The Cult of Osiris

Diamondback aimed the revolver at the Land Rover’s driver as the vehicle charged towards him—

Fear paralysed his trigger finger. He had been so intent on recovering his gun that he hadn’t seen the approaching cliff - until now.

He overcame his shock and fired, but a fraction of a second too late. The bullet punched through the Land Rover’s roof above Macy’s head. The Defender surged past him.

Nina looked back. ‘We’re not gonna make it!’ The Land Rover was designed for endurance, not acceleration.

‘We’ll make it,’ said Eddie, gripping her tightly. They passed the last earthmover, flames swelling ahead as Macy angled for the ramp. ‘Although I think we should duck!’

They dropped as low as they could as the Land Rover drove into the blaze, tongues of fire licking hungrily through the broken windows.

They hit the ramp—

The Zubr reached the cliff.

A huge blast of escaping air swept sand and stones off the rockface as the skirt vented into the void below. Its support gone, the hovercraft’s bow dropped, the massive vehicle jolting violently as the bottom of its hull ground against the lip of stone. Still driven onwards by its three huge propellers, it balanced like a see-saw - before tipping over the point of no return. Everything inside it that was not lashed down slid forwards . . .

Including the bulldozer on which Diamondback was pinned.

He screamed as the earthmover screeched down the hold. The machine shot out into the open, plunging at the ground with Diamondback trapped on the scoop like a shrieking hood ornament.

Thirty tons of steel smashed down at the base of the cliff - followed by over five hundred tons of metal as the hovercraft landed on top of it. The Zubr exploded with earth-shaking force, a burning mushroom cloud roiling upwards.

Towards the Land Rover.

The 4?4 hadn’t gained enough speed to cancel out the hovercraft’s forward momentum as it flew out of the stern, and it skidded backwards to crunch to a halt with its rear wheels over the edge of the cliff. The front wheels spun uselessly, lifted off the ground as the back end dipped . . .

Though half stunned by the hard landing, Nina realised the danger - and threw herself against the dashboard.

The shift of weight was just enought to bring the Defender’s front end back down, the tyres finding grip and pulling the vehicle back on to the clifftop with a bone-shaking thump. The fireball boiled upwards behind it, setting one of the wheels alight. Still engulfed in the cloud of sand, the Land Rover got about thirty feet before the burning tyre blew out. Macy brought it to a jolting stop.

The dust gradually settled. Coughing, they climbed out. Berkeley shakily faced Nina. ‘Thanks for waiting for me.’

‘And thanks for . . . sort of trying to help me. I guess,’ Nina replied dubiously.

He looked relieved, holding out his hand. ‘No hard feelings?’

To Macy and Eddie’s surprise, she shook it, once . . .

Then punched him in the face. He dropped on his ass, stunned. ‘Actually, yes! That was for selling out in the first place, you son of a bitch!’ Eddie pulled her back before she could take another swing.

‘What about Shaban?’ Macy asked. She looked into the distance, but the dune buggy was long gone.

‘Shit!’ said Nina, thoughts returning to larger concerns than Berkeley. ‘He’s got the jar! How’re we going to catch up with him?’

‘We’re not,’ Eddie told her. ‘He’s got a head start - and I bet he’ll be able to get someone to pick him up by chopper. That buggy had a sat phone.’

‘So he wins?’ Macy asked, appalled. ‘After all that, he gets away with it?’

‘No,’ said Nina. ‘No way. I’m not going to let that happen.’ She stared after the departed Egyptian, thinking. ‘We need to get back to Abydos.’ Both Eddie and Macy appeared on the verge of making sarcastic comments about the obviousness of her plan. ‘Don’t even start. I said we needed to contact the authorities. We still do.’

‘In that case,’ said Eddie, indicating the Land Rover’s smoking rear tyre, ‘we’d better change that wheel. It’s a bloody long walk.’

The Egyptian Mil Mi-8 helicopter approached from the west, silhouetted against the bloated red sun on the horizon. It kicked up a swirling vortex of sand as it touched down near the Osireion at Abydos.

Nina, Eddie and Macy stood by the battered Land Rover, Berkeley sitting sullenly in its rear seat, shielding their eyes from the blowing dust. Hatches opened, six men emerging. Five were soldiers, but their uniforms were not the standard tan of regular Egyptian troops: these were the darker camouflage pattern of a special forces team.

The sixth man was a civilian - Dr Ismail Assad, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. ‘Dr Wilde,’ he said as he reached the Land Rover.

‘Dr Assad,’ Nina replied. She looked past the helicopter to the desert from where it had come. ‘I’m guessing you checked out the GPS co-ordinates I gave you on the phone before coming here.’

‘I did. It was . . . incredible.’ He shook his head in near-disbelief. ‘And I only had time to examine the entrance chamber. How much more is there?’

‘A lot,’ said Macy. ‘All the way down to Osiris’s tomb.’

‘Incredible,’ Assad repeated. ‘I left a team from the Antiquities Special Protection Squad,’ he nodded at the soldiers, ‘to secure the site - the SCA will send a full expedition as soon as possible.’

‘Shaban won’t be going back there,’ Eddie warned. ‘He’s got what he wanted from it.’

‘Yes, the canopic jar you told me about,’ Assad said to Nina. ‘Are you serious? You believe Shaban is going to use it to make a biological weapon?’

‘He certainly believes it,’ said Nina. ‘And he’s got the resources of the Osirian Temple - well, the Setian Temple now, I suppose - to back him up. From what I saw in Switzerland, he might be able to do it.’

Assad frowned. ‘Maybe so, but weapons of mass destruction are a little out of my field. And without proof, I can’t persuade higher authorities to take action.’

‘There’s something that is in your field, though,’ said Nina. ‘The zodiac from the Sphinx. I’m sure Shaban has it - Osir would have shipped it back to Switzerland. He even had a space picked out for it in his Osiris memorabilia collection.’

‘If Shaban has the zodiac,’ Assad mused, ‘that would definitely justify taking action. He’s an Egyptian citizen, after all - and our government takes a very dim view of archaeological thieves.’

Eddie regarded the soldiers. ‘You’d send this lot in to extradite him?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on whether the ASPS have ever carried out missions outside the country,’ the Egyptian said with a small but meaningful smile.

‘And if along the way you also happened to find proof that he was manufacturing biological weapons,’ said Nina, ‘well, then you’d have to do something about it, wouldn’t you?’

‘I suppose I would. But first I would need proof that he has the zodiac.’

Nina looked at Eddie. ‘Which means getting back inside the Osirian Temple’s headquarters.’

‘How are you going to do that?’ Macy asked. ‘I mean, we saw the place - it’s like a fortress. Because it literally is a fortress! They won’t let you walk right in this time.’

‘Maybe not,’ Eddie said thoughtfully, ‘but there’s someone they might . . .’

29 Switzerland

Soft lights washed across the high stone walls of the castle as the last glow of sunset faded behind the Alpine mountains. The pyramid dominating the courtyard took on new form as blue LEDs along its edges flicked on, the black glass building becoming a neon outline topped by an intense beam shining skywards towards the pole star: a pointer to the ancient Egyptian gods.

More lights approached along the lakeside, turning on to the short spur leading to the castle and stopping at the gatehouse. A sleek black Mercedes S-Class, windows tinted almost as dark as the paint. But it wasn’t the chauffeur’s window that smoothly lowered to respond to the voice from the intercom; instead, the rear window