“Who knows about the device?” said Phillips.
“No one else,” said Garner.
“So there’s no reason to think Al-Qaeda are aware? As far as they know, you’ve got something, enough to deal with the target. Explosives, but nothing special. No more than they already have access to.”
“Why are they here?”
“They watch everything that happens in this country. It’s one of their safest bases. As I see it, they fear the place we’re heading for, and the only reason they’ve turned a blind eye to our little sortie is they’re happy to have it destroyed, especially with someone else taking all the risks.”
“I don’t like it,” said O’Reilly.
“Look,” Phillips told them, “if we turn back now, there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all and take what they can. They’ve nothing to lose. While we’re on the mission, we’re potentially useful to them. They want the target eliminated.”
Garner looked at O’Reilly. “The target is Priority One. That’s the instruction.”
“What’s Priority Two?” said Phillips.
“Destroy the device,” said Garner. “If we go on, we’ll set it off rather than let it fall into the wrong hands. We’ll die doing it. How about you, Mr Phillips? You sign up to that? If not, we go back.”
Phillips grinned sardonically. “Not the best deal I’ve ever signed up to, but okay. It’ll soon be dark. Let’s go.”
They traveled across the endless sands by night, the dunes silvered by moonlight, each one indistinguishable from the next, although their guides knew the terrain as well as a city-dweller knew the alleys and side streets of his home town. Days turned into a week, two, and the slow, monotonous trek morphed all of the travelers into silent ghosts. They ate and drank sparingly, surrounded by utter silence, broken only by a brief desert wind. Phillips knew they were as far from civilization as they would have been traversing the Antarctic, their target hidden away deliberately in this dead, empty zone.
“We are close,” Mamoudou told Phillips at last. “We are on the edge of one of the ergs, a very great expanse of sand and rock. If we rest for the day, by nightfall we will see the place.”
Later Phillips sat with the two engineers outside their pitched tent. “Over the next long ridge,” he told them. “Tonight we arrive.”
“What’s the plan?” said Garner.
“If this place is anything like the one I entered in Egypt, it won’t necessarily be guarded. But be prepared anyway. It’ll seem like a heap of very old ruins. That’s part of its disguise. Deep down in the heart of it is where we’ll find our target. I’ll know when we see it.” He watched the rest of the party settling for its last sleep under the blazing sun. In the haze of the journey, the desert people had become indistinguishable, their private thoughts inscrutable.
An hour after nightfall they crested a low ridge and the moonlight deftly painted another ridge beyond them, a high scarp, its rocks exposed, leaving tall, jagged stumps of rock, sheer and glassy, apparently impenetrable. Mamoudou pointed to a cleft in the rock surface, a long, tall gash, like the slash of a giant’s scimitar. “There,” he said, his voice dropping. “It leads to the place of stars below the sands.”
The company quickly crossed the dust bowl, the camels picking their way through a field of small, sharp boulders, dangerous as mines. The moon rode high, a brilliant light, when they came before the tall crevice. Darkness seemed to bleed from it, together with a cold breeze, permeating the surrounding rocks with an aura of deep unease. The camels tried to shy away, but Mamoudou had two of his men prepare a place for them to rest. Everyone dismounted. From now on they must journey on foot.
“You’ve been beyond here?” Phillips asked him.
Mamoudou shook his head. “Not I. But one who ventured within came back to Chinguetti. He spoke of a decaying city and its passageways. At home, he sat in a stone room, without food or water, and did not stop speaking for five days. In that time his body shrank until only the bones and a little skin remained, sucked dry by the madness that claimed him.”
Overhead, night had swallowed the skies and countless stars gleamed in their myriad clusters. Silence, more extreme than any Phillips had ever experienced, closed around them and the camels snorted in renewed fear. They could have been on a distant world.
“My two men will remain with the beasts until we return. The rest of us may enter, if it is still your desire.”
Phillips nodded. Garner and O’Reilly had already unloaded their packs and strapped them to their backs. They looked unwieldy, but both men were built like oxen and grinned at the effort. They said nothing, ready for the final trek beyond the wall of stone. Mamoudou and his ten remaining Arabs got into line. Their faces were devoid of expression, but Phillips could read the fear in their eyes. He hid his own misgivings. Where they were going would be festering with an evil beyond time.
Several of the men carried flashlights, while Garner and O’Reilly had lamps fitted to their helmets. Their beams prodded the bulging wall of darkness within the cleft as the party entered. Slowly the body of men wriggled onward, twisting and turning into the gut of the rock, heading downwards, the dusty path’s inclination increasing. The walls opened out around them and by the lights they carried they could see they had come into a jumble of low buildings, their walls leaning into one another, broken, some in ruins, others like spires, alleys choked with several feet of dust. Windows gaped, twisted, and everything dropped away into the lower darkness. Age draped everything like a shroud, a remnant of another time.
The company followed the main street, descending in a long spiral until presently the walls on one side fell away to reveal a gulf, a huge cave, like the empty maw of an extinct volcano. Phillips knew, however, this was no natural chasm. Some other power had scooped it out of the desert floor, or bored down to the distant bowels of the earth. The party came beyond the crumpled city and examination of the inner walls of the huge cavern revealed chiseled bands of stone, the work of unimaginable beings, from a time hidden by centuries. The slope broadened and soon the company had come to the first step of a stairway. It had not been created for human feet, being far too wide and deep.
Phillips shone his flashlight out into the vault and it was as though he had aimed it at the night sky, revealing an infinite, starless void, though within it something curdled, invisible, remote shapes writhing in silence more unnerving than any sound. Phillips turned the beam aside, again watching the stone descent. The magnitude of the place gripped the company like a fist, making each of them dizzy with uncertainty, their senses reeling at this exposure to immensity beyond normal human comprehension. Far, far below them, a rising wind swirled, with its threat of desert storms and stinging sand blasts, and yet this was a tunnel down into the utter heart of the stone, not an exit back to the world the party had left.
“Hear the song of the underworld,” Mamoudou whispered to Phillips. “Close up your ears, for it will drive your reason from you.”
They were all wrapping their neckerchiefs around their ears and turning up jackets and clothing to muffle the sounds. Shrieks tore at the air, invisible sirens sweeping to and fro, shadows coalescing, making the hell-wind a solid reality, though mercifully human eyes could not decipher details. Gradually the walls became less shrouded in mystery, glowing faintly, spotted with lichen and larger globules of fungus, the phosphorescent light strengthening as the descent continued. This weird glow distorted the shadows of the intruders, throwing them upon the twisted inner wall, making of them bizarre shapes, mocking throwbacks to a more primitive man-thing that barely stood on two legs. Other shadows writhed on the measureless wall, arachnid and crustacean, as if a time-lost sea had cast up in its silent waves a slurry of crawling life.