The Atlantis Covenant Read online

  THE

  ATLANTIS

  COVENANT

  OTHER TITLES BY ROB JONES

  The Hunter Files

  The Atlantis Covenant (The Hunter Files #1)

  The Joe Hawke Series

  The Vault of Poseidon (Joe Hawke #1)

  Thunder God (Joe Hawke #2)

  The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke #3)

  The Curse of Medusa (Joe Hawke #4)

  Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke #5)

  The Aztec Prophecy (Joe Hawke #6)

  The Secret of Atlantis (Joe Hawke #7)

  The Lost City (Joe Hawke #8)

  The Sword of Fire (Joe Hawke #9)

  The King’s Tomb (Joe Hawke #10)

  Land of the Gods (Joe Hawke #11)

  The Orpheus Legacy (Joe Hawke #12)

  Hell’s Inferno (Joe Hawke #13)

  Day of the Dead (Joe Hawke #14)

  The Cairo Sloane Series

  Plagues of the Seven Angels (Cairo Sloane #1)

  The Avalon Adventure Series

  The Hunt for Shambhala (Avalon Adventure #1)

  Treasure of Babylon (Avalon Adventure #2)

  The Raiders Series

  The Raiders (The Raiders #1)

  The Harry Bane Thriller Series

  The Armageddon Protocol (A Harry Bane Thriller #1)

  The DCI Jacob Mysteries

  The Fifth Grave (A DCI Jacob Mystery)

  THE

  ATLANTIS

  COVENANT

  THE HUNTER FILES

  №1

  R O B

  J O N E S

  For my children,

  Never let go of your dreams –

  Or they’ll fly away without you.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Other Books by Rob Jones:

  The Hunter Files

  The Joe Hawke Series

  The Cairo Sloane Series

  The Avalon Adventures

  The Raiders Series

  The Harry Bane Thriller Series

  The DCI Jacob Mystery Series

  CHAPTER ONE

  To ascend into heaven, you must first work your way through the seven levels of purgatory. Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust. Each one a single but essential step on the long and arduous journey up the mountain into paradise.

  Max Hunter slammed his back up against the wall of the ancient Iraqi tomb and wondered which level he was on right now. He closed his eyes for a second and hoped to hell the soldiers hadn’t seen him. He was wrong. One of them shouted orders in Arabic and they advanced down the long tunnel toward him. Peering around the burial chamber’s stone door casing, he counted twelve of them. They wore ballistic helmets and combat vests and gripped Cold War Zastava assault rifles in their hands.

  Envy, he decided. That was the level of purgatory he was on, and the situation was getting out of hand. Yesterday, he had enjoyed a lunch of slow-cooked lamb with roasted nuts and raisins alongside his old friend Adil al-Amiri, the head of Mosul’s Antiquities Authority. The professor had assured him he had permission to enter the tunnels beneath the Tomb of Jonah and excavate the Statue of the Winged Guardian. Now, he had that artifact clutched to his chest and a dozen armed men were hunting him through a labyrinth deep beneath the Gates of Nineveh.

  Hunter knew danger better than most. Sometimes he even went looking for it, but he also knew there was a line. When he heard a familiar voice shouting at him from the other end of the tunnel beyond the antechamber, he knew he had crossed that line.

  “There’s nowhere to run, Max.”

  Brodie McCabe.

  That good-for-nothing, cheating, low-down son of a bitch, relic-thieving scumbag. Just hearing his voice after all these years gave him chills. He kept his cool and called back down along the tunnel.

  “Is that really you, Brodie?”

  “In the flesh.”

  “Fancy meeting you here. I thought you’d joined a convent.”

  McCabe laughed without humor. “Hand over the statue and I’ll let you live.”

  In the darkness of the tomb, Hunter shook his head and let out a cynical laugh. The soldiers’ boots crunched on the gravel, louder with every step. “That’s unusually generous of you. It’s just a shame everything you ever say is a lie.”

  “Don’t make me chase you into the tunnels. These soldiers are hungry and tired and not in a very good mood.”

  “Some soldiers,” Hunter shouted cynically. “How much did you pay them?”

  “That is not your concern, but needless to say they are fully in my employ. If you don’t come out and give me the statue, I will order them to come in there after you and kill you.”

  He scanned the tomb once again for another way out. Nothing but a giant statue of Nergal, the Assyrian God of the Underworld standing at the end of the tomb in a bricked-up stone portico. The marble deity stood below a marble pediment and looked serenely back at him as if it knew the answer to all his questions.

  “Maybe I’ll let them know what you did to the last men you employed back in Angkor Wat. The Cambodian authorities still have an arrest warrant out on you for their murders.”

  “But sadly, none of these soldiers speak English, Max.” He laughed again. “And if I recall correctly, you cannot speak Arabic.”

