The Mummy's Curse Read online

  Unraveling a Dangerous Case …

  “So what’s the case?” Frank asked the screen impatiently.

  “The case has to do with the legendary Tomb of the Golden Mummy. Perhaps you’ve heard the story? It says that somewhere in the heart of the desert, beyond the Valley of the Serpents, lies the richest tomb in all of Egypt, a maze built into the side of a cliff.

  “It is the tomb of Pharaoh Semerkhet III—known as the Golden Mummy, because he was supposedly buried with more golden implements and statues than any other pharaoh before or since.”

  Q kept talking as the screen showed scenes of archaeological digs near the pyramids. “Until last year, everyone assumed that the Golden Mummy and its tomb were just legend. Then, last year, rumors started going around that Roger Corson had found the tomb.”

  I hit the pause button. “Roger Corson? He’s that explorer guy who dates all the supermodels, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s always in the news.”

  “Hey, Frank, didn’t Corson—”

  “Good memory, Joe,” Frank said. “The papers said he died ‘under mysterious circumstances.’”

  “Whoa.” I sat down on the edge of my bed and hit play.

  THE HARDY BOYS UNDERCOVER BROTHERS™

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  #4 Thrill Ride

  #5 Rocky Road

  #6 Burned

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  #9 Martial Law

  #10 Blown Away

  #11 Hurricane Joe

  #12 Trouble in Paradise

  #13 The Mummy’s Curse

  Available from Simon & Schuster

  The Mummy’s Curse

  FRANKLIN W. DIXON

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster

  Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas,

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  THE HARDY BOYS MYSTERY STORIES and HARDY BOYS UNDERCOVER BROTHERS are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Lisa Vega

  The text of this book was set in font Aldine 401BT.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition November 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Library of Congress Control Number 2006922950

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-1507-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-11267-0

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-1507-9

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Down a Dark Alley

  2. How Bazaar, How Bizarre

  3. A Cruise Down the Nile

  4. The Mummy Wakes

  5. Things Start to Unravel

  6. Into the Desert

  7. Night of the Dead

  8. The Shadow of Death

  9. The Mark of Poison

  10. The Sting of Betrayal

  11. The Serpent’s Tooth

  12. The Missing Man

  13. A Woman of Hidden Talents

  14. Secrets of the Tomb

  15. The Riddle Solved

  16. Echoes of Egypt

  Unraveling a Dangerous Case …

  “So what’s the case?” Frank asked the screen impatiently.

  “The case has to do with the legendary Tomb of the Golden Mummy. Perhaps you’ve heard the story? It says that somewhere in the heart of the desert, beyond the Valley of the Serpents, lies the richest tomb in all of Egypt, a maze built into the side of a cliff.

  “It is the tomb of Pharaoh Semerkhet III—known as the Golden Mummy, because he was supposedly buried with more golden implements and statues than any other pharaoh before or since.”

  Q kept talking as the screen showed scenes of archaeological digs near the pyramids. “Until last year, everyone assumed that the Golden Mummy and its tomb were just legend. Then, last year, rumors started going around that Roger Corson had found the tomb.”

  I hit the pause button. “Roger Corson? He’s that explorer guy who dates all the supermodels, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s always in the news.”

  “Hey, Frank, didn’t Corson—”

  “Good memory, Joe,” Frank said. “The papers said he died ‘under mysterious circumstances.’”

  “Whoa.” I sat down on the edge of my bed and hit play.

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  THE HARDY BOYS UNDERCOVER BROTHERS™

  #1 Extreme Danger

  #2 Running on Fumes

  #3 Boardwalk Bust

  #4 Thrill Ride

  #5 Rocky Road

  #6 Burned

  #7 Operation: Survival

  #8 Top Ten Ways to Die

  #9 Martial Law

  #10 Blown Away

  #11 Hurricane Joe

  #12 Trouble in Paradise

  #13 The Mummy’s Curse

  Available from Simon & Schuster

  1Down a Dark Alley

  Usually, when Joe and I race, it’s to see who’s faster.

  This time? We were running for our lives.

  I’m not just saying that. The five nasty characters chasing us through the back alleys of Cairo, Egypt, were very, very real. We’re talking long, curved knives in their teeth, sharp machetes in their hands, and a look of sheer murder in their eyes.

  If they ever caught up with us, killing us would be just the start of it.

  I have to say, they were pretty fast on their feet. I mean, Joe and I run track for Bayport High, and we have a ton of medals to show for it. It’s amazing these guys were even keeping up, what with all the hardware they were carrying. But they were gaining on us.

  To be fair to me and Joe, we didn’t know these streets—we had come to Egypt strictly as tourists. It was only a chance encounter on our first night here—namely, a body falling from the roof, right past our hotel window—that had landed us right in the middle of an international drug cartel turf war.

