David Sakmyster - The Mongol Objective

She would wait for Colonel Hiltmeyer’s team, his men and his supplies. Flak jackets and automatic weapons. Floodlights and flares. Grenades. But they’d have to be careful, and even then… She glanced at the trap again and imagined what else lay in store on the way up.

Best to send up the grunts first, one at a time. It was the only way they might make it to the top.

Frustrated and growing angrier by the minute, she made her way back down toward the camp.

On the descent, her thoughts turned to Caleb, imagining where he might be right now. Was he remote viewing her this very instant? For a moment she paused, feeling naked, exposed even more than being on this mountain at the mercy of an expert marksman. She narrowed her eyes, then quickened her pace.

Best to get back to Montross, and to the tablet. It had some kind of psychic deterrent built up around it, a kind of cloud that made its presence, and those around it, invisible to scrying eyes. Part of the reason it had gone undetected for so many centuries. And of course, Montross had something else, something like it-a sphere he had stolen from the Smithsonian archives years ago. It had shielded him from any prying eyes while he prepared for this mission. Now, they were doubly protected.

But as she got close to the camp and saw the men suiting up, preparing for the ascent, she found herself wishing their situations were reversed, that she was the one remote viewing Caleb. Seeing his every move, voyeuristically laughing, or cheering at his progress.

#

“We can make the Threshold before dark, if we move now,” Colonel Eric Hiltmeyer said. He was fitting on his vest over his camouflage threads and supervising his team of fifteen soldiers, all loaded with gear and weapons.

Montross was eyeing the mountain in the distance, with its twenty or more square miles of available hiding space just begging him to try. He narrowed his eyes, then turned and headed for the first tent. “Hold on, we need a little more precision before we go blindly tramping up there.”

“I agree,” said Nina, skidding and sliding down the last few yards to their camp. “And I think our friends up there have devised some rather nasty traps for the unwary. This might not be such a good idea in the dark.”

Hiltmeyer coughed in his hand. “Bullshit. We can handle it.”

Nina scoffed. “Doubtful, but you’re welcome to try. I’ll just hang back and watch the carnage from down here. I say we wait until morning.”

“No waiting,” Montross said. “Get ready to move on my return.” And with that, he stormed into the first tent, tossed back the flap, and stepped inside where just a lone candle bathed the white felt material in a pale glow, mixing with the emerald haze from the tablet beside Alexander.

Alexander emerged from his trance slowly, grudgingly. He had been sitting cross-legged on a mat on the hard ground with the Emerald Tablet right in front of him. Its aura had tugged at his consciousness once he was left alone with it, and he had spent several minutes just staring deeply into its oddly angled surfaces, trying to force the images into some sort of cohesive shape. But the edges wouldn’t line up, and the letters appeared to vibrate with a frequency all its own. Pulsing into his mind, tweaking parts of his brain, nudging him down paths of sight that were alien, powerful and terrifying.

But at last he gave in. He had to be brave, had to do this for his dad. For Aunt Phoebe. For Mom. It was up to him. He had to see. Maybe if he found what Xavier Montross was looking for, then all this could end. He could go home, be with Dad and forget all this.

But his home was gone. Burnt. All his toys, his books. His treasured books.

Anger swirled in his thoughts, but he pushed the emotion aside and trusted the waves of green, throbbing behind his eyelids, prying open his inner sight. And then he saw…

… a camel. One hump, no saddle, but a muzzle and its harness. Led across the snow-covered desert by a lone man wrapped tight in a llama-skin coat and a fur hat. The sun, distant and weak, follows the pair across the wilderness as the moon lights their way at night, enticing them to continue without rest.

Until finally they arrive at a frozen river, its surface like glass, reflecting the cold, distant constellations.

“ Here?” the man asks the camel.

And the beast lowers its head. A female, she makes a whining sound, then half-trots, half-stumbles to the edge of the riverbank. Sniffing deeply.

“ Here?” he asks again, setting down his pack, which he opens. He pulls out an ax. And a shovel.

The camel paws at the ground, then lifts its head in alarm.

Two dark shapes sprint across the landscape, converging from the north and the east.

With bows drawn.

The camel’s owner takes a step back, and is about to cry out when two arrows simultaneously pierce his chest. He slumps to his knees, eyes wide in disbelief. The ax drops. Arms at his side, he remains kneeling as if frozen, while the two forms approach, slower now.

One of them clicks his tongue, calming the beast. The other circles around it, draws a knife, then holds the camel’s head while he slits its throat, spilling hot blood upon the snow and ice.

After the beast stops thrashing on the ground, lying on its side beside her dying master, the two men turn to consider the man.

“ He’s dead,” one says to the other.

“ Too bad. We could have asked him.”

“ But I think we know. This is the camel. The mother of the calf we buried last year.”

“ Then it’s true. Camels have memories like elephants.”

One nodded, looking back at the beast. “A mother’s love is not easily swayed. We should have killed its whole family after burying the child with our master.”

“ No matter. The site is safe. Now, even more so.” He looks out over the frozen expanse of the river, winding around in a huge, silver-coated “S” back to the distant black hills. “Our Khan is safe.”

A flash like a thunderbolt lights up the world…

… and the same river bends in the summer sun. Black flies swarm over a field of men slaving at the land, carving up trenches near the river, carving a path that will give it its S-shape.

“ It is almost time,” one man on horseback says to his uniformed companions. “Ogadai is coming tomorrow to supervise and to formally close the tomb.”

“ And then we will punch through the final barrier and divert the river over the entrance, there.” The general points to a large, dark aperture carved into the bedrock twenty feet below the earth. Men were still down there, moving up and down a wooden ramp, carrying items of great value-food, gold, urns full of jewels. Next, a single young camel is led by its harness into the depths. And in a nearby tent, twenty maidens are being prepared.

“ Tomorrow,” the general says again, swatting a fly from his neck, “we finish this, make the sacrifices, and lead his caravan back to the Sacred Mountain. The secret of Temujin’s tomb shall be safe.”

“ What about these laborers? They know-”

“ I said, the secret shall be safe.”

Alexander’s vision fluttered, wind blew through the tent, the green aura around the edges flickered, and a voice whispered through the sands and the buzzing of flies.

“What have you seen?”

Alexander shook his head, whipping his hair across his face, and finally he pulled himself free. He looked up into the eyes of Xavier Montross, eyes that eerily reflected the color of the Emerald Tablet. Eyes that threatened to send him back into an ancient, inescapable world of dreams and visions, of blood and secrets.

“I-” he started, and then glanced again at the tablet.

And another vision suddenly exploded in a kaleidoscopic rush of intensity, more real than anything he’d ever experienced, except for the burst of fire in the lighthouse vault. It grabbed hold and shook him to his core as if to say: Not yet. You still need to see something more…