The Power of Five Oblivion (14 page)

He had arrived in some sort of corridor and it was getting lighter ahead: a strange, orange light like nothing he had ever seen before. It was throwing shadows that swirled around the walls. At the same time, he heard a howling like a thousand wolves. The further he went, the brighter the light became and the louder the noise. At last he stepped out …

… into a sandstorm.

He was almost knocked backwards. But for the weight of Scarlett, he would have been thrown off his feet. He could see nothing. The sand pounded him, blinding him. He could feel it stinging his arms and cheeks and he had to press his lips together to stop it entering his mouth, bowing his head into his shoulder so that he could breathe. His hands had been wet with Scarlett’s blood and the sand clung to them, instantly forming a coating over his skin. He drew her tighter towards him, trying to protect her from the worst of it. He could have been anywhere. One thing was certain. This wasn’t England. Where the hell was he?

Somebody shouted. The voice came from nowhere and meant nothing. Richard stood where he was as first one car engine then two more started up, moving in on him from different directions. It was only when they were very close that they became visible, looming out of the billowing sand as if from another dimension. They were open-top jeeps, dark green, military, driven by men partly in uniform but with their heads wrapped in scarves and dark glasses. They pulled up in an arrow formation, the lead jeep pointing at Richard. And suddenly there were soldiers everywhere, moving forward with automatic rifles, covering the two of them from every side.

Richard couldn’t take it all in. His thoughts were still fixed on Scarlett, who seemed to be getting lighter in his arms, as if her life was slipping away from her. It didn’t matter why these soldiers had come or what they wanted. Had they actually been waiting here? That was what it looked like. But it wasn’t important now.

“I need help!” Richard shouted and the sand eagerly swept into his mouth, almost choking him. The howl of the storm whipped the words away. “A hospital!” he shouted again. “A doctor!”

One of the soldiers, the commanding officer maybe, reached him. He was wearing a green tunic and trousers, a tattered red-and-white bandanna and black wraparound glasses. He was a big man, almost six and a half feet tall, with wrestler’s shoulders. He was unarmed. He shouted something and reached out, taking hold of Scarlett, pulling her away. Richard resisted, refusing to let go, then felt something huge and heavy thump into his back. As his knees buckled, he was aware that another of the soldiers had crept up on him from behind and clubbed him with the butt of his rifle. Richard fell. Scarlett was snatched away.

There was nothing he could do to stop them. He felt ill, ashamed of himself. But there were dozens of them and he was alone. He knew now that his instinct was right. Whoever they were, these people
had
been waiting for them … which meant that they knew who Scarlett was. They were taking her into captivity … and what of him? If they knew about her, they would know that he was of no use to them. As Richard lay there, cocooned in sand, he waited for the bullet that would be his end.

But at least he was wrong about that. They wanted him too. Richard felt two soldiers grab hold of him under his arms, dragging him towards one of the jeeps. Scarlett had disappeared, separated from him by the storm. He could barely see anything. His eyes were already cloaked with sand. He heard a door click open and he was thrown forward, landing on the soft leather of a car seat. Somebody was shouting again, the words falling over each other, and he guessed that he was hearing Arabic and that he must be in some desert in the Middle East. It was certainly hot enough. His clothes were clinging to him and he could feel the sweat trickling down his skin. But if this was a desert, what was the building he had left behind him?

All twenty-five doors were located in sacred places, although, in truth, the places were sacred for all the wrong reasons. It was the doors that mattered. They had been there first. The buildings – churches, temples, mosques, whatever – had sprung up around them, constructed by local people who had always remembered that the doors were special, even if they had forgotten exactly why.

He heard car doors slamming. The soldiers had got what they had come for and were now preparing to carry them away. The engines started up again. Richard felt the jeep begin to vibrate beneath him.

But before they could move, there was a sudden explosion of gunfire, bullets fired from unseen guns, slamming through the wall of sand. Richard looked up just as the windscreen of the jeep shattered, broken glass showering down onto his shoulders and head. The soldier who had been about to drive him away jerked in his seat. Blood sprayed out of the side of his head and he slumped against the steering wheel, setting off the horn which began to blare continuously. Another bullet thwacked into the passenger door and Richard ducked down, afraid of being hit in the confusion.

