The Mongol Objective (25 page)

They carried four flare guns and twenty-eight flares, hoping that would be enough. Caleb took a flashlight and played it over the river, the light skipping over its metallic appearance. Then he shined the light higher, the beam darting across the arched ceiling twenty feet above. Mostly earthy, their rooftop sported occasional stalactites hanging like swords.

More lights fanned out from the soldiers, finding the two gondola-like boats tethered with chains to iron posts thrust into the shore. Gazing at the river besieged by flashlight beams, Orlando whistled. “It looks like that cybernetic liquid alloy stuff in
Terminator 2.
Hope nothing pops out of there and slices us in half.” He turned to Caleb and Phoebe. “I think we should take this fine opportunity to psychically Mapquest the next leg of our journey.”

“Definitely,” Phoebe whispered, holding her hand over her mouth, coughing.

The tunnel ahead beckoned, shimmering in the flashlight beams before disappearing around a bend into darkness. It gave Caleb the impression of the start of a watery amusement park ride, like one he had taken Alexander on just last year at Busch Gardens. “Hold up,” he said. “Anyone think to bring gas masks?”

Sniffing the air, Chang motioned one of his guards who wriggled out of a backpack, opened it and began passing out masks.

Good old Chinese efficiency and preparedness,
Caleb thought.

“This will be a very toxic stretch,” he said, pointing ahead, down the tunnel into the darkness. “Especially as we begin paddling, as the oars will stir up the mercury. It’ll combine with the air and get in our lungs, and depending on the levels, which I imagine are quite high, we’ll soon be suffering a host of nasty symptoms. Burning lungs, stinging eyes, coughing. It gets into the bloodstream quickly, impacting the central nervous system, and could cause paralysis and even death, given enough exposure.”

“Twenty masks,” Renée said, counting them.

I only hope Montross and Nina are likewise prepared
, Caleb thought.

“We have extra,” he said. “Can we leave some for Montross and my son? If they come this way?”

Renée narrowed her eyes at him.

“Please.”

“Fine, drop three. Only because I think you may be right, and we may need your son.”

Orlando took a mask, making sure he got his before they were all accounted for, then moved closer to the edge to examine the boats. “Sturdy bastards. Looks like iron plating and reinforced wood. Very little decay. Maybe the mercury helped.”

“How did this water get so contaminated?” Phoebe asked.

“On purpose, I believe,” Caleb said. “He may have just been copying, but like Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Genghis Khan may have also come to believe in mercury’s alchemical powers. For centuries, mystics used mercury—also known as quicksilver—as a combining reagent to induce elemental changes, attempting to turn lead into gold for example, but it was also believed to be a source of a great many cures. And possibly, if mixed just right, an elixir for immortality.”

“No thanks,” Orlando said, fitting on his mask after coughing into his hand. “That’s the crap they used to put in dental fillings.”

Phoebe groaned through her mask. “Here we go. Conspiracy time. Let me guess, dentists are all part of some master plan to monitor our thoughts, weaken our resistance, make us sick—”

“Scoff if you like.” Orlando shined his light into his open mouth. “But I’m a brushing fanatic, not one cavity.”

“That’s because you’ve never been to the dentist.”

He smirked. “At least I’m confident that my mind is my own.”

“Trust me, no one else would want it.”

“Please shut up,” Renée snapped. “And let’s get moving.”

Afraid to move, Phoebe stared at the water. “So emperors actually tried drinking this stuff?”

Caleb nodded. “It was what killed Qin Shi, if the legends are true.”

“Enough talk,” Renée said with her mask on. “Get in the boats. Eight in each. Chang, you’re with us. And two of your men will row. You keep an eye on Qara. Caleb, Phoebe and Orlando, remote view the path ahead. I want no surprises.”

“Best to do it here, on the shore,” Caleb said, tightening his mask. Phoebe did the same.

“No, in the boat,” Renée replied. “I believe you will perform better in the thick of things. Urgency sharpens your need.”

“Aren’t you suddenly the expert?” Phoebe quipped.

“Get in, and get to work.”

They settled into the two boats. Caleb’s team left second, after the boat full of soldiers pushed off. Phoebe and Orlando sat on one side, at the stern, with Caleb and Qara facing them while Renée stood at the prow, her.45 still in her hand, scanning the shadows ahead.

