The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (22 page)

But more red-clay warriors were closing in.

 
11
 

To Pierce the Heart of Evil

T
he terra-cotta warriors closed in on Rick and Evy O’Connell, who were out of ammo, and out of time . . . or nearly out of time, because with death drawing near, the couple gaped in amazement and relief as the approaching red-clay soldiers were suddenly shattered by strafing thirty-millimeter cannon fire.

A squadron in the sky, put together in haste by their compatriot Maddog Maguire, was rolling into action, laying down hellacious fire on the troops below. A bulky Bristol Beaufighter and two single-engine, single-seater fighters, P-40s, were currently cutting the Emperor’s lines to ribbons.

Up in Maguire’s old gray monster, Jonathan was manning a .30-mm out the side door, yelling, “Die! You bleeding mummy bastards . . .
die!”

Hyper with his own heroism, Jonathan grinned over at Maguire, who looked back from the controls. “Don’t you just love the smell of burning terra-cotta in the morning!”

Below, the Emperor was raising a fist to shake at the sky and roaring in rage as the planes streaked by, strafing across the battlefield. He could not allow the tide to turn and, Zi Yuan forgotten, he summoned his mastery over the elements to shape-shift . . .

. . . becoming a giant, lionlike Foo dog, ten feet to its withers.

The great beast the Emperor had become howled with vengeful rage and charged on all fours, crushing terra-cotta soldiers and Foundation zombies alike under its massive clawed paws. When a low-flying P-40 strafed the Foo dog’s path, the beast leaped onto the back of the plane and used the machine’s own weight to help drag it toward the earth. Like a man on a hang glider, the Foo dog touched down, but the plane wasn’t so lucky, smashing to bits, its propellers chewing up zombie warriors like a ghoulish gardening tool.

Elsewhere, the O’Connells and their empty weapons were facing a handful of terra-cotta survivors from the strafing attack. But those attackers were chopped up by machine-gun fire from the ground, not the air, as Alex and Lin came skidding up on motorbikes.

Alex asked his parents, “You two okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” his father said, wide-eyed. “No problem.”

Evy blew tendrils of hair from her smudged face. “We had it utterly under control—can’t you tell? You wouldn’t happen to have any spare bullets?”

Their son tossed each parent a machine gun from his sidecar.

Alex grinned at his dad. “You wouldn’t care to drive, would you? I’d just as soon shoot.”

“Deal,” O’Connell said, and sat on the front of the bike, his son climbing aboard behind him. Evy climbed on in back of Lin, but before they could roar off, they all saw the latest manifestation of the Emperor’s powers—the giant Foo dog was bounding across the landscape, crushing zombie warriors underfoot as he made for the Great Wall.

Alex swore and said, “Doesn’t that clown ever run out of tricks? Where the bloody hell’s he
going?”

“To the chamber,” Lin said, “under the Wall.”

Evelyn’s eyes widened. “My God—if Er Shi Huangdi reaches that altar, he could reverse Zi Yuan’s spell, and destroy the Foundation Army!”

O’Connell revved the bike. “So, then, why don’t we
stop
his evil ass . . .”

“Wait!”

It was Lin.

“My mother . . .”

They turned to where Lin was pointing and saw Zi Yuan across the field from them, crawling toward a ruined section of the Great Wall.

“Mother—no!
She’s
hurt . . .”

Zi Yuan, dragging herself along, did not seem to hear.

“Come on,” O’Connell said, and he and Alex rode over to her, with Lin and Evy just behind.

They arrived just as the sorceress had crept inside a collapsed section of stone, to shield herself from the battle. Lin jumped off her bike and ran to her fallen mother and knelt beside her.

With a faint smile, Zi Yuan noted her daughter’s presence, and withdrew the dragon dagger from under her bloodstained robes.

In English, keeping no secrets from their friends, Zi Yuan said to Lin, “Take the dagger. Pierce the heart of evil. We
must
fight on . . . You, my daughter, who I love more than life . . .
you
must fight on . . .”

Lin accepted the dagger, but set it aside when Zi Yuan seemed to collapse into herself, and daughter took mother into her arms as the lovely sorceress left the temporal plain.

Evy picked up the magic weapon and handed it to her husband.

“You heard,” she said to the O’Connell men.

“Through the
heart.”

Neither O’Connell nor Alex nodded; their steely gazes were response enough.

O’Connell said, “Lin—I’m sorry. But I need you to direct us to the entrance to the Foundation Chamber.”

Still at her mother’s side, she looked up, nodded, and did as she was asked.

Then O’Connell and Alex mounted the bike, father in front, son behind, and sped off, leaving Evy to stay with the mourning Lin and her late mother.

The secret entrance to the Foundation Chamber was no secret to Er Shi Huangdi, who padded down the tunnel as a giant Foo dog and then swiftly transformed to his human, black-armored state, elegant and regal as ever.

The Emperor passed the astrolabe, at one end of the chamber, which began to revolve as he went by; troughs of coal oil ignited, lighting the huge chamber and, spontaneously, braziers atop stone dragon heads burst with flame as if in welcome to their long-absent ruler, lighting the walkway to the foot of the altar stairs. The waterwheel began to turn and an underground stream started flowing in its trough.

Er Shi Huangdi strode down the flame-lighted pathway and up the great staircase to stand before the altar, where, in one sweeping gesture, he raised all five elements—a spinning ball of fire, an orb of ice, a sphere of molten metal, a ball of mud, and another of rich-grained wood. All revolved before him, as if he were a juggler of mystical proportions, which indeed he was.

