Carpathian (76 page)

The castle was close to rocking and rolling itself down the mountainside.

*   *   *

Carl Everett paused on the way up the sheer wall and swiped the sweat from his brow. The temperature had risen by at least thirty degrees since he had started climbing. The captain was about to place his hand in a better and more secure location when his left hand slipped free of the rock securing him and that was when he knew he was going to fall a great distance and that would be that. Suddenly he was in midair as he fell backward. Just as his hand slipped from the rock he was grabbed hard enough that his wrist almost broke. He was yanked upward like he was nothing more than a child and then before he realized it he was dangling over the ledge with Stanus holding him and staring right into his face. The wolf seemed to be smiling as the corners of the mouth turned upward.

“Oh, hi,” Carl said, as it the only thing that came into his head.

Stanus lost the good-natured look on its fur-covered face and then pulled Everett up so hard that he felt his shoulder almost pop from its socket. He was unceremoniously tossed to the floor. The area was so black that the only thing the captain could make out clearly were the yellow glowing eyes of the Golia. Carl backpedaled a few feet until he bumped into something. He stopped and then leaned his head back and looked up. In the upside view of the dark world around him he saw another set of glowing eyes looking down at him.

“Mikla,” Carl said nervously, “I’m glad to see—” Mikla cut him off by reaching down and pulling the large American to his feet. Everett brushed himself off and then wiped sweat from his face. Carl chanced looking away from Mikla and then turned and looked at the larger Stanus as the beast stood on both hind legs and was placing weight from one large clawed foot to the other. The breathing was deep and steady and their ears, much to Everett’s comfort level, were straight up and not lying along the side of the skull in an aggressive stance. No, if Marko was in there someplace he wasn’t inclined to kill him right off the bat. He glanced back at Mikla, who went to all fours with the loud popping sound of the skeletal frame adjusting. “Uh, Anya says hello,” was all Carl could think to say.

Stanus didn’t move. The animal just stood and swayed as if it were listening to a tune only the Golia could hear.

“Look, bad men are here to destroy the Jeddah and take their heritage from them. They must be stopped.”

Stanus growled, as did Mikla behind him, which made Carl close his eyes in hopes he wasn’t about to be raked by Mikla’s claws straight down his back until his spinal cord was exposed. Still he tried again.

“We have to get the Jeddah to safety. We have to leave here, now,” Everett said as Stanus suddenly went to all four legs.

The great Golia slowly closed the distance between man and animal. The eyes remained locked on Carl as it approached. Stanus was as close to Carl as Anya had been only minutes before, only the captain did not feel the same emotions coming from the Golia leader as much as he had from Marko’s little sister. Stanus, although Everett knew it was really the curiosity of the traveler inside, Marko, sniffed the man up and down and then the yellow eyes settled on Mikla. There seemed to be a symbiosis of silent commands and then Mikla sprang from the ledge and vanished in the direction of the temple.

“No!” Everett shouted. “That’s the wrong way, the bad men are that way, we have to go to the barn, Stanus, the barn!”

The Golia tilted its head as it tried to understand. Then the wolf nudged Carl and then nudged him again, almost knocking him into the wall. Suddenly Carl knew this wasn’t about an escape route to Stanus, but of a more personal nature to the man inside, Marko Korvesky. The Golia reached out and took Everett by the neck and then squeezed. The whole time the animal remained on three legs and the reach was simple to accomplish, especially since the captain submitted to Marko.

“Go ahead, that won’t change a thing about my intentions, fella, my mind was made up the minute I met your sister in Rome,” he said, as the grip of Stanus, or as Carl knew it to really be, Marko, increased until the air was cut off from Everett’s lungs. Carl became angry and held his breath as the beast slowly applied pressure to the human. The captain saw his vision start to narrow and knew before too much longer he would be hanging like a damp washrag in Stanus’s grip.

The whine was loud enough that Carl’s eyes flew open as Stanus released him and allowed the large American to slide to the stone floor. In the dark Everett could see the golden glowing eyes blink in confusion as Stanus whined again and then turned and looked around as if he were lost.

