by S. A. Beck
Otto peered over his shoulder. He still looked pale. “That’s a pretty wide area. Let’s hope we can spot it.”
“I’ll find it,” Jaxon said.
She sat back in her seat and didn’t take part in the conversation, allowing the words to pass through her unheard. Instead she relaxed her mind, leaving it open to impressions beyond words.
This was how she had found the last source of the water. She had been half dead from thirst, mentally numb and lost in the desert with Vivian, when a quiet impulse led her right to the lifesaving well.
And that impulse came back. A feeling of vague certainty came to her, like walking in the dark in a familiar house, and she said, “To the right, a little further on.”
Grunt angled the Land Rover to the right, and after another kilometer Jaxon spied a series of low, rocky hills.
“There,” she said. “Somewhere in there.”
As they approached she grew even more certain, pointing to one hill in particular. Soon they spied dark shapes amid the sand and sun-blasted stones.
“Walls,” Otto said. “Just like in the last place.”
They pulled up at the edge of what they could now see was the ruins of a village. Jaxon could tell immediately that it had once been a home of her people, not just because of her gut feeling that this was the place with the well, but by the way the village was constructed. The walls had crumbled and stood only a foot or two high above the sand. Even so, she could see how the houses clustered together, sharing common walls and opening out onto little courtyards where neighbors could spend time with each other.
About half a kilometer to the west stood the ruins of a larger building.
“I bet that was the actual caravanserai,” Elaine said, pointing to it. “Our people worked there with the regular humans but lived here with their own kind.”
“Smart,” Mateo said with a nod.
Everyone got out, looking around quietly. The sun beat down and the wind whistled through the ruins. Winston put a hand on the top of one of the collapsed walls.
“See this?” he said, tapping the glossy surface of the top stone. “This is called desert varnish, created by the windblown sand rubbing against the surface of the rock. This basalt is some of the hardest rock there is, and it takes thousands of years to make a gloss like this.”
“And it’s on the exposed, inner part of the wall,” Yuhle said, peering at it through the cracks in his glasses. “Which means the wall collapsed thousands of years ago.”
“So just how old is this place?” Jaxon asked.
“If we only knew,” Elaine said. She sat half in and half out of the Land Rover, still too tired to walk. “It could be from a hundred thousand years ago, maybe more.”
Jaxon felt a little shiver at the thought of so much time. What were her little troubles and anxieties compared to all this?
She walked off into the ruins. The others gave her space. As her boots crunched in the sand she found a little lane between the houses and followed it until it led her to the base of the hill. The last well had been in an undercut at the base of a cliff. Would this be the same?
She came to the remains of a broad square. A larger building stood off to one side. Before her, half filled with sand, she could see an overhang in the side of the hill.
“This must be it!” she called back to the others. “Grab the shovels and let’s dig it out.”
They only had three shovels between them, so Grunt, Mateo, and Winston got to work. Jaxon smiled to herself as she saw that even the scholarly Winston kept up with the hulking mercenary, his Atlantean muscles naturally superior. Mateo, who had obviously had some combat and physical training, beat Grunt by a mile. The Peruvian seemed to get some pleasure from that.
As they dug, Jaxon had a strange feeling that this wasn’t quite the right place. That didn’t make sense, though, because the side of the hill was the obvious source for a well. She found her eyes straying to the large building to the side of the open square. She wandered over there.
The building was about the size of a small supermarket, with thicker walls and the remains of columns inside. The feeling came stronger here. But why would the water be in this big building? She didn’t see a well or the remains of a fountain or anything like that.
She kept searching, the heavy breathing of the men and the sound of the shovels scraping against sand in the background.
At last those sounds stopped.
“Nothing!” Mateo shouted, tossing his shovel on the ground with disgust. “Not a goddam thing!”
Grunt and Winston leaned on their shovels, disappointed.
