Severus was an old hand at this style of fighting; he had experienced it against the Britons. Noting that his enemy was reckless and untrained, he called a halt and ordered all weapons be dropped on the ground. The barbarians, taking it as a gesture of surrender, were deceived into making a rash charge. Then, at Sevenis's order, the swords were snatched up and the Romans counterattacked.
Straddling two rocks, the centurion swung his sword in almost measured, metronomic strokes. Four barbarians dropped at his feet. He knocked another one sprawling with the flat of his sword and slashed the throat of one who lunged against his side. Then the frenzied tide receded and the naked horde retreated out of hand-to-hand range.
Severus took advantage of the breathing spell to count his casualties.
Out of sixty of his soldiers, twelve lay dead or were dying. Fourteen more sustained various wounds. The slaves had suffered the worst. More than half were killed or missing.
He approached Venator, who was binding up a gash on one arm with a torn piece of his tunic. The Greek wise man still carried his precious tally sheet securely under his sash.
"Still with us, old man?"
Venator looked up, his eyes brimming with fear mixed with determination"You'll die before me, Sevenis."
"Is that a dream or a prophecy?"
"Does it matter? None of us will see the Empire again."
Severus did not reply. The fight abruptly resumed as the barbarians unleashed another discharge of spears and rocks that filled the air and thumped against the shields. He quickly returned to his place in front of the depleted square.
The Romans fought viciously, but their numbers were dwindling. Almost all of the Syrian archers were down. The square was closing in on itself as the withering assault continued unabated. The survivors, many of them wounded, were exhausted and suffered from the heat and the attack. Their swords began to sag and they switched them from one hand to the other.
The barbarians were equally exhausted and taking huge losses, yet they stubbornly contested every foot of the gradual slope to the never-Half a dozen of their corpses could be counted around every slain legionary.
The mercenaries' bodies, pierced by scores of arrows, looked like pincushions.
The giant overseer Macer was struck in one knee and the thigh. He stayed on his feet but could not keep up with the moving formation-He dropped behind and soon attracted a group of twenty barbarians who swiftly surrounded him. He turned, at bay, waved his sword like a windmill and cut three of them completely in two before the rest drew back and hesitated in respect of his awesome strength. He shouted and motioned for them to come close and fight.
The barbarians had learned their lesson the hard way and refused to be drawn into arms-length combat. They stood back and launched a torrent of spears at Macer. In seconds, blood gushed from five wounds on his body. He grasped the shafts and pulled out the points. A barbarian ran close and hurled his spear, striking Macer in the throat. Slowly he toppled over from the loss of blood and dropped into the dust. The barbarian women rushed in like a pack of mad wolves and stoned him to pulp.
Only a high sandstone bluff separated the Romans from the river's edge.
Beyond, it seemed that the sky had suddenly turned from blue to orange.
Then a column of smoke rolled upward, black and heavy, and the wind brought the smell of burning wood.
Shock gripped Venator, quickly replaced with despair.
"The ships!" he shouted. "The barbarians are attacking the ships!"
The bloodied slaves panicked and made a suicidal dash for the river. The barbarians rushed in from the flanks and viciously assaulted them.
Several of the slaves threw down their arms in surrender and were slaughtered. The rest tried to make a fight of it from behind a grove of small trees, but their pursuers cut them down to a man. The dust of the sage land became their shroud, the dry brush their sepulcher.
Severus and his surviving legionaries fought their way to the summit of the bluff and suddenly halted, oblivious to the murderous onslaught raging around them, and stared in stunned fascination at the disaster below.
Pillars of fire rose and merged into a coil of smoke that unwound and reached upward like a serpent. The fleet, their only hope of escape, was burning along the river's edge. The enormous grain ships they had commandeered in Egypt were being incinerated under great sheets of rolling flame.
Venator pushed his way through the front rank and stood beside Severus.
The centurion was silent; blood and sweat stained his tunic and armor.
