Treasure of Babylon, page 17
part #2 of Avalon Adventure Series
They left the tomb and stepped back up to the surface. Outside, the moon was rising over the desert in the east as they walked back across the sand to the car.
“Ark location?” Charlie said.
Atticus was silent for several seconds. “Bastian goes into more detail here. He says that when Alexander the Great died, Antipater had the Ark buried with him in Chogha Zanbil.”
Selena was stunned, “Wait, what?”
“The general had the Ark buried with Alexander the Great in a subterranean tomb beneath the southern wall of the Ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil.”
“So you mean to say that not only do we know the location of the Ark of the Covenant,” Selena said excitedly, “but that we also just found one of the most famous missing tombs of all time?”
Atticus looked up at his daughter, the manuscript shaking in his trembling hands. They both burst out laughing at the same time. “We did it!”
“Where is this Chogha Zanbil place?” Decker asked.
“Maybe a little over one hundred kilometers to the east,” Hassan said. “Antipater must have decided to hide the body of his king and the Ark in a location far away from any possibility of them every being discovered again.”
“If what Bastian says about the powers of the Ark are even half true, then I can’t blame him,” Decker said. “It sounds like he’s describing some kind of WMD or something.”
Riley nodded. “I don’t like the sound of it – strange glowing, pulsating noises – men vanishing from the face of the Earth. Sounds like bad karma to me, Lena.”
Selena looked from Riley to her father and gave a shallow nod. “But we have to find it, right? We’ve come this far, after all.”
Atticus gave his daughter a fatherly shoulder-squeeze and smiled. “That’s my girl! Never afraid to venture into the unknown.”
“Sure,” Charlie said, looking anxious. “But there are unknowns and then there are glowing Arks that turn people to dust in a heartbeat.”
Riley frowned and rubbed his face, leaving a smear of sandy dirt on his cheek. “Wait, if we know where it is, why are we still here?”
And with that, they were gone, but none of them noticed Kai Bloch laying flat against the ridge of a sand dune with Riley’s Spectra Laser Mic in his hands.
28
“Four flat tires?” Charlie said, kicking one of the rear wheels. “Are you kidding me?”
“This is no coincidence,” Riley said. “We’ve been rumbled.”
“Impossible,” Selena said. “Hagen has no way of knowing we’re even in Iran.
“Either way, we need to get going,” said Decker. “Looks like we’re running on the rims till we get to the next garage.”
Hassan gently pressed the accelerator and the SUV pushed away from the isolated site like a cruise ship leaving port. Surrounded by leather-clad luxury, Selena thought about sleep for the first time in a day, but the views of the landscape as they drove across the desert were too great to be missed, plus the sound of the wheel rims scratching along the asphalt were not exactly conducive to good sleep.
They changed the tires at the first garage, and then they raced north, skirting the eastern banks of the River Karkheh as they went, and all the time the bright Iranian moon climbed ever higher into the sky above them. Outside, the heat was lingering. This was the region where eighty-seven degrees had once been recorded, but inside the air-conditioned cocoon of the Jeep they were shielded from the heat outside.
“This is very beautiful country,” Hassan said proudly.
Riley scanned the horizon from time to time, taking extra care to check behind them for any sign of Hagen and his forces, but the road was long and desolate, and there was no sign of any trouble.
Decker leaned forward closer to Hassan and Atticus in the front. “Any ETA on Chogha Zanbil?”
“Not long now,” Hassan said. “We leave the wildlife reserve soon and then we turn east. After that, we’ll be at the ruins in less than half an hour.”
Decker checked his watch. “Good. Let’s hope there are no nasty surprises when we get there. The four flat tires have put me on edge.”
Hassan shook his head and gave a sigh of wonder. “Atticus, do you really believe the tomb of Alexander the Great is located in the Ziggurat?”