  Nice, eh?

  We didn’t know our way around these Old Cairo neighborhoods with their narrow, winding streets, and there was no time to consult a map now. I felt like a mouse in a maze, and Joe looked totally clueless.

  The drug smugglers chasing us weren’t from around here either. From their whispers, we figured they were French, Russian, and Burmese—but they seemed to know the neighborhood a whole lot better than we did. No wonder, really. We’d done a little digging and learned they’d been doing business in Cairo for at least a year when we stumbled on their operation and blew it wide open.

  It was after midnight, but the streets of the Egyptian capital were crammed full of people. This city is home to about twenty million, so I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised that a few million were still out and about.

  Still, it made it hard to get away. We kept bumping into stuff that slowed us down—market carts, bicycles left on the sidewal
k, and lots of slow-moving Cairenes (that’s what they call themselves).

  None of that slowed the crooks down, though—when you have knives and machetes on you, people tend to get out of your way.

  By the time we ran into our fourth (or was it the fifth?) blind alley, it was too late to get back out. Our five foul “friends” blocked the entrance, brandishing their blades at us.

  Yikes.

  “Okay, Joe, how are your kung fu moves? You still in practice?”

  “Uh … kind of. It’s been a while.”

  “Well, just think of that movie we saw last week. Be like that guy.”

  “Jackie Chan? Sure thing—that’s me,” he said, giving me a wink. Nothing scares Joe. Me, I’m allergic to sharp knives—the kind we were facing now. The bad guys came at us all at once—not like in the movies, where they’re polite and come at you one at a time.

  Luckily, the narrowness of the alley played to our advantage. It squeezed them into a tightly packed ball.

  At the last possible instant, Joe and I sprang into action. We dove into twin low rolls, bowling three of our assailants over. Two were so surprised they dropped their machetes—and Joe and I grabbed them.

  “Now I feel better,” I said. No matter how hard you karate chop a sharp knife, you’re going to get the worst of it. Now that we were armed, I liked our chances a whole lot more. We swung our machetes in a blur of motion, keeping the five men at bay.

  They couldn’t come at us down the alley without running straight into the blades and being cut to pieces, so they hung back, looking at each other for inspiration. None of them was willing to go first—and we were blocking the front of the alley. There was no escape except through us, and our flying machetes.

  Of course, this was just temporary. We couldn’t keep it up for very long. My arms were already feeling exhausted.

  One of the attackers put his machete back in its sheath and grabbed a garbage can instead. He threw the lid to one of his buddies to use as a shield, and then grabbed the handles of the can, holding it in front of him like a battering ram.

  Uh-oh.

  They slowly advanced on us. We backed up toward the street.

  I glanced over at Joe, and he nodded back. We’d been in situations like this together many times, and we each knew exactly what the other was thinking.

  We could try to hold them here in this alley until the police arrived….

  Or we could make another run for it. If we ran, though, they would catch up to us sooner or later.

  I heard sirens in the distance. “Boy, I sure hope they’re coming for us.”

  We were wearing GPS tracking devices, so, assuming they were working, Captain Ali and his men should have been on our trail the whole time. We’d planned this in advance. On the other hand, in this city of mazes and blind alleys, they could easily have gotten as lost as we had.

  No, the sirens were definitely getting closer. The only trouble was, we were running out of blind alley to back up into. Soon we’d be out in the street, where they could easily surround us. We had them trapped for the moment, but the police would never make it in time to turn the tide.

  We needed to go to Plan B.

  Whatever that was.

  Now, I’m the idea guy in moments like this. That’s not to say Joe doesn’t come up with a brilliant plan every once in a while—but I knew we were both counting on me to get us out of this one.

  “You remember the last blind alley we ran into, before this one?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Could you find it again if we made a run for it and got separated?”

  “No way.”

  “Okay, just follow me then.”

  “What? You want to run, and then get trapped in another dead end? I like it better this way, with us on the outside, so we can escape if we have to.”

  “Joe, we need to set up the gizmo.”

  “Huh?”

  “The gizmo—the free sample from the convention, remember?”

  “Which one?”

  I looked at the advancing assassins. They were so close now we had to keep moving back toward the street. My arm was falling off from all the machetewaving, and I was sure Joe’s was too.

  I couldn’t describe which gizmo, or I’d give it away. One of these clowns was sure to speak English.

  Then it hit me—Pig Latin!

  “Ee-they ip-tray ire-way!”

  “Huh?”

  “Figure it out, okay? One, two—go!”

  We turned and ran out of that alley before the five dirtbags knew what hit them. They dropped the garbage can and lid and started after us, stumbling over each other and giving us a good head start.

