But he spotted a small depression in the blanket of stones covering the ground. On its own it would have meant nothing, but near it was another, and another . . .
A trail of footfalls, leading away from the 4×4 up the volcano’s side. Two trails, in fact, one lighter than the other.
Sophia recognised his curling smile of triumph. ‘You’ve found them?’
‘I have,’ he replied. He called out to the others, ‘This way!’
They set off up the slope, Stikes leading the pack like a foxhound.
Eddie had eventually found two promising spots on the meteorite to plant his charges, and was now carefully traversing the top of the great rock, looking for a third. If the explosives shattered it along its natural fault lines, the combined blasts might have more chance of pulverising the separate pieces.
It was a long shot, though. So Plan B would have to come into effect, and even that had a major flaw – one that he only had to look up to see. If the worst came to the worst, people could descend on lines from the top of the crater. Considering the Group’s resources, if they found the place it wouldn’t take long for them to realise that.
And he was increasingly thinking there was no ‘if’ about it. They had already triangulated the meteorite’s general position based on the bearings taken in Japan and Switzerland, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that the plane he had seen was carrying out reconnaissance. Finding the Temple of the Gods was a matter of money, material and manpower, and the Group had all three in abundance.
He dismissed the grim thought as he spotted a wide crack in the meteorite’s surface, deep enough to swallow his entire arm. That should do the trick.
It would take a few minutes to rig the detonator and place the explosive. He glanced at the towering temple, seeing the flash of Nina’s camera from the second tier. ‘Might have bloody known she’d wander off,’ he grumbled, before raising his voice to a shout. ‘Oi! I’ll only be a couple more minutes – come back down!’
On the temple, Nina heard him, and reluctantly waved to show her agreement. There was still so much more to see; as well as the statues, the walls were inscribed with more Atlantean texts: accounts of the builders’ journey across Africa and how they had constructed the temple despite the extreme conditions.
But now nobody would ever know their story. The temple was well within the fifty-yard blast radius Alderley had mentioned, so blowing up the meteorite would bombard it with debris, smashing the statues and shattering the ancient records behind them. She would be the only person ever to see the hidden wonder of the lost civilisation close up.
She knew the sacrifice had to be made, though. Taking one last picture of a statue, whom she took to be Eupraxia, the goddess of well-being, she headed back to the narrow flight of stairs.
By the time she returned to the ledge, Eddie was out of sight on top of the meteorite, lying down to push the primed explosive as deeply into the rock as possible. She aimed her camera upwards, trying to get as much of the temple as she could into frame with the mouth of the crater high above . . .
A sound caught her attention. A soft scuff, like someone stepping on gravel.
She moved across the temple’s front to the tunnel entrance. Nothing but darkness was visible. She listened for several seconds, but the noise didn’t recur. Dismissing it as just the breeze shifting grit on the floor, she turned away, lining up her photograph again—
Crunch.
The same noise, louder, closer.
She whirled – and saw Stikes emerge from the lava tube, his gun pointed at her. Behind him, other faces came out of the shadows, all equally unwelcome: Sophia, Warden, the other members of the Group. And Larry, held at gunpoint by an unsmiling mercenary in desert combat gear.
‘Dr Wilde!’ said Stikes with malevolent brightness. ‘We can’t go on meeting like this.’
‘Eddie!’ Nina yelled. ‘They’re here, they found us! Set off the—’
Sophia rushed past Stikes and slammed a gloved fist against Nina’s jaw. The blow knocked the redhead to her knees. She spat out blood and whipped up one leg, trying to plough a retaliatory strike into the other woman’s stomach, but Sophia neatly sidestepped the attack and drove a boot into her chest. Nina let out a choked gasp of pain.
‘What’s the matter, Nina?’ Sophia snarled as she delivered another savage kick, this time to her abdomen. ‘Eddie not been keeping –’ a third impact – ‘up with your training?’ She stamped on Nina’s stomach, leaving her writhing and struggling to breathe.
‘That’s enough!’ ordered Warden. ‘We need her alive!’