“Truthfully, I really couldn’t say. My heart wants it to be true, but people have been searching for that tomb for over two thousand years. Every realistic option has been burned out and now people are starting to waste time and money on very unrealistic options. If it’s here in Chogha Zanbil then that’s as good a place as any, I suppose.”
“At least it makes sense historically,” Selena said from the back. “We know he died only three hundred miles west from here in Nebuchadnezzar’s Palace. It wouldn’t have been the toughest job for Antipater to bring his body here and hide it in the Ziggurat. The orthodox theory is that his body was taken much further afield than this, after all.”
“Where?”
“It was supposed to go back to Macedon in modern-day Greece but it got seized by Ptolemy and taken back to Memphis instead, so he got around even in death. The next king, Ptolemy II then moved it to Alexandria.”
“They took his body to Tennessee to see the king?” Riley said. “That really is getting around.”
“Stop being a twat, Riley,” Selena said. “You know damn well I mean Memphis in Egypt.”
Riley raised his hands in an exaggerated act of surrender. “All right, I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you.”
Riley lowered his voice into an Elvis slur. “Thank you very much.”
Selena rolled her eyes but turned to the window so the Australian didn’t see the smile on her lips.
They arrived at the famous ziggurat to find several Jeeps parked outside. After checking the coast was clear, they clambered out into the night and took stock of the situation.
“If this isn’t connected to the flat tires, I’m a monkey’s uncle,” Decker said.
“Looks like we’re definitely too late,” Charlie said. He cupped his hands and peered inside the rear window of one of the Jeeps. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you’re average party of tourists doesn’t turn up to a place like this with three black Jeeps.”
“It’s not out of the realms of possibility,” Atticus said, mopping his brow. “It could be load of Chinese business executives, for instance.”
“At this time of night?” Diana asked.
“Well…”
“With a Grade A 50 Cal ammo box on the back seat?”
“Ah.”
“It’s Hagen, all right,” Decker said. “But how the hell did he know we were Iran?”
Riley scanned the area with Decker’s monocular. “He didn’t post anyone on sentry duty, at least.”
“He’s confident,” Selena said.
“Too confident,” said Diana. “He thinks he can just walk in there and steal the Ark, just like that.”
Hassan gave a wise smile and shook his head. “A thief is a king until he is caught,” he said. “Old Iranian proverb.”
“Well, this son of a bitch is about to taste some of that medicine,” said Decker. He pulled his gun from his holster and checked the magazine. “Let’s get in there and get the Ark.”
29
Hagen clenched and loosened his fists compulsively as Kurz ordered Bloch and his three genetically-modified men to start work on the chamber wall. The GPS tracker Olsen had put on the Avalon had allowed them to track the aircraft to Tehran, and from there it was simply a matter of trailing them from a distance. Bloch’s use of the laser mic to pick up the location of Alexander the Great’s tomb was the final touch in a well-oiled machine that had brought him closer to his true destiny than ever before.
He watched the superhuman workers as they hefted chunks of rock in the attempt to break through the ancient wall. Korhonen had met them at his private plane, and after ordering the men into the aircraft, he had commanded the Finnish scientist to return to the compound and get busy on the shredders and destroy the labs. He knew the authorities would be onto him now, and it was time to move on to another of his many secluded residences.
He checked his watch and sighed. Even here, standing deep below the surface levels of the world-famous Ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil and closer than anyone had ever been to the tomb of Alexander the Great, he was tense and nervous. The great king’s tomb would be enough treasure and glory for most men, but not for Tor Hagen. For him, only the lost Ark of the Covenant would ever be enough.
Kurz and the other men were struggling to break a hole through one of the many subterranean tombs that were built into the foundations of the ancient structure. He sighed heavily and wiped the sweat from his brow as one of the weaponized super-soldiers pushed him aside and lifted the rock effortlessly out the way.
“Now you see why my work is so important, Stefan,” Hagen said with a fiendish smirk. “Leif here can do the work of five men, and so can Marius and Oddvar. Just imagine when I have an army of hundreds, or thousands of them. The power in the Ark will allow me to speed up DNA sequencing and manipulation more than ever before and give me the very power of God’s creation! Imagine!”
