Arachnosaur

by Richard Jeffries

  “Afflict,” Key echoed. “Interesting choice of words. Do you actually mean infect? Do the Saudis and Iranians know about that?”

  Davi sniffed. “You do not even know about that, my friend.”

  “I’m all ears,” Key said, shaking away the image of Davi looking at him. “Okay.” He nodded. “Poor choice of idiom. Let’s just say I’m very anxious to know.”

  “You will know,” Davi assured him. “But I cannot do it here.” He made abortive hand motions that looked as if he was trying to magically make the SUV grow larger. “Please wait just a few hours more.”

  “A few hours? Do we even have a few hours?” Key asked.

  Davi nodded. “We’ll have to make it so. We have no choice.”

  Key’s jaw tightened. There had to be a good reason for Davi to go missing. “Yeah, about that—”

  “Please,” the Professor interrupted, his head lowering, and his hands making a calming gesture. “I must rest. I do not want to, but I must.”

  Rahal said, “He had not slept since—”

  “No, Eshe,” Davi interrupted. “Do not speak. I do not wish any passing motorist to even suspect you might have someone in the vehicle with you.” He looked apologetically at Key. “I know this is trying. But it will be rewarded. That I can assure you.”

  Key exhaled sharply, his lips tight. “Another Arab proverb?”

  Surprisingly, that made Davi laugh. “As a matter of fact, yes.” He said something in Arabic, then translated. “’Be patient and you will get what you desire.’ Now let me rest. And, if you are wise, you will too. Neither of us may get the chance again for quite some time.” And the Professor was asleep almost as soon as his head rested upon the seat.

  Key shifted to get more comfortable, and was about to say something to Rahal before he remembered Davi’s paranoia about passing motorists. That further reminded him that he might, indeed, be more tired than he hoped.

  And that was his last thought until the Murano’s stopping woke him up. He twitched, then straightened when he saw he was alone in the vehicle. The auto was in a tent the size of a one-car garage. A tent flap was open behind them, and he stepped out.

  He blinked into a breathtaking sunrise on a pristine, sweeping desert. Rahal must have driven all night, leaving them at the edge of an astonishing swath of sand dunes. She was standing beside the tent opening, holding a large pile of clothing.

  “Welcome to Rub’ Al Khali,” she said, amused by his gaping reaction. Even amidst an attempted suicide bombing, and the purposeful, seemingly malicious, extermination of three infected girls, she had never seen Key be anything but resolute.

  “Rub’ Al Khali?” he repeated for the lack of anything else.

  “The Empty Quarter,” Rahal translated.

  “Well named,” he commented, getting some of his equilibrium back. “Where’s the Professor?”

  Rahal nodded toward the nearest sand dune. “Obtaining for us our next ride.”

  A man in full Bedouin, desert dweller garb—including a sarong, the ankle length thobe, and kimono-shape-sleeved, striped, aba sheath—appeared, holding the leashes of three saddled camels.

  Key realized it was Davi, then turned back to Rahal, his eyes wide and mouth open. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “No, we aren’t,” Davi said as he neared.

  Rahal tossed Key the similar Bedouin garb she had been holding. “And you,” she told him with the first real smile he had ever seen on her face. “How you say, it? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  Chapter 15

  It was so well camouflaged even Key didn’t see it at first.

  One second it was just another sand dune out of millions of sand dunes. As beautiful as they all were, after a couple thousand they got to be a bit monotonous, despite the spectacular skies and landscapes.

  The next second the sand shifted just enough to reveal what seemed to be a cloth edge. As the camels ambled forward, the edge became a flap, and suddenly a small section of tent appeared as if by magic.

  Sure enough, Professor Davi brought his ungulate to a stop a few feet away, and started the laborious process of dismounting. But then again, everything was laborious where camels were concerned. But Key had ridden in enough military vehicles over ridiculous terrain to have a head start being, as Eshe put it, “comfortable being uncomfortable.”

  Although Rahal had also informed him that the Rub’al Khali was more than six-hundred-miles long and three-hundred-miles wide—covering parts of Oman as well as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen—he had no idea where they were despite extensive training in pinpointing his location. But Key supposed that was the whole idea.