Jaxon went over and saw they had cleared out a little cave set in the hillside. It was smaller than the last one, with no paintings, but like the other well it had a sunken area that had once held water and a little fissure leading to the subterranean water source. Both were as dry as the desert all around.
“What a waste of time,” Grunt said, chugging from a water bottle Otto handed him.
Jaxon sighed. She looked out over the bleak, barren ruins and thought of Trisha, dead before she had ever gotten a chance to really know her. She thought of the Russians too, killed in a fight they probably didn’t understand. Yes, it was a waste. A profound waste.
Or was it? That nagging feeling about the big building kept bothering her. On impulse she picked up the shovel that Mateo had thrown down and walked back to it.
Without thinking about where she was going, her feet led her to the center of one end of the building and she began to dig.
Chapter 5
AUGUST 19, THE DESERT NORTH OF TIMBUKTU, MALI
2.30 P.M.
* * *
“What’s she doing?” Otto Heike asked as he watched his girlfriend digging amongst the ruins.
“Working on instinct,” Grunt replied, taking another slug of water. “Leave her to it.”
The others seemed to agree. They had all sat down in the meager shade provided by the Land Rovers and were eating and drinking. Elaine lay down on the back seat and fell asleep.
Grunt handed him the water bottle and he took a drink. The water was cool compared to the blistering heat outside and it sent a sharp jab of pain through his broken tooth.
“Why do you keep rubbing your mouth, pyro?” Grunt asked.
“When I was chewing through Yuhle’s ropes I broke a tooth. One of my incisors.”
“You should drink more milk. Gives you strong teeth.”
“Ha ha. Very funny. I need to see a dentist.”
“Not until we get to a city.”
“Don’t they have dentists in the villages here?”
Grunt laughed and slapped him on the back, almost making him topple over. “Sure. I’ve seen one of those country dentists. They heat up a nail until it’s red hot, then shove it in the gum to kill your nerve. Then they take a pair of pliers and yank out the tooth. Very professional.”
“Stop making fun of me. I’m in pain.”
“I’m not making fun of you. That’s really how they do it here.”
“Oh.”
Grunt paused, glanced to the others to see they were out of earshot, and asked in a low voice, “So how are you feeling?”
“My tooth hurts, I just told you.”
“No, I mean about the firefight.”
“I … um,”
“I saw.”
“I might not have killed him,” Otto said. His voice came out as a squeak.
“You did. Own it. Deal with it.”
Otto buried his face in his hand. “Oh, God.”
“Did you puke? I puked the first time.”
Otto nodded. Grunt put a hand on his shoulder.
“No shame, pyro. Every soldier I ever knew freaked out the first few times. Everyone except for Isadore. I should have known how she’d turn out.”
“I don’t want to be a soldier anymore,” Otto whispered.
“Then don’t be. You don’t have to fight.”
“Yeah I do. All those people chasin
g us will make me.”
Grunt opened his mouth to respond and then closed it without saying anything. They sat watching Jaxon work. Grunt kept his hand on Otto’s shoulder. It didn’t take the pain and guilt away, but it helped a little.
“Were Dimitri and Nadya among the people who ambushed us?” Otto asked.
“No.”
“Maybe we got lucky and they got killed in the fight in Timbuktu,” Otto said.
Grunt shook his head. “I didn’t see their bodies so we have to assume they’re still alive and kicking. You hardly ever get lucky in this business.”
Otto thought of Nadya and how she had led him on. He still felt guilty about it, like he had cheated on Jaxon, but the guilt of killing a man made that guilt seem like nothing.
If I get out of this alive, I’m never going to set another fire or tell another lie, Otto told himself, then wondered if that itself was a lie.
“This world is so messed up,” Otto said. “Why does everyone have to make it worse?”
Grunt squeezed his shoulder.
“I feel sorry for you kids. You got a crap inheritance from us—war, terrorism, overpopulation, the environment all turning to poison. It’s a bum deal.”