He gazed in frustration at the sea of flame and smoke, seeing the blazing sails disintegrate in a maelstrom of sparks, the dreadful reality of defeat branded in his eyes.
The ships had been anchored on the shoreline and lay naked and exposed.
A force of barbarians had engulfed the small body of seamen and torched everything that could burn. Only a small merchant ship had escaped the conflagration, its crew somehow beating off their attackers. Four seamen were struggling to raise the sails while several of their shipmates strained at the oars in their struggle to reach the safety of deep water.
Venator tasted the falling soot and the bitterness of calamity in his mouth. Even the sky itself seemed red to him. He stood there in helpless rage. The faith he had placed in his carefully executed plan to safeguard the priceless knowledge of the past died in his heart.
A hand was laid on his shoulder and he turned and stared into the strange expression of cold amusement on Severus's face.
"I had always hoped to die," said the centurion, "drunk on good wine while lying on a good woman."
"Only God can choose a man's death," Venator replied vaguely.
"I rather think luck plays a heavy role."
"A waste, a terrible waste."
"At least your goods are safely hidden," said Severus. "And those escaping sailors will tell the scholars of the Empire what we did here."
"No," said Venator shaking his head. "No one will believe the fanciful tales of ignorant seamen." He turned and gazed back at the low hills in the distance. "It will remain lost for all time."
"Can you swim?"
Venator's eyes returned to Severus. "Swim?"
"I'll give you five of my best men to cut a passage to the water if you think you can reach the ship."
"I . I'm not certain." He studied the waters of the river and the widening gap between the ship and shoreline.
"Use a piece of debris for a raft if you have to," Severus said harshly.
"But hurry, we'll all be meeting our gods in a few more minutes."
"What about you?"
"This hill is as good a place as any to make a stand."
Venator embraced the centurion. "God be with you."
"Better he walk with you."
Severus turned and swiftly selected five soldiers who were unwounded and ordered them to protect Venator on their run for the river. Then he went about the business of reforming his ravaged unit for a final defense.
The few legionaries clustered around Venator-Then they made their dash for the river, shouting, and hacking their way through a loose line of startled barbarians. They cut and slashed like madmen on a bloody rampage.
Venator was exhausted beyond feeling, but his sword never hesitated, his step never faltered. He was a scholar who had become an executioner. He was long past the point of no return. There was only grim stubbornness left now; any fear of dying had disappeared.
They fought through the mad whirl of fiery heat. Venator could smell the odor of burnt flesh. He threw off another shred of his tunic and covered his nose and mouth as they fought through the smoke.
The soldiers went down, protecting Venator to their last breath.
Suddenly his feet were in the water, and he sprang forward, diving the instant it rose above his knees. He glimpsed a spar that had fallen free of a burning ship and feverishly paddled toward it, not daring to look back.
The soldiers still on the bluff countere
d everything that was thrown at them. The barbarians dodged and chanted defiance while probing for a weak spot in the Roman defenses. Four times they grouped in mass formations and charged, and four times they were hurled back, but not before they took down a few more of the exhausted legionaries. The square became a small knot as the few survivors closed ranks and fought shoulder to shoulder. Bloody heaps of dead and dying carpeted the land, their blood flowing in streams down the slopes. And still the Romans resisted.
The battle had been raging without let-up for nearly two hours, but the barbarians were attacking with the same intensity as at the beginning.
They began to smell victory and massed for one last charge.
Severus broke off the arrow shafts that protruded from his exposed flesh and fought on. Barbarian corpses carpeted the ground around him. Only a handful of his legionaries remained at his side. One by one they perished, sword in hand, buried beneath swarms of rocks, arrows and spears.
Severus was the last to fall. His legs folded under him and his arm could no longer lift his sword. He swayed on his knees, made a futile effort to rise, then looked up to the sky and muttered softly, "Mother, Father, carry me to your arms."
