‘You need me just as much as you need him,’ she said. ‘More, even. Unless you suddenly became an expert translator of ancient cuneiform languages.’
‘The human body is remarkably adaptive to even the most atrocious mutilation,’ Usberti said. ‘I have seen double, even triple amputees capable of some amazing feats of dexterity. Consider for a moment, Professor, the minimum physiological requirements necessary for translating a piece of writing from one language to another. All that is really needed is a brain to think with, one eye to read with, one hand to write with, a heart and a pair of lungs to keep the abbreviated organism functioning. A marvel of economy, thanks to the genius of God’s design. But what a pity it would be to reduce so beautiful a feminine form to such a pitiful state. And how upsetting for Major Hope, knowing such an outcome could have been avoided.’
‘I’ll make the climb,’ Ben said. ‘But I can’t do it with my bare hands. Though I’m sure you already thought of that.’
‘Naturally.’ Usberti turned to Starace. ‘Maurizio, fetch the equipment from the vehicle.’ Starace walked to the rear of the RV and opened up a compartment big enough to accommodate a Smart Car. A light came on inside. The compartment was empty except for a black holdall. Starace knelt down to unzip it, and pulled out a large coil of thin rope, climbing gloves, body harness, pick, hammer, pitons, a lightweight flashlight, and a belt pouch with the legend NIKON. A small digital camera, Ben guessed, for taking pictures of the inscriptions.
‘These items were obtained at the last minute before we departed from Ankara,’ Usberti said. ‘I trust they meet your requirements?’
Ben inspected the pile of equipment. The rope was the kind of super-strong cord that could lift a tank but would stretch to soften the jerk on a falling climber. The karabiner clips, pitons and belay device were all decent stuff, light and robust. Then he looked up again at the cliff. It was little wonder that two of the Von Grüber expedition hadn’t survived it, back in 1923 when rock climbing gear was a lot more primitive.
‘No climbing shoes?’ he said.
Usberti spread his hands. ‘Forgive me. I did not know your size.’
‘Goggles?’
‘I am sure you can manage without them. Whenever you are ready, Major Hope. I suggest you do not tarry too long, the light is failing rapidly. The rest of us will shelter in the cave and await your safe return.’
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Anna said.
‘You know I do,’ Ben told her.
‘Please be careful.’
‘This is a walk in the park,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
Usberti was right about one thing. He didn’t have a lot of time before nightfall made climbing ten times harder, and weather conditions were worsening every minute. The freezing rain was turning to snow, driving down harder on a stiffening wind that was making his hands and face numb. He quickly put on the harness, strapping up the Velcro and buckles good and tight. Made sure the various loops and connectors were properly fitted, clipped the camera pouch to his waist, slipped the hammer and pitons into their respective pouches, pulled on the gloves and fastened their wrist straps, and he was as ready as he’d ever be.
All he had to do now was scale the damn rock and get back down again alive.
He spent a few moments with his neck craned upwards to scan the sheer cliff face for handholds and footholds, and cracks into which to hammer his pitons. Once he had a rough route figured out, he reached up and hammered in his first piton, then hooked up his rope. Took a deep breath, and began his ascent.
It started out bad, and it got quickly worse. Without proper climbing shoes his toes were slipping all over the smooth, damp cliff face. And having to keep his face constantly tilted upwards with no goggles on left his eyes unprotected from the steadily thickening snow. It was the frozen wastes of Ankara all over again, except then he hadn’t been clinging to a past-vertical incline with a lethal drop and a bunch of gangsters holding Anna hostage below him. Sometimes, you just don’t realise how lucky you are.
He climbed. One hand over the other, feet scrabbling for grip, fingers numb and raw even inside his gloves, unable to feel his toes inside his boots. Pausing to grope for cracks above him, reach for his hammer, tap in another piton. Clipping and unclipping ropes as he went, so that there was always a safety line to anchor him to the wall and another to haul himself up another few feet before the process had to be repeated over. Ten minutes of solid, constant, muscle-ripping effort. Then twenty minutes. Night was falling fast. His mind emptied of all the anger he felt against Usberti, Bozza and the rest. Gravity was the enemy now, the deadly presence that wanted to reach up and grab him by the ankles and yank him to his death. He was shivering and sweating both at once. His eyes were burning and watering from the bite of the cold wind.
