Age of Heroes (2 page)

He and Kadeer arrived at the mouth of the cleft splitting the face of the rocky escarpment that loomed above the campsite. Within lay a snaking, broad-bottomed valley, which had once housed an ancient town. The remains of habitation were to be seen all around, in the worn, sun-bleached timbers protruding from drifts of sand in irregular rows like the bones of dinosaurs.

This place, whose name was long forgotten, had once been a stopover on the northern branch of the Silk Road. Sheltered in its valley, it had thrived as a staging post and watering hole for merchants and their caravan trains as they crossed the Taklamakan Desert, the most inhospitable and treacherous leg of the journey.

Then, like so many other pockets of civilisation in this arid wilderness, the town had died. Who knew why? Perhaps the subterranean aquifer that fed its cisterns had dried up. Perhaps an unusually severe sandstorm had engulfed the valley. Perhaps the Silk Road itself, its route altered by the Taklamakan’s eternally shifting dunes, had veered away, taking with it the passing trade the town relied on. This desert was not somewhere man was supposed to live. It had proved that time and time again, if the ruins of countless other towns which littered the landscape were anything to go by.
Taklamakan
, in the local dialect, meant “Once you’re trapped, there’s no escape.” The desert was also popularly known by the nickname the Sea of Death.

Badenhorst and Kadeer entered a large chamber hewn out of the valley’s side. This would have served as the town’s meeting hall, or marketplace, or possibly temple. Badenhorst didn’t know its original function and frankly didn’t give a shit. What was he, an archaeologist? The chamber was big and centrally positioned – that much he did know – and it had no doubt been important to the townsfolk. Even so, it was little more than a rough-floored manmade cave that could have held fifty people at best, with everyone standing.

Currently it was occupied by Badenhorst’s workforce, which consisted of a dozen men. Like Kadeer, they were all of them Uyghurs, a Turkic minority principally found here in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, its people having colonised the Tarim Basin during the tenth century. They were gathered around something on the floor, and their voices were raised in a babble of consternation.

At a command from Kadeer, they parted ranks, and what Badenhorst saw lying at their feet set his heart plummeting. He had pretty much suspected that this was what he would find; the blood on Kadeer’s shirt had been a clue. That didn’t make it any less dismaying.

A body.

The man, sprawled on his back, had a round, ragged hole in his torso. Something solid, with the diameter of a drainpipe, had punched into his chest. Within the gory cavity, Badenhorst glimpsed the shattered end of a rib and the glistening fascia of some internal organ. He had seen worse sights in his life, but still he had to fight down nausea.

“
Fokken
hell,” he said under his breath.

Already he was making mental calculations. This was going to cost money. There would be compensation for the dead man’s family. There would also be a salary hike for the remaining labourers. From past experience, Badenhorst knew they would not go back to work without some form of incentive. The question was how much? How much would they hold out for? How much palm greasing would be required to get the whole show running smoothly again?

Cash flow wasn’t a problem in itself. Badenhorst’s employer had astonishingly deep pockets. “Money,” Badenhorst had been told more than once, “is no object. Getting the job done, that’s all that matters. Whatever it takes. Whatever the price. Blank cheque.”

What Badenhorst found galling, though, was being held to ransom, being blackmailed by a bunch of unskilled shovel-jockeys. They were already being paid well. Accidents happened. It was only to be expected. Poking around in ancient, long-lost ruins was a hazardous occupation. They had known that when signing up. They should just grow a pair and carry on.

“How did he get this?” Badenhorst said, pointing to the hole in the dead man’s chest. “Did he slip and fall onto a sharp rock or something?”

Kadeer looked nonplussed. “Big hurt. He cry out. Men take him here. I try to help him. Stop blood. Too late. He dead already.”

Badenhorst simplified. “Yes, but how did he die? What happened?”

Kadeer understood. “This way. I show. Is good thing.”

“You mean bad, surely.”

“No, sir. Yes, bad,” Kadeer said, with a nod at the corpse. “Bad thing for Abdulkerim. But also good thing. For us.”

Kadeer set off, and Badenhorst, intrigued – and now just a bit excited – followed.