  Just as he had mounting his camel—the one they jokingly called Alshshaytan, a.k.a. the Devil—he watched Davi and Rahal dismount, and followed suit. They were all wearing full Bedouin garb, including the maser hooded headwear, held in place with an igal headband of camel wool, so they looked no different than the two men who were suddenly in front of them.

  To Key, it appeared as if the desert sand had given birth to them, although he knew they simply had pushed, rolled, or crawled out of a sand-covered tent. They faced Key now, one holding a heavy carbine and the other holding a big, curved, beautifully inlaid and decorated khanja knife. Davi said something to them in Arabic, after which they begrudgingly stepped away from the corporal.

  “Good timing,” Key commented, glancing up at the nearly white sun that stabbed the sky at about the 11:00 a.m. position. “Another few minutes and my head would’ve been hard boiled.”

  “After a season in Yemen?” Davi sniffed as he kneeled by the sand-covered cloth. “I doubt that.”

  “Impressive,” Key continued, crouching beside the professor and his assistant. “No way to approach this place without the dwellers knowing.”

  This time Davi snorted as he buried one hand in the sand. “You don’t, how you say, know the half of it. They knew we were coming a mile back.”

  Key looked over his shoulder to try spotting any lookout. Halfway through the motion, he knew that if he couldn’t even make out the tent, he’d never spy a watcher. When he looked back, Davi was already halfway through the tent flap.

  Rahal motioned that Key should follow, which he happily did. Once inside, he had another half-expected surprise. It wasn’t a constricted hovel, which basic engineering suggested it had to be. Instead, it was an expansive, if low-ceilinged, series of tubular bubbles, strewn with carpets, blankets, pillows, and boxes.

  Key blinked and tried to get his head around how they had managed to illuminate the place, as well as air condition it. At any other time he might have questioned Davi about it at length, but not now. The professor had not brought him all the way out here to brag about engineering. In fact, Davi was ignoring the small bowls of rice yogurt and round, unleavened, bread that were being offered to them. Instead, he motioned at Key to follow him deeper into the complex.

  “I am descended from the Najdi Tribe,” he said as he went. “True Bedouins. When I became a scientist, my father didn’t know whether to bless or exile me.” Davi stopped in a chamber that looked like a squat version of his college office. “I think he did both.”

  “Family is family.” Key shrugged, stopping just inside the entrance. “You obviously still have friends here.”

  Rahal joined them.

  “Yes,” Davi replied. “When they heard of my trouble, they moved quickly to make a haven for me and my findings.”

  Key found a place to kneel in the center of the area, directly behind a small, low rectangular table amid the piles of papers. He didn’t have to ask anything since Davi seemed to have every intention of telling him about his trouble and findings without any prompting.

  “As you may have guessed,” the professor said, kneeling across from Key and a pile of papers he had placed on the table top, “I am a member of th
e Oman Study Committee.”

  “A disgraced member,” Rahal stressed, kneeling beside Davi.

  Davi gave her a sharp look. “We’ll come to that,” he admonished her. “First things first.”

  Key’s eyebrows raised at Davi’s use of his father’s favorite phrase, as well as the way Rahal blushed and lowered her head.

  “We found something in Shabhut that has grave consequences for the world,” Davi continued.

  “And you didn’t want to keep silent about it,” Key suggested, inwardly kicking himself for trying to support Rahal in some way. Neither chivalry nor machismo was timely in this tent.

  “No,” Davi retorted. “I would have been satisfied, even delighted, to keep silent about it, if only we had taken immediate, destructive, action.”

  Key rocked back on his heels. “You had a chance to destroy it?” he marveled with gradually increasing incredulity, “and didn’t?”

  “Obviously.” Davi grunted. “We never would have, should have, or needed to meet each other if we had.”

  Davi slapped a scroll to the table and rolled it open for Key to see. On it was a series of blueprints, schematics, and pictures of a bulbous, multi-legged fossil, as well as a computerized recreation of it.

