The Eye of Ra Page 26

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘Tell me, Uncle. Did Cranwell or anyone else tear any pages from the book?’

  ‘No, it’s just as it was when Wingate left it.’

  Elena jabbed me on the arm impatiently. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jamie,’ she said, ‘what does it say?’

  I grinned at her, trying to keep the excitement from showing. ‘Well, Wingate found Zerzura all right,’ I said, ‘but for some reason he was dissuaded from revealing to the world what he’d found. There’s no description, no map coordinates, no navigational data of any kind; it looks as though all the geophysical stuff has been torn out.’

  ‘What about the ushabtis? Where did they come from?’ ‘They came from Zerzura. They were going to be Wingate’s proof that he’d found it, only something went badly wrong.’

  ‘But how come the ushabtis were lying around at a desert oasis?’

  ‘Because the Lost Oasis of Zerzura wasn’t just an oasis,’ I said, ‘Zerzura was actually Akhnaton’s tomb.’

  34

  It was almost noon when we climbed back to the surface and the sun was directly above us, grilling the sand and reducing the shade to purple patches among the ruins. As soon as we’d pulled the rope up after us, Mukhtar touched the Eye of Ra device on the capstone and the segments closed with a sharp thud. He stood upright suddenly and sniffed the air. ‘Do you smell it, Omar?’ he asked.

  I inhaled deeply and tasted the faintest flavour of fire-ash on the wind. ‘The ghibli,’ I said, ‘it’s on its way.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but more than that. Oil — engine oil. Motor fumes.’

  ‘What is it?’ Elena asked.

  I sniffed again, this time with deeper concentration. Suddenly I felt as if a hand was clutching at my brain, squeezing it, and a voice I hardly recognised as my own said: ‘The ones looking for us are already here.’

  Mukhtar stared at me in shock. Elena turned pale. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’d better get this covered up before someone else finds it!’

  It took us only minutes to shovel the hot sand back over the capstone with our hands, level it off and smooth its surface with shamaghs, so that no one would guess there’d been activity there. When it was done, Mukhtar hid the coiled rope carefully in a crevice behind a fallen pillar, and picked up his rifle. He cocked it quietly, and set the safety catch. ‘Ready?’ he asked. We nodded. ‘Let’s go.’

  We followed his jerky, spring-like step through the ruins, until we came to the last square of shade. The camels were happily regurgitating and masticating cud, exactly where we’d hobbled them, about a hundred yards away. One had rolled over in the sand, and now sat up with its saddle worn at a ridiculously squinted angle. Mukhtar stood very still, his head forward and slightly raised, silver dreadlocks fluttering, scanning the desert with eyes as keen as a predator’s. To the east lay the range of interlocking, amber-coloured dunes, their crests alive with smoking sand-devils. There was no other movement in all the landscape, but for the tiny black dot of a single kite, circling higher and higher into the methylene-blue sky. Mukhtar looked at me closely. As our eyes locked there was a sudden inward flash, and I felt the same vice-like grip clutching at my brain, the same alien voice whispering, ‘They’re here. Behind those dunes.’

  ‘We might make it to the camels if we run,’ Mukhtar said. ‘No, Uncle! We won’t!’

  ‘It’s the only chance we’ve got,’ he snapped. ‘Come on!’

  He launched himself into the open, sprinting with amazing speed, with myself and Elena dashing frantically behind. We’d covered almost three-quarters of the distance between ourselves and the camels, when the engines roared. For an instant we froze in our tracks and I looked up to see two, then three, four and five olive-coloured Jeeps bulleting towards us through the soft sand, each carrying a huddle of black-clad police troopers in steel helmets. On the first Jeep a blue light was flashing. I saw Mukhtar look about desperately for a way of escape. He raised his rifle for an instant then let it drop. ‘Too many to fight,’ he said, ‘and they’ve got us cold.’ The first Jeep ploughed around us in an arc with exquisite slowness, and an unusually tall man with a domed forehead sprang out of the front passenger’s seat, waving an enormous Ruger .44 Magnum in our direction. It was Hammoudi. Sergeant Mustafa, his nose now tacked up with a dirty Band-aid, jumped out of the back brandishing what looked like a baseball bat. ‘Ah, Ross!’ Hammoudi said mockingly, ‘I told you, didn’t I! Don’t imagine you’re going to get off lightly this time with a warning and a kick in the ribs. Oh, no indeed.’ He was pointing his Ruger at Mukhtar. ‘Drop that weapon, grandad,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll leave your old bones for the kites!’ Mukhtar sneered as he laid his precious rifle in the sand. Two black-jackets seized his arms and forced him down.