B
EYOND THE CHAMBER
, through a narrow exit in the rear wall, lay two tunnels. One of them led to the town’s cisterns, now just a row of empty hollows gouged out of the sheer rock. The other, branching off from the first, had until recently been blocked by a cave-in. Or so it appeared. Badenhorst had overseen enough of these difficult retrievals that he knew not to take anything at face value. While it looked as though the tunnel ceiling had collapsed due to natural causes, there was every chance it had been brought down deliberately. He was dealing with a devious, tricky mind, after all, the mind of someone who had devoted decades of his life to stashing valuable artefacts in far-flung locations around the world in such a way that nobody would stumble across them by chance, or be able to unearth them without considerable expenditure and sacrifice.

The blockage, at any rate, had been no match for a few pounds of mining explosive. But what lay on the other side was a sequence of obstacles, each more obstructive and challenging than the last.

There had been doors. The first was made of a single slab of granite so thick and hard that a jackhammer barely made a dent in it, and only by drilling dozens of holes and packing each with a shaped charge was Badenhorst able to reduce it to rubble.

The second boasted a complex locking mechanism and had pictograms carved into its surface. The images constituted a cryptic code, the solution to which might enable the decipherer to open the door by rotating the concentric stone rings in the middle to the correct configuration, rather like tumblers on a safe.

Having been confronted with a number of similar devices before over the past two years, however, Badenhorst knew better than to attempt to crack the code. It was a hoax, a swindle. Setting the rings in any permutation would spring a trap of some sort. He resorted to explosives again, accepting that the upshot was going to be some new deterrent. In this instance, no sooner was the door breached than ancient gearing groaned into life and huge quantities of sand began to pour from reservoirs embedded above the tunnel, both on this side of the door and beyond, filling it to the ceiling. The unwary explorer might have been swamped and suffocated, but Badenhorst had taken the precaution of detonating the charges remotely by radio signal.

After that it was down to manpower. The labourers cleared the sand away bucketload by bucketload, over the course of a week, until they revealed a third door lying some ten metres along from the second.

It was while excavating the last of the sand from in front of this door that Abdulkerim had met his grisly fate. And Badenhorst could see why.

There was a hole dead centre in the door, of the same diameter as the hole in Abdulkerim. Lying on the floor nearby was a cylindrical chunk of stone, roughly half a metre long. It would have fit snugly and precisely into the aperture in the door, like a plug. One end of it was spattered with blood.

Badenhorst squatted onto his haunches and, with great care, examined both cylinder and hole. Kadeer waited patiently beside him. The portable halogen lamps illuminating the tunnel buzzed softly.

Within the hole, Badenhorst could make out a kind of spring-loaded propulsion system, an elaborate ratcheted catapult that had launched the cylinder outward at high velocity, making it a lethal short-range projectile. A last-ditch attempt to dissuade intruders from venturing any further. Abdulkerim must have inadvertently tripped some switch or trigger... Yes. Down at floor-level, in the door’s base. A protruding knob of stone. Badenhorst tested it tentatively with the toe of his boot, making sure beforehand that neither he nor Kadeer was in the line of fire, just in case there was another missile secreted within the door.

There wasn’t. But the knob gave under the least pressure, nudging inward. All Abdulkerim would have had to do was touch it with his shovel – which now lay on the ground, blade end first towards the knob – and
blam!
Instant death by blunt force trauma.

“
Ag sies, man
,” Badenhorst muttered. “Poor bastard.” It was the closest he would get to a eulogy for the Uyghur labourer.

“Look, sir.” Kadeer indicated the hole. “You see? Inside?”

“I’ve seen. It’s a hell of a
blerrie
contraption, all right.”

“Inside.
Inside
. You look.”

Badenhorst put his eye to the hole again, as urged. Kadeer didn’t mean inside the door; he meant
through
it, to the chamber beyond. Badenhorst had been so preoccupied with fathoming the workings of the trap, he had neglected to consider anything else.
Is good thing
, Kadeer had said.

Of course.

