The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (17 page)

At the base of the dynamite-wired golden stupa, Jonathan had dropped to his knees, and was getting out his trusty Dunhill lighter. But when he tried to get the bloody thing to light, it was no go—not the Dunhill’s fault, Jonathan knew, rather his own trembling hands.

First to appear in the courtyard was Yang, shouting orders in Mandarin. O’Connell, from behind a side column, fired off a few quick shots at the general, whose attention was drawn that way, and with a handgun Yang returned O’Connell’s fire. At the same time, troops hustled around the general’s flanks and set up their own positions, firing and diving behind columns and steps.

Finally, Jonathan got a flame going, and was about to light the fuse when shots chewed up the snow inches from him, and he instinctively pitched the lighter and scurried for cover, muttering, “Damnit to bloody hell! That was a gold-plated Dunhill!”

Then Jonathan cut a zigzag path back to O’Connell and Evy, who were together now behind a half-crumbled brick wall.

Elsewhere, Alex was dashing behind a partial brick wall himself as shots pocked around him. He withdrew a roll of electrical tape from his pouch and began to bundle three sticks of dynamite into a makeshift bomb.

At the same time, Alex’s uncle had dived behind that broken wall while Evy provided cover, pumping away with her Winchester, winging a soldier who’d been getting too close, and winning a glance of admiration from her husband.

A startled Alex saw Lin break from cover and run toward the rear of the colonnade, where stood a torii-style gateway. Though she was for the moment at the far side of the fray, Lin was nonetheless out in the open and making a perfect target, much to Alex’s dismay. She seemed to be staring up at the open mountain slope behind the colonnade;
had she lost her mind?

“Lin!” Alex yelled, and went scrambling after her.

Yang’s brutal onslaught just went on and on, the general and a few helmeted soldiers advancing to the stupa while others inched their way up the courtyard on either side, ducking the bullets of Rick and Evy O’Connell, who exchanged desperate glances as they reloaded.

O’Connell said to his wife, “I guess we’ve been in worse scrapes.”

Evy said to her husband, “Really? If we survive, you’ll have to remind me . . .”

Then a haunting howl cut through even the gunfire, that same mournful bellow that had been heard in the darkness the night before.

O’Connell and Evy’s eyes went to the rear of the colonnade, where, centered within the torii, stood the source of that strange sound—
Lin herself!
—her hand to her face as she delivered the ululation, like Tarzan calling for the animals of the jungle to come to his aid.

Bullets puffing the snow chased Alex as he ran to the torii within which Lin stood, eyes on the mountainside and the surrounding hills, and half a second after he tackled her, rolling with her to relative safety, strafing gunfire chewed up where she’d been.

That gunfire was still pounding away when a howl like the one Lin had somehow summoned from within her lithe form came down from the slope, horrific and otherworldly, a sound that could stand the hair up on the back of a human neck.

Three shaggy forms came charging down from the hills—at first they seemed to be big men in long fur coats, but quickly they became something else: creatures, nine feet tall, covered in gray-white fur, with smallish heads for such large and powerful frames, with mouths opened wide to show off fierce fangs.

Yang’s men stared in disbelief but so, for that matter, did Jonathan Carnahan, behind the half wall of bricks with his brother-in-law and his sister. “My God, can those bloody things be—”

“Abominable snowmen?” O’Connell said, between submachine-gun bursts. “Yeah.”

“Actually,” Evy said, between Winchester rounds, “the Tibetans prefer ‘yeti.’ ”

“How quaint.” Jonathan threw his sister a withering glance, fired several shots at Yang’s men from his own rifle, then said, “Well, by all means, let’s defer to
them
on the subject . . .”

Neither husband nor wife seemed particularly surprised about such bizarre reinforcements showing up, but perhaps, Jonathan thought, that was because they were preoccupied with the forces of a reanimated mummy.

And the Yeti indeed seemed to be reinforcements, as Lin dashed out to them and shouted something guttural in a tongue unknown to Jonathan or for that matter O’Connell and, for all her expertise with antiquity, even Evy herself. The creatures were roaring something in response that seemed half animal cry, half spoken word, and then raced by her, apparently doing her bidding.

O’Connell turned to Evy. “Well, now we know a little more about our son’s girl—she apparently speaks yeti!”

Evy said, “Fluently, I should say . . .”