All around him, people were shouting, panicking. The gunfire intensified. Richard glimpsed one of the soldiers get hit. He spun round, throwing away his own rifle as if in surrender, then allowed himself to be sucked into a whirlpool of sand. Whoever had been waiting for them on the other side of the door had themselves come under attack. Scarlett! He couldn’t just stay hiding here. He had to find her.

Richard scrabbled for the door handle, opened it and tumbled out of the jeep, keeping low to avoid the bullets. The soldier who had just been shot was lying close to him and his bandanna had come free. Richard grabbed hold of it and tied it around his own face, covering his nose and mouth. The dead man was very young, dark-skinned, clean-shaven. Perhaps the sandstorm was beginning to subside, because Richard could make out the shapes of the other jeeps, parked a few metres away. He saw another soldier standing in front of him, firing at nothing. Then he was hit by a bullet and thrown off his feet. He didn’t move again.

Richard ran forward and reached the nearest jeep. He had been lucky. Scarlett was there and she was on her own. For a moment, Richard stood there, uncertain what to do. She looked so fragile, stretched out on the back seat, her skin very pale and her eyes closed. She was barely breathing. Someone had covered her with a blanket but she had stirred in her sleep and it had slipped to one side. He didn’t dare lift her up. Moving her again might kill her and how could he carry her through the sand and the gunfire – the one almost as lethal as the other? He glanced at the dashboard and saw keys dangling from the ignition. The driver must have left them there, joining the others in the fight. Now Richard knew what he had to do. He had no idea what was happening, who was fighting whom. He just had to get them out of there.

He threw himself into the front and turned the key. The engine coughed into life. He could see nothing out of the windscreen. His elbow had accidentally banged one of the controls and the windscreen wipers were scraping uselessly against the glass, pushing waves of sand left and right. He rammed the jeep into first gear, afraid that one of the soldiers would return at any moment. The wheels spun in the sand but then the vehicle leapt forward. They were away!

He was still driving blind, although the sand was getting thinner – he was sure of it. There seemed to be some sort of structure away to his left … not a building but a statue or a memorial of some sort. It looked like a huge, crouching cat. His own jeep, the one he had just left, was in front of him. Richard swung the wheel and swerved round it. He was picking up speed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two of the soldiers running towards him, shouting, but he was away before they could get anywhere near.

Now just one man stood in front of him. From his size and from the colour of his headscarf, Richard knew he must be the commanding officer, the man who had snatched Scarlett in the first place. The jeep was doing about thirty kilometres an hour. Richard pressed his foot down on the accelerator, waiting for the man to dive out of the way. But he just stood there, huge and menacing, a concrete pillar in the driving sand. He was holding a gun but didn’t seem to want to use it. Was he mad? Did he want to be killed? Richard didn’t care. He wasn’t going to let anyone stop him.

And then, at the last minute, as the man’s figure filled the windscreen, something extraordinary happened. It was more horrible than anything Richard had ever seen.

It was impossible to see it clearly – what with the sand, the movement of the jeep, the chaos of the moment. The man’s head seemed to split open. His shoulders peeled back. It was as if he had been hit by a mortar and blown apart. But there was no mortar. The man had done it deliberately, and even as Richard sped towards him, a snake’s head and neck reared up from the ruin of what had been his neck. Huge tentacles slithered out, replacing his arms, and suddenly the man was only human from the waist down. Above, he was a monster, squirming in the sand, the snake mouth spitting, the eyes blazing, the tentacles writhing as if in pain.

Richard knew he couldn’t avoid it. But nor could he stop. So he did the one thing that was left for him to do and stamped on the accelerator, driving straight into the man-thing. There was a dreadful thud as the front of the jeep hit it and Richard felt the shock travel up his arms. The creature let out a hideous screech and disappeared from sight. The jeep lost control, spun in a circle, nearly turning over on one side, then stopped suddenly. The engine stalled.