“Maybe my generation will come up with the answers.”
Grunt snorted. “Your generation eats Tide pods.”
The sound of Jaxon’s shovel scraping stone made them look.
“I think I found something,” she called.
They hurried over, all except for the healer Elaine, who remained in an exhausted slumber in the Land Rover.
As they came up to Jaxon, she scraped away more sand to reveal a stone platform about the size of a large dinner table. On the wall behind they could see vague fragments of some sort of carved picture, but time had eroded away too much of it to tell what it once depicted.
“What is this, an altar of some kind?” Otto asked.
“It might be more than that,” Jaxon said, pointing to a seam around one of the stones. “Get me a crowbar.”
Otto hurried to fetch one. Jaxon gripped the thick metal rod and placed the narrow end into the seam. With a grunt and a heave, she lifted the thick stone square up to reveal a small niche beneath. Inside was a gold box.
“Whoa,” Otto said.
“This is powerful, I can feel it,” Jaxon said.
With infinite care, she picked out the gold box. It measured about a foot long and a little less in width. An elaborate embossed decoration covered its entire surface, showing a world map with all the continents. They looked a bit skewed, though, and Otto’s breath caught when he saw a large island in the middle of Atlantic between Africa and the Americas.
“A map of the world from hundreds of thousands of years ago,” Yuhle said, his words almost silenced by awe.
“And Atlantis is right there where the legends said it was,” Otto whispered.
Jaxon opened a clasp and lifted the lid. The interior was padded with some plush green material. Inside lay a thin gold chain on which hung a disc of some strange silvery metal. It was about the size of a silver dollar and had a map of the world embossed on it just like the chest. The map was arranged so Atlantis was at the center of the disc.
“What is it?” Otto asked.
“I have no idea,” Jaxon replied. She turned to the Atlanteans. “Guys?”
Winston and Mateo shrugged.
“An amazing artifact. It would make a prize find for any museum, but that doesn’t help us. We needed more of that water,” Yuhle said.
Jaxon set the box down and put the pendant around her neck. She got a confused look on her face, and then her jaw dropped.
“You okay?” Otto asked.
Jaxon turned and faced Mateo and Winston before looking beyond them at the Land Rovers. Then she stared at the horizon in the direction of Timbuktu.
“Jaxon?” Otto said.
Jaxon made a slow turn, gazing out at the horizon in all directions, trembling a little.
She closed her eyes.
“Winston. Mateo. Split up and walk away in different directions. Stop once you get about a hundred yards away.”
The two Atlantean men stared at each other for a moment, shrugged, and did as they were asked. Jaxon kept her eyes closed.
Once they stopped, Jaxon pointed right at Winston. “One of you is there.”
She turned and pointed directly at Mateo, “And another of you is there.”
She spun around several times, eyes still closed, then pointed at them again.
“There and there.” She was dead on.
“That must be Elaine over there,” she said, pointing right at the Land Rover a few hundred feet away.
She pointed to the south, “Timbuktu is that way,” then to the southwest, “another settlement of Atlanteans is that way,” then to the due west, “and a big group of Atlanteans, probably that prison camp, is that way. I can even sense that they’re much further away than the Atlanteans in Timbuktu.”
“How is that possible?” Otto said, looking at the scientists. They had no answer.
Winston and Mateo walked back to her.
“What a perfect thing for a Keeper of the Texts,” Winston said. “You can find any lost members of our people and bring them back into the fold.”
Jaxon opened her eyes. They sparked with excitement. “We’ve been so scattered for so long, but now we can connect everybody!”
“How far can you sense them?” Winston asked.
“I’m not sure exactly. I can tell if one person is closer than the other, and if they’re near or far, but not how many miles or anything like that. I also couldn’t tell who was who when you two guys split up. That big concentration to the west feels like it’s on the borderline of what I can sense, and I kinda get the impression that I’m only feeling that because there are so many of our people there.”