  Damn it. Hunter scratched his jaw and cursed to himself in the silent tomb. “No, I never got around to it.”

  “That’s too bad. These men believe you are an antiquities smuggler who intends on selling the statue to ISIL and they’re not very happy about it. It seems no amount of schmoozing the old Antiquities Director over plates of quzi is a substitute for good, old-fashioned bribery.”

  How the hell did he know about his lunch with al-Amiri? Hunter stared down at the ancient statue in his filthy hands and took in the neat inverted ziggurat in the base and a faint inscription running around inside it. He already knew it dated back at least to the days of the early Assyrian Empire, but the carved letters would take some serious deciphering if he wanted to know the secre
t they had held for so many centuries. Whatever happened today, he couldn’t let it fall into McCabe’s hands.

  He had to stall for time.

  “You want to pay for it?”

  The laughter grew colder. “You’re playing for time, Max. I’m sending the soldiers in.”

  “Shit.”

  The soldiers stormed toward him, forced to run in single file because of the ancient passageway’s narrow width. When the first man burst into the tomb, he raised his rifle and aimed it at Hunter. Another three from the squad came inside the dark, clammy chamber seconds later. They were young men, mostly in their twenties and dressed in the standard desert camouflage uniform Hunter knew so well. Sweat formed a film on their angry, hate-filled faces.

  “I don’t suppose I could pay you guys to turn your guns on McCabe instead?”

  The lead man screamed in Arabic and lifted the muzzle of his weapon until it was pointing directly in his face.

  “I guess that’s a no, but is it a firm, final no?”

  Another scream and another pace forward. Cornered, Hunter had no choice. He was no fool and he knew the odds, but if he wanted to get out of this tomb alive he had to take on all four of the soldiers at once. As for those outside the chamber, he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.

  The men moved deeper inside the tiny manmade chamber with their guns fixed firmly on the target: Max Hunter. One of them shone a flashlight down at the strange metallic figurine in his hands and then up in his face.

  After speaking to him in Arabic, Hunter replied. “And I guess that means you want me to hand it over?”

  The soldiers moved forward again. They were brave, but they didn’t seem to realize that in such a small space, the rifles worked against them.

  Sliding the statue inside his canvas bag, he lunged at the closest man, ripping the gun from his hands. He brought the stock of the weapon up into his face, smashing his nose into a bloody pulp. A pained scream filled the chamber, followed by the other soldiers taking a step back and shouting in Arabic as they aimed their guns at him.

  Hunter moved fast, striking the wounded man hard in the side of the head and knocking him out. Another soldier fired at him; the roar of the old Soviet assault rifle deafeningly loud in the enclosed tomb. The bullet missed and buried itself in the sandstone wall beside him and he returned fire with a warning shot and dived behind the altar.

  The soldier who had fired made a move for him. He ran toward his hiding place repeatedly firing on him as he advanced. Hunter tucked his head down to protect his face from the chunks of altar stone being blasted into the air by the soldier’s bullets. Back in the tunnel he heard McCabe demanding to know what was going on.

  When the soldier reached the space behind the altar, Hunter threw a handful of grit in his eyes and scraped his boot through the dirt in a small arc, hooking the man’s legs out from under him. He fell back and cracked the back of his skull on the chamber’s south wall. It was a lucky result, but Hunter usually found winging it was the best way to get what he wanted.

  Usually.

  He scrambled to his knees and brought the rifle up into a firing position, but the next soldier was faster. As the young Iraqi leapt over the altar and landed beside him, he fired his gun. The bullet smacked into the dirt an inch from Hunter’s boot and kicked up a small cloud of dust.

  “Shit!”

  The soldier landed with a crunch and swung the gun back around to him, preparing to fire again, but when Hunter heard the dry-click both men knew the gun had jammed.

  “Got to love fifty year-old Soviet rifles.”

  More soldiers now ran across the tomb to the altar, but Hunter moved fast. Clambering to his knees, he lunged at the man with the jammed gun and tackled him to the floor. He grabbed the gun and twisted it from his hands before piling the stock into his face and knocking him out cold.

  The former guards officer tried to unjam the semi-automatic rifle but it was no dice. No surprise there, he thought. Rifle jams could take minutes to clear. Another soldier rushed him, this time around the closer end of the altar. Hunter spun around and swung the jammed rifle up, just clipping the soldier’s chin in the arc and knocking him off his balance.

  He struck the teetering soldier a second time with the stock and knocked him out. This man’s weapon wasn’t jammed, so he disarmed him and swung the gun around at the rest of the approaching soldiers. He fired on them and forced all but one into a retreat back in the tunnel with McCabe. Spinning around and scanning through the darkness and gun smoke in the tomb for another way out, he saw a soldier. The man had split from his squad and was aiming his gun at him.

