The Lost Ark

by J. R. Rain

  “He’s been hurt, father,” said Faye. She reached out and caressed my right hand, the same hand that was gently maneuvering the cyclic. “He was hurt saving our asses, I might add.”

  Caesar patted my shoulder. Although it was my good shoulder, a shockwave of pain pulsed through me. “Anyone have any painkillers?” I asked hopefully.

  Caesar picked up the first aid kit and frowned at the head-sized dent in it. He opened the box and produced a bottle of aspirin. I ate four raw. Anything to dull the pain.

  “Where to now?” asked Caesar.

  Before I answered, I looked over my shoulder at Farid. The big bodyguard was hunched behind the co-pilot seat, the cabin too small for him to stand erect. He was staring down through the cockpit window. I saw now what was in his arm. The warhead.

  “What do you think, big guy?” I asked him, arching an eyebrow. “Give them something to remember us by?”

  Farid was covered in blood that did not appear to be his own. “Do it,” he said grimly.

  I flicked on the arming switches to the two Hellfire missiles, both equipped with the newly-developed blast/fragmentation warheads, and hung from pylons under the fuselage. I took a deep breath, willing the aspirin to act quickly. Seconds later, the laser seeker locked onto the coded laser energy reflected from the target. The laser-guided Hellfires were ready.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I flicked a switch and the helicopter shuddered as the first rocket, propelled by a single-stage, single thrust, solid propellant motor, exceeded a thrust of five hundred pounds and left its rail, blazing through the afternoon sky, reaching speeds of upwards near 950 miles per hour.

  The missile, capable of leveling tanks and concrete factories, as they had done so well in Desert Storm, entered the Scud launcher. There was a brief pause before a blinding explosion illuminated the mountainside like the dawning of a new sun. I immediately launched the next Hellfire, and the mountainside erupted into a burning pyre, black smoke billowing into the air.

  We were silent, watching the burning wreckage. Faye leaned over and kissed me long and hard. When she was done she looked me in the eye. “Boys and their guns.”

  “It’s a big gun.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  I banked to port and rose to 13,000 feet, near the chopper’s maximum elevation and pushed the throttle forward. We reached a cruising speed of two hundred miles an hour, leaving the burning ruins of the emir’s revenge machine behind us.

  I was going to need more aspirin.

  Six Months Later

  Mount Ararat

  North Face, 12,000 feet

  The three of us were in a familiar cave.

  Outside was a crooked finger of rock, pointing accusingly into the morning sky. We sat before a crackling campfire, fueled by dry shrubbery. I removed a bubbling pot of oatmeal from the fire, and poured the steaming contents into three tin bowls. As we ate, Professor Caesar Roberts said, “Today is the day, dear girl, that we finally put this matter to rest.”

  “Only if you say so, father,” said Faye, laughing. “Aside from the pack of ravenous wolves we narrowly escaped, I’ve found this second trip to be rather relaxing. And it’s good to be away from my students.”

  The small dirt mound was still there, as I hoped it would be forever. This would be my last visit to Liz’s grave. When finished with our breakfast, I packed our equipment and helped the others with their backpacks.

  Caesar looked at his daughter, running his fingers through his neatly trimmed beard. “Are you sure, dear girl, that you didn’t see it? I mean, it was right there in front of you.”

  As Faye adjusted her backpack, she said, “For the last time, father, no. I was too worried about you two. I ran into the ice cavern with blinders on, seeing only the three of you before I was yanked back into the tunnel.”

  “And you never saw a massive ship hidden behind the ice?” I asked.

  “Refer to my prior comment,” she said dryly.

  “What do you think, old man?” I asked.

  “I think she’s telling the truth.”

  I led them out the cave and onto the Abich glacier.

  * * *

  I had been left with a nasty scar on my chest and back. Although the scars looked impressive, they never tanned. We had landed the helicopter at a small airstrip outside of Dogubayazit. The Turkish government had officially declared that the deaths of the handful of Kurdish soldiers involved in the Omar Ali affair were, in fact, the result of a Kurdish uprising. We had been confined in Turkish prisons for over two weeks, questioned relentlessly about the activities upon the mountain. In the end, we were set free. Officially, there was no mention of Emir Omar Ali. He had died not only in shame, but in obscurity. And the entire mountain had been picked clean of the missile launcher.

  Farid Bastian was back with his own people, living from one oasis to the next, following ancient trade routes, living a simple nomadic life far removed from the court intrigue of the Arab royalties. At least, that’s what he said in his last e-mail.

  I’m back now with the National Geographic, here on this day to finish an article I had begun almost three years ago. Life is like that sometimes.

  Now, high above the Abich glacier, we turned into a little-known granite canyon. Above, storm clouds were gathering. We moved deeper into the canyon until I was sure we had come to the spot where the ark had plummeted six months before. I stopped and set down my backpack. The others did the same.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Faye.

  “We’re here,” I said.

  She looked around the mostly desolate canyon. Massive ice cliffs rose to either side. “So where’s the ark, Mr. Ward?”

  “It’s here,” I said. “Of course, it’s been buried under many dozens of snowstorms.”