And all through it, he could hear the sound of war growing louder. It was coming from the north, the unmistakable crash and sonic boom of heavy artillery carried on the wind like rolling thunder, interspersed with ragged volleys of crackling small arms fire. Pausing to catch a breath, he let the rope hold his weight and dangled freely, used his feet to rotate himself around to look to the north and saw the strobe-flashes and arcs of light on the dark horizon.
It was heading their way. A running battle: tanks and mobile rockets and light armour, moving fast. Another twenty minutes, half an hour, and they would be much closer, perhaps too close for comfort. A full-scale military engagement was no thing to be a spectator to. He was worried about Anna’s safety down there. For a few seconds he thought about abandoning his climb – but returning back down the cliff empty-handed wasn’t going to do either of them much good.
In which case, there wasn’t a moment to lose. He kept on climbing, but now it was getting too dark to see, so he took the lightweight torch from his harness pouch, switched it on and clamped it between his teeth so that it pointed wherever he looked. There was a ledge right above him. With a huge effort he managed to drag himself over its lip. He hauled his rope up and recoiled it, then knelt on the craggy rock and shone the flashlight around him. The ledge was maybe twenty feet deep, and part of it had been cut away in edges and angles much too straight and regular to be the work of nature. He swept the torch beam left, right, up and down over the cliff wall, hoping to find what he’d come here for.
No inscriptions anywhere to be seen. Nothing but craggy rock and broken sections of weathered, time-smoothed block wall that he quickly realised were the remains of a millennia-old fortification of some kind.
The last holdout of Ashar the Babylonian. It had probably been ancient even when the band of outlaws had taken up residence there, originally built by an even older civilisation back when this ledge had been part of a much bigger overhang on the cliff face. Sometime in the last couple of thousand years both it and, presumably, the narrow cliff path that allowed the renegades access to their base must have been carried away in a major rock slide, perhaps as a result of an earthquake.
But as interesting as that might be to an archaeologist, all it meant to Ben was that he was unlikely to find the inscriptions here. A bandit leader wily enough to elude the might of the Persian army for as long as Ashar had wouldn’t have been foolish enough to carve the vital clues as to the whereabouts of his treasure right where his enemies could find them.
Which meant Ben had to keep searching, and keep climbing.
Leaning back as far as he could over the edge of the lip, he pointed his torch beam vertically through the swirling snowflakes and saw a second, smaller overhang another fifty feet or so higher up. A long, long way above the ground. Whichever one of the Von Grüber party had first spotted the inscriptions from down below must have been packing a hell of a pair of binoculars. Assuming the inscriptions were even there, and not eroded away to nothing or destroyed in another rock slide.
Only one way to find out.
A Gauloise would have been nice about now. Better still, a slug of scotch. Ben hugged his sides, then clapped
and rubbed his hands and kicked his feet to try to get some sensation back into his extremities. He checked his harness pouch and saw he was running short on pitons: just enough left, or so he hoped, to make the final leg of the climb. The wind was blowing harder. The snow was gusting strongly, clinging to his hair and eyelashes, and creeping icily down his neck. His body was racked with shivering. He looked towards the north. The flashes on the horizon had advanced a considerable distance. Usberti and the others might not be able to see the faraway explosions as well as he could from so high up, but they’d be deaf if they couldn’t hear the battle inching ever closer.
Time was running short.
Ben climbed on. He was getting very tired, and very cold. He was beginning to make mistakes as the creeping chill got to him. A couple of times, he failed to hammer a piton deeply enough into its crevice, only to see to his horror that it was working its way out when he had the full strain of his weight on the rope. Only luck and speed saved him. When he misjudged a foothold and his numb toes slipped and he felt himself going, it was the strong, stretchy rope that kept him from falling to his death.
Maybe there was a God, after all. Ben thanked him, just in case.
