Treasure of Babylon, page 18
part #2 of Avalon Adventure Series
He swung the beam around in a desperate search for any clue that might tell him what happened to the Ark. “It must be here! I know it was here…”
Decker moved into the chamber and raised his gun. “Hold it right there, Hagen!”
30
Hagen moved to raise his hands, but at the last minute shone the powerful Maglite beam in Decker’s eyes. The American moved his arm up to shield himself, but that was all the time Kurz and Lechner needed to dive for cover and fire on him.
Decker hit the dirt and rolled into the cover of a tomb as he returned fire. He yelled at the others to stay where they were in the tunnel, but Riley was already at his side. The young man had sprinted through the firefight to give the former marine some much needed backup.
“They’re behind the main sarcophagus over there,” Decker said. “But no sign of Bloch.”
Riley pushed himself up against the stone wall of the tomb and wiped the sweat from his face. “That’s not good… holy crap, Mitch! They’ve got Diana!”
Decker raised his head above the edge of the tomb and saw Kai Bloch gripping Diana and pushing a gun into her neck. “Bastard must have found a way to get around behind them in the tunnel.”
“Drop your weapons!” Hagen shouted. “Drop them or I’ll give the order to kill her!”
They dropped their weapons, and Hagen had Kurz and Lechner march them up against one of the walls with their arms raised above their heads. It was then he noticed a collection of symbols carved into the wall behind them.
Hagen looked at them with contempt, and then returned his attention to the French archaeologist. “Well, Marchand? What do you make of these new symbols?”
The Frenchman studied them for a moment, passing his hands over the ridges of the carved symbols in the hope this might help him translation. “I’m sorry…”
Hagen gave a weary sigh and he raised a gun and held it at Diana’s head. “Will one of the Professor Moores please step forward and translate these. The Ark is supposed to be here, right here, but as we can all see, it is not. Perhaps these will offer some clue.”
Selena stepped out of the line, but Atticus pushed her back. “I’ll do it.”
Atticus passed Marchand, giving him a look of disgust as he approached the wall. He too spent several moments studying them before shrugging his shoulders. “Never seen anything like them before.”
“Too bad for you,” Hagen said, and cocked his gun. “You have sixty seconds to tell me their meaning or I will kill you.”
“Wait!” Diana cried out. “Please, don’t kill him! He doesn’t know, but I do.”
Hagen looked from Atticus to Diana. He pushed the archaeologist into the dirt and then pointed his gun at the Portuguese linguist. “Then this is your time to shine, my dear. You had better get busy telling me what this says. Why is the Ark not here?”
Diana stepped cautiously forward, glancing behind her at her friends for reassurance. Riley gave her a wink and told her it would all be okay.
“This is written in Classical Hebrew,” she said, tracing her fingertips over the strange letters carved into the brick wall.
“The language of the Bible?” Charlie asked.
She shook her head. “Yes and no. It was spoken, yes, but it was never referred to as Hebrew back then. They called it Judean, or the tongue of Canaan. In Greek texts the language was called Hebrew.”
“And that’s what this is?” Hagen said, pushing the pistol into the small of her back. “You’re certain?”
She flinched at the feeling of the gun in her back. “More or less, but there are some differences. The consonants are written in a different way, but I can still read it.”
Moser stepped closer to the wall. “And what does it say?”
“Yes,” Hagen snapped. “What?”
“It says the Ark was taken by descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.”
A bleak silence rose up to meet her words.
“I want more!” Hagen snapped.
Diana looked over her shoulder at him, her dark brown eyes loaded with fear and doubt. “In fact, the carvings on this whole wall were made by the Lost Tribe. They’re writing a history of why they came across the desert to find the Ark, and where they took it.”
“They say where they took it?” Moser said.
Diana nodded. “They left the location here in case the descendants of other Lost Tribes also found their way here.”
Hagen sighed angrily. “And where is this location, Dr Silva?”
“It’s given here by a man named Jehu. He was in the Tribe that found the Ark, and he writes here about how he travelled on… I can’t understand this section – it’s mentioning dates, I think… but here he says that he travelled with the Ark to its new location and then returned to leave this message as a kind of map for others.”
“How kind,” Hagen said. “Where did he take the Ark?”
“Africa… deep inside a mountain named Namuli. They built an underground city there.”
“Namuli?” Moser said. “Where is that?”
“Mount Namuli,” Kurz said. “It’s in modern-day Mozambique.”
Moser looked like she was slipping into a dream. “So that’s where they went…”
“Where who went?” Kurz asked, but Hagen interrupted him.
“The Lemba people!” A look of wonder lit Hagen’s wrinkled face.
“Was?” Bloch asked in German, irritated.
“The Lemba people,” Hagen repeated. “There have always been legends about how the Ark was taken by the Lemba people down to Zimbabwe. I never believed it, but it held a shred of truth to it – the Lost Tribe took the Ark to Mount Namuli instead!”
“But there’s more,” Diana said.
Hagen pushed the gun into her temple. “Do tell.”
