“You might have your precious fly-boy, Hunter. But how many men can ignite a world war?”
They didn’t call him Lucifer for nothing …
Chapter 35
It was cold inside the pyramid. The walls had a strange, clammy feel to them, the opposite of what Hunter had expected from a structure standing in the middle of the desert.
He had no trouble finding the entrance to the massive Cheops — the Russians had carved a large door out on one side of the base. Trudging up to the doorway, Hunter came upon a trove of abandoned Soviet equipment scattered about in front of it. He found AK-47s, grenade launchers, mortars, and even a few SA-7 shoulder-launched SAMs. There was no one around. Just as he had hoped, all of the Soviet troops had fled.
“Well,” he thought, taking the knapsack off his back, “time to get dressed.”
Ten minutes later he was inside the pyramid, his powerful searchlight in one hand, a small Geiger counter in the other. He found walking in the bulky antiradiation gear to be torturous, especially in the cramped passageways. The suit — he looked more like a beekeeper than anything else — had been found along with the Geiger counter in a locker on the Saratoga. Obviously, it hadn’t been designed with comfort in mind.
“Who the hell built this place?” Hunter muttered to himself as he moved along the pyramid’s dark tunnels.
The passageways ran through the structure at the oddest angles, none of them conducive to walking normally. When he first entered the structure, he was walking downward. Now he was climbing. He held the Geiger counter out in front of him, but so far he had yet to get so much as a peep out of it.
After what seemed like an endless ascent, he finally reached what he knew was the Grand Gallery — a relatively spacious passageway that was thankfully equipped with a stairway installed by archeologists years before. It was at the top of these stairs that the Geiger counter started beeping.
By directing the microphone-like device, Hunter was able to find the source of the beeping. He climbed down into a small room off the Grand Chamber and scanned the walls with the radiation meter. He got nothing but the monotone beeping. But as soon as he pointed the device to the floor, it started buzzing like crazy.
There was a dilapidated trap door at the far end of the chamber. With much effort, Hunter was able to squeeze down through it, dropping several feet to the dusty floor. As soon as he adjusted both his light and helmet, he saw he was in a room quite different from the polished walls of the pyramid’s passageways.
He knew at once it was a ritual chamber. Its walls were covered with ancient Egyptian paintings and writings — many of them at first glance apparently relating to burial ceremonies. But Hunter knew this to be misleading — despite popular belief, no one had ever conclusively proved the pyramids were built as burial chambers for the Pharaohs.
At the center of the chamber was a large, tomblike structure. Again, he knew this was not as it appeared to be. The box, which looked to be carved from a single block of alabaster, didn’t contain a mummy. Similar empty, coffin-like coffers had been found all over Egypt.
However, even if no body was in the box, something else was. It was highly radioactive — Hunter’s Geiger counter was buzzing so loudly it hurt his ears, despite the bulky anti-radiation helmet.
“This must be the place,” he thought.
He approached the box cautiously. Soon he was close enough to peer in. Sure enough, sitting in the middle of a bed of straw was a metal box. An instantly recognizable radiation symbol — like those that once marked the entrance to 1960s bomb shelters — was emblazoned on its top.
“Thank you, Mr. Cheops,” Hunter said to himself, smiling. “Wherever you are … ”
Less than 100 miles away and to the northeast, a half-dozen yachts sailed into the mouth of the Suez Canal. At the controls of the first boat — a sixty-five-foot cruise beauty — was Commodore Antonio Vanaria. The Commodore was not wearing his usual Napoleonic-style uniform. He had replaced the colorful garb with a black frock and a Roman collar. For this mission, the Commodore — like his five lieutenants on the other boats — was disguised as a man of the cloth. To add to the illusion, each boat carried two of the call girls, dressed in nun’s habits hastily sewn from dyed bedsheets.
Each yacht also carried a large crucifix on its bow, flags and flowers adorning its base. Large, hastily painted cloth signs hung from the boats’ sides, extolling the one thing the Mideast — like the entire globe — had not experienced in a while: “Peace.”
The yachts had sailed about fifteen miles into the Canal when they were intercepted by the three gunboats.
“Everyone below decks,” the Commodore had called out after first sighting the three boats heading for him. “Except the women. Keep it quiet down there. Not a word.”
The patrol boats were of South African manufacture. Large and swift-looking, they carried powerful rocket launchers and.60-caliber machine guns. As the first one pulled alongside the Commodore’s lead boat, he saw the decks were crowded with Arab soldiers, armed with Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles. Each man was wearing a distinctive white uniform, with gaudy gold trim, and a Soviet-style helmet. Each had a patch on his left arm: a triangle containing a field of red and a design of two interlocking Arabic letters.
The Commodore recognized the emblem immediately. It was the coat of arms for Lucifer’s Legion.
“At last,” the Commodore thought, fingering the .357 Magnum he had hidden in his smock. “No more dealing with surrogates and stand-ins. Now we meet the Devil’s men themselves.”
“Prepare to be boarded,” the Caucasian officer on the patrol boat called over to the Commodore in a heavily accented English. The Commodore knew that the man, like the patrol boat, came from South Africa.
The Commodore had cut all his engines at this point and, standing on the deck with the two nuns, raised his hand in a sign of peace. He called out, “You may board my ship, but leave your weapons behind. This is an instrument of peace.”
The patrol boat commander ignored the Commodore’s request and six of his men jumped onto the yacht, their AK-47s at the ready. Next the commander himself came aboard.
“You are in a restricted military zone,” he said to the Commodore. “We could have sunk you on sight.”
“We are on a mission of peace, sir,” the Commodore told him with a straight face. “The sisters and I are sailing to the south to meet with this man Lucifer, to urge him not to make war.”
The patrol commander laughed. Meanwhile, his other two boats had taken up positions on either side of the small fleet of yachts. Their guns were manned and ready.
“I don’t think you can change his mind,” the patrol boat commander told the Italian.
“With prayer, my son, all things are possible,” the Commodore intoned. “Please, let us through. We have traveled the entire Mediterranean to come to this place. We have taken up collections all along the way from people who want peace.”
“Collections?” the patrol boat commander asked.
“Yes, sir,” the Commodore answered. “For we heard that there are tributes to be paid — perhaps to someone like yourself — to pass through here, sir. A tariff of free passage, so to speak.”
In other words, a bribe.
The Commodore motioned to one of the “nuns,” who came forward with a small burlap bag. “Do we turn these collections over to you, sir?”
The patrol boat commander looked inside the bag, saw it was filled with gold, and didn’t hesitate. “Yes, that is true,” he said. “You may give me such a payment.”
At the same time he motioned all his soldiers back onto the patrol boat, with a look that said: this never happened.