Staff of Judea

by Alex Archer

  She stared at him, honestly stumped. All her career she’d been digging for purely archaeological reasons. To learn about a people or a culture, to verify an ancient legend, to restore a forgotten wonder to the annals of living history. Never had she conducted a dig for the sole purpose of searching for treasure. Especially not buried treasure. The very idea of using an over-the-counter metal detector hadn’t even occurred to her.

  “But what?” Grimes pressed.

  “Nothing.” She looked up and smiled at him. “Nothing at all. Excellent idea. Please, be my guest.”

  She got out of the way, giving him room to work. She made sure Benjamin was still taking photos with the camera and then turned back to watch.

  Grimes put on the device’s headphones, fiddled with the settings on the control panel and then flipped the switch. He waved the round sensor, the loop, over the ground in front of him for a moment, getting an ambient reading so he’d be able to tell what was normal background and what was not. Then he moved to where the cistern had once stood and began to move the metal detector in small circles about an inch or so above what had once been the bottom of the tank. He went back and forth from one end of the cistern to the other, methodically covering the entire area. When he was finished, he turned off the metal detector, took off the headphones and turned to them, a big smile on his face. He pointed to the back corner.

  “Right there,” he said. “Dig right there.”

  They found the first treasure cache less then fifteen minutes later.

  Chapter 10

  They set up camp near the end of the afternoon close to the ruins. The trucks were arranged in a semicircular pattern with their noses pointed outward. A fire pit was dug in the center of the area just behind them and the tents set up on the other side of the pit, the ruins at their backs. Connolly shared a large canvas safari tent with Grimes, while the security team members were paired up in standard issue two-man army field tents. Both Anna and Ephraim had their own tents, while the male graduate students shared one and the female graduate students shared another.

  After dinner that night, Annja and the others celebrated their find, ecstatic that their efforts had paid off so early in the expedition. It had truly been a spectacular find. The gold had been buried in a set of earthen jars, sealed with wax and stacked one on top of the other. Over time some of the jars had cracked, spilling gold over the rest of the pile.

  A talent was a measure of weight equal to about sixty kilograms, which meant by the time they were finished extracting the jars they had over five thousands kilograms of gold sitting in front of them. At current market prices, a single talent was worth about $840,000. That meant their entire haul, from just the first of sixty-four different treasure caches, equaled somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five million dollars.

  Seventy-five million. Annja could barely believe it.

  They couldn’t keep it, of course. Arguments would be made that it was part of the Israeli national heritage and Annja agreed with that. But the ten percent finder’s fee, split seventeen ways, meant each of them was walking away with almost five hundred thousand dollars from this one site alone.

  That was worth partying over.

  Discovering that Ben was a fan of American rock from the 1980s and that he had an iPod full of tunes with him, Mike jury-rigged a connection to the sound system in one of the Land Cruisers and after dinner that night the desert air was filled with the sound of Eddie Van Halen on the guitar and David Lee Roth singing about California girls and the summer sun. It wasn’t long before Susan and Rachel were on their feet, pulling Ben and Mike with them, and gyrating to the music in the light of the campfire. Cheered on by the security team. The young people gestured for Annja to join them and at last she threw caution to the winds. It had been too long since she’d danced and she let herself go with the music.

  One song led into another and another. The volume was cranked higher every time someone heard a song they liked. Once, Grimes came out of the tent he shared with Connolly and for a moment Annja had thought he was going to order them to turn it off and go to bed, like a parent with wayward teenagers partying too long. But he simply watched them for a moment and disappeared back inside.

  Guy needs to learn how to relax.

  Less than a minute later a sudden, heavy sense of impending doom overtook her, like a thousand ghosts drifting across her own grave, and she faltered, then stopped dancing altogether.

  She glanced around. Ever since taking up the sword she seemed to have a heightened sense of danger and she’d learned to trust that feeling for what it was, an early alarm system. And right now it was blaring away like an air raid siren in the middle of a blitz.

  The celebration continued without her. Her companions danced or lounged around the fire, talking and laughing. The music rose up into the night, the guitar wailing, the drumbeat pounding out a rhythm….

  A rhythm that sounded familiar.

  Like the beat of horses’ hooves.

  Annja spun around, fully expecting to see a horde of horsemen thundering toward them.

  But there was no one there.

  The night was as dark and as empty as it had been just moments before.

  Her senses were still on full alert and she knew they were no longer alone. She might not be able to see anyone yet, but she was positive they were out there, somewhere.

  She walked over to the iPod and cut the music off abruptly, eliciting a round of cries from the others.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Annja?”

  “Turn that back on!”

  “Hey! I liked that song.”

  She held up her hand for silence as she turned in a slow circle, looking out beyond the campfire into the night.

  Suddenly Grimes was there by her side, a pistol in his hand.

