‘From the eruptions in the nineteenth century,’ Lucy observed as she knelt down to pick up one of the thick chunks of old magma.
‘I thought that there would be some kind of altar or place of worship during the sacrifices,’ Ethan said as he looked around the empty plateau.
‘Too far from their homeland, perhaps, or they just wanted to keep this location secret from grave robbers and the conquistadores,’ Lucy replied as she glanced back down to where Lopez, Jarvis and his men were following them up to the plateau. She looked back down at the snow. ‘This snowfall beneath our feet may be hundreds of years old. We need to clear it to see if there’s anything below — it could be what’s concealed these tombs for so long.’
Ethan shrugged off the rucksack he had carried up the mountain and pulled from within it a folding shovel, Lucy mirroring his actions as together they began breaking the frozen snow into chunks and shovelling it away from the plateau. Several inches thick, the work was hard in the thin air and Ethan found himself repeatedly going for more oxygen from his supply as he worked.
Jarvis and his men joined them on the plateau along with the huaqueros, and while Jarvis watched Lopez, the two escorts and the huaqueros all unpacked their shovels and began helping clear the snow and ice from the plateau. Lucy directed them as they dug down and the shovels hit the raw earth and rock of the mountainside, gradually exposing more of the surface of the plateau.
‘Hold there,’ Lucy said as she made her way to the centre of the dig.
Ethan stood upright and sucked in deep breaths of the meagre air as he let his shovel drop by his side, exhausted. He could see that Lopez, Jarvis’s agents and even the huaqueros were equally tired by the hard labour at such high altitude. Lucy moved to the centre of the plateau and knelt down as she examined the earth. Frosted with ice, Ethan realized that the surface was probably unchanged since the first snows had fallen on the burial site hundreds of years before, frozen solid for all eternity.
‘Here,’ Lucy pointed at what to Ethan looked like a perfectly normal piece of earth.
He moved alongside Lucy and knelt down to see that the rocks and soil were rutted and pitted unlike the smooth, free-flowing slopes of the volcano further down where countless eruptions had produced aged lava flows of basalt rock.
‘We must dig carefully,’ Lucy said. ‘If they’re in here, they won’t be far down. All the remains found previously were within a couple of yards of the surface.’
‘Just a couple of yards from the surface of permafrost entombed rock,’ Lopez uttered. ‘And there was I thinking this was going to be hard work.’
Getting onto their knees, Ethan and the remaining members of the team formed a circle around the spot Lucy had indicated and began digging down, using their shovels as trowels in order to scrape the unyielding soil away. The first few inches were unbearably hard, frozen solid, but then they began to reach slightly softer material beneath. They dug deeper and faster until Lucy’s voice rang out above the buffeting gale.
‘Hold there.’
Lucy pointed to a small piece of fabric fluttering in the wind that was poking out of the ancient soil. The group seemed to close in around her for a better look as Lucy used her trowel to pull away soil from around the fragment. Longer than it had at first seemed, Ethan watched in fascination as she worked carefully and began exposing a tightly wrapped bundle of fabric that seem to get larger before his eyes. Lucy finally threw her trowel aside and used her hands to scrape chunks of soil away from the remains.
Driven by her enthusiasm the rest of the team began likewise lifting chunks of soil out of the grave and tossing it across the pure white snow around them until Ethan could see the outline of a small body beneath the thick fabric. Despite the covering, he could see the shape of narrow legs pulled up under a chin and arms wrapped around them, the entire body concealed beneath swathes of patterned fabric and surrounded by a small ring of pottery, everything frozen absolutely solid as it had been for centuries.
‘Is this it?’ Lopez asked. ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’
Lucy looked down at the remains, and in the bright sunlight that was beaming down into the ancient tomb Ethan spotted at the same time she did a quipu hanging around the neck of the ancient mummy along with a necklace of solid gold.
‘This is it,’ Lucy said without a shadow of doubt. ‘This is the one.’
It was a Russian voice that replied to her.
‘And we will take it from here.’
Ethan looked up in surprise to see a dozen armed men emerge from just below the plateau, there rifles trained on Ethan and the team as they advanced upon their position. At their head was a determined looking old man, his cold grey eyes blazing with hatred.
‘Yuri Polkov,’ Lucy snapped as she recognised him.
The old man’s features fractured like a glacier into a broad grin.
‘We meet at last,’ he uttered, his voice as brittle as thin ice. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this moment.’
XXXVI
Ethan walked alongside Lopez with his hands behind his head as they were marched down the mountainside. Behind them, a Eurocopter AS350 hired by Yuri Polkov’s team hovered above the mountain slopes, its rotors kicking up whirling clouds of snow as Yuri’s men loaded the mummy aboard. Specially designed for high-altitude operations, the helicopter was one of only a handful of rotary craft able to reach the summit of the volcano.
Ethan watched from the corner of his eye as the helicopter lifted off with its valuable cargo and swung past them through the bright blue sky as it began descending away toward the east. Ethan saw the eastern horizon brooding with dark grey clouds marching their way west, the towering cumulus flaring bright white at their peaks just like the mountains around them.
The Russians had deployed twenty men to the mountaintop after they had captured Ethan and the team, and they had wasted no time in completing the excavation of the tomb that Lucy had found. Yuri had taken great delight in thanking Lucy for finding the mummy for him, regaling her with tales of his own ingenuity.
‘The wonders of modern technology,’ he explained as they trudged down the hillside. ‘Thermal imaging cameras. They’re mostly used at night, but here against these frozen mountains it was so easy to watch you and your team ascend to the plateau. And my little drones, flown by Sergei, kept watch as we followed far behind.’
Ethan had seen the disgust on Lucy’s face.
‘You think you’re clever, but you have no idea what you’re doing.’
‘I am very well aware of what I’m doing,’ Yuri replied with a wave of one gloved hand, in which he held a Glock pistol. ‘I am preserving these remains that you found for the benefit of generations to come, for the right price of course, and for the exposure of all the world’s religions for what they truly are — the darkness, the lies.’
‘You’re selling something that doesn’t belong to you and you’re taking lives while you do it.’
Yuri pulled a face as though he were genuinely insulted by the accusation. ‘Come now, Lucy. My son gave you every opportunity to help me back in Chicago but you chose to brush him off. He warned that you would regret it, and now clearly you do. There is nobody to blame here but yourself.’
Ethan looked down the mountain to where in the distance the flashing blades of the Eurocopter had swung around and it was gently lowering its cargo down onto another windswept plateau far below the snow line. Ridges of long-cold magma hid whatever was down there, but he assumed that the Russians had established a base camp before embarking on their intercept mission. This far out into the wilderness he could expect no help from any other quarter unless Jarvis was able to call in support somehow. The Russians had no idea who he was, probably assuming him to be a scientist or similar, and Jarvis had remained silent since the Russians had arrived.