  “Idmonarachne Brasieri,” Davi said sadly. “Their ironstone-preserved remains were three million years old, and found in France.”

  Key stared at the charts, spotting a measurement bar. According to it, the Idmonarachne Brasieri was about four feet long from its antennae to its multiple legs. Unable to completely comprehend what he was seeing or hearing, he felt an itch that crawled from his skull to his coccyx, then looked up at the professor.

  “You mean this is real?” he said with open disbelief. “This exists? Now? Here?”

  Davi nodded gravely. “The OSC first got wind of a discovery in the bowels of a Shabhut temple, when extremists destroyed it a little too well.”

  Key translated that for himself. Either ISIS or Awar’s gang opened a hole that somehow went back all the way to the dinosaurs, then along came…this.

  “I thought I was chasing down a disease,” Key retorted. “You mean I’m chasing some sort of prehistoric spider?”

  Davi nodded. “Actually yes. It is most similar to the modern arachnid.”

  “Except it doesn’t spin silk,” Rahal interjected ominously, rewarded by another glare from Davi, a glare she ignored to finish her statement. “It spins…something else.”

  Key stared from the woman, to the man, to the fossils. “What?” The professor and his assistant shared a glance, as if they were suddenly reluctant to say more. Key could imagine why. Things were about to get even worse. “What?” he repeated more insistently.

  Davi opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, one of the men who greeted them stuck his head into the office. He said one word in Arabic, which made Davi’s face go white. Before Key could ask for a translation, both Davi and Rahal had leapt to their feet and were running back to the entrance.

  By the time they arrived there, Key was between them. He was practically riding one of the guard’s backs as they rolled outside, just as a helicopter shot past them, its struts practically tearing off their heads.

  He tried to stop the guard from standing. He failed, and then the man danced as the copter’s thirty-millimeter bullets tore into him from turban to sand boot.

  Saudi Army Apache, Key immediately identified. At least five years old. Probably downed by Yemini and somehow refurbished.

  He rolled over and practically kicked Rahal and Davi back into the tent as the helicopter screamed up and around for another pass.

  “Chain gun. Maybe anti-tank missiles and rockets!” Key grabbed Davi by the scruff of the neck and propelled him back toward the study. “Talk, and talk fast!”

  Davi looked as if a long-delayed execution order was finally being carried out, but he didn’t resist. He went with Key back into the tent bowels, and started jabbering as the corporal searched for any decent weapon.

  “The authorities want to make peace with Usa Awar. The man even invited the committee to study his new discovery.” Davi gasped, trying to catch his breath and order his mind as a large whomping sound shook the tent.

  Hydra rocket, Key recognized, gritting his teeth as he kept searching. Direct hit and they wouldn’t be able to separate what was left of them from the crystallized sand. “Go on!” he yelled.

  “The Idmonarachne Brasieri can excavate any animal carcass,” Davi said, slowly backing into a corner, “planting eggs that can gestate in the corpses. We concluded they were sealed in a massive underground mausoleum where seeping groundwater and cannibalism allowed them to survive.”

  “They? How many?” Key barked.

  “We don’t know! Awar only allowed us to examine one. But even if it’s just two, these arachnosaurs could spread inland like a locust swarm, or send seeded corpses into the Gulf of Aden. It would only be months before they would affect the world.”

  Another rocket tore a hole through the tent’s entryway, exploding some yards off target. But it was enough to make Davi scream and clutch his head. Key grabbed the man by his shoulders and shook him, silently thankful that whoever was manning the copter was a lousy shot.

  “Are the eggs making people explode?” Key shouted in Davi’s ear.

  The question gave the professor something to concentrate on. “No!” he yelled over the din of the swooping copter just a cloth away. “It’s their webbing. The webbing! It contains ammonia picrate and picric acid. It’s impossible, but if it touches you, or you touch it, the formula enters your bloodstream and somehow intensifies in the light to extreme potency!”

  As another explosion sent them staggering, Davi started crying.

  Key could’ve sworn he heard an echo. He turned back to see Rahal had crouched beside Davi, holding him tightly as the professor sobbed.

