The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (20 page)

No Regrets

T
he gray crate that was Maddog Maguire’s plane was dwarfed by massive clouds in the nighttime sky. Not only had Maddog been game to fly his little party to the valley in Ningxia Province, China, where Alex had first uncovered the tomb of Er Shi Huangdi, the pilot seemed so relieved to see them alive—and able to pay him the balance of what was owed him—he might well have flown them to the moon and back.

From the extra space available in the otherwise cramped cabin, now that Jonathan’s friend Geraldine the yak had moved on with her life, the party was able to—one or two at a time—make certain preparations for the warmer climate, including making changes of clothes. Only Zi Yuan had dressed for the trip before leaving her cavern dwelling—she was now in a flowing olive skirt, gold silk blouse and purple brocade vest, all subdued colors but for a splash of purple sash, attire she described as “battle ready.”

The rest of the O’Connell party had left some of their baggage and clothing aboard the plane, in anticipation of another possible leg to the journey. Jonathan merely abandoned his heavy parka and announced himself ready (“if not entirely willing and able”), while Evy had gotten into a full-skirted brown dress over which she now wore a brown leather jacket with matching gloves, looking elegantly prepared for adventure.

Rick O’Connell, like Zi Yuan, was prepping for battle—light brown chinos, a blue-gray long-sleeve shirt (rolled halfway up the forearms) and a brown vest-style shoulder sling for his twin .45 revolvers. Alex, also in a long-sleeve shirt and chinos, had a brown leather coat on and both men were gloved.

The father had already opened up his weathered case of weaponry, filled with its mishmash of handguns, shotguns, an M3 submachine gun (the ever-popular “grease gun”) and of course his prize tommy gun, which had jammed on him back at the colonnade. Alex was getting into a suitcase that brimmed with showroom-worthy Russian PPS 43s, the submachine gun Alex had sworn by and used so effectively in the recent struggle with General Yang’s mercenary soldiers.

“You mind,” O’Connell asked his son, “if I try out a couple of those?”

Alex glanced at his dad, and both men grinned—a divide had been crossed. They had finally bonded, even if it had been over submachine guns.

Their pilot called back to them over his engine roar: “Look, three-o’clock port! The boys back home’ll never believe this yarn!”

O’Connell and Alex made it to the nearest port-side window and could see, thousands of feet below, catching the oranges and reds of dawn, the three-headed creature that Er Shi Huangdi had become, flapping its huge wings, heading east. Barely visible in a back claw of the beast was its unwilling passenger, Lin.

Alex stared at his love, far below, and fading. His father gripped his shoulders and squeezed. The two exchanged glances but no words were said. None were necessary.

Maguire’s plane banked away, making a quick exit after delivering O’Connell, Evy, Alex and Zi Yuan to a designated drop point in the desolate valley, not far from the site the younger O’Connell had worked, seeking Er Shi Huangdi’s tomb. Jonathan stayed on board with Maguire, as per plans O’Connell had put in motion. In fact, it was already time to check in with Jonathan.

O’Connell knelt and clicked on his shortwave. “Any sign of our flying friend?”

Jonathan’s voice came back over the radio: “Negative. You better get a move on, though, if you’re going to beat him to that tomb.”

“Just do what I told you to,” O’Connell reminded his brother-in-law, and clicked off.

The little party began to walk, four abreast. The morning was cool, but compared to the Himalayas, seemed damned near subtropical.

Alex, at his father’s side, said, “Dad, I know we’re good—no question otherwise. But the Emperor will have thousands of warriors, once he wakes ’em up.”

But it was Zi Yuan who answered: “His terra-cotta army will not be indestructible.”

Evy said, “Well, that’s comforting.”

Zi Yuan continued: “That is, not until they have crossed the Great Wall.”

Frowning, Evy asked, “Meaning no disrespect, might I ask how exactly the four of us are going to fend these ‘thousands of warriors’ off?”

“When the emperor built the Great Wall,” the serene sorceress said, “he buried his enemies underneath, cursing their souls to hold it up for him, for all eternity.”

Alex said, “Tough boss.”

Evy was ahead of her son, if not her husband. She asked the woman, “You know how to raise them from the dead, don’t you?”

Expressionless, Zi Yuan said, “There is a Foundation Chamber with an altar dedicated to the five elements.”