As if in answer to his plea, the barbarians rushed forward and savagely clubbed him until death released his agony.
In the water, Venator grimly clutched the spar and kicked his legs in a desperate attempt to reach the retreating ship. His effort was in vain.
The river's current and a puff of wind pushed the merchant vessel further away.
He shouted to the crew and frantically waved his free hand. A group of seamen and a young girl holding a dog stood on the stern, staring at him without compassion, making no move to bring the ship around. They continued their escape down river as if Venator did not exist.
They were abandoning him, he realized helplessly. There would be no rescue. He beat a fist on the spar in anguish and sobbed uncontrollably, convinced that his God had forsaken him. Finally he turned his eyes toward shore and gazed at the carnage and devastation.
The expedition was gone, vanished in a nightmare.
PART I
October 12, 1991
Heathrow Airport, London
No one paid the slightest attention to the pilot as he slipped around the crowd of media correspondents who overflowed from the interior of the VIP lounge. Nor did any of the passengers sitting in the waiting area of gate 14 notice that he carried a large duffel bag instead of a briefcase. He kept his head down, eyes straight ahead, carefully avoiding the battery of TV cameras aimed at a attractive woman with a smooth brown face and compelling coal-black eyes, who was the hub of the noisy activity.
The pilot quickly walked through the enclosed boarding ramp and halted in front of a pair of airport security agents. They wore plain clothes and blocked the aircraft door. He threw a casual wave and tried to shoulder his way past them, but a hand firmly grasped his arm.
"One moment, Captain."
The pilot stopped, a questioning but friendly expression on his dark-skinned face. He seemed idly amused at the inconvenience.
His olive-brown eyes had a gypsylike piercing quality about them. The nose had been broken more than once, and a long scar ran down the base of his face.
He stood nearly six feet four inches, thickset, with a slightly rounded paunch. Seasoned, confident, and standing straight in a tailored uniform, he looked like any one of ten thousand airline pilots who captained international passenger jets.
He removed his identification from a breast pocket and handed it to the security agent.
"Carrying VIPs this trip?" he asked innocently.
The British guard, correct, immaculately dressed, nodded. "A body of United Nations people returning to New York including the new SecretaryGeneral."
"Hala Kamil?"
"Yes."
"Hardly the job for a woman."
"Sex didn't prove a hindrance for Prime Minister Thatcher."
"She wasn't in water over her head."
"Kamil is an astute lady. She'll do all right."
"Providing Moslem fanatics from her own country don't blow her away,"
replied the pilot in a decided American accent.
The Britisher gave him a strange look indeed but made no further comment as he compared the photo on the I.D. card with the face before him and read the name aloud. "Captain Dale Lemk."
"any problem?"
"No, simply preventing any," the guard replied flatly.
Lemk extended his arms. "Do you want to frisk me too?"
"Not necessary. A pilot would hardly hijack his own airplane. But we must check your credentials, to be certain you're a genuine crew member."
"I'm not wearing this uniform for a costume party."
"May we see your carry bag?"
"Be my guest." He set the blue nylon bag on the floor and opened it. The second agent lifted out and riffled the pages of the standard pilot's aircraft and flight operations manuals and then held up a mechanical device with a small hydraulic cylinder.
"Mind telling us what this is?"
"An actuator arm for an oil-cooling door. It stuck in the open position, and our maintenance people at Kennedy asked me to hand-carry it home for inspection."
The agent poked at a bulky object tightly packed on the bottom of the bag. "Hello, what do we have here?" Then he looked up, a curious expression in his eyes. "Since when do airline pilots carry parachutes?"
Lemk laughed. "My hobby is skydiving. Whenever I have an extended layover, I jump with friends at Croydon."
"I don't suppose you would consider jumping from a jetliner?"
"Not from one flying five hundred knots at thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean."
The agents exchanged satisfied glances. The duffel bag was closed and the I.D. card was passed back.
"Sorry to have delayed you, Captain Lemk."