“Yes, just imagine,” Kurz muttered under his breath.
Hagen beamed as his three creations cleared a path to the tomb wall, moving the heavy granite blocks as if they were made of balsa wood.
“A simple deletion of the myostatin gene has doubled their muscle mass,” Stefan. “That and a number of other more complex procedures have created these majestic servants.”
“It’s very impressive, sir.”
Hagen was proud of his work – proud of his manipulation of God’s work, as Moser had tried to put it – but it was still as nothing compared to what was hiding behind the ancient baked bricks of the Ziggurat. There, hidden for over two thousand years inside the tomb of Alexander the Great was the greatest prize of all time: the lost Ark of the Covenant, and the powers contained by the Ark would enable him to take the final step he needed to take in order to become a living god.
With the last of Antipater’s annoying granite defenses out of the way, he was able to see the tomb’s rear wall for the first time. More baked bricks stared back at him, only unlike most of those on the outside, these were carefully glazed and decorated with gypsum and intricate cuneiform inscriptions carved into their smooth surface.
“We’re almost there, Ursula. Can you feel the power?”
Moser glanced at him and taking one look at the expression on his face she took a step back without even thinking about it. He hadn’t shaved since they left the Valhalla complex and now his silver stubble was catching the lamplight as Kurz and the super-soldiers were preparing to knock a hole through the tomb wall.
“Can’t you feel it?” he said again, raising his hands above his head. “It’s radiating through the bricks. It wants me to take it. The Ark actually wants me to control its power!”
Moser and Henri Marchand looked doubtful, and even Kurz was starting to look apprehensive, but when Hagen ordered the wall to be broken down, he obeyed as he knew he must. It was too late to back out now, and even if he did Leif and the other synthetic soldiers would do the work anyway, faster and easier than he could do it and without questioning anything the old man ordered them to do. They were genetically programmed to obey, after all.
After exchanging an anxious look with Ursula Moser, Kurz approached the wall and started to search for an area weak enough to blow out with their explosives. “This is the best place.” He was running his hands over the smooth baked bricks jut above the sandy floor. “The bricks are weakest here.”
“That must be what Antipater used as his exit after hiding the tomb,” Hagen said. “He filled it in afterwards but left it weaker than the rest of the section, trusting in the granite blocks as a last line of defense.”
Hagen ordered Bloch to place the explosives and then they took cover behind the granite defense blocks. Holding their hands over their ears, Kurz detonated the C4 and the chamber was filled with a thunderous roar and an enormous cloud of brick dust.
With the smoke and dust still in the air, an excited Tor Hagen got to his feet and made for the newly blasted hole. “There!” He pointed at a man-sized aperture in the wall of baked bricks. “I was right! This is how Antipater must have accessed the lower section of the Ziggurat.”
He walked to the freshly-formed entrance and after waving the remnants of the smoke and dust away from his face he craned his neck inside the black hole and snapped his fingers impatiently behind his back. “Flashlight, now!”
Bloch fumbled to remove a flashlight from his utility belt and handed it to the boss.
Hagen shone the flashlight inside the entrance and after several generous sweeps of the beam from side to side he smiled and nodded with satisfaction. It extended a few meters to the east, and then turned into a series of crumbling stone steps which receded into total darkness somewhere deep beneath the Ziggurat. “We’ve found it. I can see boot marks on the floor of the tunnel and even some old tools dumped just inside the entrance. This is without a doubt the access tunnel used by Antipater.”
Moser took a step forward. “Are you certain?”
“Bring the equipment,” Hagen said, ignoring the Austrian woman’s question. “We’re going in.” Slowly, the old man made his way inside the depths of the Ziggurat.