  ‘Curse your fathers!’ Mukhtar grunted.

  ‘Careful,’ Mustafa said, ‘these monkeys have tricks up their sleeves.’ He tore off Mukhtar’s stiletto, and handed it to a burly corporal then delivered a flying kick to my uncle’s belly. Mukhtar let out an ‘Ooof!’ and lurched sideways. I struggled to get to him against the dozen or so police troopers who were swarming around us now. The same corporal ripped off my khanjar and its sheath, and they forced us to our knees, pinning our hands behind us, handcuffing us roughly. ‘Take your hands off me, you filth!’ Elena squealed. There was a slapping sound as a trooper hit her across the face with an open-handed blow. I couldn’t see her any longer, but I heard her panting. ‘Bastards!’ I shouted, and the corporal whacked my head with the butt of his Kalashnikov, while someone else booted me in the spine, making me double over in pain.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Hammoudi snapped. ‘I’m sure they’re ready to cooperate,’ he added in his Call-Me-Mr-Reasonable voice. ‘Just tell us where the rest of the ushabtis are and everything will be all right.’

  All three of us stared back in defiance.

  ‘Oho!’ Hammoudi said. ‘The Bedouin Law of Silence is it? I advise you to reconsider. Now, where are they?’

  Mukhtar spat into the sand. Mustafa stepped forwards and dealt him a vicious blow across the ear with his baseball bat. There was a crack of bone and my uncle slumped into the sand. Two policemen hauled him up again, and I saw to my relief that he was still breathing, though his eyes were closed tightly and blood was trickling out of his ear.

  ‘Search the ruins!’ Hammoudi snarled, and Mustafa detailed a squad of troopers to go with him. Elena and I exchanged silent looks. Her cheek was bright red where the trooper had slapped her, and there were pinpoints of tears in her eyes. Hammoudi holstered his Ruger in his waistband, removed his dark jacket and threw it into the Jeep. Then he lit a Cleopatra and puffed at it pensively.

  ‘What’s this all about, Hammoudi?’ I blurted out. The heavy corporal made a move to boot me again but Hammoudi motioned him away.

  ‘You tell me, Ross,’ he said. ‘Is it about smuggling antiquities? Your pal Cranwell dug them up, Kolpos found the buyer and Miss Feisty Anasis here was the mule?’

  ‘A mule I wouldn’t mind riding!’ the corporal grunted, leering at Elena.

  ‘Shut up!’ Hammoudi barked. ‘What happened, Ross? Did Kolpos and Cranwell have a thieves’ fall-out? Kolpos wasted your crony, so you blitzed his shop with a firebomb, was that it?’

  Elena lifted her eyes and gave me a painful glance.

  ‘It’s not true,’ I said.

  ‘You were there. We know you were there. Bungled it, though, didn’t you? What happened? Set the timing wrong and got your hair singed? Then you paid a poor baker’s boy named Mohammad Ghali to haul you to Dr Barrington’s flat in Zamalek. Oh, we know all about Dr Barrington. Yes, poor Mohammad Ghali — nice boy. Squealed like a pig. No longer with us, I’m afraid. I told Sergeant Mustafa it was going a bit far to stick the electrodes on his balls like that; there’s so much paperwork when someone croaks under interrogation. Next time you kill one, I said, you can damn’ well fill in the forms yourself!’

  ‘You fucking bastard!’

  ‘You be
tter believe it. What happened, Ross? You get even with Kolpos for wasting your pal? You get Miss Sweetlips here to set him up?’

  ‘Shit!’ Elena spat.

  ‘Ooh, talks too! A fall-out among thieves, is that it? Or is it something else. Something to do with Source Jibril?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘I think you do. I’ve got a feeling in my bones. This is more than antiquities. I know how many times you foreign bastards have tried to penetrate our service. What about ‘67? They found a whole team of Israeli spies actually posing as Egyptian army officers in key posts. They’d been through officer selection and training — everything — even spoke with Cairo accents. Now that’s what you call deep penetration!’

  ‘I don’t know anything about deep penetration.’

  ‘May be. May be not...ah, here’s our friend Sergeant Mustafa again.’

