Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [2]
Single-minded, unstoppable and completely devoid of sympathy, del Piero urged his people onward. Considering what was at stake, the deaths were an acceptable loss.
The Nine kept charging through the swamp on the south side of the mountain, heads bent into the rain, feet pounding through the mud.
They ran like soldiers—low and fast, with balance and purpose, ducking under branches, hurdling bogs, always staying in single file.
In their hands, they held guns: MP-7s, M-16s, Steyr-AUGs. In their thigh holsters were pistols of every kind.
On their backs: packs of various sizes, all bristling with ropes, climbing gear and odd-looking steel struts.
And above them, soaring gracefully over the treetops, was a small shape, a bird of some sort.
Seven of the Nine were indeed soldiers.
Crack troops. Special forces. All from different countries.
The remaining two members were civilians, the elder of whom was a long-bearded 65-year-old professor named Maximilian T. Epper, call-sign: Wizard.
The seven military members of the team had somewhat fiercer nicknames: Huntsman, Witch Doctor, Archer, Bloody Mary, Saladin, Matador and Gunman.
Oddly, however, on this mission they had all acquired new callsigns: Woodsman, Fuzzy, Stretch, Princess Zoe, Pooh Bear, Noddy and Big Ears.
These revised call-signs were the result of the ninth member of the team:
A little girl of ten.
The mountain they were approaching was the last in a long spur of peaks that ended near the Sudanese–Ethiopian border.
Down through these mountains, flowing out of Ethiopia and into the Sudan, poured the Angereb River. Its waters paused briefly in this swamp before continuing on into the Sudan where they would ultimately join the Nile.
The chief resident of the swamp was Crocodylus niloticus, the notorious Nile crocodile. Reaching sizes of up to 6 metres, the Nile crocodile is known for its great size, its brazen cunning, and its ferocity of attack. It is the most man-eating crocodilian in the world, killing upwards of 300 people every year.
While the Nine were approaching the mountain from the south, their EU rivals had set up a base of operations on the northern side, a base that looked like a veritable floating city.
Command boats, mess boats, barracks-boats and gunboats, the small fleet was connected by a network of floating bridges and all were facing toward the focal point of their operation: the massive coffer dam that they had built against the northern flank of the mountain.
It was, one had to admit, an engineering masterpiece: a 100metre-long, 40-foot-high curved retaining dam that held back the waters of the swamp to reveal a square stone doorway carved into the base of the mountain 40 feet below the waterline.
The artistry on the stone doorway was extraordinary.
Egyptian hieroglyphs covered every square inch of its frame— but taking pride of place in the very centre of the lintel stone that surmounted the doorway was a glyph often found in pharaonic tombs in Egypt:
Two figures, bound to a staff bearing the jackal head of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the Underworld.
This was what the afterlife had in store for grave-robbers—eternal bondage to Anubis. Not a nice way to spend eternity.
The message was clear: do not enter.
The structure inside the mountain was an ancient mine delved during the reign of Ptolemy I, around the year 300 BC.
During the great age of Egypt, the Sudan was known as ‘Nubia’, a word derived from the Egyptian word for gold: nub.
Nubia: the Land of Gold.
And indeed it was. It was from Nubia that the ancient Egyptians sourced the gold for their many temples and treasures.
Records unearthed in Alexandria revealed that this mine had run out of gold 70 years after its founding, after which it gained a second life as a quarry for the rare hardstone, diorite. Once it was exhausted of diorite—around the year 226 BC—Pharaoh Ptolemy III decided to use the mine for a very special purpose.
To this end, he dispatched his best architect—Imhotep V—and a force of 2,000 men.
They would work on the project