Moon Mask (48 page)

King spun, stepped out and threw his entire weight onto the narrow ledge. His heart practically burst through his chest. Only then did he realise that his eyes had been clamped tightly shut. He opened them one by one and discovered that he was still alive.

He let a relieved breath whistle out through his lips.

That was when the wall of ice to which he clung exploded!

The thunderous bombardment of bullets jack-hammered through the ice as the Black Cat powered overhead, its nose-mounted machine gun spewing out the deadly fire.

In an instant, the ledge upon which King stood crumbled and he felt himself slip. He groped desperately at the wall of ice but that too crumbled under the Black Cat’s onslaught, large chucks blasting out in all directions. One large piece slammed into Sid’s head and she dropped to the ground, her unconscious form sliding towards the precipice.

Then, as the plane pulled up, its engines screaming through the frigid air, King felt his last fingertip-worth of purchase slip and, with a stomach lurching sense of motion, he slid down the chasm-

A four inch-long nail slammed into the back of his right hand, punching through, out the palm and into the ice, pinning him to it. He cried out in sudden agony as his entire body weight snagged to a halt, held in place by the nail. The hole in his hand began to stretch and rivulets of blood coursed down his arm and smeared across the vertical side of the chasm.

“Ben!” Bill called. “Give me the map!”

King struggled to catch his breath. A mixture of shock, pain, anger and abject fear caught in his throat. The last of the exploding ice cascaded down around him, large blocks bouncing painfully from his back and plummeting forever downwards until they were lost into the inky blue gloom far below. The thudding sound of impact echoed up dully several seconds later.

He struggled to look around at Bill. Thankfully he had pulled Sid away from the edge of the crevice and she was slowly stirring back into consciousness. Bill pointed his machine gun directly at her head. “Now!” he ordered.

King struggled to speak. “Okay.” His voice seemed weak and feeble. Pathetic. He tried to support his impaled arm by clamping his left one onto it but it was no use. He became suddenly aware of the burning in his right bicep caused by the nail already embedded there. The nail in his hand, meanwhile, continued to rip slowly but surely through the flesh as his bodyweight pulled down on it. The ice started to give way under his struggling, melting from the heat of his palm, the nail pulling out.

“You think I won’t kill her?” Bill snapped. He pulled the trigger. Bullets erupted from the muzzle of his weapon.

“No!” King screamed. But the bullets slammed into the ice just beside Sid. The tremendous noise shocked Sid back to full wakefulness and she stared in horror at the gunman, then over in King’s direction.

“Okay!” King shouted. “Okay, I’ll give you the map.”

They’d lost, he knew. The nail pulled out further. His hand and arm throbbed. He realised in that moment that this was it. He wasn’t going to live through this. The same obsession that had led his father to whatever fate he had met; the same obsession that had dragged Kha’um to his tropical grave in Venezuela, had also lured him to his death in an icy coffin in Argentina.

Strangely, he realised, he could accept that.

But he wouldn’t accept the same for Sid.

Without even really contemplating what he was doing, King reached into the folds of his jacket and wrenched free the Egyptian dagger. Then, taking aim, he wrenched his hand away from the wall and kicked off it, using his body’s momentum as it dropped to hurl the dagger at his enemy.

It flashed by in a streak of gold. Bill dodged to the side but the blade sliced through his cheek and pummelled the lower half of his ear. He fell back reflexively but the last thing King saw before he dropped below the edge of the crevice was the mercenary recover enough to aim his gun at Sid.

As he plummeted to his death, King heard the resounding crack of a single shot echo down the shaft. He screamed inwardly. Not at his own fate, but at that of the woman he loved. Instead of killing Bill as he’d hoped, he’d enraged him and sentenced Sid to death.

He dropped like a stone at phenomenal speed, the sides of the chasm racing past in a blur of ice-blue, the yawning abyss of hell’s hungry jaws closing in around him-

He snagged to an agonising halt as something caught his outspread arms!

His downward plummet ceased and he swung in the middle of the abyss, a hundred and fifty feet down.

Fearing what he might find, cautiously he looked up into the smug face of Nathan Raine.