  “Of course,” she said, humoring me, touching me lightly on the shoulder. The gleam in her eyes was wicked. “Then again, maybe it’s right here in front of me and I’m the only one who can’t see it, like the emperor and his new clothes.”

  I handed Caesar an ice shovel. “Are you ready to start digging, old man?”

  He grinned. “I’ll do anything to shut her up.”

  As a light snow began to fall, Caesar and I began digging. And, yes, this time I did have my camera.

  The End

  Also available on Amazon Kindle:

  THE BODY DEPARTED

  A Ghost Story

  by

  J.R. Rain

  (read on for a sample)

  1.

  I stepped through the wall and into my daughter’s bedroom.

  She was sleeping contentedly on her side. It was before dawn and the building was quiet. The curtains were open and the sky was black beyond. If there were any stars, they were lost to the L.A. smog. The curtains were covered with ponies, as was most of the room. A plastic pony light switch, a pony bed lamp, pony wallpaper and bedspread. Someday she would outgrow her obsession with ponies, although I secretly hoped not.

  A girl and her pony. It’s a beautiful thing.

  I stepped closer to my sleeping daughter, and as I did so she shifted slightly towards me. She mewed like a newborn kitten. Crimson light from her alarm clock splashed over her delicate features, highlighting a slightly upturned nose and impossibly big eyes. Sometimes when she slept her closed eyelids fluttered and danced. But not tonight. Tonight she was sleeping deeply, no doubt dreaming of sugar and spice and everything nice.

  Or of Barbies and boys and everything in-between.

  I wondered if she ever dreamed of me. I’m sure she did at times. Were those dreams good or bad? Did she ever wake up sad and missing her father?

  Do you want her to wake up sad? I asked myself.

  No, I thought. I wanted her to wake up rested, restored and full of peace.

  I stepped away from the far wall and glided over to the small chair in the corner of her room. We had made the chair together one weekend, a father/daughter project for the Girl’s Scouts. To her credit, sh
e did most of the work.

  I sat in it now, lowering my weightless body into it, mimicking the act of sitting. Unsurprisingly, the chair didn’t creak.

  As I sat, my daughter rolled over in her sleep, facing me. Her aura, usually blue and streaked with red flames, often reacted to my presence, as it did now. The red flames crackled and gravitated toward me like a pulsating static ball, sensing me like I sensed it.

  As I continued to sit, the lapping red flames grew in intensity, snapping and licking the air like solar flares on the surface of the sun. My daughter’s aura always reacted this way to me. But only in sleep. Somehow her subconscious recognized, or perhaps it was her soul. Or both. And from this subconscious state, she would sometimes speak to me, as she did now.

  “Hi, daddy.”

  “Hi, baby,” I said.

  “Mommy said you got hurt real bad.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Mommy said that a bad man hurt you and you got killed.”

  “Mommy’s right, but I don’t want you thinking about that right now, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said sleepily. “Am I dreaming, daddy?”

  “Yes, baby.”

  We were quiet and she shifted subtly, lifting her face toward me, her eyes still closed in sleep. There was a sound from outside her window, a light tapping. I ignored it, but it came again and again, and then with more consistency. I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was raining. I looked back at my daughter and thought of the rain, remembering how it felt on my skin, on my face. Or, rather, I was trying to remember. Lately, such memories of the flesh were getting harder and harder to recall.

  “It’s raining, daddy,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you live in the rain?”

  “No.”

  “Where do you live, daddy?”

  “I live here, with you.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  I said nothing. I hated to be reminded of this, even by my daughter.

  “Why don’t you go to heaven, daddy?”

  I thought about that. I think about that a lot, actually. I said, “Daddy still has work to do.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Good work.”

  “I miss you,” she said. “I miss you so much. I think about you every day. I’m always crying. People at school say I’m a crybaby.”

  “You’re not a crybaby,” I said. “You’re just sad.” My heart broke all over again. “It’s time to go back to sleep, angel.”

  “Okay, daddy.”

  “I love you, sweetie.”

  “I love you, too, daddy.”

  I drifted up from the small wooden chair and moved across the room the way I do—silently and easily—and at the far wall I looked back at her. Her aura had subsided, although some of it still flared here and there. For her to relax—to truly relax—I needed to leave her room entirely.

  And so I did. Through the wall.

  To hell with doors.

  2.

  I was standing behind him, reading the newspaper from over his shoulder, as I did every morning.

  His name was Jerrold and he was close to sixty and close to retirement. He lived alone and seemed mostly happy. He was addicted to internet poker, but, as far as I could tell, that was his only vice.

  Thank God.

  He turned the paper casually, snapping it taught, then reached for his steaming mug of coffee, heavy with sugar and cream, and took a long sip. I could smell the coffee. Or at least a hint of it, just like I could smell a hint of his aftershave and hair gel. My senses were weak at best.

  As he set the mug down, some of the coffee sloshed over the rim and onto the back of his hand. He yelped and shook his hand. I could see that it had immediately reddened.

  Pain.