With evident reluctance, Sophia withdrew. Ignoring Nina’s moans, Stikes surveyed the ledge. ‘Chase!’ he called, his voice echoing off the temple. ‘Show yourself or I’ll kill your father!’ The mercenary forced Larry forward, gun pressed hard into his back.
A head slowly rose into view over the top of the meteorite. ‘Let ’em go, Stikes!’ Eddie shouted. ‘This thing’s wired to blow – if you don’t, I’ll take us all out and this whole thing ends right here.’
There was a flurry of consternation amongst the Group, some of them pushing back through the mercenaries into the tunnel, but Stikes was unbowed. ‘You’re bluffing. You won’t let your wife die, especially not at your hand. Or even your father.’
‘Well, Eddie?’ asked Sophia. ‘What are you going to do?’ She kicked Nina again, drawing another pained cry.
‘Leave her alone!’ Eddie demanded.
‘Or what? You’ll blow us all up? Hardly. I know you better than that.’
‘We’re wasting time,’ said Warden irritably. ‘Mr Chase, I will let Mr Stikes carry out his threat if you don’t surrender right now. If you do, then . . . I’ll let you and your father live.’
‘What?’ snapped Stikes.
‘What can they do? We have the meteorite, and we have Dr Wilde – as you say, he won’t risk anything happening to her.’ He turned back to Eddie. ‘What do you say, Mr Chase? This is your chance to end this without any more death or violence.’
To Nina’s shock, Eddie held up his hands, then climbed down the sulphur-covered rock, jumping the last ten feet and walking out of the circle of statues towards the entrance. ‘Eddie!’ she gasped. ‘You can’t let them—’ Her words were cut short by another blow from Sophia’s boot.
‘She’s right,’ said Larry, forcing the words through his fear as the mercenary jabbed the gun harder into his back. ‘Edward, you can’t just give up!’
Eddie didn’t reply, stopping ten feet short of Stikes and Warden. The American nodded. ‘Good. You’re doing the right thing.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Eddie replied. ‘That thing you said about ending this without more death and violence?’
‘Yes?’
He grinned. ‘Not my style.’
Before anyone could react, he pushed the trigger button.
34
A deafening explosion rocked the ledge – but it didn’t come from the meteorite.
The trigger’s selector dial was set to detonate only a single bomb: the one Eddie had planted in the entrance chamber. The blast shattered the stone beam running across the room . . .
And the hammer fell.
The enormous stone block plunged to the floor – splattering those Group members who had retreated in fear and some straggling mercenaries to a bloody pulp.
But the carnage didn’t end in the entrance chamber. The earthquake force of the impact collapsed the roof of the lava tube. Rubble flattened more people—
Then the temple itself began to crumble.
A section of the first tier above the entrance splintered away, statues spinning through the air as it dropped. The people closest to the lava tube could do nothing but scream as it obliterated them like ants beneath a boot. The entire ledge shuddered, a great wedge-shaped chunk breaking from its edge and tumbling down to the lava lake far below.
Those further away were flung off their feet as the ground bucked beneath them. Eddie landed hard on hi
s side, bringing up his arms to protect his head from flying debris.
As the echoing rumble of stone died away, coughs from inside the dissipating dust cloud revealed the survivors. There were not many. Of the twenty-four passengers from the helicopter, only ten remained alive, the others all buried under tons of broken rock.
Stikes painfully picked himself up and wiped his eyes. Sophia was sprawled on top of Nina, while Larry and his guard were both crumpled nearby. Warden sat up, moaning, while a few feet from him Meerkrieger held a hand to his bleeding head. The only other Group member who remained alive was Brannigan; behind her, what was left of the Bull brothers lay partially visible beneath a smashed stone slab, united in death as in life. Three other mercenaries were also stirring. Everyone else was dead.
Except one.
The thought made Stikes whirl. Chase—
The bruised Eddie realised he had dropped the trigger. Where was it? There – about six feet away. He started to crawl towards it . . . until the ringing in his ears faded enough for him to hear movement.
