Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

“Well,” Mitch conceded, “I haven’t heard any shooting yet.”

They could see the helicopter in the clearing below them to the west, on a flat mesa just big enough to provide a landing zone. Mitch got a better look at it through the nightscope on the rifle Qi had thrust into her hands. She tried her damndest to hold it steady as she squinted to see through it.

The Kamov was a Russian special ops aircraft about a decade old, comparable to the Bell 430 or the Sikorsky S-76, Mitch knew. The four-bladed coaxial rotor was still now. Many iterations of the Kamov were manufactured in Russia for foreign sale; knowing Cheung’s present orbits, this one had probably come into his hands via India. It was painted combat green over black and—interestingly—featured no registry numbers.

The pilot still had his helmet on, and his buddy was holding at port arms an M4 with a stretch magazine. Both were smoking. The M4 was less accurate at distance fire than the M16 it largely replaced; still, you wouldn’t want to be within 150 meters of a 30-round spray…and Mitch and Qi were already well within the bubble.

Qi tugged Mitch’s sleeve. “Can you fly that thing?”

“Depends who you ask,” Mitch said. “The U.S. Air Force has some doubts.”

Qi’s face fell.

“But they’re wrong,” Mitch said. She started down the final slope.

Chapter 21

Right on cue, a wayward bat flittered out of the crack on the right side of the idol once Gabriel had worked the hidden lever. Its timing could not have been better. Dinanath’s men watched it wheel crazily around the upper curve of the shrine room until it found a roost.

“Hold it,” said Gabriel, raising a hand. Dinanath turned to his crew and everyone froze. “See that bat? There could be more inside. We don’t know how large the chamber actually is. We have to be quiet and cautious.”

Fully half of Dinanath’s force was conscripted to muscle the foot-thick iron panel, which yielded by degrees. Gabriel raised a hand and pointed at the small chalk mark he had made at about the midpoint of the panel’s arc—when the opening was slightly wider than a man.

“Stop,” he said. “We must not open this all the way.”

“Countermeasures?” said Dinanath.

“Yes—remember your history. Traps in tombs. We must be silent and very careful. Do you smell that? More bats inside. The footing will be treacherous. Excess noise will disturb the bats. Have you ever done this sort of thing before?”

“No,” said Dinanath, uncertain whether his rank was being usurped.

Gabriel picked up a flashlight. “Mask these like so. Focused beams, not wide light.” He was halfway through the doorway when Dinanath yanked him back, bodily.

“You could have a weapon just inside the door,” the big man explained calmly.

“How could I…?” Gabriel raised his hands in conciliation. “Okay. You’re the boss.”

Dinanath directed two men to precede Gabriel. They self-consciously stayed as quiet as mute cats in a library, whispering back a description of the hundreds of miniature warrior figures they saw inside.

The information grapevined through the rest of the men and Gabriel could witness its effect. They were eager, hoping for treasure and measuring the capacity of their own pockets for same.

Dinanath posted two gunners at the base of the idol. Two more at the mouth of the shrine room. Two more on perimeter, outside. Their check-ins were leapfrogged so that the first sign of trouble would bring a radio alert to the unit on Dinanath’s belt.

“Now you,” said Dinanath, directing Gabriel to step through.

The men inside were already picking up the small soldiers, examining them for traces of precious metals or jewels. The men behind Gabriel were eager to start nosing around on their own. Dinanath squeezed through behind Gabriel.

“Cover pattern,” he hissed to his subordinates. “Keep sight of the man in front of you!”

Men were filing in behind them, grouping, oozing the point of the expedition through the second chamber and toward the head of the stone stairway. They had begun to notice the abundance of creepy-crawly life-forms among which they were standing, and Gabriel turned back to shush them. “They’re not poisonous,” he whispered. “Just move through them swiftly.” Several of the men nodded. The more he asserted himself as knowledgeable and a leader, the more they would look past Dinanath to him for guidance when things went wrong.

This was Gabriel’s third foray into the realm of the Favored Son’s Killers of Men. His first exploration had released the bats. His second had revealed to him the ways in and out of the massive vault. Before he’d left the second time, he’d also observed the mechanics of the giant, pendulum-like iron baskets bracketing the stairway that led down from the stone arch. He had set to work on them, using the tools and climbing gear he had to restore the ancient mechanisms’ original function. And then he’d paced off the distance from the entryway to the spot below the funnel that wound its way to the outside. Keeping himself precisely oriented as to distance and direction, he could now move to that exact location even in the dark.

Standing at the head of the dung-befouled stairway, Gabriel reached back to tug Dinanath forward by the sleeve. “The Killers of Men,” he whispered, shining his masked flashlight forward into the void.

Dinanath’s mouth dropped open at the sight. His men crowded in behind him, eager to see for themselves.

Gabriel gave Dinanath a hard shove. The big man lost his balance against the thick oilslick of guano on the floor. Then Gabriel dived onto the right-hand balustrade and slid down into darkness as everybody started shooting.

Qi and Mitch heard a sound like two congested little barks. Squirrel coughs in the darkness. The helicopter pilot and his buddy dropped, tumbling lifeless out of the open cockpit doors, their cigarettes still smoldering.

“What the hell—” Mitch said.

Qi signaled her to keep quiet. Neither of them had seen even a muzzle flash.

Qi spoke with her eyes. Don’t move. Not a sound.

Five minutes later, still frozen and silent, they still hadn’t seen anything to explain what had happened. All they could see was the two dead guys by the chopper growing deader.

“Let’s take the bird,” Mitch whispered, impatient.

“No—too obvious. We would be exposed. We wait.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Mitch said, feeling her condition worsening.

“You must,” Qi said.

In the hunter’s-hide silence that descended around them, they could finally hear the sounds of gunfire coming from deep within the mountainside.

The iron plates of the floor inside the entry rooms were pressure-sensitive, Gabriel knew. His investigation showed that the ordeal of sliding open the large iron door at the base of the idol had a secondary purpose, which was to cock the mechanism for the long-dormant catapults. The weight of a single man could not trip it, but the weight of many would cause the floor to shift exactly one quarter of an inch. It was similar to the bed on a truck scale. And its purpose…

Gabriel surfed to the floor of the main chamber in a sludgy mudslide of decay, guano and worse.

Outside, the counterbalanced door slid back into position and locked, crushing one of Dinanath’s men who was half-in, half-out. Six men had been posted as sentries outside the idol. That left Gabriel with twelve inside, plus Dinanath.

As everybody unslung their hardware and started shooting, the thousands of bats in the cave awakened and began flying in every direction.

Thin flashlight beams swung wildly about the room, each extending three or four feet into the darkness before petering out. Muzzle flashes lit up the darkness as well, providing confusing snapshot contrasts of shadows and light, strobing in all directions, not aiding sight but blinding everybody.