O’Connell said, “The elements Er Shi Huangdi controls.”

“Yes. From this chamber, with those powers, the Emperor enslaved those souls, locking them in, so to speak. Most were captured soldiers who were then turned into slave workers. I will
un
lock them, using that same altar. And I will call them to battle, one last time . . .”

O’Connell was nodding. “Unlock that altar, raise an army. Sounds like a plan.”

His wife glanced at him. “An army of the dead,” she reminded him.

“Right. Zombies. But
good-guy
zombies . . . on
our
side. That’s the kind of living dead I can get behind.”

Alex, walking along, was thinking how casually his father was taking all this. Of course, no one on earth had dealt with as many reanimated dead people as his old man, so he guessed he could understand it.

But Alex had not been at this long enough to be nonchalant, and until the two-thousand-year-old young woman he loved was freed from these literally evil clutches, he was unlikely to be.

The wasteland where Alex O’Connell had unearthed the Emperor Mummy once again had tents near the base of the half-exposed Sphinx-like monument Er Shi Huangdi had built in honor of himself twenty centuries before. This time, however, an archaeological expedition had been replaced by the gray-uniformed soldiers of General Yang. For days these men had been training and awaiting orders, hoping to hear from the general, and from the arisen Emperor who would lead them to victory.

They did not expect to hear from Er Shi Huangdi in the manner he chose, however, specifically laying a huge blue shadow over the camp and bringing all eyes to the sky, where a giant three-headed dragon went sweeping by.

With surprising grace for such an ungainly if grotesquely magnificent creature, the dragon dropped Yang and Lin to the ground before the colossus, right in front of the gathered soldiers, who numbered nearly two hundred.

Yang straightened himself, brushed off his uniform, and—mustering as much dignity as possible for a man just dropped from a dragon’s claw—he summoned a cadre of soldiers and turned Lin over to them, saying in Mandarin,
“Guard her with your life.”

The dragon itself touched down beside the head of the colossus, like a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder. The great beast folded its wings around itself, halving its size, then the necks with the three heads wrapped themselves around the trunk of the creature, melding and condensing. The conversion was bizarre and freakish but the result was amazing.

There, standing next to his own commanding colossus, was Er Shi Huangdi, regal in his black, jade-encrusted armor, with his golden-hilted sword at his side and the dragon dagger sheathed at his waist. A vision of imperial power, he merely had to look at the assembled soldiers for them to immediately bow, awestruck.

General Yang, bowing his head as well, wore an expression rarely seen on this somber, serious, self-important man—a smiling one; but a smile touched with hysteria and greed. Though his eyes were on the scrubby ground, he was gazing into what he felt sure would be his future.

At the Emperor’s right hand, Yang would himself live like an Emperor, guiding Er Shi Huangdi in the ways of the twentieth century. And he, like the Emperor, would live forever in the pages of history, and perhaps his lord would grant him the gift of eternal life, for without Yang, Er Shi Huangdi would still be but a bronze statue encasing a terra-cotta mummy.

Then, as was their wont, the soldiers began to cheer and fire their weapons in the air, celebrating the return of the general and, especially, their emperor.

Crouched low in a ditch, Rick O’Connell watched the celebratory scene through binoculars, thinking,
That’s fine, boys—just keeping using up that ammo . . .

Next to him in the ditch were Evy and Zi Yuan, with Alex behind them, flat on his belly against a mound, using his own binoculars to see for himself.

O’Connell, after watching the situation at the colossus camp awhile, said, “Okay, Alex . . . you wait here with the shortwave, in case Jonathan and Maddog call . . .”

Alex said nothing.

His father lowered the binoculars and turned to look; Evy and Zi Yuan craned to look, as well.

But Alex was nowhere to be seen.

Evy, alarmed, said, “Where did that boy go?”

His father, however, was not alarmed; he was even smiling a little, as he again raised the binoculars to see his son scurrying across the plain, keeping low, heading toward Yang’s encampment. “Where do you think, my love? He’s gone to save the damsel.”

Then he led his little commando team, now reduced to two females (albeit remarkable ones), and they made their way toward the Great Wall, half a mile away.