A yeti jumped from the roof of a side building and down into the courtyard, sending up flurries of snow with his feet. The other two yetis were already on the attack, charging toward the forward-flank soldiers, who—as Yang commanded,
“Shoot! Kill them!”
—raised their carbines to take aim, but not in time. The yeti were upon them to bat away the weapons and grab the soldiers and effortlessly fling them into a nearby stone wall, where the helmeted men thudded and crumpled, like flung rag dolls.

Panic quickly spread among Yang’s men, and the O’Connells took full advantage, father and son charging from either side of the colonnade, with Evy and Lin right behind, attacking a force of far greater numbers but dealing with shocked, distracted, terrified troops, who fell like carnival-midway targets.

The only hitch was when O’Connell’s Thompson jammed, earning him a quick I-told-you-so smirk from his son, whose Russian assault weapon was still doing just fine.

Thinking,
I hate it when the kid’s right,
O’Connell found himself staring down an enemy’s rifle barrel. But one thing that never jammed was Rick O’Connell’s hand-to-hand combat skills, and he snatched the weapon away from the man and used it to beat him senseless.

O’Connell wheeled to find another soldier bearing down on him with a big knife, held high; grabbing the man’s wrist and giving it a vicious twist, O’Connell broke the bastard’s wrist and then knocked him cold with a good old-fashioned right hook that dumped him on the snowy courtyard floor.

Lin and Evy were also showing off their hand-to-hand skills, more than holding their own with several clearly well-trained martial-arts experts among Yang’s men, one of whom was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of an Evelyn O’Connell spin kick, which deposited him in the arms of a yeti, who promptly flung him like a javelin into a brick wall.

Yang’s men, however panicked, were managing to hit the trio of yeti now and then, but the slugs seemed to do little more than mildly ruffle the creatures’ fur. The general himself fell back into the small stupa, unaware Alex had ducked in to change ammo, and walked into the boy’s fist.

Blocking the punch, Yang threw a high kick and knocked Alex to the floor of the little structure, then shoved his right boot heel into the young man’s larynx, pinning him painfully.

“Your adventure, young O’Connell,” Yang said through a small, rare smile, “ends
now . . .”

But before Yang could deliver a deathblow, a hairy arm reached into the small temple and grabbed the general, yanking him across the interior of the stupa, and through its front entryway, and flung Yang with a momentum that sent the general unceremoniously tumbling down the short flight of steps, bouncing right past the Emperor, who was moving into to the courtyard. Without a glance at, or a thought for, his injured general, Er Shi Huangdi stepped over Yang and moved calmly on through the chaos of battle.

Of all the remarkable feats of bravery on either side—though clearly such feats were more the domain of the O’Connell party—one stood out that afternoon: Jonathan Carnahan, on his hands and knees, crawled through the melee of gunfire and hand-to-hand combat and yetis committing carnage to find his way to his lost Dunhill lighter. Recovering it, Jonathan crawled on to return to the dynamite-strung stupa and, cackling with self-worth, he finally lit the fuse.

“Yes!” he said. “Piece of cake . . .”

Still staying low, Jonathan then turned to crawl away and almost bumped into two huge gray-white legs. He smiled up at a yeti, who looked down at him curiously, the way a monkey might regard a baby bird with a broken wing.

“I say,” Jonathan said cheerily, getting cautiously to his feet. “Wonderful, brisk weather we’re having, don’t you think? Enough snow for you?”

The yeti roared in Jonathan’s face—
what
had
the thing been eating?
—and Jonathan, his moment of bravery past, went running pell-mell toward the walls near the rear of the courtyard.

But as Jonathan ran, something strange occurred—even for a day that already included a terra-cotta Emperor Mummy and a trio of yeti—as a great cracking filled the air, like an ice floe breaking itself into pieces. Huge stalagmites of ice burst from the snowy stone floor of the courtyard, massive yet with points as sharp as the tip of a stiletto.

All of them were in danger—O’Connell, Alex, Evy and Lin and Jonathan, too—and had to run a serpentine course to keep from being impaled. The yeti bounded up on the roofs of the side temple buildings, showing themselves capable of caution and good sense.

Only from the entrance to the courtyard to the golden temple of the stupa, with its stairstep walls leading to the gleaming spire, did a clear path remain.

And down this path walked the rust-brown figure of Er Shi Huangdi, who—spotting Jonathan’s fuse—waved a hand and dispatched a knife blade of ice to cut the fuse in half, causing it to fizzle out.

