The Voynich Cypher

by Russell Blake

  Steven studied the entrance to the Wadi – a magnificent canyon, carved from the light limestone rock, easily towering hundreds of feet overhead on either side.

  “There will be snakes and scorpions and poisonous spiders galore, so try not to get bitten by anything that will kill you. By the time we can get you out of here, you’ll be long gone,” Steven said.

  “He’s not kidding,” Moody stressed. “There’s a first aid kit in one of the bags, but it’s not going to do a lot of good if you get the wrong kind of bite, so pay attention to where you’re walking. There are enough deadly critters around here to kill us a hundred times over, so remember at all times that this isn’t downtown Los Angeles.”

  “L.A.’s no picnic either,” Natalie said. “You obviously haven’t been there for a while.”

  Everyone laughed, relieving the stress that was building from the remorseless ravages of the sun.

  A Jordanian military truck pulled off the road and an officer stepped out. He approached the group gingerly, and then deferred to Luca, as the oldest. In broken English, he welcomed them on behalf of the Jordanian government and assured them that their vehicles would be watched over by the attendant, twenty-four hours a day. He seemed uncertain what else to say, so Moody addressed him in Arabic, thanking him for the attention and the courtesy of stopping to see them off.

  That seemed to satisfy the officer, who strutted back to the truck and climbed in, patting the roof as a signal to drive on. The message was clear – the military was watching them.

  “This is a nature preserve, and you need a permit from the government to hike it. They’ve stopped handing those out until we’ve finished with our excavation,” Luca said.

  Natalie came to stand by Steven’s side, gazing up into the canyon. “Steven. It’s magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She was right. It was incredible, and humbling. The small stream of erosion had taken millions of years to cut through the rock, and the effect was breathtaking. Few people alive would ever get to experience it as they were about to.

  The solitude of the moment was shattered by the beating of rotors, and a medium-sized gray military helicopter hovered over the area before slowly descending. Leaning into the swirl of dust, the group toted their bags to it. The flight crew stowed the luggage, everyone boarded, and they lifted off to make the short flight.

  Steven watched as they traversed the canyon, veering to the right when they hit the fork in the rivers. After what he knew to be roughly four miles they arrived at the dry, relatively flat area where Steven had calculated they could make camp, at the base of what was going to be their work area. The river bed was gray gravel, with an inclination of twenty feet over its surface of three hundred foot length, but it was large enough to land a helicopter if there was no wind, and he reasoned that they could set up a base camp on the edge and not have the tents blow away by the rotors.

  The chopper set down and the small group disembarked, taking their bags from the flight crew. The hold contained several drums of water, as well as various other duffel bags and containers. Ten minutes after arriving, the helicopter was empty, and the crew waved to them as they lifted off. Once the aircraft had departed, the silence was deafening – there was literally no sound but the burbling of the meager river beyond. After only a small amount of exertion everyone was already bathed in sweat – the temperature in the canyon was into the triple digits due to lack of any breeze.

  Steven had brought a handheld outdoor thermometer; when he pulled it out of his pack, it read a hundred and seven Fahrenheit. At eleven-thirty a.m.. Anyone with doubts as to whether this was going to be easy duty quickly lost them, and it was with a certain sluggish determination that they unpacked. Several of the unidentified cases contained their camping gear, and they doggedly pitched tents and built a ready-made enclosure for the two latrines. Moody handled the creation of the area for the food and water, and once they were well on their way, he made another call on his satellite phone.

  Forty minutes later, the quiet in the canyon was again fractured by the thumping of rotor blades as their chopper approached, loaded with the remainder of their supplies. They were fortunate there was still no wind to speak of, and the landing occurred without drama. The three man flight crew hopped out of the cabin and hurriedly unloaded yet more boxes and crates, which Moody and the two Templars moved to the little camp area.