  I hadn’t known pain in quite a long time. My last memory of it was when I had been working at a friend’s house, cutting carpet, and nearly severed my arm off.

  I looked down at my translucent arm now. Although nearly imperceptible, the scar was still there—or at least the ghostly hint of it.

  Still cursing under his breath, Jerrold turned back to his paper. So did I. He scanned the major headlines, and I scanned them along with him. After all, he was my hands in this situation.

  He read through some local Los Angeles news, mostly political stuff that would have bored me to tears had I tears to be bored with. I glanced over at his coffee while he read, trying to remember what it tasted like. I think I remembered.

  I think.

  Hot, roasted, bitter and sweet. I knew the words, but I was having a hard time recalling the actual flavor. That scared me.

  Jerrold turned the page. As he did so, something immediately caught my eye; luckily, it caught his eye, too.

  A piano teacher had been murdered at St. Luke’s, a converted monastery that was now being used as a Catholic church and school. Lucy Randolph was eighty-six years old and just three days shy from celebrating her sixtieth anniversary with her husband.

  I had known Mrs. Randolph. In fact, she had been my own music teacher back when I was a student at St. Luke’s. She had been kind to a fault, a source of inspiration and joy to her students, and especially to me.

  And now, according to the report, someone had strangled her, leaving her for dead on the very piano she had taught from. Perhaps the very same piano I had been taught from.

  Damn.

  Jerrold clucked his tongue and shook his head and moved on to the next page, but I had seen enough. I stepped away,

  “You’re still young, Jerrold,” I said to him. “Lose fifteen pounds and find someone special—and ditch the gambling.”

  As I spoke, the small hairs on the back of his neck stood up and and his aura shifted towards me. He shivered unconsciously and turned the page.

  I left his apartment.

  3.

  We were in Pauline’s apartment.

  She was drinking an apple martini and I wasn’t, which was a damn shame. At the moment, I was sitting in an old wingback chair and she was on the couch, one bare foot up on a hand-painted coffee table which could have doubled for a modern piece of abstract art.

  “If you ever need any extra money,” I said, “you could always sell your coffee table on eBay.”

  “It’s not for sale,” she said. “Ever.”

  “What if you were homeless and living on the streets and needed money?”

  “Then I would be homeless and living on the streets with the world’s most bitchen hand-painted coffee table.”

  Her name was Pauline and she was a world-famous medium. She could hear me, see me and sometimes even touch me. Hell, she could even read my thoughts, which was a bit disconcerting for me. She was a full-figured woman, with perhaps the most beautiful face I had ever seen. She often wore her long brown hair haphazardly, a look that would surely have your average California girl running back to the bathroom mirror. Pauline was not your average California girl. She wasn’t your average girl by any definition, spending as much of her time in the world of the dead as in the world of the living. Luckily, she just so happened to live in the very building I was presently haunting.

  “Yeah, lucky me,” said Pauline, picking up on my thoughts.

  She did her readings out of a small office near downtown Los Angeles, usually working with just one or two clients a day. Some of her sessions lasted longer than others and tonight she was home later than usual, hitting the booze hard, as she often did. I wouldn’t call her a drunk, but she was damn close to being one.

  “I’m not a drunk,” Pauline said absently, reading my thoughts again. “I can stop any time I want. The booze just helps me...release.”

  “Release?” I asked.

  “Yeah, to forget. To unwind. To uneverything.”

  “You should probably not drink so much,” I said.

  She regarded me over her martini glass. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her face gleamed with a fine film of sweat. She wasn’t as attractive when she was drunk.


  “Thanks,” she said sarcastically. “And do you even remember what it’s like being drunk?”

  I thought about that. “A little. And that was below the belt.”

  “Do you even have a belt?”

  I looked down at my slightly glowing ethereal body. Hell, even my clothing glowed, which was the same clothing I had been wearing on the night I was murdered two years ago: a white tee shirt and long red basketball shorts, my usual sleeping garb. I was barefoot and I suspected my hair was a mess, since I had been shot to death in my sleep. Dotting my body were the various bloody holes where the bullets had long ago entered my living flesh.

  “No belt,” I said. “Then again, no shoes, either.”

  She laughed, which caused some of her martini to slosh over the rim. She cursed and licked her fingers like a true alcoholic.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said.

  “Waste not, want not,” I said.

  She glared at me some more as she took a long pull on her drink. When she set it down, she missed the center of the cork coaster by about three inches. Now part of the glass sat askew on the edge of the coaster, and the whole thing looked like it might tip over. She didn’t notice or care.

  Pauline worked with spirits all day. Early on, she had tried her best to ignore my presence. But I knew she could see me, and so I pursued her relentlessly until she finally acknowledged my existence.

  “And now I can’t get rid of you,” she said.

  “You love me,” I said. “Admit it.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I do. Call me an idiot, but I do.”

  “Idiot,” I said. “Besides, I’m different than those other ghosts.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “I’m a ghost on a mission.”

  “Could that sound more corny?” she said.

  “Maybe after a few more drinks,” I said.

  “So how’s the mission coming along?” she asked. We had been over this before, perhaps dozens of times.