He tracked the trail through the dense foliage, carefully pushing away the hanging leaves and vines. Something very dangerous was out here. Dangerous enough to take down a man without a fight, stealthy enough to attack without warning.
Native trackers could follow a man’s movements in the wild as well as Hank could follow a map, but Hank didn’t have that skill set. He had to look carefully to find the blood drops amid the ground cover, while at the same time trying to maintain what was called “total sensory awareness.” He wasn’t good at it. Under any other circumstances, he shouldn’t be out here.
But these weren’t other circumstances.
He had the feeling that he was being watched. He felt a tingling. An energy. He’d felt it before, and not only back at the Niantic Labs at CERN or on the field of battle in Afghanistan. Years ago he experienced the same thing at the Cahokia pyramids in the States, even in Manhattan and L.A. He just hadn’t known what it was until the Niantic Project.
I’m close to a transdimensional XM portal.
Hank didn’t know where it was, and he didn’t want to take a chance of lighting it up until the time was right, but that’s what it was.
And he heard the sound. A low hum. Fuzzy.
He looked around and saw a strange, amorphous shape drifting toward him. More like a shadow or a dissipating waft of smoke than solid matter. He turned to face it, and it stopped. That in itself gave him a jolt. The thing was aware of him, and now he was aware of it. Now he knew exactly what killed the watcher.
Why doesn’t it kill me too?
He remained silent, motionless, waiting.
This thing was not an enemy. He had long suspected the presence of portal guardians, but this seemed to be guarding him. No, it didn’t seem. It was. But why? And from what?
And then it simply vanished.
Hank stood there for a moment, not sure what to do, and then saw the trail of blood again. As he tracked it, the blood soon turned to a trail of bones and metal bits that ended at a crack in the earth that looked like it might lead to a predator’s den. In an hour there would be no trace of the poor bastard who’d been dragged down to hell. The flesh that hadn’t been devoured by whatever killed the guy would soon be picked clean by the minor mammals, flies and insects.
This rainforest is a full-service recycler.
At least the dead Chinese guy’s gun was still there. So was his phone. Whether he’d been using it as a camera or a GPS, or texting to others, Hank knew there would be a treasure trove of information inside. If he could get into it. Better yet, he’d turn it over to Montgomery for analysis.
He retraced his steps and snagged the drone from the pissed-off spider, which was the size of his hand, then headed back to the trailer. Once inside, he pinged Montgomery and told him to pick up the phone. An hour later, another drone showed up on site, this one designed for autonomous transport. Hank dropped the phone in the payload bay, and it shot up and disappeared over the horizon.
Pretty soon he might have to call on Conrad Yeats too.
For there be monsters here.
CHAPTER 5
More than forty queens and kings were buried in the South Cemetery, the oldest of the Nubian pyramid sites in Meroe. Because the most honored and visible position in an ancient cemetery was occupied first, with succeeding burials arranged farther and farther away, Conrad Yeats could effectively drive his jeep back through time to the pyramid of King Arkamani-qo, the first ruler on record to be buried at Meroe.
The record, of course, was wrong.
Long before these royals rose and died, one legend said that the Queen of Sheba had built her palace here after her torrid affair with the great King Solomon in Jerusalem. Of course, he and Hank disagreed over whether there was ever any physical relationship between the two royals, let alone a torrid one at that. The Bible said only that she and the Lion of Israel discussed affairs of estate, with the Queen of Sheba gifting Solomon more than four tons of gold in exchange for his great wisdom. But what with all of Solomon’s foreign brides and concubines — documented into the hundreds — Conrad felt comfortable in his speculations about the nature of their relationship. And if the Queen of Sheba took any inspiration away from Solomon’s legendary Temple, then her own palace must have been extraordinary, greater than the ruins of the nearby Temple of Isis.
Conrad climbed out of his jeep, slipped on his pack and looked around the dead graveyard of pharaohs under the stars. The cool desert air made him shiver.
Forty generations of Nubian royalty were buried here, and every royal Nubian tomb was housed within — or rather beneath — a pyramid. The problem was that the tombs were built and buried first, independent from the pyramids on top of them later. Some alignments were so off that the tombs weren’t even under their associated pyramid. Often the entrance to the tomb was a good way beyond the pyramid and chapel.
Indeed, everything was so poorly aligned that Conrad could only wonder if the effect was intentional.
Which was why the stars were a far better guide here than the eye.
Conrad took out his phone and held it up to the night sky. He clicked his modified Google Sky app icon. His screen now framed the stars like a window through the camera lens while a GPS readout fixed his location in time and space. He moved his thumb in a circular motion to “dial back” the stars to their positions around 950 BCE.
Eureka.
Based on his own celestial map, he was standing out in the open over the Queen of Sheba’s tomb, which had no pyramid, landmark or monument to speak of. That being the case, he had to find the stairway entrance.
His contrarian gut told him that since many of these Nubian tomb entrances were found outside their pyramids, it stood to reason that the stairway entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s tomb, which had no landmark, was actually beneath and sealed off by another tomb.
It made a wild kind of sense. It took a few calculations based on the alignments of his position, but he found the axis he was looking for. It pointed him forty meters away — to one of the cemetery’s several “anonymous queen” pyramids.
The pyramid was imposing enough, belonging to a Nubian queen and all. It was about 20 meters tall, made of solid sandstone and a cultural treasure. It was also, if his celestial calculations were correct, directly on top of the entrance to the lost tomb of the Queen of Sheba.
The stairway entrance to the surface pyramid was east of the surrounding wall and north of the pyramid’s central axis. Above the stairway was an offering chapel decorated with various reliefs, but nothing to suggest the identity of the anonymous Nubian queen it honored, let alone any secret Queen of Sheba tomb deep below it.
Conrad strapped on a small headlight and tiny camera around his head, slipped his pack over his shoulders and started down. He descended 19 steps to a passageway cut into the bedrock beneath the pyramid. He followed the long tunnel east to the burial chamber, like many archaeologists and tomb raiders before him.
Nothing new here.
The framed doorway opened to another tunnel, which grew wider and taller the further Conrad walked until he found himself in a cavernous antechamber with a barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Again, so far he was hardly the first to set foot here.
Eight massive pillars carved from some kind of green alabaster divided the burial chamber into two side aisles and a central nave. It almost looked like the kind of set-up he’d expect to find around one of Hank Johnson’s multidimensional portals, as the alabaster pillars seemed to almost glow.
In the middle of the floor was a massive pile of skulls and bones. And not just human bones either. Conrad could pick out horse, camel and dog bones, as well as some other bizarre shapes from creatures he’d rather not imagine.