with the promise of an additional twenty million dollars Feines had agreed, telling Salibi that there were no guarantees.
He’d made his way to Odessa, where he caught a flight to Cairo. Salibi had given him the name of an Al Qaida operative who could put together everything they would need, including finding a translator to decipher the photographs he’d taken of the stele. Of course the academic had to be killed to ensure his silence. The biggest delay had been finding men with scuba experience once they realized the tomb was under Lake Nasser.
Now that they were here they found that diving wouldn’t be necessary. Sometime in the five centuries since Skenderbeg’s men had returned the alembic to Alexander’s tomb, an earthquake had cracked the sandstone hills that once towered over the flooded Shu’ta Valley. Many of these fractures were mere cracks in the earth, but there was a long gouge that extended up from the lake. The feature was too straight to be a natural phenomenon. Poli recognized immediately that there was a tunnel rising up from the bottom of the valley and the quake had collapsed part of its roof. He set teams of men to begin digging at the top of the depression where he believed the tunnel’s ceiling had remained intact. Already they had dug down six feet.
Just offshore, the boat he’d planned to use as a dive platform, a forty-foot houseboat they’d bought in Aswan, sat quiet. They’d also bought two outboard boats to act as pickets to keep fishermen and others from the area.
Poli saw Mohammad bin Al-Salibi emerge from one of the tents. With his darkly handsome features and traditional white robes, he cut a dashing figure. The men all stopped as he passed, greeting him with deference or touching the hem of his robe. They might all be fanatics, but they knew who the money man was.
“Who was that on the radio?” Salibi asked.
“Picketboat stopped a yacht about five miles from here. Just some tourists.”
“Ah.” Salibi looked around the encampment. They’d accomplished an amazing amount of work in just a short time. All the tents were up, the kitchen was putting out meals, and the men had already settled into their routines. “So how long do you think this will take?”
“I do not know. The tunnel may be under another inch of sand or another fifty feet. It is possible I am wrong altogether which means I will have to dive and look for the cave’s entrance. You have to be prepared for the likelihood that it has been buried by the earthquake and may never be found.”
“Allah will bless us, I know it.” Salibi gazed out across the bay and continued in a dreamy voice, “We failed in Novorossiysk because the plan displeased Him. It wasn’t a blow worthy of our abilities. When you find the alembic we will strike at the very heart of our problem.”
“Yeah, and what’s that?” Poli asked, curious at the depths of depravity Salibi was capable of. He fully understood that the Saudi was doing this for political gain and economic advantage and not for some religious cause, but how he could warp his motivations to convince himself he was doing God’s bidding was fascinating.
“Turkey is the key. Their leaders are all godless secularists who care nothing for
Poli thought to himself, thereby giving you the ability to cut off the million barrels a day that flows across the country in pipelines and use the Bosporus as a choke point to prevent tankers from entering the Black Sea.
“This is about saving the souls of the Turks because they believe women should have rights and that the church and state should be separate.
“This is about freeing a people and letting them know God’s love. I wish I could join the martyrs who will die in Istanbul for their glorious deaths will lead to a revolution that will see Islam elevated to its rightful place.”
“You plan to use the plutonium against Istanbul?”
“Yes. It will be like in Russia, only this time we will not fail.”
Feines gave a little thought to the fourteen million people who lived in the city straddling the Bosporus and shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy.”
In a secluded bay twenty miles from where they’d been stopped Mercer killed the Riva’s engine and dropped the anchor. The silence seemed to rush in on them after so many hours on the loud boat. They’d already made their plans and used a satellite phone to apprise Ira Lasko of the situation. He agreed they should reconnoiter the head of the bay before bringing anything to the President.
Dinner was subdued as they ate in the cozy dining nook. After the meal they changed into dark clothes. Mercer wondered if subconsciously they’d all known this could happen, because each of them had brought clothing suitable for a night operation. They waited another hour for the last rays of the sun to be snuffed out before hauling the small inflatable raft from the stern garage.
With the three of them plus one set of diving gear it was a snug fit and the little rubber boat sank almost to the gunwales. Their only weapons were a four-inch dive knife and a two-pound hammer Booker had found in the Riva’s tool box.
Using a handheld GPS they motored to within two miles of where they’d been stopped by the guards. Book was at the controls. He slowed the little dinghy to an idle and they crept forward another mile.
“This is good,” Mercer whispered. Book drove the inflatable onto a beach and he and Mercer dragged it out of the water.
“Bring the tanks or leave them?”
There was sixty pounds of equipment to lug another couple of miles over the rough desert but with three of them they could spread the load. “Leave ’em for now. We can always come back later.”
They walked single file and widely spaced. With his years of military experience Booker took point, and Mercer had the drag slot. Book took them inland about a half mile in case Poli had men watching the shore. With the GPS there was no chance they could get lost. The ground was mostly sand and small rocks, easy enough in the daylight, but a misplaced step could turn an ankle and it wasn’t until the landscape was bathed in the milky glow of the half-moon that they started to make time.
There were no sounds except the gentle wind and their own careful footfalls.
An hour into the march Book raised his hand and lowered himself to the ground. Such was his skill that it was as if he’d vanished. Mercer had seen the spot where he had been standing a second earlier but now there was no sign of his friend. He and Cali paced forward in a crouch until they came to a shallow wadi that hadn’t seen a flood in a century. Peering over the far bank of the old streambed, Mercer saw the moon’s reflection on the lake, a dancing white line that stretched to the horizon. Nearer, he saw lights and quickly made out an encampment. He counted a dozen tents. Anchored near the shore was a speedboat identical to the one Book said the guards had used, and a larger boat farther out in the bay. It looked like there was a guard aboard it manning a heavy machine gun.
The sounds of men talking wafted above the rumble of a generator.
Book handed Mercer the binoculars he’d been carrying.
Looking closer, he spotted armed men on patrol walking the perimeter of the compound and another guard stationed near the speedboat. A few men sat in a loose circle listening to another. By the listeners’ expressions Mercer could see the speaker held them spellbound.
“Nothing short of an air strike is going to take them all out,” Booker whispered, his mouth so close to Mercer’s ear he could feel his breath.
Mercer just nodded. He was looking at a spot where Poli’s men were digging into the side of the hill that rose at the head of the bay. The excavation was lit by floodlights and the men worked in teams hauling buckets of sand and loose dirt from the hole. Mercer saw that their work was at the apex of a straight trench that ran down to the water’s edge. By mentally extending the line, Mercer realized it went directly to the bottom of the valley, exactly where the stele said they’d find the entrance to Alexander’s tomb. He thought back to his visit to Egypt years earlier. He’d toured the Valley of the Kings with Salome and he recalled that the ancient Egyptians had dug long tunnels into the mountains in order to bury their pharaohs. He imagined what the Shu’ta Valley would have looked like before the Aswan Dam had filled it with water. It would have mildly resembled the fabled burial place of Egypt’s kings, so was it possible that Alexander’s men had ordered the excavation of a tunnel, only instead of descending into the mountains, his had risen from the valley floor?
“They’re going to have the alembic by tomorrow or the next day,” he said softly and explained his suspicions. “For a tunnel collapse to show on the surface like that it can’t be more than ten or fifteen feet deep.”
“What are we going to do?”