“Hey Benny,” he mock-scolded, suspended upside down from a line attached to a hovering
airplane
. “Quit hanging around. We’ve got a job to do.”

37:

Rules of Engagement

Viedma Glacier,

Argentina

At
the exact instant that Benjamin King had wrenched his impaled hand free of the ice wall and hurled the Egyptian dagger at the mercenary leader known only as Bill, the V-22 Osprey had swung across the glacier. Its wing-mounted rotors had tilted vertically to bring it to a halt, hovering above the three human-shaped heat signatures lost within the twisted landscape of Viedma.

Strapped to repelling lines, ready to zip down to rescue King and Sid, Raine had watched in horror as King dropped into a yawning chasm while Bill had raised his MP-5 submachine gun angrily at Sid’s head.

A single shot from Private Murray’s M14 sniper rifle missed Bill’s head and slammed into his chest, hurling him backwards, into the narrow channel of ice. He slid down the incline out of sight.

But Raine ignored all of that, focussed instead on King. With a surreal sense of slow motion, the archaeologist hurled himself into the chasm. Raine, somehow, had predicted the move seconds before he had made it, just as the Osprey had come to hover above the mini-battle ground, and had already thrown himself into thin air.

As King dropped below the edge of the crevice, Raine had been only meters above. He’d reached out to snag the falling man but missed.

Expertly, he clamped his arms tight to his sides and angled his body like a torpedo, streamlined and fast compared to the wild flailing of King’s limbs.

Faster and faster the two men flew down the chasm, one oblivious of the other. Raine reached out again and, quite by accident, clamped his hand around King outstretched right arm. Despite being slick with blood, Raine found a strong purchase and, using his free, gloved hand and wrapping his legs around the repelling line, he’d snagged them both to a halt in the middle of the abyss.

“Hey Benny,” he’d said, feeling a rush of relief wash over him. “Quit hanging around. We’ve got a job to do.”

Minutes
later, winched up to the safety of the hovering tilt-rotor, Gibbs helped King inside the hold. Raine clambered in after him and watched as he staggered forward into the arms of Sid. They embraced tightly, both tearful.

After Raine had leapt from the plane to save King, Gibb’s had
led his team down onto the ice. Securing Sid, he had taken her back to the safety of the Osprey while O’Rourke led the remaining men in pursuit of the mercenary leader.

“I thought you were dead,” King and Sid said to one another before kissing. But King pulled away from the kiss.

“Before anything else happens,” he said hurriedly, pulling something desperately from his pocket as though his life depended on it. He flipped open the ring box that had travelled with him through Venezuela, New York, Jamaica and Argentina. In all those places he had been shot at, kidnapped, almost blown up, attacked by crocodiles and anacondas, leapt from waterfalls and plummeted into bottomless pits, yet only now did he find the courage to utter four simple words.

“Will you marry me?”

Sid’s face lit up and, despite the tenseness of the situation and the usual harshness of Gibbs, the coldness of Nadia and the coolness of Raine, all three spectators broke into wide grins as she replied: “Of course I will!” They kissed again, hungrily and passionately.

Raine felt a tremendous swell of joy for his two friends. He tried to shrug off the memories of his own lost love and found his eyes drifting towards Nadia. Whether she had meant to or not, her eyes had also drifted towards him. An almost guilty expression crossed her face, self-recrimination at being caught, but instead of flicking her eyes away, her full lips curved into slight smile.

“Alright people, this isn’t the love boat,” Gibbs snapped, all business again, his broad Texan accent tearing the warmth of the moment apart. “Those maniacs are still out there and they’re still after the mask. We need to find it. Your doe-eyed canoodling can wait til later. O’Rourke, report,” he snapped into his radio.

“Come on, lover boy,” Raine said, scrambling past Gibbs to take King’s arm and guide him to a bench where Nadia was busy opening a first aid kit. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

King reluctantly released his new fiancée yet despite all he had just been through, he couldn’t wipe the world’s biggest grin off his face. He allowed Raine and Nadia to gently get to work on his injuries.

“There’s no sign of any mercs, Boss,”
O’Rourke replied.

