Treasure of Babylon, page 14
part #2 of Avalon Adventure Series
“But what I don’t understand is, what makes you think the Ark has this power?” Atticus asked.
Hagen looked delighted with the question. “The Bible itself tells us. Any man who touched it was killed on the spot. Some have speculated it had an electrical power, while others have always believed it must have emitted some of kind of radiation. Other descriptions have included metal plates that could be batteries. The list goes on.” Hagen’s eyed began to glaze over as his mind ran wild with the thought of securing such a power for himself. “Moser has briefed me very well on the Bible.”
He turned on Atticus and held the key up in the cold light. “Now, you’ve had plenty of time to study this. What does it say?”
Atticus looked at Selena and then both looked over at their captor. “It says the Ark was snatched when the Babylonians torched Jerusalem and taken to the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar.” He turned away from Hagen and looked at Selena with an apology on his face.
“You mean?”
“Yes, the Ark is part of the Treasure of Babylon.”
Bloch entered the room. He looked vaguely rattled but still in control. “Sir, the grounds have been breached. Kurz is involved in a fire fight out the front.”
Atticus and Selena shared a look of hope. It must be Decker and the rest of the team coming to rescue them.
Hagen was less thrilled. “Deploy all the men you have and kill the intruders, we’re getting out of here!” He turned his head and called out to the man on the balcony. “And now jump, Arvid.”
“No!” Selena cried out.
Atticus stumbled out of his chair and lunged for the young man’s legs, but it was too late. Arvid had leaped from the balcony and was now tumbling hundreds of meters down toward the rocky mountainside below.
“My God!” Atticus said.
Selena covered her mouth with horror. “He’s not even screaming.”
“Of course not,” Hagen said. “He wants to obey.”
Atticus ran to the balcony but turned away when the young man’s body smashed into the frozen scree a few meters above the surface of the fjord. In a grisly tangle of broken arms and legs it rolled out of sight into a line of spruce trees near the water’s edge.
He turned to see Bloch pull a gun from his holster and walk to the door. He waved the barrel of the gun at him. “Come inside, old man. We’re going.”
Hagen was now talking into the phone on his desk. “The tracker will be on their plane within the hour. Lock these two up in here while we prepare the boat.”
23
Decker watched Kurz scramble back through the slush and disappear inside the main entrance of the compound. Karin made the last few meters into the forest and slammed down against the trunk of the spruce beside him and the others. Riley’s cover fire had saved her life, and everyone knew it.
“You were right,” she said, still breathing hard from the run to the trees. “As soon as we showed them your picture of Professor Moore they pulled guns on us. Jensen went for his gun and they killed him on the spot. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Decker frowned. “Have you told your boss, Olsen?”
She shook her head. “Not Olsen, no – he was unavailable. I called a sergeant I know in the IT department, Nina. I called her when I was taking cover behind the police car. I also asked her to send through the schematics for the compound.”
“Quick thinking,” Riley said. “I like that in a chick.”
Diana rolled her eyes.
“Good job.” Decker said. “Has Olsen sent them through yet?”
Larsen gave a quick nod as she flicked through her smart phone. “We have all of the schematics here, and reinforcements will be here as fast as possible.”
“But it took us nearly two hours to get here!” Diana said.
“Olsen is sending a chopper but it’s on a mission fifty kilometers to the north and needs to go back to the station to pick up the armed response team.”
“What kind of chopper?” Decker asked.
Larsen closed her eyes to think for a moment. “It’s a… Bell Jet Ranger, mostly used as a rescue chopper in the mountains.”
“Two hundred and twenty Ks top speed,” the American said almost to himself. “Fifty Ks back to the station and then sixty Ks out here means they’re not arriving for around a half hour. We can’t wait for them.”
“Mitch is right,” Charlie said. “They know we’re here now so we no longer have the element of surprise. Lena and her father are in serious trouble. We have to get in there now.”
Decker slipped the monocular in his pocket as Riley shouldered the rifle. “All right,” the American said in a calm, businesslike manner. “They could be holding them literally anywhere in the place, but it’s my best guess that they’re either in Hagen’s lab or his private quarters because this is a private residence and not likely to have a brig.”
“A brig?” Karin asked.
“He means jail,” Charlie said. “He used to be a Marine.”
“Sorry,” Decker said. “Force of habit, but the point remains they’re not going to be locked up in there, so we have that on our side. Can you find those two locations, Karin?”
“Ja, already done it. The laboratory is the building to the north and it looks like it’s on two floors with the lower floor underground. Hagen’s private quarters are on the top floor on the southern side of the building.”
“Dammit,” Decker said. “We’re going to have split the team. One goes north to the labs and the other goes south to the private area.”
Golan loaded the Jericho. “How many armed men do you think he has in there?”
“Difficult to say,” Riley said. “There are only a few cars, but that only tells us so much. We know Kurz and his men – minus poor old matey lad in the upstairs window – are in there, plus Moser and Hagen himself. I’m thinking we have the advantage, unless the old bastard’s hiding a load of Special Forces under his bed.”