Seeing this from behind half a brick wall, Jonathan muttered, “Definitely not cricket . . . these damned mummies just don’t play fair . . .”

Into the now-empty courtyard strode the Emperor Mummy, head up, exuding arrogance like heat over asphalt. As he walked, nearby icicles retreated into the snowy courtyard floor.

O’Connell ran up the cleared path and threw himself onto the stupa wall, and began scaling the stairsteplike side. He would beat the son of a bitch to that spire, where if Er Shi Huangdi applied the Eye, all was lost. Alex threw down fire to cover his dad, and even caught the Emperor Mummy with a good volley, for all the good it did.

Almost to the top, O’Connell could see clearly the spire that was the prize, glinting in the sun. What he could not see, on the other side of the stupa, was the smiling Er Shi Huangdi simply touching the little temple and turning O’Connell’s steplike path into a sheet of ice, down which the adventurer slid fast and landed hard against an icy stalagmite.

O’Connell was in the Emperor’s view now and Er Shi Huangdi extended a hand and an arm, the red clay heating up, glowing white-hot; his fingers made a tiny gesture that produced a big fireball that shot out like a meteor at O’Connell, who scrambled out of its path even as it exploded and toasted his heels.

Behind the cover of a column, Alex was readying his homemade bomb . . .

The Emperor had climbed the stairlike side of the stupa and was placing the blossomed Eye in the depression atop the temple golden spire. The Eye began to glow and a rodlike beam of icy blue light shot out, careening against a series of ancient mica reflectors, and finally pinpointing a declivity at the mountaintop opposite.

On a tiled roof nearby, Lin watched, and waited . . .

On her cue, Alex charged out into the open and, as Lin had told him to do, threw the bomb not at the Emperor, but up the mountainside, to disrupt the transformation Er Shi Huangdi intended to initiate.

But the Emperor Mummy could see what Alex was up to and a sword materialized in his terra-cotta hand, and he hurled the blade, sending it pinwheeling toward Alex’s back.

O’Connell dove in and pushed his son out of the way, but caught the sword himself, as it cut through his back rib cage and pushed all the way through like a skewer.

Alex’s bomb exploded short of its target, the blast sending thundering reverberations throughout the hills and mountains nearby. But the boy’s eyes were elsewhere; his father had collapsed facedown in the snow. And the Emperor Mummy’s sword had returned by magic to his red-clay hand, then retracted into nothing at all.

From behind her half-a-brick wall, Evy watched, white as the snow around her, moaning, “Oh, God . . . dear God . . .”

Alex’s scream of sorrow met the echo of the blast and the mountainside reacted, a cornice of icy snow letting loose high up, signaling what was to come . . .

Jonathan, not helping matters, screamed,
“Avalanche!”

And indeed the shelf of snow and ice was beginning its deadly journey their way, creating an earthquakelike rumbling that froze even the yeti with fear.

Alex ran to recover his father, or anyway his father’s body, and dragged him toward the entry.

The Emperor, still up on top of the stupa dome, saw shelf after shelf of snow and ice come rushing toward him, and knew even his powers would be tested here. His mouth opened and he emitted a furious roar as he raised his arms, throwing all of his mystic power at the mountainside.

Gradually, starting at its base, the avalanche began to slow, more and more snow massing in piles, but those massive white mounds seemed to be struggling against the invisible force that sought to keep the avalanche back, natural and supernatural locked in a savage struggle.

Lin had edged along the roof and, dragon dagger in hand, was closer now to the distracted Emperor; when she was opposite him, she leaped, dagger raised, but Er Shi Huangdi turned, as if he’d heard the buzzing of a mosquito, and with a glance deflected her—she was flung to a pillar and slid down into a semiconscious pile.

The living statue that was Er Shi Huangdi returned all of his attention to the tidal wave of snow and ice, concentrating every particle of his fury at it. But after the Emperor Mummy’s momentary distraction, the wall of snow was again speeding unfettered toward the courtyard . . .

Near the entry, a yeti swooped up Alex and the wounded O’Connell and bore them away, toward a portico. Jonathan, unfortunately, was petrified in horror, like a Pompeii victim, watching the avalanche inexorably heading his way. Deeper into the courtyard, Evy was helping the dazed Lin to her feet, the girl seemingly unaware of the white wall descending. Then another yeti swept in, and hauled them both away in its powerful arms.