  When the two men fired at each other, the report of the semi-automatic rounds was once again almost impossibly loud in the confines of the ancient tomb. The bullets tore chunks out of faded murals painted on the walls and blasted clouds of dust over their heads, but neither hit the other man.

  McCabe’s enraged voice screamed outside in the passageway, and Hunter heard the other soldiers making their way toward the tomb entrance again. The thirty-round detachable box magazine fixed to the belly of the Zastava wasn’t going to keep him out of trouble for long, especially at a rate of fire of six hundred rounds per minute.

  Once again, he searched the tomb with desperate eyes.

  Nothing.

  He exchanged fire with the rogue soldier once again, knowing he was almost out of lead. He turned and fired on the entrance, raking the stone archway with bullets and exploding clouds of stone fragments and dust down on the heads of the approaching squad. It drove them back, but for the last time.

  He was out of bullets.

  So was the soldier already inside the tomb, because now he rushed him, keen to bring the scalp back to McCabe. He drew a combat knife and raised it in the air, ready to slash down and plant it in Hunter’s neck.

  Hunter had no choice but to charge into the fight. He crashed into him, grabbing his hand and rotating it until the wrist bones shattered. The man screamed and dropped the blade. It clattered on the dusty stone floor and the soldier struggled free and tried to reach down and grab it.

  Hunter brought his knee up and rammed it into the man’s face, smashing his nose to pulp and spreading it all over his face. He grunted in pain and jerked backwards giving the Londoner enough time to piledrive a savage uppercut into his chin. The direct strike was hard and fast and his filthy fist slipped off the soldier’s face, slick with sweat.

  The back of the man’s skull smashed into the outstretched arm of the Nergal statue and forced it back until the finger was now pointing at the bricked-up wall behind him. Clouds of dust tumbled from the top of the archway and a deep grinding noise filled the tomb. Hunter watched in amazement as the dust cloud cleared to reveal a door slowly opening inside the center of the archway.

  “A secret passage,” he muttered, running toward it. Glancing at the dead soldier, he gave him a mock salute. “Thanks. Talk about using your head to get out of a problem.”

  McCabe was ranting in the tunnel beyond the antechamber and the rest of the army squad were charging forward, guns blazing. Hunter checked the winged statue was in his bag, and under a hail of automatic gun fire, he ran into the unknown darkness on a wing and a prayer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hunter fumbled for his flashlight and switched it on, all the time sprinting along the narrow hidden passageway, only seconds ahead of his own death. It was cramped, filthy, thick with cobwebs and there was debris and rubble all over the floor. Behind him, a squad of Iraqi soldiers wanted to blow his head off. If you say anything about my job, he thought, say never a dull day.

  Then there was light.

  The artificial light of McCabe’s soldiers as they jogged into the tunnel in pursuit of him. The beams threw his shadow out in front of him along the ancient tunnel. This time, there was no shouting, just a rifle shot. He felt the bullet trace over his head and ricochet off the curved vaulted ceiling of the stone passageway.

  “Damn it!” he cried o
ut. “That nearly hit me, guys! Be more careful, would you?”

  He ducked his head down and ran faster, his boots scuffing in the dirt as he jogged toward a bend in the tunnel up ahead. When he rounded the corner, he saw a flight of stone stairs leading into a wall of large granite blocks inside another archway. It was the mother of all dead ends.

  “That’s not helpful at all.”

  Running up the steps, he traced his hands over the wall and searched for some kind of a hidden lever. There had to be something; why build the steps? Then something caught his eye on the façade above the blocks. He blew a thick layer of dust away from the surface to reveal a line of hieroglyphics.

  “Getting slightly more helpful.”

  His flashlight died.

  “Much less helpful.”

  His trembling hands rummaged around in search of his lighter. The sounds of the soldiers’ boots trampling over the debris in the passageway behind him grew louder as he scanned the line of tiny symbols. Similar to early Assyrian. Interesting. He remembered his Rawlinson – the names of metals, animals, tribes, cities, men and gods, and the points of the compass have a special sign attached to them, either a suffix or…”

  The bullets drilled into the curving wall of the passageway’s bend fifty feet farther back, shattering the brickwork. Hunter almost jumped out of his skin when they exploded behind him and ricocheted into the darkness.

  Focus, Max.

  He focused on the bas-relief glyphs in the dim glow of his lighter. The special sign was either a suffix or a prefix, and that meant things were getting a little clearer. He recognized the symbols for mankind and at the apex of the archway, those of the heavens and Nergal and Anshar, the Assyrian sky god. Each of the symbols had a corresponding one below on the granite stones blocking his way.

  “It’s a code,” he muttered. “Follow Anshar to ascend into the heavens. Anshar, Anshar…”

  He hurriedly wiped more dust and cobwebs from the stone blocks inside the archway until he found a picture of Anshar. The god was carved onto a small brick at the base of the wall.