The Golden Elephant. Alex Archer

      

       “You aren’t going to leave me to drown!”

      The astonishing thought distracted Annja from the floodwaters until they rose above the tops of her waterproofed shoes. Their touch was as cold as the long-dead Emperor’s.

      “At least leave me my pack!” Annja shouted, jumping up and swiping ineffectually at the dangling rope-end. She only succeeded in making it swing. She fell back with a considerable splash.

      “I’m afraid not,” the woman called. “You have to understand, Ms. Creed. There are two ways to do things—the hard way and the easy way.”

      Annja stood for a moment with the water streaming past her ankles. The words were so ridiculous that her mind, already considerably stressed by the moment, simply refused to process them.

      Then reality struck her. “Easy?” she screamed. “Not Easy Ngwenya?”

      Annja stared. The chill water reached her knees. She stood, utterly overwhelmed by the realization that she had just been victimized by the world’s most notorious tomb robber.

       Titles in this series:

      Destiny

      Solomon’s Jar

      The Spider Stone

      The Chosen

      Forbidden City

      The Lost Scrolls

      God of Thunder

      Secret of the Slaves

      Warrior Spirit

      Serpent’s Kiss

      Provenance

      The Soul Stealer

      Gabriel’s Horn

      The Golden Elephant

      Rogue Angel_™

      The Golden Elephant

      Alex Archer

       www.mirabooks.co.uk

      Contents

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Chapter 29

       Chapter 30

       Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       1

       Tomb of the Mad Emperor

      “Oops,” Annja Creed said as she felt something give beneath the cleated heel of her Red Wing walking shoe.

      The floor of the passageway was caked inches thick in dust. Annja couldn’t see the trigger. She had sensed more than heard something like a twig snapping.

      Already in motion, Annja dived for the floor. She heard a grind, a rumble, a rusty creaking. Then with a hefty metallic sound something shot from the stone walls above her.

      Catching herself on her hands, Annja looked around by the light of her bulky hand lantern, which lay several feet ahead of her. She spotted three bronze spears spanning the two-yard-wide corridor a yard above the floor. They were meant to impale any unwary intruder. That included her.

      Annja shook her head. “Emperor Lu may or may not have been crazy,” she muttered. “But he sure was paranoid.”

      The echoes of her words chased each other down the slanting corridor, deep into the earth’s dark recesses.

      C AUTIOUSLY A NNJA WIGGLED forward. As her weight came off the hidden floor plate the spears began to retract into the walls. By the time she reached her lantern they had vanished. The stone plates that covered the ports through which the spears had thrust out swung back into place.

      Coughing on the dust she had stirred up doing her snake act, Annja sat up and shone her light on the walls. She could see no sign of where the spears had come from. The walls had been painted with some kind of murals, perhaps once quite colorful. They had faded to mere swirls and suggestions of faint color. They worked to camouflage the trap, though.

      She shook her head and picked herself up. “Got to move,” she told herself softly as she dusted off the front of her tan shirt and khaki cargo pants. This would be her only shot. With the construction of a giant dam nearby, the floodwaters were rising. By tomorrow they would make the subterranean tunnels unsafe.

      With redoubled caution she made her way deeper into the lost emperor’s tomb.

      The corridor walls were hewed from a yellow limestone. Tests showed it had been quarried in some hills several miles away. The passageway air was cool and dry. It smelled of stone and earth.

      Some indeterminate distance down, as Annja began to feel the weight, not just of years, but of millions of tons of earth pressing upon her, the corridor leveled. It had taken several bends and a couple of doglegs, and had plateaued briefly, as well. Annja wasn’t sure whether the zigs and zags had some ritual significance, were meant to additionally befuddle an interloper or were simply to prevent a cart full of spoil from running all the way back down to the bottom during the digging of the corridor. She suspected it was all of the above.

      Far down the hallway, in which she could just stand upright, Annja saw that something was blocking the way. Could that be the door to Lu’s actual tomb? she wondered. Her heart beat quickened. According to the ground-penetrating radar scans, it could be. The last Chinese team to come down here had intended to open the bronze door to the burial chamber proper. She had no idea whether they had or not.

      The Beijing University officials who had hired Annja suggested that they felt the last team had indeed made some major discoveries and had then departed by some currently unknown entrance to the great mound before vanishing. There was nothing intrinsically unlikely about that. Such huge structures often had multiple entrances. But she was being asked to play archaeology cop—to find out if the tomb had been plundered and, if possible, to trace the thieves. She was certainly willing enough. Like any real archaeologist she had an unremitting hatred of tomb robbers.

      “Of course that assumes a lot of ifs,” Annja said aloud. Her voice, echoing down the chamber, reassured her. Something about the place bothered her.

      She flashed