Colonel Choi, missing in action since the Emperor’s escape by chariot from the Shanghai Museum, was once again at General Yang’s side. With him, she watched with keen interest as the Emperor, still up there on his own giant shoulder, withdrew his wide-bladed sword from its golden sheath.

Facing the empty landscape beyond the camp of Yang’s mercenaries, the Emperor plunged his blade into the stone, as easily as if the colossus were made of human flesh.

In a commanding voice, he shouted,
“Awake!”

That single word echoed across the plain like ungodly thunder.

And the earth began to tremble, to quake, but not to break apart at its seams, rather to collapse in a dozen places, angling down as if providing ramps into—and up out of—the underworld. A drumming rumbled from the earth, not martial music, but feet, and not human feet, but hard-baked clay, as from each ramplike hole emerged terra-cotta soldiers, moving quickly, with murderous purpose, charging up and out of the hell of their long state of suspended animation and into the light of day, and onto the field of battle.

Rick O’Connell needed no binoculars to see the swarming soldiers now. He and the two women had made it to the Great Wall.

“My God,” O’Connell said to his wife. “There must be ten
thousand
of them . . .”

“If they get past the Wall, we don’t stand a chance. The
world
doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Don’t worry—Zi Yuan will give us all a chance, if . . . where
is
she?”

They turned and the sorceress, like Alex before her, was nowhere to be seen. She, too, had a job to do, her own job, and the O’Connells did not figure in.

“Us mere mortals,” he said, “must not get to see the supersecret entrance to the Foundation Chamber.”

“I’ll forgive her,” Evy said, an automatic pistol in either delicate, gloved hand, “if she raises those zombie reinforcements before that terra-cotta army catches up with us . . .”

O’Connell knew better than to argue with his wife.

In the camp of yurt tents, one tent in particular had two guards positioned outside. They had been given strict orders that their lives depended upon guarding the young woman within. And yet they were human—seeing an army of terra-cotta soldiers march up and out of the ground had gotten their attention.

They didn’t notice one of their number, or anyway someone wearing one of their gray uniforms, walking by with his head down. Had they not been distracted, Alex might have looked suspicious to them. As it was, the first they knew anything was when an unfamiliar voice said in Mandarin,
“Sweet dreams,”
and, one by one, the men got a rifle butt jackhammered into the back of their skulls.

The guards fell, still alive, though unlikely to be for long, after their general learned they had allowed their charge to be rescued.

Because that was exactly what Alex was doing—he went into the tent, untying the wide-eyed Lin, who said, “How can you be here?”

“A dragon didn’t bring me,” he said with a grin, “but you should’ve known I wouldn’t give you up without a fight.”

Her mouth frowned but her eyes smiled. “Oh, Alex. This is a bad idea . . .”

“Oh, yeah. The worst.”

Then he kissed her, and she kissed him, and the world stopped for a thirty-second eternity, as if the reality beyond the tent was not a reanimated Emperor Mummy, a megalomaniacal general, two hundred mercenary soldiers and a thousand or two terra-cotta warriors raised from the dead.

A massive stone door rolled back and Zi Yuan stepped into the Foundation Chamber, breathing in air that bore the staleness of centuries. She moved past the astrolabe and the waterwheel and down the walkway to the great stone staircase. On the domed ceiling high above were corpses protruding in macabre bas-relief, a portion of the souls enslaved by Er Shi Huangdi to hold up his Great Wall.

The sorceress climbed the many steps to the altar with its stations representing the five elements. Once there, from her garment she withdrew the Oracle Bones she had discovered in the library at the Monastery of Turfan on the Silk Road, so very long ago.

These bones she tossed in the air with a grace and sureness of purpose, and they landed, unfolding for her to read from them, which she did.

In ancient Sanskrit she intoned the text:
“Open the gates of the past and free the souls of the wrongfully damned . . .”

On the rolling plain above, a sea of terra-cotta warriors had taken the field in lines—infantry, banner carriers, pikemen, archers, and cavalry, terra-cotta horses as well as soldiers. They marched with an efficiency that was a fascist’s dream, until they came to attention before the Emperor, high above them on the shoulder of the colossus, saying in ancient Mandarin,
“Look to me and hear my purpose! Today you awake to a world in the grip of chaos and corruption. With your allegiance, I will restore order and crush the scourge that is freedom.”