  Ten minutes after it had set down, the helicopter lifted off again, not to return for three days, at the earliest. The muggy air settled on the group like a blanket as they watched it crest the hill towards Amman, their last link to civilization severed. After a few minutes of rest, they returned to setting up the camp for the night before it started to get dark. There were still a few hours of light, and they needed to get the kitchen area up to speed. The helicopter had brought them a small gas-powered generator with several five gallon tanks of fuel, so they could have limited refrigeration in the oversized ice chests using several deep-cycle batteries they could then charge with the generator.

  It wasn’t Club Med, but it would do.

  Steven took bearings with the rangefinder, then retrieved the handheld GPS he’d brought to calculate positions. He powered it on, but nothing happened. Checking the batteries, he tried again, but with no success. After a half hour of fiddling with the device, it was obvious that something had malfunctioned. The adventure wasn’t starting off well. Without the GPS, they’d be down to dead reckoning from approximate points on their campsite. That wouldn’t work very well, Steven knew, but he would make the best of it for now.

  The afternoon wore on as they put the finishing touches on the camp. Just before dark, Luca approached him as he stood near the bottom of the slope, studying the north face of the canyon through his binoculars.

  “It’s a huge area, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It is. That’s what I was trying to explain on the plane. It’s one thing to read the Scroll’s directions, but quite another to be on the ground. The place is vast,” Steven agreed.

  “Do you see anything promising? It all looks the same to me,” Luca said, his face red from exertion and sun.

  “No. But we have no idea what we’re looking for. Whatever it is has been exposed to the elements for many hundreds, or even thousands, of years. So this isn’t going to be a matter of seeing two columns from an old temple sticking out of the cliff. If it hasn’t been discovered by now, it’s because it doesn’t look like anything special. Countless generations of nomads have been down this creek, and they’d have noticed.” Steven lifted a thermal canteen to his lips and drank some water. “It’s not going to be easy. It will be luck, more than skill, that gets us results, I’m afraid. And hard work. A lot of digging. Starting at first light tomorrow.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Oh well. Goodnight, Dr. Cross.”

  “Goodnight. And it’s Steven.”

  “Ah. Right then. Goodnight, Steven. Say goodnight to Natalie for me. And it’s Diego,” Luca said and moved off in the direction of his tent, walking stiffly, in the wake of the day’s demands.

  CHAPTER 35

  “There.”

  Steven released the button of the small two-way radio and watched as Arturo, high up on the canyon face, set an orange pole into the steep slope. Steven adjusted the laser rangefinder and shook his head at the futility of it as he waved approval. The absence of a GPS was worse than he’d thought. With the coordinates programmed in, it was far easier to get a bearing on the starting position. This was using a hammer to thread a needle.

  He walked over to Moody and took him aside.

  “You need to get the chopper back here with another GPS. I have the coordinates in my laptop, but we need the device. Otherwise we’re just spinning our wheels for the next three days, exhausting ourselves for no reason,” he said.

  “Let me see what I can do.” Moody moved to his tent to get the Sat-phone.

  Their first night had been hot, and the largest, most unexpected
problem had been the noise. Or rather, the lack of it. Other than random animals, there was no sound other than their camp, and Steven had realized within a few hours that three of his companions snored. Loudly. Natalie and he had spent the night tossing and turning, listening to the nocturnal symphony of labored breathing, and had gotten too little sleep. Two weeks or more of this would be a kind of hell.

  Moody had unpacked the weapons the prior evening and passed them out – several M-4 assault rifles, and six Colt .45 semi-automatic pistols, fully loaded. He’d watched as Natalie had efficiently checked her weapon and then thumbed the safety on and off before putting it by her pillow, doing the same with one of the rifles as she set it next to the bed. It had been a long time since he’d fired one – over twenty years, but the rifle still felt like second nature when he picked it up. Some things were like riding a bicycle, he supposed.

  Moody squinted at the sun as he moved to the kitchen area to get a drink, listening intently to a voice on the other end of the phone. He grabbed a water bottle out of the cooler and held it against his forehead.