Leif picked up the diesel generator and headed silently into the tunnel while Marius and Oddvar collected the weapons, ammunition and the rest of the archaeological equipment and followed him inside. Moser, Kurz and Bloch gave each other a look of uncertainty and fear, and then followed up in the rear with Lechner and Marchand trailing behind them.
*
“Looks like they found a way into the lower levels,” Riley said.
“So what next?” Diana said. “Do we just follow them inside, or what?”
Decker studied the chamber as he thought about what to do next. He could still smell the C4 in the air, and he noticed several large cracks running out from the hole Hagen’s team had blasted in the wall at the far end.
He knew enough about engineering to appreciate the damage the explosives had done to the integrity of the chamber’s ceiling and far wall, and he didn’t much like the idea of thousands of tons of baked brick above his head that could come crashing down at any moment.
“We have no choice,” Riley said. “There’s no one else within calling distance and Hagen’s minutes away from discovering not only the tomb of Alexander the Great but also the lost Ark of the Covenant. It’s up to us to stop him, guys.”
“Riley’s right,” Selena said. “We can’t allow a man like Hagen to seize what is easily the most important archaeological and historical discovery in history. He has the ethics of a sewer rat.”
Images of the laboratory storage facility back in Valhalla rose in Decker’s mind like phantoms. He closed his eyes for a moment to clear his head of the vision of that terrible place. “Let’s end this.”
*
Hagen led the way down the stone steps with only his flashlight beam for light. The staircase was cold and damp and cobwebs hung from the ceiling, untouched for thousands of years. Behind him, his three super-soldiers grunted as they hauled their heavy loads through the darkness, and further at the back, Moser and her strongmen brought up the rear, their shadows bobbing about in the flashlight beams.
At the bottom of the steps Hagen found himself faced with a heavy wooden door. He tried the handle. It was not locked, and he cautiously pushed it open with the toe of his boot. Shining the beam into the darkness beyond, he was so shocked by what he saw that he gasped and instantly dropped the flashlight.
He fumbled around in the dusty floor and snatched it back up again.
“What is it?” Moser called out.
He heard Leif and the others come to a stop a few paces behind him, but for this moment he was the only man in the world who had seen it. “I found the tomb,” he called out. “I found Alexander the Great’s tomb.”
Moser pushed her way past the super-soldiers and joined Hagen in the tomb. She shone her beam into the darkness and saw what he had seen. There, in the center of an enormous chamber ringed with pillars and darkened archways was an ornate sarcophagus covered in ancient Greek letters and intricate carvings.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” Hagen said. He took a step closer and approached the small stone structure. Running his bony fingers along the top of the lid, he shone his flashlight along the carvings in the ancient stone and read the inscription with tears coming to his eyes. “Attic Greek,” he said quietly. “It reads, Here Lies the Great King Alexandros.” He turned his watery eyes up to the Austrian woman. “I found it.”
“You found the tomb,” she snapped. “But where is the Ark?” Sweeping her flashlight around the chamber she saw nothing but dust, gravel and more cobwebs. “There’s not even any treasure in here.”
Hagen had been so consumed with Alexander the Great’s tomb, he had failed to notice that the Ark was nowhere in sight. He pulled himself up to full height and scanned the chamber with his flashlight, almost as if it might illuminate something Moser’s beam had failed to find. “Hva i helvete?”
“I told you, nothing.”
“Leif! Marius, Oddvar! Get the lid off this tomb, now.”
Because he had not been given the order to put down the heavy generator, Leif was still holding it. Now he lowered it to the dusty floor and padded impassively over to the tomb. The other two super-soldiers followed his lead, but they were not needed.
What Hagen had speculated must be at least a ten thousand pound stone capstone was lifted up and pushed off the tomb effortlessly by Leif alone. It crashed to the floor with a deafening thump that shook the entire chamber.
Hagen moved through the cloud of dust and shone his beam inside the tomb. “It’s a sarcophagus, all right,” he muttered. “And it’s certainly that of Alexander the Great, but it’s just the body. There’s no sign of the Ark. Steikje!”