Running footsteps—
He fumbled to draw his gun – but Stikes kicked it from his hand. Eddie yelled in pain. The mercenary leader followed up with another crunching blow to his chest. ‘I should have shot you in Afghanistan when I had the chance!’ he snarled, lining up another strike at his head—
Eddie whipped up both arms, one taking the full force of the kick while the other clamped around Stikes’s ankle. Despite the pain he still twisted and rolled, yanking his opponent off balance. Stikes stumbled, landing heavily on one knee. He cried out – only for his yell to become a breathless groan as Eddie drove an elbow into his stomach. ‘Fuck off, you southern ponce!’
The Yorkshireman swivelled and unleashed a kick of his own that struck Stikes’s head with a satisfying crack. He pulled back to attack again, about to drive the former officer’s jawbone up into his skull—
A gunshot boomed across the ledge, a bullet smacking off the stone floor beside the two fighting men. Eddie froze, seeing Sophia striding towards him, the smoking Jericho in her hand. She sighed. ‘“Fuck off, you southern ponce”? Really, Eddie, the quality of your bons mots just keeps getting worse. Nina’s education clearly isn’t rubbing off on you.’
Stikes looked angrily up at her. ‘Why didn’t you just shoot him?’
A little mocking smile. ‘Because I didn’t think you’d appreciate the bullets going through you first, darling. Get up, Eddie.’ She gestured with the gun for him to stand, then looked back towards the entrance. The lava tube was now completely lost to sight, tons of stone blocking the exit. ‘You should have blown up the meteorite after all. We still have it, and we still have Nina and your father. And you, for that matter.’
‘Yeah,’ said Eddie, ‘but there’s not much you can do with it, is there? There’s no way out, and it doesn’t look like you brought a JCB with you to dig through the tunnel.’
‘There’s always a way out for the resourceful.’ She looked up at the circle of sky high above.
Warden staggered over to them. ‘What have you done?’ he yelled at Eddie. ‘You psycho! You’ve trapped us in here!’
‘Fuck me, so I have,’ Eddie replied sarcastically. ‘Hope you brought a packed lunch.’
Stikes stood, barking commands to his surviving men to secure Nina and Larry, then reclaimed his gun from Sophia. Seething, he regarded Eddie for a long moment as if considering pulling the trigger, then pointed at his other two prisoners. ‘Get over there.’
Meerkrieger and Brannigan, both visibly shaken, joined Warden. ‘What are we going to do now?’ asked the Australian. ‘Chase is right – we’ll never clear all that rubble.’
‘We might not have to,’ said Stikes, following Sophia’s gaze and staring up at the shaft above the temple. ‘It’ll be a tough climb, but I think it might be possible to reach the top of the volcano.’
Meerkrieger was far from pleased at the suggestion. ‘I’m eighty-one years old! How do you expect me to climb up there?’
‘I wouldn’t worry yourself about getting out of here,’ Stikes replied, his smug self-confidence returning. ‘There are ropes in the helicopter.’
‘And how are you going to get up to the helicopter in the first place?’ asked Nina. She indicated the temple. The collapsing tier had brought the first two flights of stairs down with it, making it impossible to ascend the structure. She turned to Warden. ‘Face it, you’ve lost. Most of the Group are dead, and while you might have got your precious sky stone, there’s nothing you can do with it.’
‘The Group will go on even without its individual members,’ Warden said angrily, then his expression suddenly became more calculating. He looked at the meteorite, then back at Nina. Chillingly, he was now smiling. ‘There may not be anything we can do with the meteorite – but there is something you can do with it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Brannigan demanded.
Warden hurried back to the rubble scattered around the entrance, searching the debris until he found the case he had dropped. He returned to the survivors and opened it, revealing the three small statues. ‘Put them together,’ he ordered Nina.
She shook her head. ‘Go to hell.’
‘Stikes?’
Stikes pushed his gun against Eddie’s head. ‘I think you know the drill by now, Nina.’
‘What exactly is this going to achieve?’ she said scathingly. ‘You don’t need the statues to tell you where the meteorite is any more. I mean, it’s right there.’
