The second bullet hit an overhanging branch just above the hole in the ground through which Murphy had poked his head. They were both peppered with pieces of bark.
Murphy threw his body in front of Laura's for protection, pushing them both back against the rock wall.
"Murphy, what's happening?"
"Bullets. Somebody isn't fooling around. Unless we can
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backtrack in hope of finding an amphora full of guns and ammo, we've got to move. Now."
Laura had never been shot at before, but she quickly got the message. The third bullet, kicking up sand at Murphy's foot, helped to get her moving. They started running farther underground but hit a full wall of sheer rock. We're going to have to risk coming up out of the hole. And whoever is shooting at us knows it. Come on."
Murphy led Laura back to the clumps of root in which she had gotten her foot tangled, since it afforded the best protection from the gunfire. It wasn't much, but at least they weren't out in the open. "Stay here and stay down."
"Murph, where are you going? Don't leave me!"
Murphy ran to the rocks just on the far side of the hole. "Shh. I've got an idea that might work, but it's going to get noisy" Whoever was firing was able to shoot down the hole but would not be able to establish much range unless he stuck his gun inside it. Which was what Murphy was counting on.
There was quiet for a moment as the gunman was reaching that conclusion on his own once he no longer saw the Murphys running underneath the ground hole. First, the tip of the barrel of an AK-47 showed itself in the hole, then the rest of the barrel. As it was being pushed through the hole, it was firing dozens of rounds of ammunition at the ground, making a deafening racket and breaking the ground into a furious cloud of dust, dirt, and sand.
Murphy hoped his timing was correct as he leaped for the gun barrel while it was still spitting out round after round and yanked it downward. With a horrible shout, the rifle and
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the man who held it came hurtling through the ground hole. Murphy straightened, positioning himself to pounce on the gunman once he hit the chewed-up ground into which he had been firing. Murphy figured he had, at most, a split second to take his only advantage, the momentary element of surprise.
In the end, the surprise was greater. For the gunman did not actually hit the ground for long. He fell right through and just kept falling. The bullets had torn up the ground to such an extent that they loosened centuries of sand, dirt, and stone that had provided only a relatively shallow covering--for a deep pit of sand way underneath the ground.
As Murphy looked on in wonder, the gunman finally stopped with a soft thud. Since the rifle was still in Murphy's hands, he assumed the gunman had nothing else to fire at him. Murphy peeked over the new, much-deeper hole. He need not have worried about the gunman. Or what was left of him.
As Murphy tried not to listen to the horrible, high-pitched scream, he could make out the body of the gunman being buried alive. Tons of sand that had not been touched by humans for centuries, if ever, rushed to cover his body within seconds of landing. Even if he had wanted to, there was nothing Murphy could have done to save the shooter. In fifteen more seconds, there was only a mound of sand where the head had been in the sunken chamber.
Before it disappeared completely, though, Murphy recognized the head as he shined his flashlight beam on it. Bezhad, the driver.
Gun still in his hands, Murphy whipped around, ready to
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fire, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, Murph, take it easy. It's me."
"Oh, sorry, sweetheart. Let's get up that hole in case this whole floor collapses." Then to himself, so as not to scare Laura, he muttered, "And since that was our driver trying to kill us down here, I wonder what's waiting for us up there."
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NINETEEN
BLOOD OOZED OUT at them. Murphy and Laura had pulled themselves out of the ground hole after Murphy carefully surveyed the opening, rifle at the ready. It was blessedly quiet after the roar of gunfire underground. They had worked their way down the ridge to where the Land Cruiser was, calling for Saif.
When they reached the car, they realized why Saif had neither answered nor helped them. He was slumped in the front passenger seat with his head bleeding from what looked like a blow from a heavy object.
"Is he ... dead, Murphy?"
Just as she asked her question, Saif gave a weak groan and his body stirred. "My professional opinion is no, Laura, Mr. Saif is not dead." Laura glared at Murphy.
"Get out of the way, wise guy, and let me look at that
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wound." She reached for the bottom of her shirt, which was as close to a clean cloth as she saw in the vicinity. "Mr. Saif, can you hear me? Somebody hit you. Probably Behzad, the driver, the goon who came after us. Did you see anything before you were knocked out?"
Saif opened one eye, then the other, and moaned. "Aaah, Mrs. Murphy, you are all right. Did you ... are you ... praise Allah, you are safe. I believe that substitute driver must have been a robber. He overpowered me and must have come after you. I am so sorry. The sheikh will be outraged. I am sorry the robber stole your object."
Murphy looked at Saif warily. "What do you mean, Saif? We were attacked by the same driver who knocked you out, but he didn't rob us. And he won't be robbing anybody ever again."
Saif tried to look relieved. "Then you got what you came for?"
"Yes, and a lot more--mostly bullets. Let's get to the airport now."
Two hours later, the Murphys were settled safely aboard the sheikh's jet, heading for home. "What a day, Murph!" Laura snuggled beside her husband, her eyes closing quickly despite her coursing adrenaline.