  Mustafa appeared with a squad of his black-jackets, carrying Mukhtar’s coil of rope on his shoulder.

  ‘That all you got?’ Hammoudi demanded.

  ‘The place is clean,’ Mustafa said.

  Hammoudi took the rope and examined it. ‘Well-rope,’ he said, ‘palm fibre, handmade Bedouin stuff. You find a well in the ruins?’

  ‘No ‘

  ‘Then what were they doing with a well-rope? You...Sheikh of all Araby...’ He prodded Mukhtar with his toe-cap, ‘What’s this rope for?’

  Mukhtar opened his eyes and pulled himself up painfully. ‘For stringing up a cop,’ he grunted, ‘shooting’s too good for dogs!’

  Almost before he’d finished, Mustafa had dived in with his baseball bat and given him two stinging blows across the shoulders. Mukhtar slumped and lay still.

  ‘So!’ said Hammoudi, grinning brightly. ‘No ushabtis in the ruins. So where are they?’

  Elena and I stared dumbly at the ground. Hammoudi sighed. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I think you will talk to my persuader. Mustafa, the girl first!’

  Mustafa smiled and gestured with his club. Four police troopers grabbed Elena. ‘Get your bloody hands off me!’ she shrieked, squirming away from them, ‘I’ll kill you!’ The corporal hovered near me with his rifle at the ready. I bit my lip and watched Mustafa, still smiling hideously, as he opened the bonnet of the nearest Jeep. A faint haze shimmered up from the engine. ‘Bring the wires!’ he ordered, and a trooper hurried up with a mess of orange flex attached to four crocodile-clips, the type of connection used for jump-starting cars. The four troopers were holding down Elena’s wriggling, screeching figure on the sand. Mustafa attached the clips to the Jeep’s battery and ran the wires to the struggling group. ‘Tits or crotch?’ he mused out loud with evident relish, as if inviting suggestions. ‘Tits to start with, I think,’ he said, winking at the troopers. ‘Leave the crotch for you boys afterwards.’ A trooper tore open Elena’s jibba, with excited hands, exposing tanned breasts. The cloth snagged, and he pulled out a bayonet, slitting it up to the neck and pulling it wide. Another policeman gagged her with a hand over the mouth. ‘You bloody bastards!’ I shouted, and the corporal’s rifle-butt slammed into me again, sending me spinning. I pulled myself up to see that the troopers had bound Elena’s arms and legs with thick cord, and watched helplessly as Mustafa sauntered to the Jeep with glassy eyes and a small sliver of spittle at the corner of his mouth. He climbed into the driver’s seat, ready to start the ignition which would send a massive shock through Elena’s body. I saw him hold the keys up ceremoniously, and Elena screamed again, her wild eyes started at me frantically from their sockets.

  ‘OK, let’s fry the bitch!’ Mustafa said, planting the key in the ignition. At precisely that moment one half of his head dissolved into a mess of bloody fragments, as a single gunshot cracked out of the desert’s silence.

  35

  For a fraction of a second the police troopers stared at the bloody remains of Mustafa. Then a light machine-gun opened up with a crisp rat-at-tat from the crest of a dune five hundred yards away, and they scrambled madly in every direction, yelling and loosing shots into the air. Hammoudi, his face distorted with rage and shock, was waving his Ruger, searching for a target, and snapping out useless orders. Suddenly there was an eerie whistle as a mortar-shell fell out of the sky like a stone, smack on to the first Jeep, which erupted into an orange fireball. The explosion made the ground shake. Hammoudi and the troopers near by were bowled over like skittles in the shock-wave. I saw Elena rolling frantically away from the blast, knocking the electrodes off as she did so. A dense dust-cloud mushroomed up and covered the entire column for a few moments, and when it cleared a host of dark, elvish figures seemed to pop up out of the ground only fifty yards away. They came weaving and leaping towards us, screaming war-cries — barefoot brown men with wild mops of hair, naked but for baggy sirwal and cartridge-belts, firing at the run. As the troopers backed desperately into the cover of the Jeeps, the hidden machine-gun began traversing the vehicles with deadly accurate tracer, ripping up the light alloy, smashing windscreens, puncturing tyres and igniting fuel-tanks. Two or three of them burst into flames. The truculent corporal who had used my head as a cricket-ball slapped a bayonet on his AK-47 and stepped towards me. ‘You’ll die for this!’ he growled. He drew the weapon back for a powerful thrust and as I rolled frantically away I glimpsed the face of my cousin Mansur standing behind him with his khanjar in one hand, a grim smile on his lips and his blank eye gleaming horrifically. The razor-like stiletto flashed once with lightning speed and the corporal dropped into the sand clutching at his windpipe. A streak of blood splashed across the sand. ‘The keys!’ I bawled to Mansur, ‘that one has the keys and our blades!’ I watched as my cousin grabbed the handcuff keys from the dead man’s pocket and then found our khanjars in his belt. He knelt beside me, unlocked the cuffs and offered me my stiletto blade. ‘You need this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d be undressed without it!’ I said.