‘You’re forgetting the statues’ true purpose,’ Warden told her. ‘What did Nantalas call them? The keys of power? You can access that power – and move the meteorite over to the temple so we can climb up!’
Even with a gun pressed against his back, Larry couldn’t hold in an incredulous exclamation. ‘It’s the size of a bloody whale! How do you expect anyone to move that?’
‘Those little statues levitating is one thing,’ Eddie added, ‘but that? Come on, she’s not Yoda!’
Warden snorted in disdain. ‘You’ve just illustrated perfectly why the Group will ultimately win. If you decide something is impossible before even attempting it, then you’ve already failed.’
‘We see what’s possible,’ said Brannigan. ‘Then we make it happen.’
‘And in this case, we know what’s possible. The Atlantean texts describe Nantalas levitating the sky stone. If she can do it, so can you, Dr Wilde.’ He thrust the case at her. ‘Take the statues.’
‘And be careful with them,’ said Stikes, grinding the Jericho’s muzzle into Eddie’s cheek. ‘You wouldn’t want to drop one and startle me, would you? It could have very unfortunate consequences for your husband.’
‘Nina, don’t do it,’ Eddie warned. ‘If they get out of here with that DNA . . .’
He stopped as his wife’s eyes met his. Just a look – but he instantly knew she had something in mind other than mere surrender. He didn’t know what, but there was also an unspoken warning that he should be prepared for something major.
Nobody except Eddie picked up on it. ‘I . . . I don’t have a choice,’ she said, making a show of seeming conflicted. She took out the first statue.
It glowed in her hand, brighter than ever before. The volcano was evidently the site of an extremely powerful earth energy confluence point. The second statue joined the first, shoulder to shoulder. The eerie rippling blue light intensified, a brilliant line pointing directly at the remaining figurine.
Everyone watched the display intently as she cradled the two statuettes in one hand and reached with the other for the third. As in Takashi’s skyscraper and the Blauspeer hotel, she again experienced the electrical tingling coursing through her body.
‘Put them together,’ ordered Warden. ‘Do it!’
She gave Eddie a final glance . . . then completed the triptych.
The effect this time was more powerful, yet, because she was fully prepared for it, less overwhelming. She now knew that this was truly the source of
life on earth, the feeling of having somehow come home undeniable. All life had started with the meteorite, and even after billions of years it was still linked, through the planet’s own mysterious energies. She could sense its myriad descendants even in the heart of the barren Ethiopian wilderness. There was not a corner of the planet that the offspring of the primordial DNA had not touched.
She kept her focus on the statues. If her desperate plan had any chance of working, she needed to learn how to control the power running through them.
And quickly. Through the maelstrom of unworldly sensation she heard Warden’s voice: ‘Take them to the meteorite. Now!’
Nina opened her eyes. The statues were not levitating; her hands were tightly clasped round their bases, holding them together, but she could feel the bizarre pressure as they tried to lift away from her. She moved towards the meteorite, everyone following with expressions of awe or expectation.
With two exceptions. Sophia took the opportunity to pick up Eddie’s gun . . . and Eddie himself kept a close watch on Nina, waiting for the cue to make his move.
Whatever that cue might be.
Nina reached the meteorite. The statues’ glow was now almost dazzling – and there was a strange charge in the air, as if the giant rock were humming in anticipation of the return of its long-separated splinters. She looked back. The faces of the surviving Group members were filled with rapacious greed.
‘Do it!’ Warden ordered again, but she didn’t need the prompt, already drawing a nervous breath . . . and touching the three statues to the sky stone.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the coating of sulphur and ash sizzled where the figurines met the meteorite as if dissolved by acid, centuries of grimy volcanic deposits flaking away. The purple rock beneath was revealed . . . and it too began to glow.
The entire ledge suddenly shook, everyone on it battling to remain standing. Nina shielded her eyes as a blizzard of dirty dust cascaded off the meteorite, repelled from its surface as the unearthly light grew brighter. The onlookers staggered back.
Slowly, impossibly, the stone began to rise.