Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

Chapter 19

“We’re not your enemy,” Gabriel said.

“Any man who sets foot here is my enemy,” the man said.

“There is a group in Egypt, the Alliance of the Pharaohs— Alliance Pharaonique . They’ve taken your men in the past, tortured them. And now they’ve kidnapped my sister. Said they would kill her if I didn’t find the Second Stone for them.”

The man didn’t budge. “Then I am very sorry for you. It is a terrible thing to lose a sister. But at least you will have the comfort of dying first.”

“Hang on,” Gabriel said, “nobody has to die. We all want the same thing—the group in Egypt stopped. Surely there’s a way to—”

At the man’s feet, Sammi groaned.

“Can I help her up?” Gabriel said. When the man didn’t respond, Gabriel added, “You can shoot us if you want. But until you do, I’m going to help her.”

“Is she armed?”

“No.”

The man nodded slightly. Gabriel bent and extended a hand to Sammi, and she pulled herself up. She was unsteady on her feet and she winced when she put a hand to the back of her skull.

“Who are you?” she said.

The men said nothing.

“They’re the group organized by Napoleon’s brother,” Gabriel said. “To protect the Second Stone. Am I right?”

“You are,” the leader said, “and it is the seal on your death warrant. You know too much to live.” He raised his rifle, and the men behind him followed suit.

Gabriel gauged the distance to his Colt. He couldn’t outrun seven bullets.

“Wait,” he said. “I have a proposition—”

“What proposition?” the man said.

Gabriel’s mind was racing, trying to come up with an answer to that question. He saw the man’s finger tighten on the trigger and began blurting out the first thing that came to mind, “We could make a—”

But Gabriel’s words were drowned out by a barrage of gunfire. Gabriel and Sammi both flinched and looked down at their own chests, but no bullets had struck them. Looking up, they saw spots of crimson erupting across the leader’s torso. His eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped to his knees, the rifle tumbling from his dead hands. The other men turned shouting in the direction the gunfire had come from and began firing blindly themselves.

Men wearing burnooses over their faces poured out of the forest, shooting as they came. Gabriel recognized the one in the lead—he didn’t need to see Kemnebi’s face to know it was him. Gabriel pulled Sammi to the ground as bullets whipped over their heads. The remaining Corsicans took cover behind trees. Skilled at maneuvering in this environment, they quickly vanished to obtain secure positions from which to shoot.

Gabriel’s Colt lay a few feet away, next to the Corsican leader’s body. Gabriel darted toward it but was forced back by a spray of bullets. “Gabriel!” Sammi shouted. Turning, he saw that one of the Egyptians had run out from the trees and into the clearing, unsheathing a long knife as he came. With his other hand, the man pulled his burnoose away from his face, revealing a bruised jaw—and eyes burning with rage. Sammi rolled out of his path just as his blade descended, a bitter declaration in Arabic spraying from his lips. Gabriel lunged for his pistol, grabbed it, and rolled onto his back, firing at the attacker in one fluid motion. The Colt’s round slammed into the man’s shoulder, causing him to stumble—but he kept coming, knife swinging wildly. Gabriel squeezed the trigger again, aiming dead center on the purple and yellow bruise on the man’s face. The Colt jerked in his hand and the man went down, a spray of blood hanging in the air for an instant before pattering over his body.

Gabriel ran to Sammi in a crouch and pulled her toward the cave entrance.

Behind them, Gabriel heard the battle continuing fiercely, gunshots mixing with cries of pain, exclamations both in French and Arabic. The Corsican group may have been smaller in number, but they were managing to pick off the Alliance members. Gabriel glanced back and counted five bodies on the ground—besides the Corsican leader, the others were all Egyptian. It was what the Alliance got for attacking on the group’s home turf. But Gabriel couldn’t take much comfort from the fact, since if the Corsicans prevailed, it was what Gabriel and Sammi would get as well.

He started tearing away the loose branches covering the front of the cave, Sammi working beside him to open up enough room for them to squeeze inside. They got some help from a stray gunshot that splintered a particularly thick branch just inches away from Gabriel’s hand. “Go,” Gabriel said, pushing Sammi toward the narrow hole they’d opened, and she slipped in sideways. Gabriel stole another glance back. The gun battle was still raging; for the moment, no one had the luxury of paying attention to them. He squeezed into the cave after Sammi. The noise of gunfire was instantly muted, replaced by the echoing sound of Sammi panting in the darkness beside him.

“Is it safe here?” she asked.

Was it safe, she wanted to know.

It was safer , certainly—for now.

But Gabriel had a feeling they’d just walked into Napoleon’s Web.

Chapter 20

The entrance they’d come through was actually an abscess in the ground that narrowed to a tunnel through which only one person at a time could fit. Gabriel went first, with Sammi following directly behind him. He grabbed a flashlight from his rucksack and switched it on. The cave was dark, damp, and had a familiar smell of . . . yes, bat guano. “Watch your step,” he said. “It’s going to be slippery.”

“All right.”

“There are also supposed to be traps,” Gabriel said.

“Traps?”

“Three of them. According to the Alliance’s documents. Dreamed up by Napoleon himself and built to his specifications by his court engineer.”

“You’re not serious,” Sammi said.

“They seemed to be.”

He moved forward slowly. Where the flashlight’s beam landed, he saw insects scurry away, and he could feel some crunching underfoot as well. The tunnel continued, branching and forking into a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Gabriel pressed forward, taking the rightmost fork each time, just to make it easier to backtrack if it proved necessary. And it did—twice they reached dead ends and had to retrace their steps.

But eventually they reached a larger, open space, obviously man-made, that was about the size of a large bedroom. It had been carved from the stone of the hillside, the walls and ceiling shored up with vaults of rock. The noise of their footsteps echoed loudly even after they came to a stop.

“Strange,” Sammi said, and her voice reverberated: strange—strange—strange . . .

Gabriel heard a movement behind them, a swift scraping of stone against stone. He spun to face the entryway just in time to see it sealed up with a deafening thud as a stone slab slid into place from above. He ran up to it, searched along the base and sides for handholds, anything he might get a grip on and use to lift it. There weren’t any—and even if there had been, the slab must have weighed half a ton at the least.

“My god,” Sammi said, running up behind him, “did I do—” The echoes of her voice came back at her in a cacophonous crescendo, louder even than before they’d been sealed in, the repeated syllables crashing over one another. She covered her ears and let the end of her sentence remain unspoken.

Gabriel looked up as the echoes began to fade. He remembered another cave he’d been in, a cave of ice near the South Pole where the echoes of his party’s voices had shaken loose a rain of stalactites, razor sharp and deadly to the touch. At least there were no stalactites here.