And at last, the second ledge was right above him. He was down to his last piton as he dragged himself up onto the narrow crawl-space. His hands no longer seemed to belong to him, but he managed to anchor himself with a loop of rope around a spike of rock, then take out the torch.
And that was when he saw the inscriptions carved on the cliff wall right in front of him.
Chapter 55
There was no mistaking what he’d found. The carving was made inside a crude rectangle hacked and chipped out of the pitted surface, roughly six feet wide by three feet high. Just about large enough for an observant spotter on the ground to pick out with modern optics, but much too small to be visible to the naked eye. The latter being, Ben guessed, exactly Ashar’s idea when he’d carved it.
Inside the rectangle was a mass of script. The stone was so weathered and eroded by endless cycles of wind, rain and sun that parts of it were smoothed away almost to nothing. The parts that Ben could make out were written in a language like no alphabet still used in modern times, made up of scratchy little wedge-shaped markings and crooked crosses and irregular arrows and squiggles that meant absolutely nothing to him, or to the vast majority of people alive on the planet. He had only fleeting memories of seeing writing like it before, long ago in his student days. Maybe if he’d paid more attention in class, he would have known whether it read from left to right, or right to left like Hebrew, or top to bottom like Chinese.
But he wasn’t here to work out what it meant, only to record what it looked like. He wiped away the dusting of snow that the wind had blown against the rock, then unzipped the small camera from its pouch on his climbing belt. It was all set up for him with flash and autofocus, so all he had to do was point and shoot. He zoomed out to take shots of the whole panel of inscriptions, then zoomed in again to take close-ups of the parts that were still faintly legible. He snapped about fifty images, working quickly but careful to miss nothing out. For the moment at least, Anna’s life depended on what he brought back to Usberti.
Once he was satisfied, Ben zipped the camera carefully back in its pouch. Job done. Now it was time to get back down there, and fast. The crashes and booms of the battle were growing constantly louder to the north. He could see the moving shapes of tanks and smaller vehicles clearly now, silhouetted against the flash of explosions and fireballs. It looked as if a whole tank company, probably Turkish Army Leopards or Sabra M60s although it was hard to tell, was pursuing a smaller enemy force across the desert. Ben guessed those would be Syrian insurgents, belonging to any one of a hundred factions. They were using armoured pickup trucks equipped with rockets and heavy machine guns. As Ben watched, one of the trucks took a direct hit from a tank missile and went up with a bright white-and-yellow flash that lit up the desert. The running battle was headed straight towards the escarpment. It was several kilometres closer than it had been just ten minutes ago. Not a healthy development.
Ben’s one consolation was that his descent would be a hell of a lot speedier than the climb. Fast-roping from helicopters and abseiling down buildings and mountains was trained into him like tying shoelaces was for normal folks. As a young SAS trooper, he’d been so agile at bounding down vertical drops that his instructors could barely keep up. Now he’d have to be even faster. He stuck the torch back between his teeth and untied the short length of rope anchoring him to the ledge. Here we go.
Two deep breaths, and he dropped like a stone over the side of the ledge. He swung dizzily in empty space for a few instants, blinded by the driving snow, then felt the rope go taut and the soles of his boots touch the cliff face twenty feet down. He kicked hard, swung out, swung back in, met the impact with bent knees, then kicked again, losing more altitude at every downward leap. With gravity working in his favour, what had taken him the best part of an hour to achieve going up, was less than three minutes’ work in reverse.
Anna rushed out of the cave to meet him as he landed on the ground. Bozza was just a step behind her, with a gun at her back. ‘Ben!’ Her cry was half drowned by another explosion. The battle was now just a couple of kilometres away, and still closing.
‘Told you I’d be back soon,’ Ben said. He clasped her hands and kissed her gently on the forehead. She pressed her face into his shoulder.
‘You feel so cold,’ she said.
‘So do you.’
‘I don’t think I can ever be warm again.’
‘Don’t be too sure,’ he said. ‘I get the feeling things are about to start hotting up around here.’