  “All right. See if you can get one here today – we’re dead in the water without it. And check to ensure it’s operational before you come out. Call me when you know something.” Moody approached Steven with the phone in his hand. “They’re going to try to find one and fly it out. Hopefully, before dark.”

  They exchanged glances. It was eight a.m. and already sweltering.

  Steven nodded thanks and returned to studying the canyon face for any anomalies.

  It wasn’t his lucky day.

  Arturo and Francois were covered in sweat, taking a break near the section they’d been digging up for hours. The soil was a combination of rock and dirt, sedimentary, with layers of sand, so it wasn’t hugely difficult work on the whole – if it hadn’t been a hundred and ten degrees. But the heat made it very slow going. They could reasonably keep at it for ten to fifteen minute intervals, and then had to rest for at least that long to rehydrate and replenish the salt they were losing from sweating. They’d created shade with a tarp and several poles, which provided scant relief from the worst of the sun’s blaze.

  The tarp flapped as a gust blew through the canyon, hot and dry, but still welcome after most of the day had been spent in heavy, motionless air. The two men studied their latest excavation with dismay. It was a meager effort by any measure. They’d managed to get an area twenty feet square dug to a depth of three feet, matching another like it five yards away. Other than the odd scorpion or snake hole, there was nothing to show for their efforts. Whatever it was they were looking for wasn’t in that spot.

  Cross had joined in digging for an hour, but had been called away by Luca and had never returned. It was just as well, Francois thought. They had a slow but steady rhythm, Arturo with the pick, he with the shovel, and a third or fourth body actually got in the way rather than helping. Francois had mentioned it to the Doctor just before he’d left, respectfully but sincerely. The two were there to provide the muscle. Cross was more valuable studying the terrain for possible signs of whatever they were searching for.

  The breeze gusted again, and this time didn’t fade, but rather built to a steady twenty knot wind, bringing with it sand from the desert and creating dust in the canyon, partially from their excavation. After trying to continue in futility, the two-way radio crackled to life and Cross called them back to camp. The day was over, at least as far as they were concerned. The two men gathered their water and tools and gratefully headed down the hill to the river bed two-thirds of a mile below, famished and exhausted.

  The wind continued to build and by the time they were at the camp, was gusting to thirty knots, threatening to take the tents with it. They secured the kitchen and the latrine and then busied themselves with the others, bolstering the fastenings affixing the tents to the rocky river bed. This was the Shammal, a wind that blew from the north, and which Steven had warned could last for a week at a time. Normally not a huge problem, it increased in force due to the funnel effect of the canyon, making the gusting unpredictable.

  Moody’s satellite phone rang and he barked terse instructions. In a few minutes, the chopper slowly came over the top of the hill, having problems due to the updrafts from the wind. It descended cautiously, the turbulence buffeting it around, and at a hundred feet above the river bed it lurched alarmingly towards the canyon wall, blown by a particularly strong surge. His phone rang again. He plugged his ear with one hand against the noise from the blades and peered through the blowing dust as he held the bulky handset to his other.

  “They can’t set down. Too dangerous right now. They can try coming back tomorrow, or they can get as low as possible and drop the GPS to us,” he shouted to Steven.

  “Shit. Okay, let’s get that tarp and each take a side. It’ll provide a larger surface area for us to catch the unit.” Steven called over to Natalie, who was battling with a tent peg ten yards away. “Natalie? Can you come over and help for a second?”

  Natalie moved to his side and he quickly explained the plan. They gathered up the tarp from beneath the larger rocks someone had placed on top of it to keep it from blowing away and signaled to Arturo to join them, taking the fourth side of the rectangle. They unfolded it, then positioned themselves below the helicopter, which tried descending one more time. When it was about sixty feet above the creek bed, the side door slid open, and a head popped out, followed by an arm holding a small cardboard box. The man with the box turned to give the pilot instructions, and the craft shifted a few yards to the left. In position, he released the GPS and they watched as it plummeted towards them.

