His aide burst into the library with a shout, “Colonel! Are you OK?”
“I’m fine!” Zawas brushed the broken bits of glass from his uniform and then felt a trickle along his cheek. He touched his hand to it and saw blood. “Tell the men at the forward base to prepare to move out.”
“Yes, sir!” the aide saluted and left.
Zawas turned to the cowering Omar. “Get up, you fool! If Yeats has the journal, he’s probably already figured out what we couldn’t. We have to track him to the mines and then kill him. Once we control Ada’s mines, we and the world will never have to fear the Americans again.”
CHAPTER 14
Hank abandoned his ATV in the bush and joined Conrad at the edge of a boulder field that rimmed the crater like a bull’s-eye. The old journal that Conrad stole from Zawas had turned out to be invaluable. In no time Hank matched the Mason’s drawing of the Queen of Sheba’s circular “abyss” to the Luizi Crater in the Congo, a few hundred miles from the portal he had activated only days before.
The portal and the crater had to connect somewhere underground, and that somewhere had to be the Queen of Sheba’s mines.
Satellite overheads, meanwhile, revealed the zigzag bridge over the abyss to be, in fact, a deep gorge cut along the floor of the crater — a natural trench much like the man-made passageway Conrad had followed into Ada’s tomb in Nubia. This gorge, if Hank was right, would lead them to the hidden entrance to her mines — and the all-time mother lode of exotic matter, maybe even Conrad’s so-called Pillars of Creation.
Probably one and the same.
Hank started across the cracked terrain toward the crater’s impact cone, a natural dome formed by the gigaton blast. Domes usually blew off in a titanic mushroom cloud. But for some reason this one didn’t. “What do you make of this, Doctor Yeats?” he asked, but got no answer.
He turned around and saw Conrad crouched down with his ear to the ground, M16 rifle on his back, listening intently to the rolling savanna beyond the crater rim that rose around them. “We’re being followed.”
“No surprise,” Hank said, pulling out his Nexus phone and clicking away in code. “I’ve got a strong suspicion that the boys from Strategic Explorations are all over this site. I did my homework on them. What Smith is to sadism, Chen is to diabolical genius. They make a great team. Ten to one they’ve figured out the Sheba map as well, and the Zawas boys aren’t far behind.”
Conrad stood up. “What makes you think that?”
“You’re emitting enough tracking signal to power a small radio station,” Hank said, peering down into his phone while shielding it from sunlight.
Conrad rubbed his arm with the needle tracks. “Might have shared that bit of intel with me earlier, Hank.”
“Didn’t want to make you feel conspicuous, and there’s no way to get rid of it without bleeding you dry. The signal will fade in a week or two on its own. Besides, if we can get the goons from Zawas and Strategic Explorations shooting at each other, the red-on-red conflict might save our asses.”
Conrad nodded. “And since both groups think we know more than they do, we’re safe until we get to the end. Unless, of course, this Chen guy already found the mines, in which case they’ll start shooting as soon as they see us. But that will let us know we’ve found what we’ve been looking for.”
“Exactly.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when a chopper rose from behind the volcano cone and darted across the crater.
“Looks like they spotted the Zawas brothers,” Hank said. “Better make a run for it before they spot us too.”
Conrad scrambled across a few meters of boulders and dropped into the bottom of a jagged crack in the earth — the zigzagging bridge across the abyss from the drawing in the old Mason’s journal. It was about three meters deep and getting deeper as it headed toward the impact cone.
He bolted down the dried-up runoff gorge, Hank close behind. The sandy floor was studded with oddly shaped rocks. He heard a high-pitched whine and looked up in time to see a rocket streak overhead. The distant explosion came a moment later, followed by the cackling static of automatic fire.
“Smith’s SE guys fired the rocket,” Hank reported. “Zawas and his troops fired back.”
“And we’re in the crossfire,” Conrad shouted over his shoulder. “Maybe this red-on-red idea of yours wasn’t so hot.” As he ran on, head down, his eyes picked up flashes in the riverbed below. “Hank, look. Gold dust. Hell, more than dust — nuggets!”
“C’mon Conrad, this is small-time. Let’s get to the dome before somebody wins up there.”
But Conrad was transfixed. He stumbled over a rock and fell to one knee. He picked up an egg-sized nugget. “Look at it, Hank! She didn’t even have to mine. No wonder we couldn’t find any trails, towns or mining camps around the crater.”
“I get it,” said Hank. “This isn’t a gold mine, it’s a gold farm. Now keep moving.”
They came to a pile of the odd stones that had built up near the edge of the dried riverbed. Each individual stone, upon closer inspection, vaguely resembled a foot or a hand. Cumulatively, they looked like a pile of body parts or shattered sculptures.
Conrad, surprised at his revulsion, spoke like a scientist. “Human anatomical shapes.”
“Statues?” Hank asked.
“No.” Conrad reached down and picked up a piece, which crumbled in his hand. “I’ve never seen statues like this before. Not made of such a fragile substance. How could you sculpt it?”
Hank carefully studied a chunk of it. “The rock isn’t indigenous to the area. Must have been brought in.”
“It wasn’t brought in,” Conrad said. “It walked in. These are fossilized somehow, like the bodies at Pompeii after the volcano erupted.” He held up what appeared to be a horribly mutated hand with a reptilian look to it and webbing between the fingers. “What the hell could do that to a living thing?”
“It's a transmutation,” Hank said flatly.
Conrad said, “Well, whatever morphed this poor bastard happened while he was alive.”
“Maybe it was the pulverizing force of your Great Flood,” Hank said.
Conrad wasn’t sure if Hank was being serious or poking fun.
“Not all of the water would have returned to the oceans,” Hank went on. “Some it had to go somewhere else. Like this crater and gorge, flowing into the deep recesses of the earth like a massive drain.”
Conrad could see it. “The countless bodies of an entire civilization.”
“Yeah,” said Hank. “Had to wash away somewhere.”
The characteristic whoosh of a hand-held surface-to-air missile split the air like the amplified sound of duct tape ripping.
“QW-1 infrared homing missile from the sound of it,” Hank reported. “Well within its five-kilometer range and below its four-kilometer ceiling.”
The first exploding sound was a sonic boom that shook the pile of stones before them, sending some bouncing to the ground where they shattered.
Then came another explosion, followed by the chunky thwack of dying machinery and the growl of a helicopter engine. A shiny object whirled out of control about ten meters overhead, and Conrad looked up to see the contorted face of the screaming pilot for just an instant before he disappeared and a nearby blast concussed the air.
A breath of flame licked over the top of the natural trench as Conrad raced Hank to the impact dome.
“This is it,” Conrad said, breathing hard. “What do you think we are going to find in there? Interior Petra? Lebeaux? My antediluvian Pillars of Creation?”