Killer Thrillers Box Set: 3 Techno-Thriller, Action/Adventure Science Fiction Thrillers (16 page)

He had left half the men to stand guard outside, establishing a perimeter around the base of the giant structure. Even though there was only one entrance, he didn’t want to take any chances. He’d split his remaining men again — ten with him, and ten spread out throughout the passages inside. If anyone so much as heard a squeak — from inside the pyramid or otherwise — he was to be alerted immediately. He’d also given a kill-on-sight order for any unauthorized personnel inside. Madu was certain that anyone — friend or foe — who dared enter or exit the pyramid would have to answer to him and his men.

Jabari continued down the Descending Passage. Behind him, his men moved like robotic clones, mutely following their leader downward. They made no pretense of stealth, their weapons and gear clanging and rattling around, and their boots and helmets scraping and banging the rock as they went.
 

Madu stepped into the small antechamber leading into the Lower Room. Seeing no trace of any people, he started to second-guess his decision to come this way.
If there was anyone down here,
he thought,
we would see or hear them by now.
Maybe his instincts had failed him, and the enemy was already returning down the
Ascending
Passage behind him.
 

As his men came in behind him, Madu quickly scanned the entire room.
 

Nothing.
 

He walked in a circle around the room, checking every wall. Then, he turned and looked toward the “well” in the center, the shallow shaft filled with thousands of years of debris and dust. He had seen it countless times, on trips here as a child, and a few times as an adult. Nothing out of the ordinary. The rounded shaft carved vertically into the rock, the smooth walls without hand or footholds. About eight feet down, the dim light couldn’t penetrate any further, and the well became a seemingly bottomless pit. Madu knew better though — the well was barely deeper than the eight feet he could see. He did not need to shine a light into the shaft to know that it was empty. Taking a quick glance to ensure no one was hiding there, he eliminated the well as a possibility.

Madu had two immediate objectives: extract Vilocek and his men safely, and second, overwhelm the intruders, drag them outside the pyramid, and kill them as they had killed the guards — slowly and painfully.

He looked forward to it. As a politician, he knew exactly how to dodge the media outcry denouncing his vengeance, and he also knew how to use the guards’ deaths to fan certain political flames that interested him. Even now, his men outside would already be taking pictures and preparing stories that he would later feed to the press. He grinned slightly as he thought of how well his “rescue” here would further his career.

His sergeant suddenly interrupted his thoughts with a shout.
 

“Commander! The men have found something in the pit!”

 
How could that be?
He had just looked in the shaft and knew it to be empty.

Madu moved over to the well and looked in.

He expected it to be, as it always had been, filled almost to the top with random rocks and debris.
 

But not this time.
 

The well was empty.
 

Instead of the usual solid floor of debris eight or nine feet down, the perfectly formed circular rock sides continued straight down for at least a hundred feet. Even combined, the beams from his team’s lights weren’t powerful enough to light the well to the unknown depths at its
real
bottom — now somewhere far below where they stood.
 

“Impossible…“ Madu couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but there was no denying that the well, which had for millennia been completely filled in — was now empty. One of the men snapped a glow stick and threw it in; its green luminescence easily visible against the stark black shaft. The stick fell a long time before it simply disappeared from their view without a sound.
 

Madu was stunned. He didn’t know of any projects underway at the Great Pyramid, and certainly nothing so ambitious as clearing the well of debris. Whoever had emptied the well had done it in record time. There was no place to put the rubble, much less any time to move it without anyone noticing.

He had no idea how he was going to search for the intruders now. He could scour the remainder of the pyramid, but by now the rest of his team had likely checked all of the known chambers and passages, including the small ventilation shafts leading outward from the pyramid’s center. Since he had not yet heard otherwise, he assumed they had found nothing out of the ordinary.
 

They had to search the well if Madu was going to declare the mission complete. But without proper climbing equipment — or even just a good rope long enough to get them all the down the shaft — there was no way to know for sure if anyone had escaped that way.

“Hafsa, Gahiji, remain here,” Madu ordered. “Guard the shaft; the rest of you––come with me.”

There
must
be another way down
. Desperate, he strode toward the passage on the South wall. He knew that at the end of this hallway would be a —
 

It couldn’t be.
Five feet from the end of the South hallway, he noticed something different. There was a square hole in the wall about 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide. It was easily large enough to fit a man, though they would have to crawl. Still, it was much larger than the numerous ventilation shafts throughout the rest of the pyramid. This was something different. Until today, this hole simply
hadn’t been here
.

But because this shaft was horizontal, they didn’t need extra gear to explore it. Jabari sent two of his men into the shaft, then he and the remaining six men followed. The small passage almost immediately turned at a right angle straight down. Unlike the well-shaped circular shaft of the well, this section had hand and foot holds carved out of the rock, allowing the team to get down with little trouble.

They descended with a purpose, quickening their pace. Madu felt much more comfortable descending this new passage, as it was meant for human use. The rungs were spaced about every foot and a half, and were carved about four inches into the stone, providing a solid hold at each step.

Madu estimated that they had climbed straight down for about 30 feet when heard the first man in the line reach the floor. Madu could see that the man was standing on a large, flat rock; but he also saw that the shaft continued through another hole in the wall at a shallow angle. It seemed that it was doubling back in the direction of the Lower Room. From here, they would have to crawl again on their hands and knees.
 