  “What else?” Key yelled at him. “Tell me what else!”

  “They want to weaponize them!” Davi yelled back, his face haunted. “They want to weaponize what the webbing makes humans become!”

  Key spun around again as the copter made another pass. There are definitely two copters now, he realized. But how did they find us?

  “Can they be stopped?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Davi’s hollow answer was not what he wanted to hear.

  A gigantic explosion shook the ground. Rahal shrieked and clutched Davi tightly. As shrapnel tore the tent directly over their heads, Key dove atop the professors. As the corporal recovered from the shock wave, he realized he still needed to know one thing. “Why did you run? Who wants you dead?”

  His pained eyes locked with the professor’s tormented ones.

  “They all do,” Davi whispered. “I ran because—”

  Before he could finish, the tent tore completely open directly in front of them. Rahal screamed in abject horror, her eyes screwed shut. Key leaped forward with the Idmonarachne Brasieri scroll in his hand.

  He stopped dead in his tracks as Sergeant Morton Daniels stood in front of him in full tactical gear, with his M240 in one hand and a huge fuckaduck-eating grin plastered on his stupid face.

  “Anybody call the cavalry?” he asked.

  Key was about to either embrace or slug Daniels when he felt Rahal grab him in a bear hug. He looked down to see an expression of radiant, almost Biblical, reprieve on her face. Before he could look beyond them to see what had actually happened, they all heard Davi’s small, resigned voice behind them.

  “I ran because—”

  Key turned to see the man crumpled in the corner, holding the barrel of a World War Two-era Smith and Western Victory Revolver against his right temple, his finger on the trigger.

  “I’m the only one who said they can’t be controlled. Remember—”

  Key dove at the professor.

>   “The arachnosaurs can’t be controlled.” Davi pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 16

  At first glance, Shabhut looked exactly the same. But at second glance, he actually looked like an Epcot version of Shabhut. The dirty, sandy streets, which were no more than paths, were free of corpses. They were also free of parts of corpses, human or animal. What was left of the dwellings were clean; so clean, in fact, that every surface seemed to glow, as if they had been sprayed with some sort of polymer sealant that glimmered in the moonlight. And, while the structures seemed abandoned, they were not.

  When the matte black Mercedes-Benz BMG G83 armored limo rolled slowly down the village’s central path, toward what appeared to be a natural, tan-colored bunker, cowled, automatic weapon-carrying figures appeared to its right, left, and behind like spectral wraiths. The three men inside the bulletproof vehicle each looked at the sudden chaperones nearest them.

  Saad Al-Abbasi saw that the men seemed to be wearing brand-new clothing. Dale Hood saw that the one nearest him had boots that were unscuffed in any way. Jean-Bernard Toussaint saw that the weapon the one nearest him was holding, a Kel-Tec M45, looked as if it had come straight from its Florida assembly.

  The seemingly spectral guards kept their distance as the armored vehicle slowed to a stop alongside one end of the bunker, which, at this angle, looked like the burrow of a giant hedgehog. The trio heard the doors decompress and unlock, cuing them that their trip from the Aden International Airport was at an end.

  Al-Abbasi, for one, glanced one final time around the palatial, fine leather and wood veneer interior—taking in the satellite TV, refrigerator, bar, and communication system. He knew that this vehicle had to cost at least a million dollars, and that any part of it was fortified to withstand multiple grenades and a wide array of calibers. It was so well protected that none of them had even seen the chauffeur within his one-way mirrored automotive cockpit.

  Al-Abbasi slowly extracted himself from a plush captain’s massage chair, and took one last big breath of the limo’s recirculated, purified, internal air conditioning system before joining his fellow passengers outside. By that time, their sentinels had positioned themselves like living balustrades, directing the trio unerringly toward the base of the bunker. Hood went first with the stereotypical go-get-’em spirit of an American, while Toussaint diffidently adjusted his gait so he was beside a cautious Al-Abbasi, sometimes a half-step behind, sometimes a half-step ahead. The Arab knew enough to be wary because, in the desert, in this ancient land, djinn and demon birds were once said to dwell.