Chapter Eight

As they crossed camp, an image of an earlier accident surfaced in Trummel’s mind – a worker crushed beneath several tons of stones, the casualty of a cave-in, Gosswick had assured him. Trummel had heard whispers, though. The other workers spoke of the man having triggered an ancient booby trap inside the tomb.

The laborers had stopped working and were now gathered outside the entrance in a nervous clot. They looked petrified.

Spineless goats, Trummel thought. When the dig had started, his workforce had been fifty strong. Now he had half that. A few men had somehow gotten separated from the others inside the cave and disappeared. Others had quit. Then there was the mysterious case of Corporal Aleister. He’d been mapping out the tunnel system, when he suddenly went mad with panic. He swore he’d seen a face staring at him from the darkness of a tunnel. A voice had spoken inside his head. The next day Aleister shot himself. His suicide note read, “Damned are we who enter the abyss.”

The huddle of workers dispersed as Trummel and Gosswick walked past and entered the tomb. The two turned on their electric torches and navigated a narrow passage and descended a flight of stairs. At the end of a long tunnel, they scaled a pile of rubble and stepped through a hole where rocks had been removed after a cave-in. In a chamber at the far side of the cave, two soldiers stood near puddles of blood.

Shit, not another one. Trummel felt a tightness in his stomach. “What the hell happened?”

“We don’t know,” Sergeant Vickers answered, sounding nervous.

“Tell Dr. Trummel what you told me,” Captain Gosswick ordered.

“After we broke through,” the soldier said, “we sent a worker in to explore what was in here. We’d just lost sight of him when the man started screaming. Quig and I entered and found all this.” His electric torch shone over dark splatters on the wall. Large blood droplets on the floor led to a circular opening cut in the wall.

Quig pointed to it. “He must’ve gone down that shaft.”

Trummel aimed the beam of his torch past the opening down a vertical cave tunnel, deep as a well. He couldn’t see the bottom. He sighed in frustration. It was maddening trying to manage an expedition riddled with problems – workers disappearing, archaeologists falling ill, constant delays. The guards had begun complaining that strange noises escaped from the dark corridors inside the tomb. Workers were threatening to leave because they believed this mountain was haunted. On several nights, Trummel had heard moans from the cliff’s high caves, but it was only the wind. As if it wasn’t enough to deal with superstitions and fears, the more he pressed his team to dig into this tomb, the more he risked their lives. Now Trummel had another fatality on his hands.

“Did the others see this?” he asked.

“No, we evacuated the workers before finding the blood,” said Vickers. “All they heard was the man screaming.”

“What do you think killed him?” Gosswick said.

The two soldiers shrugged.

“Probably busted his head on a rock.” Trummel pointed to a red-stained section of the tunnel where the ceiling hung low. “The blood loss caused delirium and he fell down the shaft.” That would be the official story anyway. He studied the blood spatters on the walls and the thick pool of it on the floor and knew it wasn’t true. The worker had bled too much for his injury to be a single cut.

Trummel stared hard at his soldiers. “This stays between us. Are we clear?”

Vickers and Quig nodded.

Gosswick gave orders for his soldiers to clean up the mess. When Trummel and the captain returned to the upper level, Gosswick lowered his voice. “Sir, the workers are shit-scared of this tomb. I’m concerned they’ll quit. Maybe it’s a good idea to cut our losses. We’ve found the mummy and plenty of gold—”

“We’re not quitting,” Trummel said. “Not until I’ve found what I came for. We need to work faster. How quickly can your crew dig out the next blockages?”

“Two to three days, I’m guessing.”

“You’ve got less than twenty-four hours.”

Gosswick frowned. “Sir, the men are working as fast as humanly possible.”

“Work through the night, if need be. We can’t waste another day.”