The first man in line hesitated for a moment, caught his breath, and disappeared into the new tunnel. Madu’s mind was racing, trying to analyze potential threats as he came to grips with the immensity of their discovery.

A new passageway in the Great Pyramid of Giza; one that had lay undisturbed and unknown for centuries. How had it simply “appeared” in the Lower Room? And the well shaft — how had it miraculously been excavated, within what seemed like the span of only a few hours?

CHAPTER 24

9:13 PM - GIZA, EGYPT

They had been running for almost an hour. The sheer size of the tunnel system they were in was daunting. Vilocek himself was getting tired, something he was not used to.

He had been trained by the most elite martial artists around the world — not for fighting, but for forming his body into the best shape possible. He had studied with Tibetan monks to gain control of his mind and consciousness, which had helped him develop an extremely keen sense of awareness, attitude, and edge.
 

A certified genius, he had excelled as a child, spending most of his grade school years traveling the world with his father. Dr. Enko Vilocek had stressed to his son the value of not being tied to one place, and consequently young Tanning made few friends or girlfriends growing up, choosing instead to spend his time studying chemistry and physics with his father. He was fluent in English, Spanish, Russian, German, French, and Japanese, but understood most spoken languages without trouble. Vilocek was an exceptional example of what the human mind was capable of, and his most coveted goal in life and business was to find a missing link between the mind and the body.
 

For Tanning, most of the people he had met who’d had impressive IQs — his father included — were seriously lacking in the “brawn” department. Not just a cliché, Tanning had found that for some reason, most of his subjects who displayed high test results had a harder time becoming more physically fit than their lower-IQ counterparts.
 

This dilemma troubled him. He had spent countless years of his life developing the habits, tactics, and regimens that would keep his body operating most efficiently, but he had never had trouble doing geometric proofs or understanding complex chemical conversions. Why were the intelligent people more prone to weakness — and why did the bodybuilders of the world typically get the proverbial short end of the stick?

Vilocek thought that the crystal had the answer. The rock his father had shown him so many years ago pulled at Tanning; it seemed to beg him to understand its powers. Father and son had experimented with the rock — first on small mammals and then humans — and most of the test results had been nothing short of miraculous. From aiding the adoption of new languages to somehow providing extra motivation to weightlifters during workouts, the crystal seemed to invoke magical properties that no one understood.
 

Upon his father’s death, Tanning Vilocek dedicated his life to understanding the crystal; he built one of the most impressive research firms in America and hired the most intelligent — and discreet — minds the world had to offer. It wasn’t long before the results poured out — first strides in mental and physical aptitude, then results that proved to be a bit more… paranormal.
 

His firm had already begun weaponizing the crystal — using it to cause paralysis and other effects, and because of those results, his firm had a promising future as the world’s foremost provider of advanced weapons technology.

But for Vilocek, it wasn’t enough. The same problem that had nagged at him since childhood antagonized him now. He
knew
the answer lay in the crystal. He
knew
there was a way to jolt the brain’s receptors into action — creating neural connections that would enhance the human body’s ability to grow, heal, and understand the world around it.
 

He just needed more of the crystal.
 

He was close now; he could feel it. The rock in his pocket — a mere synthetic copy of the original — hadn’t stopped glowing since they’d entered the tunnel. Every fifty feet or so, he would hold the stone up to the walls around him, and the hieroglyphic symbols would appear before his eyes, each one reminiscent of invisible ink, only seen near the presence of the stone. He had no idea what they meant, but the fact that they were
only
visible when the crystal was near was enough for Tanning. No one but the original builders had ever seen this passage, and no one since then had ever spoken of blue lights in the Pyramid of Giza. Vilocek knew he had found the answer to his problem.
 

CHAPTER 25

9:27 PM - GIZA, EGYPT

Karn knew Vilocek was lost in his own thoughts. He’d worked for Dr. Vilocek for fourteen years, the past seven of which he’d spent as Vilocorp’s head of security and Tanning’s right-hand man. He was tasked with protecting the man, so he traveled wherever and whenever his boss did. As a result, he had come to know Tanning pretty well, and understood his nuances and quirks better than anyone.
 

Even now, when Karn himself was beginning to get excited, he knew Vilocek was only getting angrier. Although they were just steps away from discovering secrets the Pyramid of Giza had concealed for countless centuries, the novelty was lost on Vilocek.

Karn knew Vilocek’s initial reactions to the discovery of the passageway were like anyone else’s — joy, excitement, amazement. But those feelings would have been replaced almost immediately by resentment, anger, and impatience. Karn had worked with the man long enough to know that he would resent the fact that the answers he sought, though closer than ever, were still just out of reach. Vilocek would be angry and impatient at the need to spend more of his precious time to end the search once and for all. Karn didn’t get it — he liked his boss, but his impatience and lack of appreciation for the simple things in life still were beyond belief.

And since Vilocek was more interested in finishing this race than paying attention to where they were going, Karn had to maintain situational awareness for him, to prevent them all from running headlong off a cliff.
 

Karn had a small field notebook, where he had been scribbling hasty notes and sketches of their progress. So far, they had been running through a curved passageway. He knew they were constantly curving to the left and getting deeper with each footfall, but without a GPS device or a depth-tracking device, he had no precise idea how far or how deep they had gone.