It all looked surreal and mythical: two gondolas carrying men and women wearing gas masks along a silvery river into a dark tunnel. Caleb thought it would have made a great Salvador Dali painting, an interpretation of Charon ferrying the dead into the waiting embrace of the Underworld.

#

“iPad,” Phoebe said after a minute of intense focus. She held her hand out to Orlando, who quickly passed it over. “I think I’ve got the next leg of this map.”

She leaned in to Caleb and whispered, “Just keep faking it, big brother. I’ve got you covered.”

“You’re the best,” he replied. “I’m trying but . . .”

“Nothing?”

“I keep seeing her. Lydia. But it’s not like our visions. They’re just memories.”

“Ah. Worse, then.”

Caleb nodded.
But maybe just as important.
A catharsis, perhaps. A flood of images played against the back of his eyelids every time they closed. Meeting her for the first time at the book signing in SoHo; their growing connection on the book tour, working together on research trips to exotic ancient locations, the steamy nights under the stars, or under the cool sheets in five-star hotels; the reunion after he had thought her dead, the moment her emotions cracked through and she revealed he had a son.

All these memories swam in his thoughts, clouding the psychic pathways like arterial blocks, suffocating the power he kept trying to access.

He couldn’t fight it any longer, and didn’t want to. She was there, in his mind, living in the only place left for her. Part of him hoped that he was seeing all this because she was trying to show him one more thing, to force him to understand some vital aspect of himself he needed to learn.

Or else, it was only his guilt.

He had killed her. As surely as if he’d pushed her off a cliff. By his silence and distrust. By his arrogance in thinking he alone could own and protect the Emerald Tablet. It was a guilt he needed to accept and overcome if he was to move on.

It’s up to you now.
Her last thought, he was sure of it, was about their son
.
But how could he save Alexander when his hands were tied? He could only stand by, watching and hoping the others could do what he couldn’t.

Someone coughed. He heard the soldiers’ raspy breathing over his own. Every sound was amplified in the cavern, the slightest movement roaring in his ears, explosions rattling in his head. The splashing of the oars echoed off the walls, and it was easy to imagine the flashlight beams scraping the ceiling or the sides, and eliciting sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

Phoebe sighed, the sound grinding in her ears as well. She took a deep breath of hot air and began drawing, expanding the previous sketch, filling in the right side of the diagram. Renée moved closer, stepping around the men rowing so she could watch.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the bottom of the screen where Phoebe had drawn the terminus of this river passageway that ended at the boundary opening up into a larger section: broad at the far end, but peppered with dots. Phoebe kept jabbing at the screen, creating the dots in a haphazard pattern until it began to look like an actual formation.

“Don’t know,” Phoebe replied. “I saw faces. White faces. Hundreds of eyes. Thousands, maybe.”

Qara made a snickering noise.

“What?” asked Renée, turning in the boat, then peering ahead. The flashlight’s glow had bounced off her mask, amplifying a mix of fear and excitement beyond the plastic. “What’s up ahead?”

“Death,” Qara said. “And I don’t need to be psychic to see that. We’re all—”

“Shut her up,” Renée snapped. “Phoebe, elaborate on what you saw.”

A gasp, and Phoebe dropped the stylus pen, causing Orlando to jump for it, and scramble at the bottom of the boat before they lost it. She shook her head, blinked and stood up. Ahead, the flashlight beams speared around, barely penetrating the thick gloom hanging over the silvery river.

She squinted, rubbed her faceplate, and tried to peer through the unresolved shadows. “Wait! There’s something before we reach the shore, something—”

But that’s when an iron sphere as large as a refrigerator came swinging down from the cavern’s roof on a steel chain, crashing into the first boat.

#

Soldiers scattered like bowling pins, two of them taking direct hits, bones shattering, bodies crumpling. The hull cracked and the boat capsized, spinning to the left and upturning the whole team.

“Duck!” Chang yelled as the sphere swung all the way back up, just missing the prow of the second boat. Everyone ducked low and his men paddled sideways, moving the boat out of the reach of the sphere’s downswing.