  The sight of the gun shocked those still complaining into silence.

  “What is it?” Grimes asked, his own gaze now turned outward, the pistol held barrel down in his right hand, ready to be brought up at a moment’s notice.

  “I’m not sure. I feel like—”

  “There’s something out there,” he finished for her. She nodded.

  Grimes opened his mouth to say something else but he was cut off as the deep mournful sound of a horn split the night air.

  Baaaaawhoooooooooooooooooooooo.

  Everyone froze. As if the sound had stunned them into immobility. It was only when the sound began to fade away that they turned and looked at one another.

  “What the hell was that?” someone asked, and Annja found herself wondering the same thing.

  What was that? And, more importantly, where was it coming from?

  The horn sounded again, the same deep, sonorous bellow that went on and on.

  Except this time it was answered, answered from several different directions at the same time.

  Whoever they are, they have us surrounded.

  The thought must have occurred to Grimes at the same time. He instantly began shouting orders at the men around him.

  “Move, move! I want a secure perimeter around Mr. Connolly’s tent ten seconds ago! Four-foot intervals, ten feet out from the center. Try not to shoot the civilians.”

  Annja didn’t know if that last was meant as a joke or not, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. She rounded up Ephraim and the students and hustled them inside one of the other tents, out of the security team’s line of fire. The last thing they needed was to have one of them mistaken for an intruder. Tensions were high as the security team swiftly moved to create a defensive cordon around their employer and the millions of dollars in gold inside his tent.

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked as Annja hurried her along with a hand on her arm.

  “I’m not sure, but the security team has it under control. You just get
under cover, all right?”

  Annja looked over her shoulder and caught Ephraim’s stare. He mouthed a single word—Gibborim—and then turned away to calm the students.

  Annja took up a position just outside the tent door, her hands loose and hanging at her sides, ready for action no matter what happened. Her fingers twitched and for a split second she had the sword in her hand before she banished it back to the otherwhere. She didn’t want it until she needed it. Too many explanations to make otherwise.

  The horn rang out twice more and each time it was answered by a chorus of others, though never from the same place twice. Annja had the sense that the enemy was moving in a slow circle around them so they couldn’t pinpoint their exact locations. Truth was, it wasn’t a bad strategy.

  Then, just like that, the horns stopped.

  Silence settled back over the night like a wet cloak.

  She was peering into the darkness, trying to spot whoever might be out there.

  “It’s a call to battle.”

  Annja jumped. She turned to find Ephraim standing at her elbow, concerned as he looked out into the night.

  “Jeez, you scared me!”

  Ephraim had the decency to appear embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said.

  After her heart had calmed enough for her to breathe more easily, she said, “A call to battle?”

  The old Israeli inclined his head toward the surrounding darkness. “The sound of the shofar calls the warriors to battle. It will not be heard again until the battle is over.”

  It took Annja a moment to make the mental connection between the long, twisting instrument made from a sheep’s horn, an instrument known as the shofar, with the braying sound they’d been hearing for the past ten minutes. Once she did she was amazed she hadn’t immediately recognized it. She’d heard a shofar played at a concert in New York a few years ago and the noise it produced was quite distinctive.

  “Who’s playing it?”

  Ephraim didn’t look at her as he said, “You know who.”

  “The Gibborim?”

  The older man nodded.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  He turned to her. “I don’t?”

  “No, you don’t,” she told him, “and neither do I. Let’s forget for a minute that it has been two thousand years since the treasure was hidden and that it is damned near impossible to get people to stick with a task for five minutes these days, never mind for two millennia. Let’s just consider the sheer scale of the task. How would a small group of men watch over sixty-four different treasure sites scattered across the country?”

  Ephraim didn’t say anything.

  “How many men would you need to do that effectively? Every day, every night, year after year? How would you hide them in today’s day and age, when a satellite the size of a toaster can see a rock the size of my thumbnail with absolute accuracy?” She shook her head. “We would have seen them by now, Ephraim.”

  But her logic didn’t sway him. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, Annja, and His people are watching us right now to see how we handle the temple treasure. How else would you explain someone’s appearance so soon after we removed the gold?”

  It was dark and in the shadows Annja couldn’t see if he was teasing her or not. She didn’t want to offend him but she had become an archaeologist so she could look at the history beneath the myth and legend.

  In a careful tone, she said, “I could explain it half a dozen ways, Ephraim, but the most likely is that they are locals trying to scare us off in the hopes we’ll leave behind whatever we’ve found. So they can claim it for themselves.”

  Leave behind nearly a million dollars in ancient gold coins? Not bloody likely.

  It seemed that whoever they had been, members of the ancient Gibborim sect or desert dwellers looking for an easy score, they were gone now.