"The first piece of the Brazen Serpent."
"And my first time getting shot at. But I'm so impressed by the Serpent that I almost forgive you for nearly getting me shot to death."
"It may take a little longer for me to forgive myself."
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Murphy turned and put a hand to her cheek. "Sweetheart, if I'd had the slightest idea I was putting you in danger ..."
Laura smiled and put her hand on his. "I know, you'd have left me at home to do the dishes and darn your socks. Now that it's all over, I can just savor the bragging rights I'll have next week in the faculty lounge."
"And I don't think I'll ever forgive or forget our friend Saif."
Laura shot Murphy a puzzled look. "What do you mean, Murph? The poor guy was practically killed himself."
"Yeah, 'practically' being the operative word. I'm no doctor, but have you ever seen a more perfect head wound? Nice amount of blood to get our attention, but nowhere deep enough to cause any head damage."
Laura bolted upright in her chair. "Oh, no! Murphy, I was too scared and deaf from the bullets to realize it at the time, but when he opened his eyes, there was no way he was coming out of unconsciousness. Those pupils were clear as the dunes."
"Yes, I noticed that. I think Saif was in on the whole thing and just trying to make it look like he was a victim, too, just in case we survived, but we were never supposed to get past the goon driver to see Saif's faked act."
"But how did he know we were looking for the Serpent?"
"He didn't. He couldn't. Nobody over here knew. I think he knew the sheikh was helping us find something of value. He didn't care what it was, he just wanted to steal it from us. I don't think the sheikh had anything to do with the scam. But once we land, I'll be letting him know just what a scheming skunk he has working for him."
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"Now, Murphy, the sheikh was our host. Don't lose your famous temper with him on the phone."
"Not at all. I just believe he would like to know the truth. Speaking of the sheikh, what do you say we take a closer look at what we almost got killed for today?" He reached for the sheikh's diplomatic pouch and removed the cloth-covered metal piece.
No longer struggling with her exhaustion, Laura smiled. "What took you so long?
"
Murphy began to loosen the knots, half expecting the tail of the Serpent to slither away between the seats with a hiss. He pulled back the cloth and held it up to the light. It had been forged thirty-five hundred years before, but the rich bronze surface seemed undamaged by the corrosive forces of man or nature.
The expertly cast texture of the Serpent's skin was intact. Each reptilian scale had been faithfully rendered, and Murphy recognized the unmistakable pattern of a venomous sand viper.
"Moses made this," he whispered. "Moses actually held this in his hands."
Laura reached out and touched it with a finger. "In obedience to God, they put their trust in Him and were healed. It was a symbol of their faith."
Murphy could see there were goose bumps on her arm. "But after Moses was done with it, what did this Serpent become? That has been the question all these centuries since."
Murphy tilted the tail of the Serpent so the light from the
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window raked its surface, making the scales glitter and dance. It almost seemed alive. "Hey, sweetheart. Did you see this?"
Laura leaned closer. "What do you mean? It's just the--" Then she saw it. Another set of markings. Barely visible, as if they had been crudely engraved, almost scratched into the bronze. But once she focused on them, they were strangely elegant--and instantly familiar. Triangles with linear tails and V shapes, like birds seen against the sky. "Chaldean cuneiforms," Laura gasped. "Just like the scroll."
"Yep. I'll bet this is Dakkuri's handwriting too." Murphy turned and pressed his face to the window. Thirty thousand feet below, the desert rippled toward the distant horizon.
"You know, whatever this high priest Dakkuri was up to, it looks like he made good on the promise in his scroll. He did leave something here on the first piece that looks like it can lead us to the rest of the Serpent."
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TWENTY
"SO, ANYBODY DO anything interesting last week? Me, I was in Samaria."
There was only a mild stir of interest among his students. Tough crowd , Murphy thought. He resisted getting their attention the easy way by adding, Getting shot at by an Arab .
Instead, he reached into his backpack beside the lectern. "And look what I found."
"A shower pipe?" someone called from the back of the hall.
"No, but the next wise guy is getting sent to the showers. This amazing foot or so of bronze, ladies and gentlemen, is a snake." Several of the heads in the front rows recoiled. "Relax, it was never alive, but it has had several lives, all of them more interesting than any real live snake ever had."
Murphy clicked his slide projector to life. "Now, these
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Biblical names and kingdoms are mouthfuls, I know, so I'm going to try to help you keep them straight by flashing them up on the screen. All of these gentlemen ruled way before they could be on the cover of People , so I don't have big, glossy color photos to help you remember them.
"Now, this slide shows a decrepit-looking document, an ancient papyrus scroll that came into my possession not too long ago. However, as is often the case for archaeologists, I had no real context for what I was looking at. It would be a lot easier if these artifacts already came with the background audio-tape you get at the museum for the walking tour, but I haven't found one yet that does. So we have to discover all those facts ourselves."
The next slide was a close-up of the scroll. "Don't worry. Those of you who think you're hungover, that's not English up there. Not even close. It is a language known--or, these days, mostly unknown--as Chaldean, dating back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest king of Babylon."
