Operation: Sahara

-Banks-

Banks took the lead all the way down to the beetle burial pit they’d seen earlier. He stopped there to look back up the trail.

There was no sign of pursuit, which was just as well. Davies was slowing the others’ descent, obviously hampered by the wound in his ankle. The private saw Banks looking higher up the cliff.

“Are they after us, Cap?”

“No. Not yet at least,” Banks replied. “Take it easy along this flat stretch. If there’s still no pursuit, we’ll take a rest at the high ledge; that’s about halfway down by my reckoning. Are you okay for that?”

Davies gave him a thumbs-up. Banks saw the pain etched on the younger man’s features, but said nothing; there was an unwritten rule among them. If one of the squad said they were okay, you believed them until proved wrong; he owed it to the men to give them the opportunity to test their limits. Davies had come through adversity before, he had to be trusted to do so again.

Banks waited until Wiggo and Wilkins had caught them up then continued along beside the charnel pit. He kept a wary eye on the cliff tops high above, but still there was no pursuit.

He began to hope.

Davies’ condition deteriorated on the steep parts of the track down towards the high ledge. At some points they were forced to stop and help the private down places he couldn’t negotiate and Banks saw there was fresh blood showing at the wounded ankle. By the time they reached the ledge Davies could hardly put any weight on that foot.

“I need to bind it again, Cap,” he said. “That, and a wee shot of morphine should see me ready for another stretch.”

While Wilkins gave Davies a hand with dressing the wound, Banks and Wiggo walked to the other end of the ledge and looked at the trail that went down the slope.

“Yon’s more of a climb than a walk,” the sergeant said.

“Aye. The lad will never make it that way. And it’s too narrow for us to be carrying him down it.”

“Do we have an alternative?”

“We do. But you’re not going to like it. We go back into the temple, back down the stairs, and out the main door the way we came in.”

“Past all them beasties? We’d never make it. We don’t have enough firepower left.”

“Not if they’re still there, I agree. But if our luck’s in, they’re all away up top feeding on the mess we left earlier.”

“Be fair, Cap. When has our luck ever been in?”

“We’ve got to chance it, for the lad’s sake if nothing else.”

“Let me go through first for a shufti then.”

“No, there’ll be no splitting up; that’s what got us into trouble in the first place. We all go through. You bring up the rear. And keep an eye on Davies. He’s a tough lad. But he’s in trouble.”

Banks was first into the narrow crevasse. It was as tight a squeeze as he remembered from the day before but the fact that he knew he’d made it through the last time made it somehow easier and it was less than a minute before he emerged at the top of the stairs high above the temple floor. The area below lay in shadow but there was no sound of the beetles’ high drone, no odor to indicate their presence. As soon as the others had come through to join him, he took to the stairs, descending slowly and quietly.

The farther down they went the more it became apparent that the temple was empty of the beasts; more than that, it was empty of all remnants of the ones the squad had left dead in their wake their last time through here. The bodies of the researchers and the Victorian squad were still laid out in rows, and if it wasn’t for the toppled and smashed idol that lay amid them, Banks might have been wondering if their last time here hadn’t been some kind of fever dream.

They reached the temple floor with no mishap. Davies’ injury was still slowing him down but he was taking the stairs with only a hint of a limp; Banks guessed the morphine might be having something to do with that.

Wilkins looked at the bodies of the researchers. Two of them were buried beneath large chunks of the fallen idol, only their legs showing.

“We can’t leave them like this,” he said.

“We can’t take them with us, and we don’t have time to bury them. Besides, if we move them, we might alert the beasts to the fact we’re here.”

“That’s ascribing a lot of intelligence to them, Cap.”

“Given what we’ve seen so far, I’m not sure I’m ascribing enough.” He looked down at the dead. “We’ll see that their families get told. That’s all we can do for them now.”

Without a look back he made for the main entranceway. With the squad at his back he stepped through and looked over the plain. He’d been right; he’d underestimated the beasts’ intelligence.

The plain was covered in a horde of the beasts in sizes from small dog to almost elephantine. Every one of them was up on their legs and all heads were turned on the entrance way, focussed on the squad.

The high drone started up out on the open area and was answered from higher up in the city by a chorus that sounded like an army on the march. On looking back through the doorway he saw the concourse beyond already filling with more of the beasts and, behind that, a darker area that resolved into a view of the house-sized thing they’d seen in the crater coming down through the city with the other beasts swarming around it as if in supplication.

They were caught in the open with no escape route.

The beetles began to advance.