What he intended next, however, would require all of his powers, and intense concentration. He closed his eyes and began . . .

• • •

As the Triumph raced along, heading toward the Great Wall and the chamber entrance, Alex asked his father, “So, Dad—what’s the plan?”

“How about ‘divide and conquer’?”

“Really?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“No offense, but that’s a trifle light on details, isn’t it?”

“Well, son, I figured this time we’d use a page out of your book.”

“What page is that?”

“The one that says, ‘Play it by ear.’ ”

That made Alex smile, but then he heard machine-gun fire behind him, and alongside them, dirt was ripping up, the ground powdering under an onslaught of slugs.

“We have company!” O’Connell said.

“I noticed!”

Alex maneuvered himself around so that he was riding backward, and saw they were being tailed by a jeep with the beautiful Colonel Choi manning (so to speak) a .30-mm cannon, and Yang straddling the door, foot on the running board, driving with one hand and blasting away with the other as the little vehicle
bump-bump-bumped
across the rough terrain.

Alex let the submachine gun rip away at them, but he was clearly outgunned. He could really use some support about now . . .

. . . and fortunately, in the sky, Uncle Jonathan was about to provide it.

Maguire had lost one plane but the other three, his own included, were crisscrossing over the battalions of terra-cotta warriors, raining destruction, machine guns pumping, turning the battlefield into a glorified skeet range.

Slugs from Yang’s flesh-and-blood troops were occasionally thwacking into the sheet metal around Jonathan as he sat in the door with a great big bomb on his lap while he fired his machine gun down from his perch.

From the pilot’s seat came Maguire’s voice: “Remember our deal, mate! My crew gets to drink for free for the rest of our unnatural lives . . .”

“You can
have
the bloody bar for all I care,” Jonathan said. “I’m getting the hell out of China. I’ve seen enough of this pesthole.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Somewhere,
anywhere,
with no
mummies!”

And as casually as a paperboy delivering the morning news, Jonathan dropped the bomb out the door, just as Colonel Choi had the O’Connell bike dead in her sights, which did her no good at all as Alex’s uncle’s bomb scored a direct hit, the huge explosion upending the jeep and sending Yang and Choi flying.

Alex figured both of that pair
must
be dead . . . but on the other hand, those two bad pennies had proved remarkably resilient thus far . . .

His father was saying, “It’s up here, behind these ruins . . .”

“What is?”

“The entrance. The tunnel.”

The Emperor’s concentration was bearing results. On the battlefield, Foundation warriors were falling to their knees, wailing, writhing in agony. Their skeletal forms were being drawn backward toward the Great Wall, as Er Shi Huangdi exerted his all-powerful force.

Lost in his trance, the Emperor kept the elemental balls spinning before him, doing his mystical bidding, but he quickly snapped from it when those five balls—one at a time but in quick succession,
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang
—were blown away like pie plates at a shooting match.

At the bottom of the stone steps, Alex O’Connell was grinning up at the Emperor, who stood framed between dragon’s-head pillars. Er Shi Huangdi glowered down with malevolent eyes at the youth in the leather jacket, who stood there defiantly, gun still smoking.

Alex, wanting there to be no mistake as to his intent, spoke to Er Shi Huangdi in ancient Mandarin:
“I dug you up, you damn demon, and now I’m going to put you back down.”

And on the rolling plain beyond the Great Wall, the Foundation Army was free of the Emperor’s mystical force; and they charged forward, back into battle, once again.

Infuriated, the Emperor took a flying, somersaulting leap down the stairs, transforming in midair back into the giant Foo dog, whose crushing landing Alex barely avoided. What the boy could not avoid was a vicious swipe of the beast’s muscular forelimb, which sent him flying across the chamber, past the astrolabe, where he hit the stone wall so hard, he crumpled like a boneless man, just a limp form in the back corner near the waterwheel.

Bleeding from his nose, and with cuts above his eyes, the young man seemed finished, out of the fray . . .

But his father wasn’t.

Rick O’Connell came out of nowhere to grab a sacred tripod and swing off it and launch himself at the beast, landing on its furry back in a painful mount, and once again he was on a bucking bronco, not a bronze steed this time, rather a giant Chinese lion/dog, between whose shoulder blades he plunged the dragon dagger.

The beast howled in pain and reared violently, tossing its unwanted rider off, O’Connell colliding with a burning brazier near his unconscious son, the thing collapsing in a shower of flame.

• • •

Lin led Evy via another way into the chamber, through a room of giant stone cogs that ran the bigger room’s waterwheel. Guns drawn, the two women passed through the machinery-grinding subchamber, but did not see General Yang—scorched, tattered, bloody—on a platform above. However bedraggled, Yang remained dangerous, as he demonstrated by diving onto the two intruders.

Knocked to the stone floor, both Evy and Lin lost their pistols, the weapons skittering away; but Lin was immediately back on her feet, and launched herself at Yang. Evy was about to pitch in, when Colonel Choi, a scorched ghost of herself, blocked the way.

Evy half sneered. “Back for another lesson?”

And, just as they had done at the Shanghai Museum when this adventure was just beginning, Evy and Choi fell into martial-arts stances.

Rick O’Connell picked himself up, but noticed his fallen boy, and leaned to gently shake him. “Alex!
Alex!”

His son did not stir.

His son looked dead.

Across the chamber, down the long pathway between burning oil fires that led to the altar stairway, the Emperor transformed from Foo dog to Er Shi Huangdi and, as if dealing with a troublesome insect, removed the dagger from his back. The blade had not found his heart.