For a moment he turned his head to glance through the window, his eyes lingering on the moon. ‘Howard Carter, if you’re up there and watching this, I just want you to know I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Right,’ he said, addressing Elliott. ‘We get into a rhythm until this bust goes over. And I just hope it goes the right way, or we’ll be squashed like … very squashed things.’
Will repeated, ‘Push … push … push …’ again and again as the pharaoh rocked backwards and forwards, and then with a last ‘PUSH!’ it overbalanced and was tipping forward. Will and Elliott jumped to the side as it toppled straight on top of the sarcophagus with a floor-shaking thud.
They had both skipped around to the front to watch as the sarcophagus, in what felt like slow motion, also went over. Its huge lid slid onto the ground, smashing the glass display case before it finally came to rest.
‘What have I done?’ Will said, as he saw the damage to the pharaoh’s head, the sarcophagus lid, which was broken in half, and to the mummy in the glass case.
But Elliott wasn’t the least bit concerned about any of these. She squatted down by the broken lid to pick something up from amongst the pieces. The lid hadn’t been completely solid – inside it there had been an object.
She stood up with it. It was some sort of baton, almost two feet in length.
‘My God!’ Will exclaimed. ‘It looks exactly like the tower!’
And it did; with the same section at the tip, it could have been a model of the tower from the inner world. It also seemed to be made from the same material as the tower, its surface smooth and grey.
And when the bare skin of Elliott’s hand had come into contact with it, a band around the shaft glowed with an intense blue light. It was identical to the light that they had witnessed before in both the tower and the pyramid.
‘Ah, so the batteries are still good,’ Will whispered, trying not to laugh with the strangeness of it all.
‘This is what I came for,’ she murmured, as she got to her feet and held the object reverentially up before her.
‘But what is it? A weapon of some kind – a mace?’ Will asked, then something occurred to him. ‘I hope it won’t suddenly change into another tower, will it?’
‘It’s a sceptre, and I have to take it back,’ Elliott said, her eyes locked on it.
At the mention of the word, Will gave a small shrug. ‘Okay, it’s a sceptre then, can I see it?’ He stepped forward with his hand out, but Elliott snatched the object away.
‘No, don’t,’ she said sharply. ‘You shouldn’t touch it.’
‘Fine, be like that.’ He shrugged again, instead going to examine the broken parts of the lid from the sarcophagus where the sceptre had been concealed. There was a circular channel bored right into the middle of the thick stone of the lid, which of course was now empty. ‘So this sceptre thing of yours could have been hidden in there for centuries, and nobody had the faintest idea,’ he thought out loud. ‘And, of course, all these relics were brought back to England by Victorian collectors, like, a century or two ago, so this sarcophagus would have been in Egypt for all the centuries before that. Is that where your sceptre was lost?’
But Elliott had already gathered up her rifle and Bergen and was heading out of the room.
‘Hey, you with the magic stick! Where are you off to now?’ Will shouted as he heard the door slam shut behind her.
Grabbing his Bergen and Sten, he rushed across the walkway and had just caught up with her several flights down when there was the sound of gunfire hammering away so loudly windows were rattling. Both of them froze on the spot.
‘That’s close,’ Elliott shouted. ‘And it’s an automatic weapon.’
‘Could be the army?’ Will suggested.
It was coming from outside the museum, and Elliott was right – it was very close. They raced further down the circular staircase until they could see through the main entrance.
There was another burst of gunfire and a huge crash.
‘A tank!’ Will shouted. ‘Bloody hell!’
It had shot up the front steps and rammed straight into the doors, crashing through them and mangling the metal and glass.
It stopped there, half of it in the building and half outside. The automatic fire came again – the volume ear-splitting in the confines of the museum, as the forecourt beyond the tank was sprayed with rounds.
The hatch opened and someone climbed from it.
Elliott was the first to recognise who it was through her rifle scope.
‘Drake!’ she cried.
‘Elliott?’ he yelled back.