  Mukhtar was already on his knees near by. ‘What kept you, son?’ he smirked.

  ‘Sorry, Father,’ Mansur answered seriously, ‘but you never told us where you were going!’ He unlocked his father’s cuffs, handed him his khanjar, and examined his bleeding ear with concern. ‘You all right, Father?’ he enquired.

  ‘Can’t hear properly,’ Mukhtar said, ‘but I’ll survive. Set the girl loose, and let’s get out of here!’

  I picked Elena up and Mansur cut her free with his dagger. ‘You OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ll kill those pigs!’ she said, grabbing at Mansur’s rifle, but he moved it out of her reach deftly, laughing.

  ‘A real Hazmiyya!’ he said. ‘It’d be yours with pleasure, but we don’t have time for revenge now. We’ve got to get out of here!’

  Together, Elena and I ran to unhobble the camels, which were straining against their ropes and bleating in fright. The Hawazim — now lying flat on their stomachs — were pouring fire at the troopers among the burning skeletons of their vehicles. Ham-moudi’s giant figure, his face streaked with dirt and blood, could be seen through the smoke, firing off his pistol and cursing. Just then a second mortar-shell whizzed out of the heavens and fell in their midst with a deafening crump. As another tidal wave of smoke and debris washed outwards, the Hawazim popped up again and we raced back towards the shelter of the dunes. The smoke and dust were already clearing and the troopers behind the cars had rallied and were firing salvoes towards us. One of our tribes-men was hit and I saw Mansur halt to pick him up in a fireman’s lift. Even at this distance I could hear Hammoudi’s strident voice bellowing orders, massing the troopers for a counter-attack. Just as he yelled ‘Get them!’ the machine-gun clattered out again from its secret position, tearing what remained of the Jeeps to shreds. The troopers ducked and fell flat and the attack broke up abruptly.

  ‘That’ll keep their heads down!’ Mansur snarled. A moment later we plunged into the shelter of the dunes, where we found the rest of the Hawazim camels — at least fifty of them — knee-hobbled in ranks in the sand. They were
fully equipped for travel-ling, I noticed, with bulging waterbags, blanket-rolls, and saddle-bags packed. Mansur put down the injured man and raced up to the crest’ of the dune to sweep the desert with a small brass telescope he pulled out of his jibba. He ski’d down, kicking up spouts of sand. ‘Here come the reinforcements,’ he shouted, ‘another seven Jeeps coming across the horizon. Better get moving, fast!’

  There was a wild scramble as the tribesmen unhobbled their camels, slung their rifles, and leapt into the saddle. The camels squalled and rumbled with excitement. I couched Elena’s animal for her. ‘But they’re going to catch us!’ she said. ‘We don’t stand a chance in the open with those vehicles after us!’

  ‘They’ll never catch us,’ Mukhtar said, barracking his own camel. ‘Not today. Look!’ He pointed at the sky with his camel-stick. An hour ago it had been pure azure: now it was grey and brown, blurred with tracings of dust. ‘The ghibli’s almost on us,’ he said. ‘In a few minutes those cops won’t even be able to see their own feet!’

  Soon we were all in the saddle, following Mukhtar down off the dunes into the open plains at a slow trot. The tribesmen, who always fought bare-chested, were struggling to don the long white jibbas, cloaks, hoods and headcloths they wore on long desert journeys. Already the western horizon was dark with columns of dust moving with the rapidity of a forest fire. Within minutes a troop of fast riders came wheeling towards us, seven or eight Hawazim with their rifles slung across their backs and their camels heavily laden. ‘It’s ‘Ali, my half-brother,’ Mansur told me. ‘It was him and his men who covered our retreat with the machine-gun and the mortar.’