Gabriel Hunt - Hunt at World's End

The high priest muttered something in Nesili.

“He says he has to receive Ulikummis,” Daniel said. “That he is Ulikummis’s vessel on earth.”

The high priest dragged himself another step forward. He was nearly standing between the forks of the apparatus on which the crystal stood.

Joyce spoke softly, her voice strained. “Put me down. You’ve got…got to stop him.”

But it was Daniel who stepped into the high priest’s path. He swung Gabriel’s Colt up before him, the gun held in both hands. “Not another step,” he said.

The priest sneered and started swinging his staff.

Daniel pulled the trigger. Twice.

The bullets slammed into the high priest’s chest and he jerked from each impact. He staggered—one step—two—and then collapsed on the ground directly beneath the crystal.

A thunderous explosion sounded overhead. Jagged bolts of lightning crackled in the air between the storm clouds and the Spearhead, each blasting the other with raw electrical energy. The light from the obelisk grew brighter, a hundred suns dawning in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. Gabriel used one hand to turn Joyce’s face into his neck and squeezed his own eyes shut. He began running away from the Spearhead, Daniel running beside him as fast as his limping gait could take him. Even through his closed eyelids, Gabriel saw the bright light that washed over them, past them, extending outward into the night. It was warm, but not as hot as he’d expected. He kept running, waiting for the burning blast that would finish them.

It never arrived. When the light had dimmed and the temperature cooled, he stopped running and opened his eyes. The storm clouds had vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. The Spearhead still glowed, but with waning intensity. In a wide circle around it, the sand had turned to glass, stopping less than a yard from where Gabriel, Joyce and Daniel now stood.

And below the Spearhead, where the high priest had lain, a figure was now standing—a figure blazing with a vibrant white light, similar to the crystal’s. Could this be the priest? That he was upright at all was extraordinary—he’d been stabbed and shot twice, he must have lost a gallon of blood. But the energy of the Spearhead seemed to have flowed into him and was animating him like some sort of puppet. He jerked from side to side. It was as if his body had somehow absorbed the immense power of the Spearhead and was desperately trying to contain it. He bent double, gripping his head in his hands. They heard him begin keening in a voice suffused with pain. The light pouring off of him intensified to a blinding glare. A moment later the light dimmed, then vanished altogether.

It took a moment before they could see at all. When their eyes adjusted, there were only the stars that dotted the night sky, and the moon hanging over the horizon. The obelisk was dark, its once clear crystal smoky and cracked.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked Joyce.

She nodded. “What happened? Where’s the priest?”

Gabriel looked toward the spot where he had stood, but there was no sign of him—not his robes, not his staff, not his body. Only the trail of blood, leading up to a point beneath the forked stand.

“Killed by the Spearhead,” Daniel said. “Vaporized.”

“It really was a weapon,” Gabriel said.

“At that moment it was, yes. Who’s to say what it could have been in the right hands?”

“There are no hands I’d trust with a power like this,” Gabriel said.

A loud cracking sound drew their attention back to the obelisk. Deep fissures spread across the crystal like spiderwebs. The crystal broke apart, sliding out of its iron supports and coming down with a crash amid the rubble from the statue.

“Well, it looks like you won’t have to,” Daniel said. He shook his head. “What a terrible loss.”

Gabriel heard the approaching helicopter’s rotors before he saw it overhead. He looked up. The wind blew back his hair and rustled his shirt. The helicopter descended, landing close enough for him to see the emergency foam patches sealing the bullet holes in its tail. The side door slid open, and four men in flight suits, helmets and goggles jumped out. Three of them held machine guns and stood in formation, looking out at the bodies scattered across the battlefield, watching for movement. The question Gabriel had posed earlier came back to him: Which army’s side were these men on?

But he only wondered it until the fourth man pulled off his helmet and goggles.

“Noboru?” Gabriel said, amazed.

Noboru rushed over to his side. He looked down at Joyce, stroked one hand across her hair. “I couldn’t just leave the two of you. Not when I still had something I could offer.”

“Does Michiko know?” Joyce asked.

“Sh,” Noboru said.

“You know this man?” Daniel asked.

“How did you find us?” Gabriel said.

“You can thank your brother,” Noboru said. “Michael told me where you were headed from Turkey. He sounded worried, figured you might get yourself in trouble again. That seemed likely to me, too. I thought maybe you could use some backup.”

“How’d you get your hands on a helicopter like this?” Gabriel asked. “Never mind the missiles.”

“I called in a few favors from my Intelligence days,” Noboru said. “It took a bit of finagling, but I got the team and equipment I asked for.”

“I’m just…glad you found us,” Joyce whispered.

Noboru looked at the bodies and wreckage all around them. “You guys are hard to miss.”

Daniel stuck out his hand. “Daniel Wingard. Joyce’s uncle.”

Noboru shook Daniel’s hand. He looked across the stretch of fused sand at the broken shards that were all that was left of the Spearhead. “We saw that thing’s light miles away, when we were patching the chopper. What the hell was it?”

“A test,” Daniel said. “After everything, it was just a test to see if mankind is ready to use something that powerful responsibly.”

“How’d we do?” Noboru asked.

Gabriel gave a thin smile. “We survived.”

Noboru nodded, then patted the side of the helicopter. “So. You guys need a lift?”

Chapter 25

The bartender in the Discoverers League lounge, Wade Boland, slid two bottles of beer across the bar to Gabriel. “Women who like beer are something special,” he said. “You try to hold onto this one.”

Clyde Harris, sitting on his usual stool at the end at the bar, chuckled and ran a hand through his thinning white hair. “Reminds me of a woman I met in the Netherlands back in ‘43. She loved beer almost as much as she loved garroting spies.”

Wade shook his head. “Save it, old-timer. Can’t you see he’s busy?”

Gabriel took the bottles back to the table by the fireplace and sat down in the plush red chair across from Joyce. After dropping them off at the embassy in Botswana, Noboru had returned to Borneo. Daniel was back in Turkey, closing down his dig site, and had promised to join them in New York in a few days’ time. Gabriel looked at his watch. Michael would be coming over in a bit over an hour for a full debriefing. But until then, Gabriel and Joyce could finally relax. No bullets, no arrows, no explosions, just the two of them and some stress-free time alone.

She took one of the bottles from him with the arm that wasn’t in a cast, clinked it against his bottle, and took a sip. “It’s a shame about the Spearhead.”

“Your uncle seems to think everything played out the way it was meant to.”

“That’s not what I mean, though,” she said. “It’s a shame we didn’t get to study it, find out what it was. How it worked. How a civilization thousands of years in the past could have created something that channeled and contained so much energy. It was like some kind of reactor, built long before there should have been anything close to that kind of technology.” She took another sip. “Now we’ll never know. It’s gone, all of it. The Spearhead, the gemstones.”