Will and Elliott flew down the stairs. Drake had climbed down from the tank. ‘We picked up the signal from your beacon,’ he said, as Elliott threw her arms around him and held him tight. ‘But I didn’t believe it could really be you two!’ he added. Shaking his head, Drake smiled at Will. ‘But how did you get back here?’
‘That’ll take a bit of explaining,’ Will said, then interrupted himself as his friend’s appearance registered with him. ‘Drake, what happened to you?
Elliott had also taken a step back so she could see his deathly pallor and not only that his arm was strapped up, but that his head and hands were covered in dressings.
‘It was the explosion in the pore,’ Drake replied. ‘The radiation caught me.’
‘Oh, no,’ Elliott said, barely audibly.
Just then the machine gun began to hammer away again. As it stopped, there was urgent yelling from inside the tank.
‘Who’s that?’ Elliott asked.
‘Jiggs,’ Drake said. ‘The Armagi are building up outside, so we have to make tracks.’
Jiggs was shouting so much his voice sounded hoarse. ‘Bloody hurry it up out there!’
‘We’ve got to go!’ Drake said urgently, already climbing back onto the tank.
The machine gun opened up again, drowning out Elliott as she said, ‘I’ve got to protect this.’ Simply throwing her rifle aside, she tucked the sceptre inside her jacket and clamped her arm over it. Drake had seen what she’d just done and was finding it difficult to believe that she would discard her weapon like that. But now wasn’t the time for explanations.
‘They’re wall-to-wall! I can’t keep them off!’ Jiggs shouted, opening up at the Armagi again.
‘Jesus, get a move on, you two!’ Drake shouted, beckoning frantically at them from the turret.
Elliott reached him and Drake grabbed her by the hand. ‘No! No room! Ditch the Bergen!’ he shouted. She threw it aside, and he pulled her into the hatch.
Already up on the tank, Will had shrugged off his Bergen to pass it to Drake. ‘Bloody leave that too!’ Drake shouted.
The gun was firing continuously now.
‘No way!’ Will insisted. ‘Got all my stuff in there!’
Drake looked furious but snatched the Bergen from the boy’s grip and was thrusting it down inside the tank when Jiggs cried, ‘Breach! They’re through!’
There was a crash as the glass panels directly above the tank and above the two doors on either side burst inwards.
Even though he lost a second or two as he shielded himself from the shower of glass, Will might still have made it if the turret hadn’t swivelled around at that point. Taking a step back in surprise, he slipped and fell on his knees.
‘Drake!’ Will shouted, reaching out in desperation towards his friend, who was doing the same from the hatch.
Not just glass was falling around Will, but heavier objects.
Armagi.
Something nearly tore Will’s arm off as it gripped it with its claws and yanked.
The last thing Drake saw before he slammed the hatch down was the boy being heaved from the rear of the tank by two Armagi as others landed inside the museum.
‘No, no, no, no,’ Elliott was wailing and struggling with Drake inside the tank as it moved off. ‘We can’t leave him! We have to go back!’
‘I’m sorry. He’s gone,’ Drake told her, trying to shake some se
nse into her. ‘There are too many of them.’
‘Drake, I need you on the L94,’ Jiggs said, now he was driving instead of operating the tank’s chain gun. As he steered through the gates and along the road at the front of the museum, there were dull thuds as Armagi slammed against the hull.
Jiggs was swearing under his breath. It wasn’t because there was any remote possibility that the Armagi could penetrate the Chobham armour of the tank, which was twice as strong as steel, but because he was having immense difficulty seeing where he was going. The sheer number of Armagi in the way was making it impossible. And as he drove on, guessing where the road was, the Challenger was colliding with abandoned vehicles in the road. ‘If I can bloody see anything at all, I’m going to take a left into Southampton Row,’ he announced breathlessly. ‘Then head north. We’ll have to figure out how to l—’
Elliott suddenly stopped crying. ‘No! Go right!’ she ordered.
‘Go right? But you don’t know …’ Drake had begun as she pulled the sceptre from her jacket. For a moment both Drake and Jiggs were silent, amazed by the blue light that filled the tank.