  I led Joe back down the streets we’d just traveled—only this time I knew what to expect and where I was heading. That really helped—we gained some distance from our pursuers, who seemed not to have realized where we were heading.

  I needed about ten seconds to make this work—ten seconds between the time we got to the alley and the time they got there.

  Ten seconds to set the trip wire.

  Ah, yes, Plan B—when your fighting skills will only get you so far, go high-tech!

  I’ll back up a little.

  We had come to Egypt with our dad, Fenton Hardy. He’d been invited to give the keynote speech at the International Security Forces Convention, which was being held at one of the fanciest hotels in the world, the Cairo InterContinental.

  And since none of us had ever been to Egypt, Dad decided to bring the whole family along—me, Joe, Mom, and Aunt Trudy.

  While Dad was busy with the convention, Mom and Trudy had spent most of the week touring Cairo’s famous museums and seeing the pyramids and the Sphinx.

  Joe and I would have gone with them, but we got distracted by that body falling past our window. (We’re like our dad—we never can turn away when a crime’s been committed.)

  One of the great things about conventions is the free gizmos you get. This being a security convention, there were all kinds of giveaways—everything from flexible handcuffs to stun grenades (Joe took one, and I sure hoped he still had it in his pocket!) to trip wires.

  Now we were about to find out if our free samples really worked.

  The trip wire is a neat little gadget. It’s as old as the hills, really—the pygmies have used them to trap game for thousands of years. It’s like a tape measure reel. You pull it out, string it, and then it snaps back when you’re done.

  Joe and I spread ours across the alley, about ankle-high, and attached both ends with the superstick Velcro pads that came with it.

  “Now what?” Joe asked. “Do we hide?”

  “No—we stand right here,” I said.

  “Oh, I get it—we’re the bait!”

  The thugs reached the entrance to the alley, caught a glimpse of us standing there, and made a quick beeline for us. When the first one hit the trip wire, they all went down like bowling pins, one on top of the other.

  Joe and I leaped at them, grabbing more of their weapons before they could recover. I conked one on the head with a machete handle, aiming right for the sweet spot at the back of the neck. Then I cuffed him with a pair of flexible cuffs.

  One down, four more to go.

  Joe was cuffing a guy on the other side of the pile. “Got that stun grenade?” I asked him, as the other three bad guys got to their feet and retrieved their weapons.

  “Aw, man, I was gonna save that!”

  “Use it now, brother!”

  He didn’t argue. Pulling the pin, he tossed it right at the feet of the three remaining bad guys, who were just raising their weapons to deliver the fatal blows to me and Joe.

  ZZZAPP.

  No bang, no loud noise—just the sound of nerve cells frying, and the thud of three hulking hoodlums hitting the pavement like three tons of bricks.

  We had them cuffed in a matter of seconds and were collecting their weapons when Captain Ali’s police car screeched to a halt in front of the alle
y. Four more cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing, pulled up right behind it.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” Ali asked as he came toward us. He wore a big smile under his thick black mustache, and his eyes were gleaming. “It seems as if we’ve arrived too late to see the show!”

  “How’d it go on your end?” I asked him.

  “We found the gang’s leaders right where you told us they would be,” he said, with a little bow and a tip of his police cap. “I must say, you boys are not bad at this—not bad at all, for a pair of amateurs.”

  Amateurs?

  If he only knew!

  2How Bazaar, How Bizarre

  “Come inside here, gentlemen. What would you like? I sell many fine items.”

  “This way, this way! My prices are cheaper! I promise you, you’ll buy my wares if you see them!”

  “As Salaam Alaikum! Good morning! Welcome to my shop! Please, come inside!”

  All these invitations and more were coming at me and Frank as we walked down the main street of Cairo’s biggest, oldest bazaar. They were coming in English, too—most Egyptians who deal with tourists and other foreigners speak English (the Brits governed this place for a long time back in the day).

  “No thanks—just looking,” we kept saying, but none of the merchants seemed to believe us. One or two actually pulled at our arms, trying to draw us inside their tiny shops, which were filled with lots of really cool stuff.

  We weren’t really shopping, though, so much as just being tourists, here in the capital of one of the greatest, oldest civilizations on Earth. The cool stuff would wait.

  We’d already been in Egypt for six days. Tomorrow we were scheduled to leave for the States. Back to Bayport, and school, and friends, and our ordinary, everyday lives.

  After a week of chasing and being chased by international criminals, we both felt like we’d missed the best of Egypt, like the mummies in the Cairo Museum and the treasures of King Tut. Who knew when we’d ever get the chance to see them again? To make ourselves feel better, we were trying to pack in as much as we could on our last day.

  Just for fun, we let ourselves be dragged into two or three shops, where we bought a few unusual doodads to give our friends back at home: Chet, Iola, Belinda….