“Those refugees said the camp was just north of Tidjikja. I’ll get the map,” Vivian said, hurrying off. She returned a minute later, spreading out the topo map.
“Wow, honey, if your instinct is correct, you can spot a community of Atlanteans from nearly a thousand kilometers away, that’s almost six hundred miles.”
Otto let out a low whistle.
Jaxon beamed. “This is even better than finding the water!”
“We need some of that water too,” Grunt said. “Getting your people out of that camp in Tidjikja won’t be a picnic.”
More fighting, Otto thought with a shudder.
Mateo looked back at the Land Rovers, concern graven on his dark features. “Elaine is a pretty good healer, as you saw, but there are limits to how much she can do. I’ve seen her overextend herself like this before. She’s out for the rest of the day. Plus, we could use some of that water if she gets hurt.”
“We’ll go back to the well I discovered in Mauritania and get as much as we want,” Jaxon said. “Then drive straight on and bust them out of that camp.”
Grunt put out his hands. “Now wait a minute. We don’t know what we’re up against. They’ve probably taken hundreds of people. That means a lot of guards. They’ll have machine guns and maybe even some tanks just for chuckles.”
Mateo glared at him. “Yeah, but we’re going anyway.”
Grunt met his gaze. “Yeah we are, but we got to think this through or we’ll all end up dead, and that won’t be a help to your people.”
Jaxon shook her head, her face stony with worry. “There’s also the problem that all the Atlanteans have been rounded up, so we can’t stop anywhere. If the locals see us, they’ll call the cops.”
Mateo shrugged. “We’ll avoid the towns, any settled area. And if we do need to stop, the three of us will cover up and stay in the Land Rovers. The real problem comes once we get to that prison camp.”
Otto had a sudden thought. “What if General Meade is there?”
“Why would he be?” Jaxon said.
“Yuhle and Yamazaki say that he’s making his own Atlanteans now. Brett’s blood proved it,” Otto
said, his heart twinging at the hurt that came onto Jaxon’s face. “What if this roundup is part of his plan?”
“What do you mean?” Winston demanded.
“He wanted to take Jaxon as a sort of lab rat. He didn’t get her, so why not get a bunch more Atlanteans in a country where no one will care all that much and the outside world won’t even notice? He could use them as test samples, or maybe get them under his power somehow.”
Grunt went pale. “Oh hell.”
Otto bit his lip. Grunt didn’t look scared very often, and anytime he did that meant the situation was seriously bad.
He remembered how Brett had fought. The guy had thrown Jaxon around like a rag doll, and when Grunt and Vivian had opened up on him with their AK-47s, he took dozens of shots in the chest before he went down. The guy had actually walked into the storm of bullets like he had been walking into a hard wind.
Otto shuddered. Imagine a whole army of people like that! You could take over the world.
Vivian brushed a lock of blonde hair out of her eyes and said, “General Meade heads a team that oversees American military operations in North Africa. Now it all makes sense.”
Everyone fell silent for a moment, thinking of the horrible possibilities. Vivian went on.
“This changes nothing,” she said with a hard edge to her voice. “Those people need to be freed, and we’re the only ones to do it. I’d be glad if we found General Meade there. That guy’s day of reckoning is long overdue.”
They sat down together away from the sun under the shade of a tarpaulin. Even in the shade the heat pounded on them. After they studied the topo map for a time to estimate how long the trip would take, they went through their supplies. The two scientists checked the food, water, and fuel while the mercenaries and Mateo checked the weapons.
“We have enough food and water for two weeks,” Yuhle announced once they all sat down again. “And enough fuel to get there and back.”
“I got a bunch of spare fuel from the Land Rover that got hit,” Mateo said. “We’ll have plenty. And enough weapons for everyone.”
Grunt nodded. “I stripped a bunch of Ak-47s and ammo from our friends back there. I took that RPG too. It’s only got five rounds left but it packs a punch.”