‘I think we need to shake these blessed Armagi off our tail,’ Drake said, ‘then find somewhere quiet where we can catch up.’
‘How about the tea rooms at Fortnum’s?’ Jiggs quipped grimly.
As he was yanked from the tank, Will landed flat on his back. He hit the ground hard and was completely winded. All he could do was lie there, trying to get his lungs working again.
And when he did finally get his breath back and sucked down some air, the tank’s powerful diesel revved and a cloud of hot exhaust fumes swirled all around him.
It was the worst sound in the world because he knew full well what it meant. Drake and Elliott couldn’t do anything for him now.
They were leaving.
Without him.
As the tank trundled off, he was trying his best to focus on his immediate surroundings. He hadn’t been wearing Drake’s lens so it wasn’t a matter of his eyes adjusting to the moonlight, but his senses were still badly scrambled. Shapes shifted around him, many shapes.
And in the relative calm after the sound of the tank’s engine retreated into the distance, he could hear the Armagi moving close to him, their feet grinding the broken glass.
For a second or two as he remained on his back, nothing happened. But as soon as he tried to lift his head, something struck him in the mouth. The blow was so powerful that he heard the crack as one of his teeth snapped off.
Will didn’t delude himself that the situation wasn’t desperate. For an instant he wished that the tank had reversed over him and killed him, because help wouldn’t be coming. Not now he was in the midst of all these beasts, which would stop at nothing – he couldn’t plead with them for his life as he might with a human being.
He stole a look at them. He saw the dark inhuman eyes against the translucent planes of their bodies. He saw the serrated edges of their wings like so many glass daggers.
He was going to die.
And Will knew it was probably the last thing he should do, but he tried to sit up.
One of them suddenly lashed out at his chest, so hard that he was flung back against the marble floor again.
Then another blow. A kick to the head from something spiky. This time he had a glimpse of it coming towards him – it resembled the hind leg of a huge bird.
There was blood in his eyes. All he could hear was the kettledrum thump-thump of his own pulse.
I’m going to pass out, he thought. But that’s okay.
Then there was something else. Another sound.
He only just caught it as the black blanket of unconsciousness began to fall over him.
It was a car horn.
Then he did pass out.
‘They’re sticking with us,’ Jiggs said. Kingsway was reasonably clear of vehicles, so he didn’t hold back, pushing the tank almost to its top speed of 35 miles per hour. Even so, the Armagi kept doggedly following, flying around it like a swarm of angry wasps.
In the commander’s station Drake seemed exhausted as he watched the creatures pursuing them on the rear periscope. ‘We’ve got to find a way to shake them off,’ he mumbled.
‘Remember the Ghost Crab Manoeuvre?’ Jiggs asked.
‘Sort of … but was that what it was called?’ Drake replied.
Jiggs turned the tank into the Aldwych. ‘I’m not sure, but you know what I mean. There’s got to be a suitable building around here.’
‘Why don’t you keep going round this block until we spot something?’ Drake said.
Jiggs followed his suggestion, and looped around Bush House and the other buildings in the middle of the Strand, so that within minutes they’d returned back onto the Aldwych from the east side. ‘And, Elliott, we’re going to need to blow some smoke, as they say. Have a look and see if you can find controls for—’
‘L8 smoke grenades. Should be by the elevation control,’ Jiggs cut in. ‘If not, there’s another way to do it, by cooking off the diesel in the exhaust manifolds.’
‘How do you know that?’ Drake asked.
‘Went for a joyride in one of these once,’ Jiggs replied.
‘Okay, think I’ve found it,’ Elliott said, pointing to a series of numbered switches.
‘Arm them,’ Jiggs told her. She clicked a master switch on the panel and waited.
‘Jiggs, I’ve got us a likely candidate,’ Drake suddenly announced. ‘See that restaurant right on the corner of Kingsway? If you can miss the trees and hit it right, maybe we can flatten the main columns.’
‘Looks promising,’ Jiggs replied.
‘What are you trying to do?’ Elliott asked Drake with concern.
