The Mummy (5 page)

Legion of Lost Men

U
ncovered by the unintentional excavation efforts of a recent sandstorm, the ruins of the temple complex at Hamanaptra poked from the sand like the sun-bleached bones of some unfortunate desert wanderer who had died of thirst. Once grand, now partly crumbled pylons proudly bore the hieroglyphic record of gods and kings; a scattering of wind-worn stone columns and partial walls remained upright, while others had been toppled by time. Stone statues with the heads of lions or rams, exquisitely carved, carelessly chipped, stood tall here, rested there, and within his open shrine, the massive jackal-headed Anubis, swimming in sand, seemed lonely for supplicants. The ruins were themselves the skeleton of a once mighty people, whose deeply held religious beliefs in modern times might seem strange and even barbaric.

And yet in a day when a telephone wire stretched from Cairo to the pyramids, and European tourists could play lawn tennis in the court of a hotel built near the base of old Cheops himself, the strange and the barbaric remained a potent presence upon these timeless sands. Just as the screams of the tortured Imhotep had echoed across Hamanaptra in that bloodstained golden age, so now did the shrill battle cries of Tuareg warriors.

Scampering about the ruins of Hamanaptra like children playing in the sand, a “flying column” of legionnaires sought position, a
Battalion de Marche
of the French Foreign Legion, two hundred men strong. Or they would have been “strong,” had they not been outnumbered ten to one by the fierce tribesmen, who—using time-honored tribal tactics—had at a safe distance followed the legionnaires, on the march, until they were too far from a fort or a supply dump to receive help.

As wily as they were ruthless, the Tuaregs had waited until the legion’s highly trained soldiers grew careless and tired from too many days under the hot Sahara sun; then the warriors emerged from behind a sand dune like a nightmarish mirage, swords and rifles waving, their long, loose robes flapping like flags as they advanced at full gallop.

The legionnaires were clumsy in their infantry-style uniforms, burdened with backpacks of spare clothing, ammo, and rations; in this climate, only the black-leather marching boots made sense. The sun-shielding swatch that hung from each man’s kepi—round cloth caps with short leather bills—were waving like white flags of surrender from the head of each scurrying soldier.

It was times like this that made a man like Richard O’Connell, formerly of Chicago, Illinois, question his career choice.

His collegiate handsomeness made rugged by intense sky-blue eyes, a leathery tan, and an unruly mop of brown hair, O’Connell—“Rick” to his friends, “Corporal” to his men—wore his kepi at a jaunty angle. Alone among the two hundred soldiers—largely riffraff from every corner of the Western world—O’Connell, in his tan coat, shoulder-holstered revolvers crisscrossing his trimly muscular frame, cut a dashing figure worthy of a recruiting poster.
Engagez-vous a la Legion Étrangère!

Right now, however, desertion might seem more in order, if self-preservation hadn’t edged it out.

The muffled thunder of hoofbeats on sand merged with the chilling war whoops of the advancing Tuareg horde as O’Connell stood atop what had once been the protective outer wall of the Hamanaptra temple complex. He had been using binoculars, but he tossed them aside.

No need for them now.

“I’ve had better days,” he said to no one, hefting his rifle—a sad example of the outdated Lebel bayonets he and his men were encumbered with.

Perhaps this would be a fitting end, not so much ironic as just. Greed had brought them here—not honor. Their colonel had found a map showing the way to the fabled Hamanaptra, and the promise of ancient riches had seized the imaginations of a garrison composed, after all, of thieves, murderers, mercenaries, and adventurers.

And now, with the dreaded Tuaregs upon them, this legendary entryway to untold treasures would serve only as a makeshift fort.

“A tactical suggestion, Corporal,” a thin, weasely voice intoned beside him.

O’Connell glanced at the voice’s thin, weasely source: Private Second Class Beni Gabor, formerly of Budapest, proof positive that not all of the legion’s rabble came from Italy, England, Norway, Russia, or Spain. Narrow of shoulder, sunken of chest, with dark, close-set eyes and a pencil-line mustache in his pasty, almond-shaped face, the resourceful little scoundrel was the closest thing to a friend O’Connell had in the legion—perhaps because there was such a limited supply of worthwhile friends from which to choose.

“About the only tactic available,” O’Connell said, eyeing the Arab warrior-flung horizon, “is hold your fire until they’re within range.”