Usberti emerged from the shadows, followed by Starace and Groppione, both pointing their weapons at Ben. ‘Pardon me for interrupting this tender scene. Congratulations on a successful mission, Major Hope. I trust you have something for me?’
Ben unhooked the pouch and tossed it on the ground at Usberti’s feet. ‘Here you go, Your Grace. Now I’d suggest getting out of here, unless you want to find yourself in the middle of a tank battle.’
Starace picked up the pouch and passed it to his master. ‘It is their war, not ours,’ Usberti said, clutching the camera as though it was a gold ingot. The momentary flash of a rocket blast lit up his face, and Ben saw the crazed glint in the man’s eyes. He wanted to snap his neck. But now wasn’t the time, not with Bozza’s gun an inch from Anna’s back.
‘Cuff him,’ Usberti said. Groppione kept his weapon in Ben’s face as Starace stripped away the climbing harness, dumped it on the ground and grabbed Ben’s wrists behind his back. Snick-snack, and the hardened steel bracelets were back on, tighter than before.
‘Now let us depart,’ Usberti said. Bozza already had the RV’s side door open for him. Usberti hurried aboard first, closely followed by the silent Bellini, and headed straight for his throne. Ben and Anna were hustled unceremoniously in after them and shoved into their seats while Groppione dived behind the wheel and restarted the engine. Starace took up his sentry position on the leather sofa across the aisle. Ugo Bozza was the last one aboard, not taking his eyes or his gunsights off Ben. Ben ignored him and watched through the window as the flashes of artillery fire kept creeping closer. The ground was beginning to shake under the wheels of the RV with every percussive blast. ‘You’d better start praying this was all worth it, Usberti,’ he said.
‘Shut your fucking mouth, English,’ Starace growled, but his words were lost in another tremendous explosion that made the whole vehicle shudder. Groppione slammed the RV into gear and they began to pick their bumping, lurching way back down the track.
‘Faster,’ Usberti urged him.
‘Boss, if I go any faster in the darkness I’m gonna rip off a wheel or ground us on these rocks,’ Groppione protested in a strained voice.
It took nearly fifteen minutes for the RV to bounce and grind its way off the escarpment road and get back to level ground
.
Too long, by at least five minutes. Because now the whole place was a raging war zone.
Chapter 56
Just as Ben had feared, the battle had arrived virtually on top of them. A broad stretch of desert was lit up like daylight by scores of madly bouncing headlights and the strobe effect of muzzle flashes from rocket launchers and machine guns, punctuated every few seconds by the blinding glare of high-explosive blasts as heavy missiles blew craters in the ground. Ben thought he could count nine tanks rolling through the chaos. He could hear the harsh squeal and patter of their treads cutting through the gunfire as they scuttled like living dinosaurs over sand and rock.
And now he realised he’d been wrong about them being Turkish Leopards or Sabras. They were Russian T-90 main battle tanks, one of the most formidable and feared war machines ever made. Russian tank companies were made up of three platoons, consisting of three tanks each plus the command tank, for a total of ten. The tenth tank was the stationary blazing wreck several hundred yards back from the advancing column, hit by a lucky rocket strike from one of the fleeing rebel armoured trucks. But a force of even just nine T-90s were a terrifying enough opponent to send just about any militia army into total flight mode: that was what they were witnessing, and it was all happening less than a football field’s length away as Groppione pressed his foot to the floor in desperation to get them out of here.
A tank shell hummed overhead and exploded among the rocks just fifty yards to their right. The RV surged unscathed through the bursting shrapnel but the violence of the shockwave sent them into a wild skid that had Groppione yelling and wrestling the steering in a frenzy to stop them from overturning. He somehow managed to right the coach and accelerated harder across the undulating sands, crunching over boulders, no longer giving a damn about tearing off half the chassis.
For Usberti, it was as if they were out for a Sunday drive in the countryside. He was sitting calmly on his throne. Or as calmly as it was possible to sit, as he too was being thrown about by the bouncing suspension. He had the small Nikon camera in his lap and was wearing half-moon reading glasses, intently scrutinising the images on the camera’s glowing screen.