‘Don’t cry . . . You’ll get your money—’
‘I’m not worried about the money, Crawford!’ Jason snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake! We’ve just captured Fahim Al-Zahrani! And up in those mountains, I saw someone who might well have already called for help to try to set him free. As far as I see it, the entire fucking battalion should be here!’ He snatched the sat-com off the colonel’s belt and held it up. ‘Make the fucking call to General Ashford . . . or I will,’ he threatened.
The two guards exchanged nervous glances. Even Al-Zahrani took interest.
Crawford’s baleful eyes went wide. ‘I don’t take kindly to insubordination, soldier,’ he hissed through clamped teeth.
Jason stepped closer, so that his nose practically touched the colonel’s. ‘I don’t take kindly to incompetence,’ he rebuffed confidently. ‘Fuck this up and you’ll be facing a shit storm in front of a military tribunal. Plenty of men here are witness to how you’re handling this. I’m hugely interested in the success of this mission. Lots of innocent lives depend on it. Need I remind you, sir, that is why we’re all here.’
Without breaking eye contact, Crawford plucked his phone from Jason’s hand. He cocked his head sideways. ‘That’ll be all, Sergeant.’
‘Make the call,’ Jason repeated. He took two steps back and paused. Before he turned to leave, he added, ‘And just so we’re clear, Crawford: I’m not your soldier.’
44
Though Jason wasn’t fond of Crawford’s leadership style, he had to admit that the colonel’s platoon was a well-oiled machine. In less than fifteen minutes after relaying Crawford’s command to Staff Sergeant Nolan Richards, a human chain of twenty marines outfitted with respirators stretched through the cave’s passages and began ferrying out the blast debris. Camel, Jam and Meat joined them. The remainder of Crawford’s platoon went about securing the camp.
With Crawford focused on interrogating Al-Zahrani and the platoon set to work, Jason was intent on having a closer look at the cave’s burial chamber. He grabbed a flashlight and filed past the marines lined up in the entry tunnel. At the T, he split right from the marines and moved swiftly through the winding passage.
Drawing lessons from the PackBot’s earlier exploration, he tried to avoid the tunnel branches that led to dead ends. But the further he progressed into the mountain, nothing differentiated one passage from the next. Twice he forked off down passages terminating in solid rock and had to backtrack. Each time, he pulled out his knife and scraped an ‘X’ into the wall on either side of the passage.
Along the way, he managed to locate one of the surveillance cameras the bot had detected in the ceiling. Surprisingly, there was no visible wiring. Surrounded on all sides by rock, wireless signals would be near impossible. So where did the wiring run to? He didn’t have time to investigate the matter. He had to keep moving before Richards came looking for him.
The subterranean atmosphere was completely disorienting; the air cool and loamy, thin on oxygen. It felt as if the earth had swallowed him whole. Imagining Al-Zahrani groping through the pitch black with no hope of escape gave Jason bitter satisfaction. It was hard to believe that after so many months chasing ghosts, the A-list madman was now their prisoner – bound like an animal.
Over the past months, the intelligence Jason’s unit had pieced together through monitoring chatter and milking informants had pointed to a band of heavily armed operatives moving furtively from south to north, bouncing from one safe house to the next. Certainly cause for concern. But none of the intel even remotely suggested that Fahim Al-Zahrani might be among the group.
That was how the dirty business of counter-terrorism functioned: for every truth there were provocative rumours. Like the claim made by an informant in Baghdad which suggested that these phantom operatives had acquired two Soviet suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (over sixty of which were still unaccounted for after the fall of the Motherland) and were planning to erase Jerusalem and Washington DC from the map.
Accepting ‘intelligence’ at face value was anything but smart. ‘Nothin’ but a bunch of drama queens,’ Meat had once said.
The tedious process of sifting good information from bad information had persistently put Jason’s unit one step behind their quarry. Only when Jason moved on to more aggressive tactics did a clearer picture begin to take shape. Case in point: the tips extracted from a former Ba’ath Party lieutenant who’d sung like a canary after only one night of sleep-deprivation in a brightly lit windowless room with Britney Spears’s ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ playing in a loop at blaring volume. Among other titbits, Britney got him to confess that he’d helped arrange transport for the quarry, from Mosul to Kirkuk, and that travelling with the group were senior Al-Qaeda members seeking safe passage to Iran. All true. Thanks, Britney.
