His desperate screams for mercy went unheard under the heavy buzzing sound of the storm inside the iron sphere.
Lea Donovan felt like she was staring into the eye of god himself as the circle of flames increased in power and flooded the inner chamber with the neon blue light. It pulsed out an even mightier jet of plasma into the Oracle’s ancient body and lifted him off his feet, holding him in the center of the chamber. Without any warning, the men and women in the white robes began retreating and fleeing the Citadel.
“They’re leaving,” Ryan said.
Scarlet nodded. “They know something we don’t, that’s for sure.”
“And so is Salazar!” Lea said. “Look — he’s going down one of the tunnels we came down when we arrived.”
“He’ll never make it,” Ryan said.
For Lea now, time stopped. It crawled to a standstill like a dying friend as she drowned in the strange glowing light. Bewitched by the lights and only dimly aware now of the Oracle’s terrified dying screams, she turned to see Joe Hawke beside her, his unshaved dirt-smeared face glowing the same ghostly blue that was seeping into the pores of everyone else in the chamber.
She felt like she was being hypnotized by the swirling blue and orange lightning bolts as they streaked around in circles and crackled and licked at the sides of the mysterious spherical monument. Unable to take her eyes away, she began to see the face of her father slowly forming in the electrical chaos in front of her. “I must be hallucinating…”
Another vast explosion, and when the light receded the Oracle was gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The team shared a terrified glance in the silence.
“Where did he go?”
“Is he dead?”
“Or did he go inside the sphere?”
“It’s… the… same… thing…”
Turning, they saw the man in the white robe at their feet, his body and face caked in drying blood.
“I thought he was dead?” Ryan said.
They gathered around the white-robed man. “Who are you?” Lea asked. “Part of the Athanatoi?”
The man’s cracked lips turned into a half-smile. “Never.”
“Then who?” Reaper repeated, scrunching his shirt up in a ball in his meaty fist and shaking him like a straw doll. “Who?”
He leaned forward, blood on his lips and his eyes rolling up into his head.
“We’re losing him!” Lea said. “Dammit!”
“Have you heard the name Koru?”
Reaper shook his head and mumbled as he stared up at the others and then back down to the dying merc. “Non.”
“You have now,” he said weakly. “And you will be wise never to forget that name.”
“What’s so special about the name Koru?” Lea asked.
But the man was almost dead. He slumped limply down in Reaper’s grip. The Frenchman laid him gently down to the deck. “Koru? What does this mean?”
“It means trouble… big trouble for you all.”
“Bugger me,” Scarlet said. “Not again.”
“We are the chosen guardians of this place, or were… defending it for millennia, until this sacrilegious day.”
Shots rang out behind then as the Special Forces gradually overwhelmed the dwindling numbers of Athanatoi. Turning, Hawke saw Absalom take a direct hit from a grenade and get blasted into the chasm. “Another one bites the dust.”
Lea crouched down and cradled his head. “I’m sorry if we intruded into some sort of sacred place, but what was that thing?”
“That was the third gate,” Ryan said, clambering up to his knees and dusting himself down. “Am I right?”
The Guardian gave a shallow nod. “That was the Eye of the Gods.”
“A gate to where?” Hawke said hesitantly.
The guardian simply smiled.
Lea was stunned, and struggled to find the words. “But what does this all mean?”
“You cannot win,” the guardian said. “The treasures of the Citadel are gone forever, so are its weapons and its technologies and all vast libraries. All gone, hidden away by other Guardians in a place even safer than this.”
“We mean no harm!” Lea said.
“It doesn’t matter what you mean,” the dying man continued. “You cannot be trusted with the technologies of this place. They are too advanced for the current level of your society. We swore to prevent this knowledge from ever falling into the wrong hands, and so we have done our duty. You will find nothing here. We have been watching you and the Athanatoi for a long time, and we have taken steps to ensure the secrets of this place never fall into the wrong hands.”
They watched the life slip from his eyes, and he fell back limp in their grasp, this time stone cold dead.
“Oh no… now we’ll never know!”
Scarlet was uncharacteristically sombre. “What the hell happened here?”
Ryan scratched his head and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t want to say it, but just maybe it was exactly what it said it was. Maybe we just looked into the face of god himself.”
“Heaven, you mean?”
Hawke lifted his chin and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Let’s not get carried away.”
“Whoever, or whatever it was,” Scarlet said, staring at the smouldering, blackened skeletons of the Athanatoi and the bloody corpses of the white-robed Guardians beside them, “it didn’t seem very keen on that bastard getting through the gate.”
Hawke agreed, but he was already wondering just how many levels they would have to fight through to reach the mysterious Koru, supposing he even existed. “Whoever these Guardians were, they weren’t much of a match for the combined strength of the Athanatoi and those Special Ops forces.”
“Speaking of which,” Scarlet said. “They’re on their way over here. I think it’s time we made like bananas.”
“Did you feel that?” Zeke asked.
“Eh?”
“The ground shook.”
“Earthquake!” Ryan said.
With the vast structure crumbling all around them, the team sprinted into the northern tunnel network as if they devil himself was on their tail. The journey through the tunnels back up to the surface was an unforgiving punishment march after the fighting back in the temple, but with Faulkner’s Special Ops on their tail, taking a moment to rest would have been a fatal error.
When they reached the entrance, night had fallen. A vast dazzling grove of stars lit the mountain range like Christmas lights. A cold breeze whipped across the plains and into the gullies, biting at their noses and ears and making them shiver as they staggered down the slopes on their way back to reality.
For a long time, no one spoke. The slaughter they had witnessed was unlike anything any of them had seen before, but the elephant in the room was the Oracle’s epic destruction inside the sphere of plasma. No one, not even Ryan, could begin to explain what they had seen tonight, and in their hearts, they now carried a heavy memory and a thousand new questions.
Scarlet lifted a cigarette to her lips and lit it with trembling hands. “What the buggering fuck do we do now?”
“We go back to Dubai,” Hawke said without hesitation. “We touch base with Rich and take it from there.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Brooke tried to strike out but his arms were handcuffed behind his back and his legs were cuffed together. “You goddam son of bitch, threatening my daughter! When I get of here I’ll skin you alive, you bastard!”
Muston laughed as the plane levelled off.
Alex fought back the tears and tried to stop the panic attack from taking over. She was starting to sweat and felt dizzy. She hated hearing her father get so angry. She hated seeing these traitors mocking and humiliating him like this, and now they were threatening his only child. “Just leave him alone, you asshole!”