Diana looked at the black muzzle of the gun and swallowed in fear. “It’s talking about how the Ark contains both the means to create life and bring death. It’s difficult to translate as the words are very general in their meaning, but I guess the power of destruction could be translated more directly as the crystal of death, and I think maybe prima materia… first matter, is the closest I can get to describe this creation-substance.”
Hagen gasped.
“The crystal of death must be the superconductor you told me about,” Moser said.
Hagen’s eyes widened. “Ja… and the primitive material from which all matter derives! This is what I always dreamed of! This must be the semiconductor material. The Ark really does contain the power of both creation and destruction!”
“A semi-conductor?” Decker asked. “Just what the hell are you up to?”
Hagen gave a grim smile. “The crystals in the Ark are superconductors, superior to anything we have. These are necessary for the creation of my superlaser, yes. If my research is right, the prima materia Dr Silva has translated is a new substance, entirely unknown to modern science. Its structure contains free electrons that will assist the flow of electricity like no other substance on Earth, allowing me to create the most powerful semiconductor chip ever built.”
“What the hell for?”
“To create the world’s most powerful DNA sequencing tool. With this material I will be able to extract chemical information from DNA samples and transfer it into digital information faster than ever before. What I have done so far with Leif and his friends is nothing compared to what this power will allow me to do. With the power in the Ark I will be able to manipulate and alter DNA more and faster than anyone has ever dreamed of.”
“My God,” Selena said with utter contempt. “You really are going to create an army of slaves like Leif.”
31
“So you have found out what you wanted to know all along.” Hagen looked at her with utter contempt and then broke his stare to order Kurz and his men to speed up in the evacuation of the tomb.
“You think I wanted to know this?” Selena said, unable to hide the horror and disgust from her voice. “This is the vilest thing I have ever seen in my life. You intend to use the power of God himself to further your horrific human experimentation! How could you even contemplate doing such a thing?”
“For a man with a mind like mine, contemplating such things is natural. Your mind is too small to comprehend the beauty of such an idea. You are too ignorant to fully appreciate the implications.”
“And I thought the Directed Energy Weapon was bad,” Atticus said.
“Too ignorant?” Selena said, indignant. “The implications of your beautiful idea are the stuff of horror movies. You’re talking about creating synthetic human beings in their hundreds of thousands, genetically programmed to do your bidding. This is beyond depraved, Dr Hagen.”
He dismissed her with a casual flick of his wrist. He turned his eyes to heaven and started to dream, drunk with the possibility of such unlimited power. “Then there’s synthetic human genomes to consider, and what about the possibilities of recreating great men and women from the past? You have not even begun to think about such a thing! The search for newer, better semiconductors to make more efficient sequencing machines goes on. Imagine being able to extract, sequence and synthesize Julius Caesar’s genome, or Einstein’s!”
“Or Hitler’s, or Stalin’s?” Decker said with disgust.
Another dismissal. “The Ark crystals will allow much greater superconductivity than even yttrium barium copper oxide, a ceramic material that is currently the best we have. Previously much of these experiments had to take place at super-cooled temperatures, but recent advances in the Max Planck Institute have shown this work can be done at room temperature. The crystal inside the Ark will be even more powerful than this!”
“Just what the hell is a semiconductor, anyway?” Riley asked.
Decker said, “It’s a material that conducts electricity at varying temperatures. Most metals conduct electricity always at the same temperature, and other materials, called insulators – glass, stone, plastic – mostly never conduct electricity.” He looked around at the others and shrugged. “Science major.”
“Yeah, which is why you jam a wooden spoon into the toaster, right?”
Atticus said, “So you’re using the semiconductor crystals in the Ark to further your DNA experiments, and the superconductor material – the material of destruction – is for your damned laser?”
“Exactly!” Hagen exclaimed. “Superconductors are materials with no electrical resistance, which means it allows electricity to flow right through it as if it wasn't even there. In a material of normal conductive nature, the electrical current will reduce over time because it will lose energy due to overheating of the conductor. This never happens with a superconductor. Because there is no resistance, the current just flows forever without dissipation.”
Riley scratched his head. “Dammit, I was just starting to get the toaster thing.”
“I’m really beginning to understand your interest in it, Hagen,” Decker said.
“Currently, if you’ll excuse the pun,” Hagen stopped to chuckle at his own joke, “our superconductor materials are limited, and this is why the Ark has so much power – it contains within it both the power of creation and the power of destruction. Creation in the shape of the most powerful semiconductor known to man, and destruction in the form of the most powerful superconductor known to man. The materials of the Ark were God’s most fundamental tools to create and destroy life. That was its power, and soon it will be my power. I will use the creatium to build life and the destructium to annihilate it.”
“If you’re right about it being in the Ark,” Selena said.
Hagen gave a shrug of false modesty. “Three decades of research, Professor Moore… I am more than confident that the Ark contains these materials.”
Charlie shook his head with disbelief. “And your first thought of what to do with it is to create the world’s most devastating direct energy weapon so you can destroy the world order and then let an army of superhuman monsters go free range.”
“You make it sound so crude,” Hagen said. “My creations are perfect, and totally obedient to me and only me.”
“You can’t seriously think we can let you do this,” Decker said. “What you’re talking about doing would be the greatest crime against humanity in history.”