“You want what’s best for your people? This all has to end tonight or the world will descend on the Golia and the Jeddah and the people of the world will not understand. Believe me, we all know how the mob reacts to things that scare them. That’s what we do, my friends and I, we protect the world from our own fear of the unknown. Let me help Marko save his people, Stanus. Let me inside, we have to find a way out of the temple and get the Jeddah to safety.”

Stanus growled deep inside and Carl thought he had pushed the wrong button. The Golia looked at Everett and then reached outward, but instead of Stanus grabbing Carl and finishing what it had started, the beast grabbed the rock wall and leveraged itself to a standing position. As Carl sat in wonder, the beast raised its muzzle to the ceiling and in the darkness at the edge of the City of Moses, Stanus roared until rocks fell from the ceiling.

From the City of Moses to the entrance to the first temple, the roar brought every man, woman, and child to stillness. Zallas, who was nearing the columned temple complex, stopped and looked at the men around him. The roar of the animal bounced from wall to monument, from pyramid to obelisk, until it finally faded to nothingness.

*   *   *

Major Donny Mendohlson and the sergeant major stopped their travel down the long staircase to the temple when the roar froze their blood.

“Do you think command authority forgot to mention something about this mission?” the sergeant major asked as they continued their flight into the first outer temple.

*   *   *

As for Carl, he watched as Stanus reached down and took him by the neck once more and instead of pinching his head off like a tick, Stanus threw Everett onto its back and started to climb.

This is what the Golia did, and did very well.

*   *   *

Zallas was standing behind one of the smaller statues of the Egyptian god of the underworld. Anubis posed in an imposing posture wielding an Egyptian battleax and was standing legs apart and ready for battle. As Zallas looked at the statue he ran his hand along the gold leaf that had been pounded into the stone over three thousand years before. He smiled as he realized if the ancients had placed this much gold on mere statue finery, what lay in wait in the temple. He motioned for his men to redouble their efforts at getting inside. The return fire has ceased more than two minutes before. Zallas saw Colonel Ben-Nevin running down the ramp from the upper temple. It looked as if the devil himself were chasing him.

The Russian was perplexed as he leaned out and watched the Israeli gather four men at the bottom of the ramp and placed them facing the top. He gestured wildly and then his eyes looked the Russian’s way. The colonel ran to Dmitri’s position.

“Your fool men need to learn how to follow orders. We had the Israeli assault element pinned down and then your idiotic men decided to take matters into their own hands and now we have commandos inside the temple,” Ben-Nevin said angrily into the face of Zallas, who looked at him with a blank expression. “They are here to blow it up, you idiot. You must get more men up here and take that unit out!”

“Israeli commandos?” Zallas asked with an astonished look on his face. “What in the hell have you done to me? First I am eliminating members of NATO and now I’m up against the Israelis?”

“You knew what was at stake, did you think the men and women that have secured this place for almost four thousand years were going to allow you, a moron, to just waltz in here and upset an apple cart that is teetering on the brink anyway? Get men up here or we will have nothing.” Ben-Nevin braved reaching out, and taking the Russian by his tuxedo collar said, “You will have nothing, not even your little casino, it will all be gone. You have killed NATO members, you idiot.” Ben-Nevin smirked. “Do you think that any legalities will be observed when some black operations type smashes through your bedroom door in the middle of the night and places an ice pick in your brainstem? You have no choice now but to see this thing through and gather as much treasure as you can.”

“What is your game?”

“All I need is the proof of what’s inside this mountain; I couldn’t care less in whose possession it’s in. My mission is to prove the existence of the City of Moses, that’s all. Men in power only seek the current government’s downfall before they give back everything Israel has earned through blood and death.”

“You are insane, and the men you work for are maniacs,” Zallas said, regretting ever having listened to the spy, a man that was more highly trained at deceit and maneuver even far better than he could ever have been. “But as you say, I may as well get something out of this.”