Karin took the lead, her service pistol in one hand and the schematics on her phone in the other. In the gathering darkness, they moved in a single file along the snowy forest path until they reached the western perimeter. Silently moving down the path into the compound, they reached an outbuilding and took cover behind its western wall.
“This is where we split,” Decker said. “I’ll go to the labs with Karin and Moshe. Riley, you take Charlie and Diana to the private quarters. Unless we cross each other’s paths inside, we’ll meet back at the car.”
“Got it, boss,” Riley said. He took another look at the schematics and memorized the location of Hagen’s living area. After a final weapons check he led his small team south through the dusky Norwegian evening.
“It’s this way,” Karin said. “If we get into the garage we should be able to take some steps down to the basement level.”
The garage block ran along the western edge of the main building. Two large roller doors at the front were both locked, as was a side door, but a small window beside the door offered them a way in.
Golan made short work of the window putting it in with the butt of his pistol and then he reached around and opened the door from the outside. “We got lucky,” he said with a surprised smile. “Key’s in the door.”
“There’s no crime around here at all,” Karin said. “I’m surprised it was locked in the first place.”
Inside the garage, Karin led the way with the light by her phone. A Ferrari California shared the space with a Maybach Cabriolet, each resting on the smooth, polished concrete floor like sleeping tigers. Moving across the space, Moshe Golan admired the cars and gave a low whistle of appreciation. “Not bad.”
They crept over to the basement door. Decker opened it with his gun raised into the aim and when Karin shone her phone’s flashlight beam into the darkness. It revealed a staircase leading down to the basement and they all shared the relief. They made their way along a corridor lit with ice-blue emergency lighting until they reached another room, and what they found there shocked them to the core.
*
Jens Olsen wasn’t very good at poker, and he was even worse at backgammon. Something about the way the probabilities worked just caught him out every time, and yet he was drawn to the gaming tables like a moth to the flame. His debts now totalled more than the combined value of his house in Jåtten and his cabin over at the lakes. His wife Anette knew nothing about it, and that was just how he wanted it.
He had always believed something would fall from the heavens and light his way out of the disaster, and that something was a telephone call from Tor Hagen. The weird old man up at the place they called Valhalla had called and offered him five million Krone.
All he had to do was get past his old friend the harbormaster and attach a GPS tracker to an old float plane down on the water. Simple and easy – and all the debts were gone, just like that.
He was an ethical man, but the gambling had taken a hold of him. As he drove across town from the police station he was surprised at how easily he was able to shrug off his conscience and collect the tracker from one of Hagen’s men. It was one of those weird ones with the dead eyes he saw from time to time up at the fjord near Valhalla.
He took the tracker and parked up outside the harbor. Finding the correct aircraft wasn’t hard – Hagen had told him to look for a 1940s float plane and there was only one that fit the description. He checked his phone and found a missed call from Karin Larsen and then stepped out into the cold wind.
This would only take a second.
*
Decker and the others were in some kind of storage facility, and they all shared the same disgust and horror when they saw the product of Hagen’s scientific research.
Dozens of Formalin specimen jars filled with the results of hideous medical experiments, all signed off by someone of the name Korhonen. They were lined neatly up on a series of shelving units running along the north side of the room. Labels with carefully printed information obscured most of the contents, but there was still enough visible to turn their stomachs with fear.
Karin looked way in disgust, instantly burying her face in Decker’s shoulder and hiding her eyes from the horror. “Å min Gud!”
“This is an abomination,” Golan muttered under his breath.
Decker didn’t know what to say. He felt his heart beating in his chest as Karin squeezed his shoulder for comfort. He’d read about this sort of thing – DNA manipulation, genome sequencing… Nazi eugenics – but he never thought he’d be confronted by it. He felt everything coming together in his mind – the connection between Moser and Hagen, the hideous results of the Norwegian’s scientific research and most concerning of all, the Ark of the Covenant.
“We keep going,” he said at last. “Lena and Atticus need us to keep going.”
Then a noise. Karin collected herself and came back to life, raising her service pistol in the direction of the sound. It was footsteps, and they were coming toward them from the door they hadn’t yet reached. The police sergeant listened as two men approached and talked to each other. “They’ve been ordered to check the garage,” she said.
“Everyone up against the back wall,” Decker said. “And stay in the shadows. The last thing we need now is a gunfight.”
They hid in the shadows and held their breath as the two men opened the door and moved through the storage room toward the other door. Opening it, they made their way long the corridor leading to the garage. Golan closed it silently behind them and turned the key in the lock, and then slid a chunky bolt across. “Whatever they do now,” he said proudly. “They’re not coming back this way.”
“Good work, Moshe,” Decker said. He took one last look around the storage room and shuddered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
24
Selena struggled against the handcuffs holding her to the chair. Across the room, her father was suffering the same fate only he was handcuffed to a radiator. “I can’t believe you told him, Dad!”