Murphy clicked the king's name up on the screen, followed by a map of Babylon. Then he forwarded to the figure on the scroll that he had interpreted as representing the king. "Again, this didn't come with an instructional video, so how did I know that this lovely artist's rendering is of King Nebuchadnezzar? By knowing the period of the writing and knowing my succession of kings, which is to say, folks, eat your vegetables, say your prayers at night, and study, study, study. There are no Hollywood shortcuts in this business.
"Now, here's why this scroll is so exciting. A lot of what archaeologists have found from Babylonian times are storage receipts and ordinary everyday records, because the
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Babylonians were the early-day versions of college administrators. They loved to write everything down."
He clicked on the next slide. "Now, that might look like an eyelash on the projector lens, but it is the cuneiform symbol for a snake. Combining that with this next symbol, which we believe to stand for what we call bronze , I began to get excited. And then when I pieced together enough of the rest of the scroll, I started to realize this was no Babylonian grocery list."
That was his last slide, so Murphy turned off the machine. "I'm going to come back to some greater detail about methods for interpreting ancient writing in a later lecture. For now, let me skip all the way ahead, past what I learned by reading the scroll, and how that led me to find my snake friend here." He pulled the bronze Serpent tail out of his bag once more. "Because the point I wanted to get to today is about having the courage to make some leaps of logic and knowledge, because it's oftentimes the wild, crazy, impossible notions that lead even boring old archaeologists like me to discover new truths.
"This bronze piece, I believe, once we test it out in the lab, will prove to be the tail of the Brazen Serpent, which in your Old Testament was made by Moses in fourteen fifty-eight B.C. The Israelites started complaining about wandering around in the desert for so long and began acts of 'unbelief' against God. As punishment for their rebellion, God sent down poisonous serpents to bite the offenders. That got everybody back on track and they prayed and asked Moses for help. He prayed to God, who took mercy on the Israelites and told Moses, 'Make a fiery Serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.'
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"Moses interpreted 'fiery' as bronze, because he made this Serpent figure and held it up before the afflicted, and those who repented were healed. All of this Serpent symbolism, of course, is a very potent direct line back to the Serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden, which started the world down the road of sin and judgment. And one of these days I'd like to come back and talk about what healed the Israelites. Was it some magical dark power in the bronze snake, or was it the fact that the Israelites recommitted to their faith in God? But Dean Fallworth will start accusing me of being a tent-show preacher if I dare to wander off into issues of faith. Plus, I want to get to my real investigative point today.
"There are two places in history that are recorded in the Bible where this Brazen Serpent makes an appearance. The first is in fourteen fifty-eight B.C., when Moses forms the Serpent for the purpose of healing the Israelites. We then fast-forward to seven fourteen B.C., to the only other time it's mentioned in the Bible, in II Kings 18:1-5, where, contrary to the First Commandment, the Brazen Serpent becomes a special object of worship.
"The young King Hezekiah, who was one of the most devout kings of Judah, discovers that his people are beginning to adopt the practice of idolatry, which was common among the neighboring tribes. Evidently, this Brazen Serpent had been secretly preserved and used as an object of worship. Some people even attributed mysterious healing powers to the Serpent.
"When Hezekiah discovered the people of Judah bowing down before the Serpent in worship, worship that belonged to
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God alone, he was so enraged that he smashed it into three pieces.
"And that, as far as the Bible goes, is the last we see of the Brazen Serpent. Until this scroll set me on the trail of some connection to the Serpent's being around in the time of the greatest empire of Babylon, during the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. That's a long time and a long way from where the Bible leaves the Serpent lying in three pieces at Hezekiah's feet."
Murphy paused. "So, because archaeologists look
for some way besides time machines to explain how artifacts may survive leaps of time and distance, I have a theory, and that theory helped me to find this piece of the Serpent last week. I believe that when Hezekiah ordered the Serpent destroyed in Judah, it was broken into three pieces and placed in the old Temple. Back then, even if the king told you to destroy an idol, you didn't just throw away a three-foot piece of perfectly good bronze. About one hundred forty years later, when the Babylonians stormed through Judah and sacked the Temple, they took back to Babylon anything that looked like it was worth something, and somebody eventually rescued the three pieces of the Serpent.
"Now, some of the writing is missing from this scroll I uncovered, so some greater speculation than usual is in order, but we have pieced together enough of the message to reveal that some high priest among those idol-worshiping Babylonians put the Serpent back together, probably believing that it had great powers.
"In my next lecture, I will begin to talk about prophecies,
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and how Nebuchadnezzar got his fear of the true God and ordered idols destroyed left and right--and there goes the Brazen Serpent on the chopping block again. Except the high priest who wrote this scroll wanted the Serpent saved again and split up the pieces with instructions on this scroll for finding them to put them back together. Which, if I have any luck reading what's written on the bottom of this tail here, I will endeavor to do. So, while I dash off to do that, class dismissed."
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