Up ahead, the canyon path bore around to the right. Ben turned the bend, and braked to a halt.
Kirby had been dozing again. ‘What’s happening?’ he slurred, sensing that they’d stopped.
Ben didn’t reply.
Three hundred yards away up the canyon, a high rocky ridge dominated the skyline. Its top was flat and smooth and silhouetted black against the sky. Cut into the horizon, as symmetrical as the V-notch of a gun rearsight, was a perfect cleft. Ben studied it for a moment, shielded his eyes and looked up at the golden disc of the sun. It was dropping fast as evening drew on, and its line of arc was heading right for the cleft. In a few more minutes, it would be exactly positioned in the V-notch.
It was a stunning, perfect, completely accurate physical representation of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the word ‘horizon’. Now he knew he’d been right that day in Claudel’s study. Wenkaura had meant to convey more than just an abstract symbol.
‘Jesus, Kirby, I think we’ve found something.’
‘What?’
‘Look.’
Kirby looked, frowned, and understood. ‘Holy crap. That’s it. That’s got to be it.’ Not taking his eyes off it, he opened his door and stepped down from the car. ‘That’s our landmark. The heretic’s treasure is right here in front of us. It’s somewhere inside that ridge, or under it. There’s got to be a cave or something.’
He started walking towards it, as if hypnotised by the spectacle.
‘Stop,’ Ben called after him. ‘Wait.’
‘What now?’ Kirby said dreamily.
Ben pointed. ‘Look there.’
Fifty feet away, directly between them and the ridge, was a crater hollowed in the sand. What had once been some kind of desert creature, maybe a fennec fox, lay ripped to pieces around the hole. The badly mutilated corpse was still fresh, a cloud of flies buzzing over it. Around the remains of the dead animal, scattered across the crater and for a wide radius around it, were fragmented shards of dark metal.
‘Landmines,’ Ben said.
‘Landmines?’
‘This place has been a war zone for years. They have a habit of getting left around.’
Kirby turned and scurried back to the car on the tips of his toes, clambered back inside and slammed his door, breathing hard. ‘Shit. This is very, very bad.’
‘This is Africa.’
‘Where the hell could they be?’
‘Anywhere,’ Ben said. ‘Everywhere. They could be all around us, and we’d never know until we step on one.’
‘Then what?’
‘You really need me to tell you that?’
‘This is all we need,’ Kirby groaned. ‘After all this way. Can we get round the edge?’
Ben shook his head. ‘The canyon walls are too steep. Perfect spot for a minefield. There’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to dig them out, one by one, and hope we don’t hit any big ones.’
Kirby gulped. ‘Big ones?’
‘Twenty-five kilos of high explosive in a solid metal casing,’ Ben said. ‘Not the easiest things to handle in loose sand. And they become unstable after a few years. Nasty tendency to go off in your face.’
‘This is just intolerable,’ Kirby whined.
Suddenly the canyon was filled with the sound of engines and crackling gunfire. Ben and Kirby piled out of the Toyota and scrambled for cover.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Around the corner came two off-road trail motorcycles, then a third, all speeding like lunatics, bucking wildly over the rough ground. The buzz of their two-stroke engines echoed off the canyon walls as they approached on full throttle. Two of the bikes had pillion passengers, dressed, like the riders, in Bedouin garb. The passengers were twisted backwards in the saddle, holding on tight and rattling off one-handed bursts of automatic fire from Uzi submachine guns at whatever it was that was following them.
Ben watched from the rocks, all senses on full alert and the Jericho ready in his hand as the bikes came screaming past. He could hear something else over the noise of their engines. Something unmistakeable. A steady, high-pitched whirring and creaking sound that he hadn’t heard for years but wasn’t ever going to forget. He tensed and watched the bend in the canyon, waiting for the inevitable.
The main battle tank came scuttling around the corner, an inhuman thing, like a grey-green steel dinosaur. The squealing clatter of its treads and roar of its engine reverberated through the canyon. Forty-six tons of pure brutal force, twelve feet wide and over twenty long, crushing stones into dust as it lurched forward. Its 105mm gun swept left and right, as if surveying the scene. Then fired.
The deafening boom was followed by a wail like an express train as its high-explosive shell hurtled through the canyon. It impacted against the rock wall in a gigantic blast of smoke and fire and tumbling rubble. The rear motorcycle was flung in the air by the blast, twisting and cartwheeling. Its rider and passenger were dashed against the rocks.
Kirby was pressed to the ground at Ben’s feet, his face twisted in terror and his hands clapped over his ears. Stone chips, sand and dust showered down on them. Ben watched helplessly as the fallen motorcycle passenger jumped up and staggered away from his dead companion, firing his Uzi back at the tank. A long, deafening burst from the tank’s heavy machine guns and the running man was cut down, his white robes spattered red.
Ben quickly realised what he was witnessing here. They’d stumbled into a running firefight between the Sudanese military and Bedouin militia rebels-only the balance of power was massively uneven as the army ruthlessly stamped out these last pockets of resistance in the wake of the Darfur war.
Up ahead the remaining bikes were tearing through the canyon. The one in front was suddenly blown in the air. Wreckage and body parts rained down on the canyon floor. It had hit a mine.
The big gun fired again. The screech of the shell passing overhead, and a wall of the canyon disintegrated in a plume of dust and fire and smoke.
The last of the motorcycles was charging straight for the ridge, dead ahead. The sun was right in the cleft, exactly as the glyph on Wenkaura’s map had predicted.
The tank lurched along the canyon in pursuit of its prey, its turret whirring from side to side as it tracked the target. Then it fired another deafening blast from its main gun. The shell slammed explosively into the ridge a few yards ahead of the machine. The bike wobbled, but somehow the rider kept going. The machine cannon blasted out another burst and he was blown off the bike and tumbled to the ground like a bloody rag doll. The bike slid down on its side with a shower of sparks, flipped and lay silent.
The tank came rumbling on, unstoppable. Now it was just yards from their Toyota and Ben realised it wasn’t even going to slow down.
And it didn’t. The tank’s twelve-foot width kept on coming. The caterpillar tracks seemed just to engulf the parked vehicle. The tank’s front lifted as it rode straight up on top of it, then sank down as the forty-six tons of steel and armour plate bore down, crushing it like an eggshell. The huge machine lumbered onwards as if it hadn’t even noticed. In its wake, the Toyota was a flattened mess of twisted metal.
Kirby turned in horror to Ben. ‘Now we’re totally fucked’, he screamed over the roar.
Before Ben could stop him, the historian ripped the little.38 revolver from his pocket and aimed it at the tank.
Ben knew what would happen if he fired. It was like pitching a child’s dart gun against a raging bull. The low- velocity round would whang harmlessly against the massive armour plate. It wouldn’t even dent it, but the crew inside would hear. Then the tank would stop. The gun would swivel around towards them. It would locate them in an instant, and it would blow them to pieces. At this range, their bodies would be scattered over a circle of desert two hundred yards across.