  Another gust hit it and altered the trajectory, and in a split second it became obvious they wouldn’t be able to stop its fall with the tarp. Natalie dropped her corner and sprinted towards the stream, eyes never leaving the object, and executed a perfect football catch even as she tripped and fell forward. She absorbed most of the fall with her shoulder, but the round, smooth rocks of the river bed still did damage, and when she stood, triumphantly, box held aloft in her right hand, her left arm was bleeding from multiple lacerations.

  Steven ran to her as the chopper lifted back into the sky and, after gingerly hugging her, inspected the damage.

  “Good catch.”

  “Thanks. I was sort of a tomboy in high school, so I got to play a lot of ball.” She winced as he touched one of the gashes. “Easy. That hurts.”

  “I’ll bet. Let’s get you cleaned up and bandaged. I’ll ask for an extra ration of beer for you tonight, in honor of your heroics,” Steven said.

  “Not to have your way with me…” Natalie murmured.

  “You’ve seen through my evil plan.” Steven looked at her arm again. “I’ll patch you up and then enter the coordinates into the GPS from my laptop. Tomorrow should be more productive,” Steven said. “You need me to carry you?”

  Natalie gave him a dirty look. “It’s a few scratches, tough guy. But hey, if it works with your barbarian conqueror fantasy, knock yourself out.”

  Relieved that she was fine, Steven took her good hand and they rejoined the group, which was battening down the camp against the howling wind.

  The next morning started better. The Shammal was still blowing, as it had all night, but had died down to something tolerable by midnight. Steven stood with Arturo and Francois on the sloping side of the canyon wall near the top, the new GPS in his hand. They were thirty yards from the previous day’s digs.

  “This is the first section I programmed. From here, to that rock,” Steven gestured with the unit, “down to that outcropping. That’s our best bet out of the gate. You sure you don’t need a hand, Arturo?”

  “Thanks, but no. This is what we came to do. Don’t worry about it. You’ll have your work cut out for you once we find what we’re looking for.” Arturo smiled. “Which is what, again?”

  “I wish I could be more specific. Obviously, we’re looking for something buried, something man made. Maybe an old chest,
or something crafted out of stone. Anything besides dirt and rocks,” Steven said, kicking a stray stone down the hill.

  “Buried treasure, eh?” Francois commented, shouldering the pick.

  “Something like that. I’ll stay up here with you, if you don’t mind. In case we find anything, it will cut down the time to get all the way up from the camp,” Steven offered.

  “Make yourself at home. We have a few folding chairs there by the water cooler, and if the wind doesn’t get any worse than this, the tarp should stay up for shade.”

  Arturo wiped the accumulated sweat from his brow with a hand towel he’d brought for that purpose and picked up the shovel. All three looked at where the sun was rising into the hazy sky, promising them another day of its angry, roasting glare. Steven checked his watch. Seven-thirty a.m., and already baking. He headed for the scant shade provided by the tarp, giving the snake holes that riddled the mountainside a wide berth.

  Settling in, he pulled his thermometer from his cargo shorts and pressed it on. Ninety-eight degrees, and it had only been light for a little over an hour.

  It was going to be another brutal one.

  CHAPTER 36

  The helicopter lifted off from the river bed and the little group watched as it ascended to the top of the canyon and sailed out of range. After ten days of digging, they’d established a routine. Up at dawn, begin the day’s work by seven-thirty, shut down in the heat of the day at two, and prepare for the next-day’s excavation while hiding from the devastating effect of the sun until dusk arrived.

  The polite courtesy of the first week had gradually been replaced by a kind of curt brevity, as the constant demands of the environment caused tempers to shorten and patience to wane. The unspoken pressure on Steven to perform mounted with each passing day, and the northern horizon was peppered with unproductive excavations, even now fading back into the canyon sides as the relentless winds continued unabated.