One member of the first craft wasn’t so lucky. A soldier had scrambled back into the boat after flipping it, and just stood, dripping and coughing, when the ball swung back and caught him in the chest, bringing him along for the ascending trip. A hideous crunching sound echoed off the ceiling, and his body splashed down in the darkness.

Men were screaming, splashing, scrambling. Flashlights spun around and dimmed as they went underwater. Chang and the two soldiers in Caleb’s boat kept their lights trained on the first boat, keeping it illuminated for the capsized men to get back on.

The sphere came back for another swing, but this time both boats were out of its range, off to the side.

“Shit!” Renée grumbled. “What else do we have to contend with?”

“You have no idea,” Qara said.

“I do,” said Phoebe. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking close enough. But that’s it. Just that iron ball, a little pre-welcoming gift from Genghis.”

“You’d better be right,” Renée said, ruefully counting the soldiers ahead as they climbed back into the battered boat.

“We lost three,” Chang said, shining his light on the three floating, battered bodies.

Renée nodded. “Acceptable. Keep going. And you”—she glared at Phoebe—“had better be right about this.”

Phoebe nodded, but Orlando stepped up between them. “Listen, you want our help, you better start asking nicely.”

“Orlando,” Caleb cautioned.

“Fine,” Renée said, raising her gun in front of Orlando’s face. “Please just do what I tell you, or I’ll shoot your girlfriend and toss her over the side.”

“Hey,” Phoebe said. “I’m nobody’s—”

“Save it. Kid, help her out. And Caleb, maybe you should actually start contributing. I don’t recall your being of any use so far, except for prattling your academic bullshit.”

“Which,” Caleb said, “if I recall, helped to get us this far.”

Renée looked around the gloom, past the dead bodies. “Which is where, exactly?”

Caleb glared at her through his fogging facemask. Then he peered over her shoulder, to where the lights of the first boat were striking something a hundred feet ahead. A rough shoreline. “Here,” he said, moving to the head of the boat.

Chang barked a command to the lead boat, and a soldier pulled out a gun, aimed ahead as the boat approached the sandy shore, and fired.

The crimson flare left a sparkling smoke trail on its ascent. It rose at a slight angle, and kept ascending, illuminating odd shadows, glinting off impossibly white structures.

Caleb’s boat pulled up alongside the other, and all eyes were on the still-ascending flare. Chang whispered something, and three more flares fired out into the darkness. The first one dipped over a tall minaret and was lost over a skyline of domes, walls and turrets. The other, rising at a steeper angle, hit the roof of the immense cavern and stuck, sparking and smoking.

“More,” Renée said.

The flare guns fired again, four of them lighting up the darkness, dispelling shadows that had ruled undisturbed for eight centuries.

“Holy crap,” Orlando whispered, as they all gazed at the flickering red outlines of the city visible over the walls: palaces of polished white marble, temples of golden tiles and blue mosaic domes; winding walkways and soaring bridges, fountains and ponds; pillared temples and massive halls.

“The real Xanadu,” Caleb said.

Qara bowed her head, whispering something in Mongolian.

“Wait,” Renée said, pointing ahead, to the quarter-mile field stretching before the immense wall. Hard to see with the flares so high up, but it looked like the ground was composed of ridges, bumps and pockets. “Flares. Fire them straight ahead, now.”

As the men prepared to shoot, Phoebe cautioned, “I don’t think you want to see this.”

Three flares streaked out from the first boat, heading off at slightly different angles. The first struck something only fifty feet out, fizzled and then dropped. The other two went farther; one hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet.

Then each struck something and held, smoking, casting the surrounding area in a ghastly glow.

“Double crap,” Orlando said.

Twenty-thousand strong, they stood organized by their regiments, infantry on the right, cavalry in the center; archers on the higher ground to the left; and chariots, catapults, siege machines and banners on immense poles interspersed throughout. Grayish-white terra cotta statues, each one carved perfectly, detailed down to the grooves in their armor, the notches on the saddles, the hardened eyes brimming with loyalty, ferocity and menace.

“The welcoming party,” Caleb said. “Genghis’s army.”

7.

Montross covered his face with his sleeve while Hiltmeyer and Harris coughed, backing away from the boat. “No way,” the colonel said, pointing to the cavern and the river with the silvery sheen that bent around a quick curve and headed into the blackest reaches beyond their flashlights’ beams.