“That’s one option,” Beni said, nodding, “yes it is. But personally, I would prefer to surrender.”

“Give me your bandoleer.”

Beni, climbing out of his cartridge belt, handed it to the corporal, saying, “Or why not just run away? There’s another option. I’ll bet these ruins are teeming with hiding places, and what do we owe the legion? Loyalty for cold biscuits and brutality?”

“These ruins are going to be teeming, all right.” O’Connell had slung on the bandoleer, which joined his own to make an “X” on his chest.

Working his voice above the swelling shouts of Tuaregs promising slaughter, and the pounding of their ponies’ hoof-beats, O’Connell said to Beni, “I’ll take your revolver, too, since it doesn’t sound like you’re going to need it.”

“Here,” Beni said, handing the weapon to the corporal, then following him close as a dog’s tail as O’Connell moved quickly along the wall. “You know what nobody tries anymore, Rick? And I bet it would work on these dumb savages: playing dead!”

Still moving, O’Connell sighed and broke open the revolver to check its ammunition. “These ‘dumb savages’ maneuvered us into this position. But go ahead, Beni, try it—of course you’ll be tortured and probably staked out in the desert to die of sunstroke.”

“It was just a suggestion.”

“How the hell d’you end up in the legion, anyway?”

Such a question was a breach of etiquette: Many legionnaires had embraced that famous
motto—“Legio Patria Nostra (The Legion is our homeland)”—
because they were wanted by the police of their former homelands. But at this moment, with the whooping Tuaregs bearing down upon them, this lapse seemed permissible.

Beni shrugged. “They’re after me in Hungary for robbing a synagogue—that’s my specialty, synagogues: Hebrew’s one of my seven languages.”

“Robbing churches.” O’Connell, sticking Beni’s revolver in his belt, shook his head. “That’s even lower than I’d expected.”

“Prime swag to be found in holy places,” Beni said in the singsong manner of a grade school teacher. “Temples, mosques, cathedrals—and who’ve they got standing guard?”

“Altar boys?”

“Exactly! How about you, Rick?” Beni continued tagging along as the corporal strode the wall to where he could examine their front line of defense, legionnaires kneeling at the ready, watching the approaching horde; Colonel Guizot pacing behind them, apparently contemplating his battle plan. “What did you do, anyway, to wind up in the legion of lost men, Rick?”

O’Connell turned to answer, but Beni was trailing along so close, they bumped into each other; the little Hungarian lost his balance, clutched at O’Connell in an attempt to regain it, and failed. Locked in Beni’s reflexive embrace, they toppled from the wall and hit the ground in a pile and a puff of sand.

“So,” Beni continued, picking himself up, offering no apology, “what’d you do, Rick? Murder somebody?”

“Not yet,” O’Connell said, narrow eyed, on his feet, brushing himself off, checking his Lebel.

“What, then? Robbery? Extortion? I know! I hear it’s the latest thing in America—kidnapping!”

“Shut up already,” O’Connell said. He strode down a sand dune within the walls of the ruins and walked out between the front pylons onto the stone ramp where, in another time, the chariots of the high priest of Osiris had rolled up to make a fateful call.

Beni frowned. “Listen, I told you my damn story! You tell me your damn story!”

The warrior horde was half a mile out, now; the roar of charging horses and screaming men would soon be deafening. O’Connell reflected, as if time were no factor, his voice soft, musical. “It was Paris, it was spring, and I was looking for a way to impress a young lady . . . and maybe I was looking for a little adventure.”

He left out the part about being drunk.

“I think you found it,” Beni said, nodding toward the front line, where Colonel Guizot had panicked.

With an eerie detachment, O’Connell and Beni watched their commanding officer cut and run.

“Congratulations,” Beni said with a smile. “You’re promoted.”

There was no horizon, now: just a blur of Tuareg warriors, shrieking, waving their long, curved swords, brandishing Lebel rifles pilfered from the bodies of slain legionnaires.

This must have been how Custer felt.

“Damn it,” O’Connell said softly, to no one but himself. Then, with as commanding a tone as he could muster, he yelled, “Steady, men! Wait till you see the whites of their eyes!”

“I can’t believe you said that,” Beni said, standing behind the corporal.