  As Grimes ordered his men to stand down and began to set up a watch schedule to get them through morning, Annja let the others know that the crisis had passed. Not surprisingly, no one wanted to return to their festivities, so good nights were exchanged and the group headed off to their respective tents.

  Annja washed up, undressed, then pulled on the T-shirt and sweats she wore as pajamas in the field. She slipped into her sleeping bag and doused the camp light. But as she lay there, her thoughts kept drifting back to the sound of the horns in the night and the explanation Ephraim had given for them.

  A call to battle.

  But a battle for what?

  And against whom?

  Sleep was a long time coming.

  Chapter 11

  “I’m telling you, she had a sword. The same freakin’ sword she had in the museum. It was there one second and gone the next.”

  Connolly stared at his second-in-command and wondered if the desert sun was starting to get to him.

  “What do you mean it was gone?” he asked. “Did she put it down?”

  “No. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it, but I’m telling you that the sword appeared out of nowhere and then vanished just like that!” He snapped his fingers.

  Very carefully, Connolly said, “So you’re telling me that she made a sword, a medieval broadsword no less, appear out of thin air and then vanish again in the blink of an eye?”

  Grimes nodded. “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Hardly sounds possible, does it?”

  The other man grunted. “I know what it sounds like, Mitchell. I know it sounds absolutely crazy. But I saw it. Not once, but twice. First in the museum and now here. There’s something strange about that woman.”

  Connolly had known that since the moment he’d first met her. Not only was she strikingly beautiful, she was also extremely capable. And yet…

  And yet there was something in her, something lurking just beneath the surface.

  The Creed woman made him uneasy and he always felt like he was under intense scrutiny whenever she was close.

  There was definitely more to Annja Creed than first met the eye.

  Grimes was looking at him with one of those “am I crazy” expressions and Connolly waved impatiently.

  “Relax,” he told him. “I trust you. If you say you saw it, then you saw it. I’ll take your word for it. We both know there are weirder things than a sword that appears and disappears.”

  And wasn’t that the truth. All you had to do was look at why they were out here to understand that.

  He didn’t care about the gold. What the hell was he going to do with a few more million dollars? That was petty cash, for heaven’s sake.

  No, he had an entirely different reason for seeking out the various treasure caches. A few odds and ends had been hidden away with the coins and he was looking for one in particular.

  A staff. A very special staff.

  One that, in the hands of a young man named Aaron, had been used to perform some amazing feats of power and might.

  Connolly aimed to make that staff his own.

  That was what this expedition was for, after all.

  Money would only get you so far. He should know; he had more than he could ever spend, never mind need. But with the staff…the man who held the staff could rule the world.

  “I want her and the old man to translate the twenty-seventh stanza in the morning. Wherever it tells us to go, that’s where we’re headed.”

  Grimes winced. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, Mitchell.”

  “And why’s that?” he asked impatiently.

  The other man didn’t back down. “We’re not ready, that’s why. We’ve only tested one of their interpretations of the stanzas. They might have gotten lucky and, if so, we’d be off on some wild-goose chase. That’s what we hired her to avoid, remember?”

 
; Connolly nodded and, seeing it, Grimes went on.

  “We should try again. Sure, we can get them to translate the staff stanza, but we’ll get them to work on a couple at the same time. Not let them know the significance of the treasure in Stanza 27. Then follow another trail. At least once, maybe twice, even three times. The staff isn’t going anywhere, boss. It’s been there, wherever there is, for thousands of years. It isn’t suddenly going to sprout legs and walk away. We can afford to do this right. When we’re certain their methods work, we’ll get them to give us the location and then we’ll get rid of them once and for all.”

  As much as he didn’t want to admit it, Grimes was right. They shouldn’t rush. Do it right the first time, his father had always told him as a boy, and you won’t have to do it again. He’d created his fortune by only doing things once.

  A troubling thought reared its head.

  “What about these Gibborim, or whatever the hell they are called?”

  “You leave the locals—or whoever those guys were—to me. If they ever decide to show their faces, we’ll blow their heads off their shoulders from four hundred yards away. Introduce them to modern weaponry the old-fashioned way.”

  With that, Connolly was satisfied.

  Chapter 12

  The rest of the night passed without incident. Annja didn’t fall asleep until well past midnight and when she did it was a restless, uneasy sleep. She dreamed of the desert and of fire and awoke in the morning feeling less rested than when she’d gone to bed.

  Not a good start for the day.

  She joined the others for breakfast around the campfire, discovering in the process that Ephraim was a good cook. He managed to make powdered eggs and oatmeal actually taste good, sending her back for seconds.

  They were just cleaning up when they heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching helicopter. Rachel saw it first, pointing it out to the others as it came in from the north, the white EMG logo clearly visible on the black fuselage. Annja was glad they’d finished breakfast. A gritty breeze washed over them as the helicopter touched down a few dozen yards outside of camp.