It was only a glint in the darkness. Metal reflecting the light outside. An outline of something gleaming – and sharp.

But it was enough.

Badenhorst had been doing this job for two years: hunting down specific artefacts in isolated and often all-but-inaccessible regions, a dozen of them all told. Two years of his life spent chasing down treasures and piercing the layered defensive measures protecting each one. Two years of travel, preparation, recruitment, discomfort, toil, supervision, setback, slow progress and hard-won success.

Every time, at the moment of final discovery, when the object of his search stood revealed, it was worth it. Every time, he felt like Howard Carter peering through the chink into Tutankhamun’s tomb and glimpsing the “wonderful things” within. The exhilaration, however brief, was a fair reward for the days of stress, demand and frustration preceding it. For a few precious seconds, Badenhorst forgot he was helping to lay the groundwork for a string of murders, and could almost believe that he was doing something good instead.

L
ATER, IN HIS
tent, he fired up the satphone and rang his employer. Early morning, China Standard Time, meant it was late the previous evening for the recipient of the call, but Badenhorst had been told never to worry about the hour. Day, night, whenever, he should get in touch as soon as each artefact was found, without delay.

His employer picked up after eight rings.

“Badenhorst. Speak.”

The words were fragmented, rumbly, as though bubbling up from deep underwater. The satellite relay might have been partly responsible for that, scrambling the signal as it bounced through low Earth orbit and adding a scrim of static, but Badenhorst was pretty certain that some kind of voice changer software package was in play as well. The distortion was the same wherever he was in the world. It seemed intended to disguise everything about the voice’s owner – their age, gender, accent, class – leaving him with absolutely no pointers towards their identity.

That was perhaps the weirdest aspect of the entire undertaking. Badenhorst had no idea who he was working for. Not the faintest clue. His employer had remained anonymous throughout, from the initial exploratory email sent to him from a secure mailer, enquiring whether Badenhorst would be interested in a job so lucrative it would allow him to retire and spend the rest of his life in luxury, to the regular financial transfers he received from a numbered offshore bank account to cover ongoing expenses and fund the project. Every step of the way, Badenhorst had been walking blind, led along by an unknown benefactor. For a man like him, who trusted no one but himself, it had been quite a leap of faith to accept the job offer, no questions asked. Had the payday not been so mouth-wateringly tantalising – twenty million dollars cash, waiting for him in a bank vault on Grand Cayman – he might have baulked.

“We have it, boss,” he said.

A pause, a blip of delay. Then his employer said, “Excellent. You’re holding it in your hands right now?”

“Not quite. Not as such. But it’s only a matter of time. Today, this afternoon at the latest, we’ll have extricated it.”

“Then isn’t this conversation a little premature?”

Badenhorst swatted away a fly that had come to suckle on a bead of sweat on his forehead. “Getting the artefact is a formality now. We’ve jumped all of the hurdles. My men are wiring up explosives even as we speak, to crack the final door. Then it’ll be done and dusted.”

“Don’t get overconfident,” said his employer. “You can’t be sure there isn’t a last little surprise waiting for you. Sneaky bastard, the man behind all this. He really didn’t want the things to be found, and made sure anyone who tried would be punished.”

“We have been punished. Lost another labourer this morning.”

“How many does that make it in all?”

“Five. He’s the fifth casualty. Not counting the wounded, that is. The fifth death.”

From the other end of the line came what sounded like a sigh, although it could just have been noise on the line. “Tragic but unavoidable.”

“Omelette, breaking eggs,” said Badenhorst with practised nonchalance. “Can’t get too worked up over some coolie mongrel,
nè
?”

“Your pragmatism does you credit.”

Badenhorst couldn’t decide if he was being mocked or not; the distortion on the voice masked nuances of tone. He chose to believe that he had just been complimented. There were good reasons for not getting testy with his employer. Twenty million of them, in fact.

“So we’re almost finished, eh, boss?” he said. “Eleven artefacts recovered, one to go.”

“I’m well aware of that.”

“Just making the point that everything’s on track, going nice and
lekker
. Where to next? Russia, am I right? That’s where artefact number twelve is.”