Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear by Gabriel Hunt, Charles Ardai Read Free Book Online

facing in his direction. Reaching back into the crate he’d just exited, he dug under the boxes of ammunition till he uncovered the long barrel of a rifle—he’d felt it beneath him on the plane, but couldn’t get at it while he was lying on top of it. Now he set it down on the ground, loaded it, and slung a bandolier of extra rifle shells over his head. Just in case the bullets he’d slipped into his Colt didn’t fire after all. Or, hell, even if they did. DeGroet had at least a dozen men here, maybe more—it was impossible for Gabriel to be too heavily armed.
    Gripping the rifle under one arm and unholstering the Colt, Gabriel crept cautiously out of his little enclosure and into the shadow of the truck that had brought him.Then he stood up for the first time in twelve hours. Once the pins and needles in his legs had subsided, he leaned around the rear corner of the truck to get his first good look at where he was—and his jaw fell open.

Chapter 6
    It was the dead of night, two hours before the dawn, and except for the movement of DeGroet’s men, the Plateau of Giza was silent, still. In the distance, the Great Pyramid—Egypt’s towering mausoleum for the Pharaoh Khufu, the last surviving Wonder of the Ancient World—loomed darkly against the deeper black of the sky. Around it, the smaller pyramids built to house Khufu’s wives and mother, and farther out the ones for Khafre and Menkaure, his successors, gave the plain a jagged skyline, like a giant jaw full of pointed teeth. The men, by comparison, looked tiny, insignificant, lost.
    Immediately before them, facing them in its eternal crouch, blanketing them with its moon-cast shadow, was the Great Sphinx.
    DeGroet and Sheba stood between the lion’s paws, Andras shining his flashlight’s paltry beam at the stone stele erected there by Thutmose IV. Other men bustled about, Hungarians in western clothing mixing with locals whose garb ranged from turban to fez to coarse burnoose, wrapped tight against the late-night desert chill. Camels stood beside cars, shivering and ducking their heads to nose at the sand. Tilting his own head back to look up, Gabriel saw the great beast towering above them all, its sculpted head as high in the air as the roof of the Discoverers League building back in NewYork, its shoulders as broad as the building’s facade, and its torso stretching into the distance behind it for the better part of a football field’s length.
    Its body, though eroded by thousands of years of exposure both to the elements and to mistreatment by men, still showed the muscular form of a prone lion, facing east to greet the rising sun as it ascended above the Nile. It had lain like that since before the pyramids themselves all were built. Two thousand years before the birth of Alexander the Great, one thousand years before the birth of Moses, the Sphinx had already been meeting each sunrise with its majestic stare for a century or more. Today the stare emerged from the face of a pharaoh, framed on either side by the traditional Egyptian headdress of state, his stone lips cracked and ruined, the better part of his great carved nose shattered off. But this pharaonic head looked strangely small compared to the size of the body and it was commonly thought that the statue had originally borne the head as well as the body of a lion—that it had begun its existence as a monumental statue of a cat, symbol of the sun god, and that only later, under the guidance of a despot mad with vanity, had the feline head been recarved into a man’s, making what had once been a gorgeous animal into a hybrid, a monster.
    The Egyptians hadn’t called the monster “sphinx”—it had been the Greeks who’d given it this name when eventually they’d landed from across the northern seas, recognizing in its hybrid shape a resemblance to a local legend of their own, of a woman with a lion’s torso, an eagle’s wings, and a serpent’s tail. The word meant “strangler” or