"I enjoyed the chat."
"Have a good flight to New York."
"Thank you."
Lemk ducked into the plane and entered the cockpit. He locked the door and switched off the cabin lights so any casual observer could not view his movements through the windows from the concourse above. In well-rehearsed sequence, he knelt behind the seats, pulled a small flashlight from his coat pocket and raised a trapdoor leading to the electronics bay below the cockpit, a compartment that was named by some long-forgotten joker as the "hell hole." He dropped down the ladder into pure darkness, underscored by the murmur of the flight attendants'
voices as they prepared the main cabin for boarding and the thump of the luggage being loaded in the rear by the baggage handlers.
Lemk reached up and tugged the duffel bag down after him and switched on the penlight. A glance at his watch told him he had about five minutes before his flight crew arrived. In an exercise he had practiced nearly fifty times, he retrieved the actuator arm from the bag and connected it to a miniature device he had concealed in his flight cap.
He attached the assembled unit to the hinges of a small access door to the outside used by ground/maintenance mechanics. Then he laid out the parachute.
When his first and second officers arrived, Lemk was sitting in the pilot's seat, his face buried in an information manual. They exchanged casual greetings and began running through their preflight check routine. Neither the copilot nor the engineer perceived that Lemk seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn.
Their senses might have been sharper if they had known this was to be their last night on earth.
Inside the crowded lounge, Hala Kamil faced a forest of microphones and glaring camera lights. With seemingly inexhaustible patience, she fielded the barrage of questions thrown at her by the mob of inquisitive reporters.
Few asked about her sweep through Europe and the nonstop meetings with heads of state. Most probed for insights on the imminent overthrow of her Egyptian government by Moslem fundamentalists.
The extent of the turmoil was unclear to her. Fanatical mullahs, led by Ak
hmad Yazid, an Islac law scholar, had ignited religious passions that ran through the millions of destitute villagers of the Nile and the impoverished masses in the slums of Cairo. High-ranking officers in the army and air force were openly conspiring with the Islamic radicals to remove the recently installed president, Nadav Hasan. The situation was extremely volatile, but Hala had received no up-to-the-minute intelligence from her government, and she was forced to keep her answers vague and ambiguous.
On the surface Hala appeared infinitely poised and sphinxlike as she replied calmly, without emotion. Inwardly she floated between confusion and spiritual shock. She felt distant and alone, as though uncontrollable events were swirling around someone else, someone beyond help for whom she could only feel sorrow.
She could have posed for the painted portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti in the Berlin museum. They both possessed the same long-stemmed neck, delicate features and haunting look. Forty-two years old, slim, black eyes, flawless tawny complexion and long jet-black silken hair brushed straight and falling down to her shoulders. She stood five feet eleven inches in heels, and her lithe, shapely body was enhanced by a designer suit with pleated skirt.
Hala had enjoyed the attentions of four lovers over the years but had never married. A husband and children seemed foreign to her. She refused to spare the time for long-term attachments, and making love held little more ecstasy for her than buying a ticket and attending the ballet.
As a child in Cairo, where her mother was a teacher and her father a shoemaker, she had spent every minute of her free time sketching and digging in the ancient ruins within bicycle distance of her home. A gourmet cook and an artist with a Ph.D. in Egyptian antiquities, she had landed one of the few jobs open to Moslem women, as researcher for the Ministry of Culture.
With great individual effort and prodigious energy, she then successfully fought Islamic discrimination and worked up to Director of Antiquities and later head of the Department of information-She caught the eye of then President Mubarak, who asked her to serve on the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. Five years later, Hala was named Vice Chairman when Javier P6rez de Cudllar stepped down in the middle of his second tour during an upheaval when five Moslem-run nations withdrew from the charter during a controversy over demands for religious reform. Because the men in line ahead of her refused the job, she was appointed to serve as SecretaryGeneral in a tenuous hope she might mend the widening cracks in the organization's foundation.