“I know, I know!” he said pathetically. “But it only told him so much – the Treasure of Babylon is not just sitting around in a pile waiting for someone to loot it. And don’t forget, now we know Riley and the others are coming to rescue us.”
“You do realize he’s actually going to kill us, don’t you?”
Atticus Moore looked bewildered. “Are you sure? Perhaps he’s bluffing.”
“He’s not bluffing, Dad! He’s already killed countless people in an insane quest for the Ark of the Covenant and God only knows what the hell he has down in the lower laboratory because it sounded like the gates of hell themselves were down there. Maybe more of those freaks he created…”
“Surely you exaggerate, my dear. I’m certain we’ll find a way out of this if only we put our…”
“Put our heads together,” she said, finishing his sentence for him. “I know, Dad – that’s what you always say.”
“That’s because it’s true.”
“God, Dad,” she muttered. “Sometimes I think you’re from another world.”
“What was that?”
“I said we’re in deep sh—, real trouble here and if we don’t get out of these cuffs we probably have less than an hour to live.”
“No, no – Tor won’t kill us so long as he thinks we can help him locate the Treasure of Babylon.”
“And can we?”
“I have a lead, yes.”
“We have to get out of here before we can follow a lead.” She yanked at the cuffs again but succeeded only in carving a deeper groove into the soft flesh around her wrist. “Dammit!”
The door opened, and she gasped when she saw Stefan Kurz and another man standing behind him. Guns drawn, and fear etched on their face, it looked like things were about to shift up a gear.
Kurz stepped into room, and now Selena saw he was sweating. She also saw the other man was Kai Bloch. “All right, you’re coming with us now. The boat’s ready.”
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What were those shots?”
Kurz ignored her and ordered Bloch to unlock them. The moment Bloch had freed her father, the old man swung at him with everything he had. Selena gasped again, almost too scared to look as the younger Austrian effortlessly beat her father down to the ground with the stock of his weapon. The anger she felt when her old man had spilled the beans to Hagen evaporated in an instant when she saw him try and defend her from Kurz and Bloch.
“Get your hands off him!” she cried out. “He’s just an old man!”
Bloch moved to pile a boot into Atticus’s ribs when Kurz grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Leave him!” he said in English. “And unlock the girl!”
Bloch gave him a scowl and padded across the room to unlock Selena’s handcuffs. As he turned the key she felt the pressure and pain of the metal biting into her skin fade away. She rubbed them better as she watched her father stagger to his feet and wipe the blood from his bleeding nose.
Kurz and Bloch marched them down at gunpoint from the bedroom on the upper floor and ordered them to take the stairs down to the laboratory. Selena felt her stomach lurch when she heard the word, and knew at once what it meant.
Had Hagen decided he wanted to kill them after all? She knew that anything to do with the lab meant it wasn't going to be fast and painless, and you could take that to the bank.
They reached the laboratory door and Kurz kicked it open to reveal Tor Hagen and Ursula Moser standing together in quiet conversation up against one of the benches. Several men were standing nervously on the other side of the lab, pistols casually wedged in shoulder holsters. Behind them was a double door with a biohazard warning sign across it. It was bolted in three places.
Kurz approached Hagen and then the Norwegian billionaire turned and gave Selena and Atticus a sickening smile. “I’m so very glad you could join us.”
A deep, guttural growl emanated from behind the biohazard doors. Hagen and Moser exchanged a knowing look but said nothing.
“What is this?” Atticus said. “I thought you said we were going in a boat?”
“A change of plan – your friends are too close and you two will only slow us down. You’re coming with me, Atti, and you’re going to help me find the Treasure of Babylon and the Ark. Sadly, your daughter is going to play out her days here with Dr Korhonen’s creations.”
The gunshots rang out loud and violent in the corridor, and bullets raked a line in the biohazard door. They all dived for cover, with Hagen and Moser scattering away into the lab. Lechner grabbed Atticus and used him as a human shield as he stumbled toward the lab and followed his leader’s escape.
“Dad!” Selena’s heart was torn in two – her father had been snatched by Lechner right under her nose, but now Decker and the others were here to rescue them at last. “Mitch…”
“Where did they go?” Mitch asked.
“In there,” she said. “They said it was the fastest way to the fjord. They took Dad.”
Another pained howl.
“What the hell was that?” Decker asked.
Riley looked disgusted. “Don’t look at me! I can’t describe it. Sounds almost like a human.”
“Almost?”
“We think he’s been doing DNA experiments,” Selena said. “I heard those screams before when we first got here. There’s something hiding deep in the agony of those terrible howls.”
“Human-animal hybrids?”
“No, some sort of superhumans. We met one upstairs. They have enhanced DNA, They’re faster and stronger, have no conscience to speak of and are totally obedient.”
“My God…” Decker’s voice drifted away into the gloom of the corridor.
“We have to get after them!” Riley said.
Decker nodded. “Someone’s got to stay here and keep Korhonen busy – Charlie?”
“Sure thing, Mitch.”
“I’ll stay, too,” Diana said.
Karin grabbed her radio. “I’ll find out how far out the reinforcements are.”
