side of the cave, barely revealed in the uncertain light, a section of the cave wall slid into place. Garin must have ordered his men to stop firing, because the shooting stopped. Striding forward, Garin gave orders. He kicked the men on the cave floor as he passed to make certain they were dead. Twice he paused to put a bullet through a man’s head.
A man didn’t get to live five-hundred-plus years by being gentle and merciful, she supposed, trying not to dwell on his apparent cold-bloodedness. She trailed after him, pausing only long enough to pick up her camera and backpack, both of which had miraculously not been hit by flying bullets.
Two of Garin’s men had Burris in their custody. Burris protested and struggled to get free. Without a word, one of the men wrapped Burris’s wrists in disposable cuffs and the other gagged him.
One of Garin’s team sprinted toward the section of the cave wall where Bhalla and his men had disappeared. He turned and spoke rapidly to Garin, pointing to the wall.
Garin nodded and turned to Annja. “Stay back. He’s going to blow that section of the wall.”
Annja shook her head, thinking of all the age-old geological formations that might be destroyed, not to mention the model tower. “Don’t do that.”
“Bhalla is not getting away today. He’s run his course. I’m going to give him the death I promised him when our paths first crossed.”
Before Garin’s man had time to set up, a series of explosions raced across the ceiling. They were too deliberate to be natural and she guessed that Bhalla had mined the cavern to bury the model tower if it came to that or to bury whoever he lured into his trap. Stalactites and chunks of rock fell like heavy rain, knocking down men unfortunate enough to be under them when they fell.
Garin called out to his men and they began retreating at once. Pausing, Garin helped one of them to his feet, looping an arm across his shoulders.
“Annja!” Garin called.
Frozen for just a moment, Annja stared at the tower, watching helplessly as a falling stalactite smashed the model to bits.
“
Annja!
” Garin’s voice was sharper, more insistent. He paused with the wounded man draped over his shoulder.
Knowing that Garin would drop the injured man and remove her bodily if he had to, Annja ran after him as the ceiling continued to fall. She followed Garin through the entrance just before tons of rock filled the cavern. The tunnel shook as the mountain settled.
Garin looked at her. “Where does that tunnel at the back of the cavern go?”
Annja shook her head and wiped dust and grit from her eyes. “I didn’t know about it. I’d only just found the one there.” She pointed at the collapsed entrance.
“So it’s possible Bhalla got away.”
“If that tunnel didn’t come down when the cavern did, I suppose. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“He’s not a man to overlook an escape. Whoever built that model would have felt the same way.” Garin cursed for a moment and adjusted the unconscious man over his shoulder. “You have the brick Bhalla has been looking for?”
Annja knew it wouldn’t do any good to lie. Garin knew about the brick. “I do.”
Muffled by the gag, Burris Coronet protested loudly and pointed to himself.
Garin nodded to the two who held the struggling man. One of them slapped an adhesive patch on Burris, who continued to fight for a moment, then promptly fell asleep.
“It’s a narcotic,” Garin said. “It’ll keep him docile while we sort this out. I’m assuming you wanted him alive.”
“Uh, yes.” She rolled her eyes.
Garin grinned. “Then let’s go have a look at that brick you left in Damascus.” He gave orders to his men and they filed out of the cave system to the mountains where his Land Rovers were waiting alongside Annja’s donkeys.