“Who else is alive outside?” Billie asked.
“No one.”
“What happened to the other men?” Jeremy asked. “There were six of you, and you were well armed!”
“They had more men, and they came with machineguns.”
“You’re equipped with Israeli Uzis!” Jeremy spat the words out. “So what the hell happened?”
Ahmet stared at James, but his eyes were distant. He was vacantly reliving the moments just past. “They outnumbered us. One by one, they took out each of our men. When I was the last one alive, I decided to play the last card I had left to play — I opened both of my grenades and destroyed the entrance.”
“You caused an avalanche, didn’t you?” Jeremy asked. “Did any of the attackers survive?”
“I don’t know. But I doubt it. Half the mountainside came down in the avalanche. I only survived by sliding back down into the entrance.”
The edge of Jeremy’s lip curled upwards. It was more of a smirk than a smile. There was something sinister about his reaction. His eyes betrayed bewilderment at the turn of events, and then he started to laugh. Without any hesitation, he withdrew a handgun and fired twice. The shots hit Ahmet in the chest, and the man fell to the ground, as blood quickly filled his lungs.
Jeremy glanced at the dying man. “Ahmet I do believe you just did me a tremendous favor. It appears I no longer have to contend with Conquest for a place in the Third Temple.”
Billie’s eyes darted to the Uzi lying on the ground next to Ahmet, and then back to Jeremy. It would be impossible for her to reach it before Jeremy got a shot off. Her eyes fixed on Jeremy and she spoke with the confidence of a woman who knew she was about to die. “You killed my grandfather, didn’t you?”
“Guilty, I’m afraid,” Jeremy said. “I’m so, so very sorry, Billie. Really, I am. I was worried when you saw your grandfather’s corpse that the bullet holes would give it away. But even that I could have easily justified by telling you it was further proof of the lengths some would go to keep the truth hidden. I was happy, truly I was, that you could finally achieve closure. I always did love you, and never wanted it to end like this. But you had to bring up the news about the Third Temple, didn’t you?”
She studied his eyes. He looked frightened, like he didn’t want to kill her, but he no longer had a choice in the matter. After all, he was her Godfather for God’s sake! “What is it? What is so damned important about the Third Temple?”
He leveled the barrel of his handgun at her. “If it was up to me, I’d let you live — and then hope to hell you never found it. But I’m afraid it’s not up to me. It’s up to the man I work for. The man paying for this expedition was quite explicit — if we found it, there were to be no survivors.”
She held her palms outward, in supplication. “Wait! Please. Found what?”
“You still don’t know, do you?” Jeremy grinned as he aimed directly at her head.
“Know what?” she asked. “Who paid for the expedition?”
“His name is Death — and he’s been waiting a long time for the Third Temple to rise.”
Billie heard the report of the weapon fire multiple times. She held her breath, expecting the pain to follow quickly. It took a moment to realize the shots weren’t aimed at her. They were aimed at Jeremy, and they’d gone much too wide. She reacted fast, and it was a split second before she saw who had fired. But Jeremy responded faster. He turned to face Ahmet and fired a further two shots into the man’s chest and one in his head, killing him instantly.
Ahmet’s Uzi dropped to the floor. His failed attempt to save her life, had cost him his. She didn’t wait for Jeremy to turn around and kill her. She launched herself at him. Her speed had caught Jeremy off guard. Instead of trying to reaffirm his footing, he made the mistake of concentrating on shooting her instead. Billie swung her left foot into the back of his knee and pushed him hard with every ounce of force her muscular and lithe frame could assemble. He pulled at the Glock’s trigger. The shot went high, and he fell backward into the chasm.
She heard his scream as he fell into the same blackened abyss that had earlier swallowed the focus of her flashlight indefinitely. Jeremy pulled at the trigger as he continued to fall. The last thing she heard was the clicking sound of the Glock’s firing pin striking the empty chamber. She never heard him hit the ground.
Billie shined her flashlight into the chasm. The dark and sinister looking opening toward the earth had swallowed his body whole. There was still something evil about the crevasse, like it had been drawn to the darkness inside her Godfather. She shook her head, cursing herself for not seeing the darkness before. She’d known Jeremy her entire life, and yet she’d never predicted his wicked nature. Her mind drifted to the past few weeks, trying to find a time when she should have picked up on his real nature.
She found none. Instead, the sound of thunder roaring from outside the tunnel interrupted her thoughts, and returned her to her more pressing concern — was there still time to escape from her pursuers? She picked up Ahmet’s Uzi and climbed out through the ancient iron doors, and into the ice tunnel.
She scanned the new landscape. The avalanche had rendered the previously steep but traversable slope into a vertical cliff face. No longer covered in snow and ice, her crampons would provide little benefit in climbing the volcanic stone wall, and the rest of her ropes and climbing equipment had been lost in the avalanche. To her right a jagged ledge of volcanic rock ended in a vertical drop of nearly eleven thousand feet. Without climbing equipment, or a lot more experience, she had no way of descending or even traversing it. To her left the ledge was narrow and barely traversable. She looked up. There was no way she could climb, and down, was out of the question.
She carefully moved along the narrow volcanic rock-shelf. Her heart raced as she concentrated on moving quickly along the delicate route. She wasn’t afraid of heights, but she wasn’t all too keen on falling to her death either. She made certain of the strength and placement of each footing and handhold as she moved along. Her eyes continuously scanned the area for signs of her pursuers.
She made it probably three hundred feet around the face of the avalanche before she spotted her goal. It was an area another four hundred feet away, where the spur of Mount Ararat met a minor saddle, before descending steeply into the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan. Her eyes followed the spur toward the Armenian plains, where the Aras and Murat rivers ran through the closed Turkey-Armenian borders. She swallowed hard. Even if she made it, she would have trouble crossing the border.
Billie continued to move along the route, and then stopped. She dropped down as low as she could along the rock-shelf, reducing her visual silhouette as much as possible. Ahead of her, by no more than ten feet, the volcanic rock scattered into a hundred smaller fragments, as a heavy machine gun pummeled large caliber shots at her. The sound of machine-gun fire echoed throughout the mountain. For a moment, she was worried the damned thing would cause another avalanche.
The sound stopped, and she struggled to find its original source. She shuffled backward, trying to find any form of cover. Billie made it twenty feet and then stopped. The ledge rose about a foot and then dipped again. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. She stretched out, and dipped her head close to the ground, lowering herself as much as possible. Billie picked up the Uzi and stared through its scope, searching for the location of her attacker.
A few minutes went by and there were no more shots fired. Her eyes followed the narrow pathway, if it could be called that at all, until she reached the spur running down Mount Ararat. In an instant she spotted her attacker. He was positioned about two hundred feet away from her, and just up from the path. The man was lying down, looking straight at her. He had some sort of machine gun set up on a tripod. Why did he stop shooting? She wondered if he’d somehow lost her through his sight, or simply accepted that she was an impossible shot from that distance. It was unlikely. Her attacker had already managed to place a close grouping of bullets less than ten feet from her head, proving he could hit her from that distance. So why hadn’t he? Could he have intentionally missed her? She considered why he hadn’t killed her. Maybe he wanted her alive, but why? Then she recalled the words Jeremy had said to her — there could be no survivors once it was found.