Hooves pounded the sand; screams pierced the air. The Tuaregs knew about getting into firing range, too: They were raising their rifles, taking aim . . .

“You
are
with me, right, pal?” O’Connell said, with a glance at his friend, still standing directly behind him.

“Your strength gives me strength,” Beni said, clutching his Lebel with both hands.

The Tuareg war cry now shifted into a birdlike whoop:
“Ooo-loo-loo-loo, ooo-loo-loo-loo!”

“That’s all, brother,” Beni said, backing away, and ran away so fast, his boots barely touched the sand.

O’Connell allowed himself a wry smirk, drew a deep breath, said a quick prayer, and yelled, “Steady, men! . . .
Steady . . .”

Steeling himself, rifle in his hands, but not poised to shoot, O’Connell waited, ears filled with the ghastly cries, the pounding hoofbeats, waited one more moment, then yelled,
“Fire!”

And the kneeling legionnaires fired as if one, the sound of so many rifles reporting simultaneously like an explosion, a blast of firepower that blew dozens of Tuaregs off their mounts, dead before they hit the sand, their corpses becoming instant barricades over which other horses trampled and stumbled, beasts and riders going down.

O’Connell, kneeling himself now, holding fire, thought,
Good volley!,
as the legionnaires quickly reloaded, here and there a man falling as a Tuareg bullet caught him.

And O’Connell repeated his command: “Fire!”

This time O’Connell joined the volley, the sound of which was more staggered, but again bullets yanked warriors from their steeds, and men and horses tumbled to the sand, creating chaos.

Another successful volley!
O’Connell thought, but he knew, he knew . . .

The legionnaires remained two hundred men, and two hundred men—no matter how brave, however well-trained—facing
two thousand,
were still two hundred men . . .

And the Tuaregs began firing. The noise of their weapons was not the unified thunder of the legionnaires’ two volleys, rather a rumbling, snapping, cracking, continuous hail of lead that ripped the air of the day, and the flesh of the Tuaregs’ foes; the native warriors, robes flowing, were terrible apparitions moving like the horsemen of the Apocalypse through the clouds of smoke that their own gunfire had fashioned.

At least a third of O’Connell’s men fell under this onslaught, choking on dust and blood, twisting in pain and death.

“Fire at will!”
O’Connell shouted, retreating toward the pylons of the temple complex entry.
“Seek cover!”

Shooting on the run, the legionnaires headed toward the temple, boots slowed by the sand, but their bullets finding more purchase, sending Tuaregs spinning off steeds, crashing to the sand, small victories, tiny triumphs, in a great defeat. The warriors were on them now, plowing into the legionnaires, wading into them, and the gunfire lessened as the nomads hacked and cleaved with their sharp, curved blades, and the screams that tore the air now were not war cries, but cries of agony, of death, as the blood of white infidels splashed and soaked the sands, as men who had lost their way in homelands they would never see again lost their lives in this strange place.

Within the walls of the temple complex now, where legionnaires were taking cover in the ruins, the Tuaregs on horseback were everywhere, charging through the front gates, leaping partial walls, storming through areas where the walls of Hamanaptra were just a memory. Their blades carved at the air when there was no flesh to cleave, and occasionally a warrior would fall under a legionnaire’s bullet . . .

. . . but O’Connell, still outside the walls of Hamanaptra, throwing down his empty rifle, yanking both revolvers from their shoulder holsters, knew they’d been overrun, knew this was the Alamo, and that he would never see his family again, much less his country. He was just too goddamned busy shooting Arabs off their goddamned horses to worry about it.

He’d been too busy to find cover, as well, and as he tossed away both revolvers, empty, and yanked one from behind his back and Beni’s from his belt, he got a glimpse of Beni, within the temple grounds, crawling on his belly across the sand, like the snake he was, apparently heading for the open doorway of a structure half-buried in the sand.

O’Connell, whose attention was immediately back on a pair of Tuaregs bearing down on him, did not see Beni taking time to lift a watch off the body of a dead legionnaire. Nor did he see Beni getting up and sprinting for that beckoning doorway.

But when another dozen warriors had fallen under his fire, and he was once again out of ammunition, the only legionnaires around him dead ones, O’Connell whirled, tearing ass through the front gate, looking for Beni, who was inside that temple structure now, putting all his wiry muscle behind an attempt to close its massive sandstone door.