‘He’s trying to bury us,’ Jiggs said.
‘It’s an old trick. Create some confusion with smoke, then if we motor into the right building and it works out how we want it, we lie low under the debris,’ Drake explained, then turned to Jiggs. ‘Let’s give it a shot next time round,’ he said.
As they looped once more around the buildings on the island in the middle of the Aldwych, and the restaurant came into view again, Drake gave the order for Elliott to fire the grenades. They rebounded off the buildings either side, exploding and spreading a thick grey cloud across the road.
‘Now, brace yourselves,’ Jiggs warned as he powered the Challenger straight towards the corner building. ‘And wish me luck, because I’ve got zero visibility.’
Seconds later there was a huge crash, and the tank slowed to a sudden halt, throwing them all forward. But Jiggs rammed down on the throttle again, and the tank eased forward a little, before he killed the engine.
Then there was just a grinding sound, and the noise of debris hitting the hull outside.
Jiggs looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat, giving the thumbs-up.
‘Keep absolutely quiet now,’ Drake told Elliott.
The manoeuvre had been a success. The tank had penetrated the front of the restaurant and, as it knocked several supporting columns away, a section of the floor above had collapsed on top of it, completely covering it. As the wind began to sweep the smoke away, the tank was almost totally hidden, and the Armagi had nothing on which to direct their attention.
‘What do you think?’ Jiggs whispered after a while.
‘Did it work?’ Elliott asked.
‘Can’t see anything through the periscopes, but I think it has. I suppose we’ll only know it hasn’t if the Armagi call in the Limiters to use high explosives on us,’ Drake replied. ‘I just hope there’s enough air for all of us in this sardine tin.’ He shook his head as he looked around the cabin. ‘I could never have been a tankie … I hate small spaces.’ He turned to Elliott. ‘Okay, so what’s the story with that oversized glow stick in your jacket?’
PART FOUR
Mayhem
Chapter Eighteen
With the diesel roaring, the tank thundered down Fleet Street, either barging cars out of t
he way or simply riding straight over them. As soon as Jiggs had backed it out from beneath the rubble, Drake had vacated the commander’s position for Elliott. She knew precisely where she wanted them to go, and was now monitoring the way ahead using the periscopes.
Drake was suffering badly from the radiation sickness and welcomed the chance to rest, although he was doing his best to keep up with what was happening. ‘You calling the shots again, just like old times,’ he chuckled, as the girl issued directions to Jiggs in the driver’s compartment at the front of the tank.
Elliott shot him a smile, then shouted to Jiggs as they came to an intersection. ‘Straight across. Keep going.’
‘Ludgate Hill,’ Jiggs announced, the engine note changing as they began to climb the slight gradient.
‘There! Up there!’ Elliott shouted, pointing.
Peering through his periscope, Jiggs took a moment to respond. ‘St Paul’s Cathedral?’ he asked. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘No, I mean it! Just keep going!’ she called back. ‘I need to get inside – can you get us through the doors?’
‘Inside? Whatever you say,’ Jiggs laughed. ‘We’ve already walloped one British institution today, so why not another?’
‘Once we’re in, I want you to stop.’ Elliott added.
Drake shook his head. ‘If we do, the Armagi will be all over us again before we know it. So use the same MO – go in about face and keep them at bay with the L94,’ he said.
‘Gotcha,’ Jiggs acknowledged. ‘Hold on tight!’ he yelled, as they struck a couple of the stone bollards at the edge of the pedestrian area in front of the cathedral, snapping them off like rotten tree stumps. Then he swung the tank into a sharp turn, in the process managing to clip the statue in front of St Paul’s. ‘Whoopsy! I think I just clouted Queen Vic!’ he said, as he put the tank into reverse and stood full on the throttle.
Drake and Elliott hung on as, gauging where he was going through the reverse periscope, Jiggs aimed straight for the pair of wooden doors at the top of the steps. Unfortunately there were a couple of massive stone columns with not quite sufficient clearance between them. With a low, resounding clang, the tank became stuck between them and came to a sudden halt.