“Sensible. Our only break is the fact that the Sayeret were caught off guard and most of them will not make it out of the ambush. Unfortunately we cannot get them all, they are too good. So may I suggest we either kill the commandos inside the temple, or we get what we can and escape to the resort, the one place our highly secretive Sayeret cannot go.”

Zallas knew he had totally misjudged his opportunity with this man. But he also knew he had come too far to let the chance slip of recovering some of the antiquities the Gypsy was selling off. Even if the temple collapsed he would still own the lease on the land and he would recover anything the Israelis buried.

“Look, the men they left behind, they must be out of ammunition, tell your men to advance into the temple.”

The mobster braved a look and saw that it had only been two men defending the front of the temple and now they had abandoned the defense and were running it through the large doors. He shook his head in anger as he realized one of the men was the American from the resort. His suspicions on the NATO aspect of the Americans’ story were now confirmed. He stood up in anger once he realized his six-plus men had been pinned down by only two defenders and he gestured wildly for his men to advance into the temple. Zallas was tired of this and needed to be at the castle not here in the middle of a storm deep inside a mountain in a temple he hadn’t known existed twenty-four hours before.

“Kill those men, now!” he ordered. Zallas then looked over at Ben-Nevin and then used his eyes to signal one of his bodyguards. The man turned his AK-47 assault rifle on the Israeli. “Shall we see what the temple holds, Colonel?”

Ben-Nevin looked from the barrel of the weapon and then over to the Russian, who was busy brushing some dust off his expensive coat. He decided that just the antiquities in the hands of the Russian would be enough for him to complete his mission, as the proof that the treasure of the Exodus existed would be enough for the old legends to be proven as real, upsetting the lies of the left-wing government. Now he knew it wouldn’t matter if the Russian was dead when the authorities uncovered the antiquities. No, he thought, it wouldn’t matter at all.

“Yes, let us see what the Jeddah have hidden away for us.”

*   *   *

Jack called a halt as the air was becoming far too hot for the band of escaping Gypsies to breathe adequately to maintain the fast pace. Collins placed a small girl on the nearest outcropping and then raised the torch high and looked along the wall that was no longer hewn from the mountain, but this was virgin stone. They had left the temple complex and were now deep in the mountain inside a natural cave system. As he moved the torch around Jack could see the many thousands of footprints in the fine dirt of the worn train. He then understood that the path they were following was worn that way because this was the train of the Golia and how they traversed the mountain without being seen by the human inhabitants on and below the peaks.

“How are we doing, Colonel?”

Jack turned and saw Niles Compton with Sarah in tow. The lieutenant was carrying the twin girl of the child Collins had been carrying. She placed the girl down next to her sister and the two Gypsy children held each other as the American strangers discussed their options.

“If we don’t get these people out of here soon we’re going to have a mess on our hands as far as heat exhaustion is concerned.”

“We can’t go back and we can’t keep moving deeper into the mountain. Bullets or steam vents, not much of a choice,” Niles said as he cleaned his glasses the steam kept fogging.

“Jack, the shooting back in the temple has stopped,” Sarah said as she realized what that meant. Jason and Will were either dead or captured.

“I know,” Jack said worriedly. “Those two are on their own.” He looked at the worried faces of Sarah and Niles. “Don’t worry, they know the better part of valor when it’s called for. They’ll be all right,” Jack lied as best as he could for his benefit as much as for the others. It was Niles who voiced the far more immediate concern.

“Where is Mr. Everett?”

*   *   *

Alice watched the old woman sleep as she lightly dabbed at the sweat coming from Madam Korvesky’s brow. Anya held the old woman’s hand on the other side of the makeshift cot. Four of the village men were carrying a scythe, a long butcher knife, a large club, and of all things a wrist rocket slingshot. Alice could see that all were tiring. She was about to remove her hand when Madam Korvesky took hold of it and then turned her head to face Alice. Then she weakly turned and looked at Anya.

“Your hope chest,” she said in a barely audible whisper.

“What, Grandmamma?” Anya asked.

Before Madam Korvesky answered her granddaughter she turned and looked at Alice. “The chest in my home, it is Anya’s hope chest, it must be saved.”