“The way I see it, Mr Decker, you have absolutely no choice in the matter. Bloch! Kurz! Lechner! Kill them!”
The first bullet plowed into Hassan’s heart, killing him stone dead. He dropped to the floor like a lead weight and collapsed into the sand.
“No!” Atticus cried out, and everyone scattered for their lives. A skirmish broke out and quickly tumbled into a full-on fistfight. Riley and Decker disarmed Lechner and Marchand but Kurz and Bloch proved tougher and the chamber was rapidly filled with the sound of gunfire. Leif and the other men had to be ordered to take cover and Decker saw that their obedience was also their Achilles heel.
Bloch threw a grenade to clear a path to the tunnel, and in the mayhem. Selena spun around and dived to the floor of the chamber. She buried her face in the sand and grit as the bullets flew over her head and drilled into the walls all around her.
She had never seen anything like it. Bloch was relentless, marching forward, the stock of a Heckler & Koch pushed into his hip to absorb the recoil of the powerful automatic weapon. Full metal jackets flew from the muzzle like birds of death, raking over the surface of the backed bricks and blasting clouds of orange dust into the air.
Selena strained to look up and find her friends in the chaos. Coughing brick dust from her lungs, she clambered up on her elbows and crawled through the mayhem toward the entrance tunnel. A series of rounds ricocheted off the wall above her head and made her gasp with terror. She thought they’d hit her but it was chunks of brick blasted out of the wall by the bullets, striking her back at high speed.
“Lena!”
She looked up and saw Decker. He was on his knees and crouched down behind the right-hand side of the tunnel’s exit about ten meters ahead of her. “I’ll give you some cover fire – get ready to run!”
“Are you freaking kidding me?”
Riley’s dusty face appeared on the other side of the tunnel’s exit arch. “It’s the only way, babe. Run, now!”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered.
Up ahead, the figures of Decker and Riley appeared in the low, dusty light at the tunnel’s entrance and started firing their weapons. She saw the muzzles of their guns flash in the gloom and the ear-piercing chak-chak-chak of the bullets firing at Bloch who was now diving for cover behind the sarcophagus.
“Now, Lena!”
They raised their weapons and started firing much higher now, allowing her to scramble to her feet and make a dash for it. She sprinted with every bit of strength she could muster, the vision of Kai Bloch firing into her back motivating her to run faster than an Olympic champion. Her boots slipped and slid in the loose, dusty gravel on the tunnel floor but she made it, diving for the cover of one of the pillars just before the Austrian commando had reloaded. He poured fire into the dank tunnel but the dust in her wake made it almost impossible for anyone to see through to the other side anymore.
“He’s a persistent little bastard,” Riley said.
She slammed up against the wall next to Decker, her chest heaving up and down as she fought to get her breath back. “Thanks.”
Decker was clicking another magazine into the gun. He paused to wipe the sweat from his face and left a streak of gun oil and grease over his cheek. “Huh?”
“I said thanks. For saving my life.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Decker.
“You’re welcome,” Riley said sarcastically from the other side of the archway.
“Sorry, I meant you too.”
“It’s like I don’t even exist,” he said. “I try to open my heart to people but every time I get hurt.”
“I said I meant you too, you idiot.”
“I’m just yanking your ding-dong, Lena. Any idea where the others are? They kind of got lost in the chaos.”
“I think Hagen still has them,” Decker said.
“No he hasn’t,” said Atticus.
They turned to see the old professor looming out of the dust on the other side of the antechamber. Charlie Valentine was beside him, clutching his arm through a blood-soaked shirt.
“What happened to you?” Decker said.
Charlie winced. “Got nicked trying to save Diana.”
“Trying to save Diana?” Selena said, worried. “What’s happened to her?”
“Sorry folks, but they’ve got her.”
“Fuck me sideways,” Riley said. “We’ve got to get her, guys. We saw what Hagen does to people he doesn’t like back in Norway. It’s not nice.”
Selena looked around the antechamber and tried to find the exit. The grenade detonations had filled the entire lower floor of the Ziggurat with so much dust and smoke that it was almost impossible to see her hand in front of her face.
“I can’t find it,” she called out.
“Stay together,” Decker said firmly. “If we get split up now they’ll pick us of one by one.”
“I hear someone coming,” Atticus said. “Behind us.”
“Where are you Charlie?” Selena said.
“Right here.”
“Then it’s got to be Bloch.”
It was. The Austrian commando emerged from the tunnel, sucking a cloud of smoke and dust into the antechamber in his wake. He charged forward with a total lack of fear as he swept the submachine gun from side to side and blasted everything in sight with nine mil rounds.
“He’s brave,” Selena said.
Riley shook his head and grinned. “That’s not bravery, Lena. He’s foolhardy. There’s a big difference and it’s a lot easier to exploit the latter.”
They heard Moser shouting in German and then Bloch turned and slipped back into the smoky tunnel.
“Why order him to retreat?” Atticus said.
“There’s only one answer to that,” Decker said. “They must have found another way out and they’re hoping to get away with Diana and use her to find the final resting place of the Ark.”
