As they traversed the winding passage, Drake spoke over his shoulder. “Tell me, Ben, about Cook’s logs.”
Ben exhaled quickly. “It’s nothing more than an overview of this huge trap system. Cook called it the Gates of Hell because of the nature of the traps. He didn’t even see what’s at the end.”
“So who built the traps?” Drake asked. “And why?”
“Nobody knows. The markings we found outside and the ones from the Tomb of the Gods aren’t on these interior walls.” He coughed and added, “Yet.”
Komodo’s voice boomed from behind them. “Why did Cook not see the end?”
“He ran,” Karin said quietly. “In fear.”
“Oh, crap.”
Drake paused for a moment. “So, since I’m just a dumb soldier and you two are the brains of this op, let me get this straight. Essentially, the logs are the key to the trap system. And you two have copies with you.”
“We have one copy,” Ben said. “Karin’s got the other in her head.”
“Then we have one copy,” Komodo grumbled.
“No—” Ben began, but Drake stopped him. “He means that if she dies we have one copy, kiddo. A photographic memory ain’t much use when you’re dead.”
“I didn’t… yes, well, sorry we don’t think like soldiers.”
Drake noticed the tunnel start to widen. The faintest of breezes wafted past his face. He held up a hand to slow them down and then poked his head around a corner.
To behold a stunning sight.
He was at the entrance to an enormous chamber, oblong in shape and with a ceiling lost in darkness. The faint light emanated from glow sticks that the Blood King’s men must have left behind. Directly opposite him and guarding the tunnel that continued into the depths of the mountain was a sight that made his heart pound.
Carved into the very rock face above the tunnel was a giant face. With slanted eyes and hooked nose and what could only be described as horns sprouting from its head, Drake’s immediate conclusion was that this was the face of the Devil, or a demon.
Ignoring the face for now, he scouted the area. The walls were curved, their bases shrouded in darkness. They needed to get some extra light in here.
He beckoned the others slowly forward.
And then, suddenly, a noise blasted through the cavern, a noise like a hundred flamethrowers firing at once or, as Ben put it, ‘sounds like the bloody Batmobile.’
Fire shot down through the carving’s nostrils, creating a furnace around the rock floor. Two separate licks of flame blazed from each nostril, and then a few seconds later one blast from each eye.
Drake studied it uneasily. “Maybe we set off some kind of mechanism. A pressure sensitive trip switch or something.” He turned to Ben. “Hope you’re ready, mate, cos as one of my favorite Dinorock bands, Poison, used to say — this ain’t nothin’ but a good time.”
Ben’s mouth twitched into a brief smile as he consulted his notes. “This is level one of hell. According to the writer, a man called Hawksworth, they named this level Wrath. I guess the reason’s obvious. They later cross-referenced it to the devil, Amon, the demon of wrath.”
“Thanks for the lesson, kid.” Komodo growled. “Does it happen to mention a way past?”
Ben laid the text on the floor and spread it out. “Look. I saw this before but didn’t understand it. Maybe it’s a clue.”
Drake squatted next to his young friend. The copied logs were elaborately penned and illustrated, but Ben’s finger drew his eye toward to an odd line of text.
1(||) — move to 2(||||) — move to 3 (||) — move to 4 (||||||)
And the single inscription that followed it, “With Wrath, have patience. A careful man will plan his route if the lines of navigation lie before him.”
“Cook was the greatest navigator of all time,” Ben said. “That line tells us two things. That Cook navigated the route past the demon and that the way through needs careful planning.”
Karin was watching the bursts of fire. “I count four,” she said speculatively. “Four eruptions of flame. The same total as—”
A shot rang out, shocking through the stillness. A bullet ricocheted off the wall by Drake’s head, making sharp fragments of rock fracture the air. In a millisecond Drake had his gun up and fired a shot off, and in another millisecond he understood that if he ducked back into the passageway, the sniper might keep them pinned down indefinitely.
With that in mind he ran, firing, into the chamber. Komodo, clearly having come to the same conclusion, followed him. The joint fire struck sparks off the surrounding wall. The hidden man ducked in shock, but still managed to fire another bullet which sizzled between Drake and Komodo.
Drake fell to one knee, aiming.
The man jumped out of his hiding place, weapon high, but Komodo fired first — a blast that sent their assailant flying backward. There was a high scream and the man landed in a tangle, rifle clattering to the floor. Komodo walked over and made sure the man was dead.
Drake cursed. “As I thought, Kovalenko left snipers to slow us down.”
“And to thin us out,” Komodo added.
Karin poked her head back around the corner, blond hair falling around her eyes. “If I’m right, the odd sentence is the keyhole and the word ‘patience’ is the key. Those two tram lines that look like two ‘I’s’? In music and poetry and old literature they can signify a pause. Therefore — patience means to ‘pause.’”
Drake looked at the sentence as the Delta team fanned out around the cavern, urged by Komodo and determined not to make any more mistakes.
Komodo shouted, “And men? Watch out for booby traps. I wouldn’t put it past that Russian prick to jury-rig something.”
Drake rubbed his sweaty palm against a rough wall, feeling the uneven stone as cold as the inside of a fridge beneath his hand. “So it’s, ‘wait for the first blast, then pause two and move to two. After the second blast, pause four and move to three. After the third blast, pause two and move to four. And after for the fourth blast, pause six and then out.’”
“Easy.” Ben winked. “But how long’s a pause?”
Karin shrugged. “A brief spell.”
“Oh, that’s helpful, sis.”
“And how do you number the blasts?”
“My guess is the one that reaches farthest first is number one, with number four the shortest.”
“Well, that makes some sense, I suppose. But it’s still a—”
“That’s it.” Drake had had enough. “My patience has been tested already listening to this debate. I’ll go first. Let’s do this before my caffeine high runs out.”
He walked past Komodo’s crew, coming to a stop a few yards short of the reach of the longest tongue of fire. He sensed each man turn to watch. He sensed Ben’s anxiety. He closed his eyes, feeling the temperature rise as another superheated discharge roasted the air before him.
Kennedy’s face swam before his inner eye. He saw her as she used to be. The severe bob in her hair, the featureless pantsuits — one for every day of the week. The conscious effort to detract everything away from the fact that she was female.
And then Kennedy let her hair down, and he remembered the woman he had spent two glorious months with. The woman who had started to help him move on from the crushing death of his wife, Alyson, and the pain caused by that fateful car crash so many years ago.
Her eyes flared right through his heart.
Before him, the fire burned.
He waited for the heat of the blaze to wane and paused for two seconds. As he waited, he was conscious of the burst of fire from the second eye already flashing down. But after two seconds he moved to that point, though every fiber of his being screamed that he shouldn’t.