The creature hadn’t been killed. As Richard looked round, it stumbled to its feet, the snake neck twisting from side to side, its tongue flickering in and out. Richard turned the key. The engine turned over but the jeep refused to start. The creature took a step towards him. Richard froze. Every instinct made him want to get out and run. But he couldn’t leave Scarlett on her own. He tried the key again. The engine was dead. The creature came another step closer.

Then two more men appeared, stepping out of the sandstorm, dressed in pale grey and yellow. Desert camouflage. They were carrying machine guns, waist-high, strapped over their shoulders. They opened fire at the same moment, sending a blaze of bullets like two white-hot knife blades in front of them. The creature howled and twisted as it was cut into pieces by the continuous fire but the two men didn’t stop, keeping their fingers pressed on the triggers until their cartridges were empty and what was left of the creature fell and lay still.

The men ran over to the jeep. One of them pulled open the door, briefly examined Scarlett then turned to Richard.

“Vous êtes sortis de la pyramide?”
he asked.

“What?” Richard was too dazed to even realize that the man was speaking French, let alone translate.

“You came through the door – with the girl?” The man spoke English with a thick French accent.

“Yes.”

“Then you must come with us. Now. Quickly. We are here to help you.”

The other man was already lifting Scarlett out of the back. Richard slid out himself. There was less gunfire now and the sandstorm was almost at an end. Looking back the way he had come, he saw three constructions which he recognized instantly – which had appeared in tens of thousands of postcards and which would have been known to anyone in the world.

The pyramids of Giza. And in front of them, the statue he had partly glimpsed. The Sphinx.

Now he knew. He and Scarlett had escaped from Hong Kong.

And the door had brought them to Egypt.

THIRTEEN

They drove Richard at speed through the city. He had never been to Cairo but he had seen enough pictures to be able to identify it – not just the pyramids but the great expanse of the Nile with its palm trees and slender feluccas, the mosques and minarets, the colourful markets filled with spices and tourist souvenirs. He was wrong. Cairo was unrecognizable. It was a city at war with itself and it had clearly been for some time. They sped through streets covered with rubble, buildings blown apart. Burnt-out cars and trucks lined the way. There was barely a single wall that wasn’t pockmarked with bullets or shattered by mortar shells, and many of the pieces that were still standing were daubed in graffiti, political slogans in Arabic scrawled in dripping red paint.

As far as Richard could see, the shops were empty, the offices abandoned, the entire infrastructure destroyed. And still the shooting continued, in the far distance, sounding disconnected and almost harmless until they drove around the next corner, when it became ugly, loud and horribly close. A military plane flew overhead. There was a brief pause and then the heavy blast of a bomb finding its target. The ground shook and smoke rose into the air, still heavy with sand. There was smoke everywhere, trickling up in separate columns that finally joined together to form a thick pall in the sky. Nobody was moving in the streets, but when Richard examined the broken pavements and the wreckage of the buildings, he saw that there were dead bodies everywhere, lying where they had fallen and left to rot in the sun. He could smell them. Whoever had started this war in Cairo, whoever was fighting for control of the city, they clearly hadn’t noticed that there was almost nothing left.

Their convoy consisted of two jeeps – one carrying Richard, the other Scarlett – a covered truck and two outriders on ancient, dusty motorbikes. Richard knew that he would never be able to find his way out of here without a guide. Even if he could read the street signs, which were in Arabic, most of them had been twisted out of shape or smashed and all the streets were so damaged that they looked the same. Turn left past the wreckage, continue through the wreckage, turn right at the wreckage. Already his mind was racing, taking in the impossibility of what he was seeing. When he had travelled to Hong Kong, less than a week ago, there had been no war in Egypt. Unrest – yes. There was always unrest in the Middle East. Libya had recently fallen, soon followed by Syria. Iran was making threatening noises to anyone who would listen. But there had been no war in Egypt. How could this violence have begun and spread so rapidly? What had happened?