Gibbs moved into the cockpit but his voice could still be heard. “Lake, anything on infrared?”

“No sir,” she replied. “And there’s no sign of the stealth plane either.”

“Damn,” King muttered, trying his best to ignore the fact that he still had two nails protruding from his body. With the adrenaline wearing off, they were starting to hurt like hell. “He got away with the map.”

“No,” Sid corrected. Raine noticed a certain degree of reluctance in her face, as though revealing what she was about to could ruin the happiness she had just found. The quest for the mask was far from over, but had King overcome his obsession?

Before taking a seat next to her fiancée, she pulled a golden dagger out of her waistband and presented it like a prize to King. “These guys chased him off before he could retrieve it,” she explained.

King took the dagger in his left hand and turned it over, studying it fully for the first time. He noticed again the worn leather of the handle, the hieroglyphs and the precious stones, most striking of which was a large red gem in the centre of the hilt, but he still wasn’t sure how it could be a map.

Then he noticed something which seemed out of place. Twisting in a seemingly random pattern down the length of the golden blade was a crude engraving, a single line which stretched in what he could only describe as a ‘squiggle’ down the metal. Unlike the fine craftsmanship of the rest of the knife, the line was ugly and rough. Certainly like nothing he had seen on a ceremonial Egyptian weapon before.

A vibration in the deck indicated that the Osprey was moving, its tilt-rotors shifting position to pull the plane out of the hover it had maintained to proceed to the rendezvous with O’Rourke.

“I don’t see what good it’s going to do us though,” Sid frowned, looking at the ornate knife, wondering who it had once belonged to. Nadia paused in her administrations to glance at it also.

“Kha’um’s map will lead us around the coastline of an unknown island,” King told them what he had learned from the Kernewek Diary, unaware that Mrs Marley had already told Raine. “This,” he held up the dagger, “must lead us through the system of caves to where they stashed the treasure. But we still need to figure out where Emily’s piece of the map is. And I have no idea where to start looking,” he admitted.

Raine grinned triumphantly at him. “Well, smarty-pants,” he said, “look no further. Miss Yashina,” he said to Nadia as she finished wrapping King’s hand, the nail now removed and the wound coated in antiseptic ointment. “If you please.”

Not playing up to Raine’s theatrics, Nadia nevertheless flipped open the laptop screen to display an image of an area of land easily identifiable to an Englishman.

“Cornwall?” King asked. Then it all clicked into place and he slapped his forehead, instantly regretting the action as it sent new bolts of pain through his hand, his arm and his head. “Of course!”

“Of course . . . what?” Sid asked, not understanding.

The Osprey settled into another hover low to the glacier, scarcely three feet above a flat section of ice and one by one O’Rourke, Garcia and West clambered on board. Seconds later, Lake piloted the tilt-rotor up and away from the glacier and headed east over the mountains.

“
Forever more, the bearer of my name shall hold my piece of the map in their hand
,” King repeated the final passage of Emily Hamilton’s diary. “I took that to imply that the bearer of her name, her descendants, would look after her piece of the map. That it was kept somewhere safe in the Hand of Freedom building. But she wasn’t talking about her great, great,
great
grandchildren or whatever,” he said excitedly. “She literally meant the bearer of her name, which she changed to Kernewek.” To Sid’s blank expression, he added: “Kernewek is the traditional language of Kernow . . . Cornwall, the southern peninsula of Great Britain, and home to a long legacy of piracy and smuggling. The coastline is riddled with caves, many of which were expanded on by smugglers to gorge their way through the county and avoid the authorities.”

“So, the bearer of her name was another entity entirely,” Sid confirmed. “Not a person but the actual landmass where the treasure was buried. Not an island, but a peninsula.” She frowned. “But what about the hand? Her clue suggests that the map was somewhere in the Hand of Freedom building.”

Raine answered that. “May I?” he asked, plucking the laptop from Nadia. Gibbs was too busy working out the logistics of getting them to England to notice his indiscretion and Raine took that as a mini triumph.

“This is a map of Cornwall,” he showed them the image on the screen: