The smell of wet stone and cordite was carried by the wind, which howled through the Khyber Pass like a dying animal. Dawood Khan listened to the footsteps reverberating through the tunnels while leaning his back against the cave wall and holding his breath with his patu scarf. voices from America. private military.
Over radio static, a voice said, "Sector clear.""The artifact is nowhere to be found."
artifact. The mercenaries made sense.
Former special forces turned treasure hunters who sold history to the highest bidder were not new to Dawood. However, there was a problem. Their formation was too tight, their movements too sharp. These weren't merely hired shooters. They had something to flee from.
The blood trail told the story.
A wounded man was being dragged, as evidenced by the spray pattern that began thirty meters back. The droplets came to an abrupt stop at the cave wall after leading to this chamber. As though the wounded man had... disappeared.
The anomaly was first detected by Razak's flashlight beam.
He muttered, "Allah protect us."
The wall wasn't sturdy. Dawood could see, up close, the fine cracks creating a perfect rectangle, a secret door, skillfully carved into the rock face. New tool marks gleamed on the edges. This had just been opened.
Now the Cyrillic note made sense.ДРАКОH. Not merely a word. A caution.
The panel swung inward with a hardly perceptible click, revealing
Slumping against a corroded generator, the mercenary's throat was surgically sliced. He had an open, foam-lined Pelican case on his lap. empty.
On the far wall, however, was the true horror: a seismograph from the Soviet era, its needles still twitching after decades of neglect. Dawood recognized a pattern on the paper roll from his days working for the Pakistani Geological Survey:
Deep-earth resonance. The kind caused by underground nuclear tests.
Except the timestamps were wrong.
The last recorded event was three days ago.
"They weren't digging for artifacts," Razak muttered, understanding dawning. "They were measuring something."
A new sound cut through the darkness—not the cave's unnatural growl, but the unmistakable click of a safety being disengaged.
Dawood spun to see a figure emerge from the shadows. Tall. Gaunt. Wearing tattered Soviet-issue fatigues with KGB insignia.
The man's skin had the waxy pallor of a corpse, but his eyes burned with fierce intelligence. When he spoke, his voice was raspy from disuse:
"Pashtun, it's too late for the dagger. But maybe in time to discover the truth.
He held up a skeletal hand, exposing a dragon's head-shaped radiation burn. The surrounding skin was changing, with fractal patterns of grayish-green scale patches extending outward.
When Dawood touched one, it flaked away like the skin of a dried fish, but it quickly grew back.
The Russian coughed, "Not radiation sickness.""Assimilation. The scales of the dragon rewrite DNA."He gestured toward the empty Pelican case.They've transported it to Xi'an, the location of the First Emperor's terracotta army burial. You get it? They intend to awaken an older entity.
A new sound was carried by the wind outside: the rhythmic, faint rasp of something heavy dragging across stone.
The beam from Razak's flashlight swung toward the cave's
The smooth rock face was no longer seamless.
Something beneath it was shedding.