From there, Hazo’s contacts in Kirkuk pointed them to a local imam who’d been rumoured to have briefly hosted a number of unsavoury guests. Enter bright lights, Britney Spears and one sleepless night and the imam had provided detailed descriptions for the four-wheel-drive vehicles he’d procured for the operatives. Shortly after Jason requested aerial surveillance support from one of the Predator drones flying reconnaissance rounds over the northern plain, the caravan had been spotted heading east towards the Zagros Mountains. An hour later Jason’s unit had staged a hasty ambush.
Now Jason was certain that the only contraband the Arabs aimed to smuggle over the mountains was far more ominous than plutonium: it had been Fahim Al-Zahrani himself. And Jason still feared that Al-Zahrani was plotting an escape. Crawford had better call for backup, he thought.
Finally, the passage widened and yielded to the cave.
At the opening, Jason paused and moved the light beam left to right. All along the walls the bone piles were stacked high – a circle of death.
What happened to these people? Jason wondered as he paced forward and shone the light on the skeletal remains. There had to be thousands of skeletons stashed unceremoniously in this cave. This was definitely not a modern mass grave, like Crawford wanted to believe. But it certainly was evidence of a large-scale burial. There was no telling if the bodies had been buried at the same time.
Working the cave counterclockwise, he walked the perimeter while using the light to scan the bones. Every few feet, something would catch his eye and he’d paused to examine the remains and hunt for clues. Even if these bones came from victims of an ancient war or genocide, there’d be signs of trauma – broken bones, cleaved limbs, gouges left behind by sharp blades. But there was nothing extraordinary about anything he was seeing.
Conversely, modern genocide wasn’t about torture: its focus was annihilation – speed and efficiency. It wasn’t uncommon for dozens or hundreds to be gunned down en masse by automatic weapons. Or if ammunition was slim, the modern executioner might opt to work his way along a line-up and deliver single-round headshots. Like Saddam’s henchmen had done to Hazo’s dad. There was no evidence of that here. Not one bullet hole. Even if shots had been delivered to the torso, once the flesh decomposed, the slugs would drop out from the bones.
Furthermore, the lack of clothing or personal effects strongly countermanded Crawford’s chemical-weapons hypothesis. Not to mention that not a trace of flesh remained on these bones. That pointed to an event long, long ago. Well before Kurds were victimized by Saddam and his Ba’ath Party goons.
There definitely was a story to be found in these bones. But what could it be?
The bot sonar hadn’t picked up any other exit tunnels branching out from this cave. Seeing how the bones were piled so high, however, Jason wondered if the sonar signal had been obstructed. Maybe there was something to be found behind the bones? There was only one way to determine if that was the case.
‘They’re only bones,’ he told himself. ‘Nothing but bones.’
Having witnessed plenty of battle zone carnage – from blown-off limbs to bullet-riddled and decapitated corpses – Jason wasn’t squeamish when it came to blood and
gore. But bones evoked a different, unsettling feeling.
To Jason, naked bones underscored the impersonal, undiscriminating finality of death – the living being stripped of flesh to its crude frame. Like a vandalized car stripped down to its chassis and left sitting atop cinderblocks.
The ancients revered bones as a vessel for resurrection or reincarnation. As such, they built pyramids and lavish tombs and even mummified themselves to preserve the body’s sacred framework. This place, however, reflected a much deeper reality: death was cruel. Bones were nothing but remnants of a fleeting physical life. That’s what Jason had to believe. Because for the sorriest souls, like his brother Matthew, who’d been incinerated by ignited jet fuel in the World Trade Center on a crystal-clear September morning, nothing physical remained. Jason needed to believe that, in the end, bones didn’t determine one’s ultimate salvation.
Cringing, Jason placed his free hand on a knobby femur to get a feel for it. ‘Not so bad,’ he tried to convince himself. ‘Just like wood.’
Groaning, he tossed the light up on to the pile. Then he threw himself up on to the bones and began clambering his way to the top, using the skulls as steps.
‘Sorry, fellas . . .’
Halfway to the top, the pile partially collapsed under his weight as hollow rib cages buried deep beneath him folded inward with a series of brittle snaps. As if he had just cracked ice on a pond, he spread his weight flat. Once the bones settled again, he cautiously continued his ascent. Near the top there was more cracking and popping. A dust cloud of decomposed flesh wafted into his nose and mouth. ‘Aah!’ He spat out the dust, but a foul taste lingered on his tongue. That’s truly nasty, he thought.
He held the flashlight high and aimed the light into the shadowy gap behind the bone pile. Moving the light along the wall’s arc, he was able to scan about a third of the cave’s circumference. For good measure, he checked the ceiling too. Definitely no holes or openings.
He slid down the pile, sending a pair of skulls clattering across the ground. Then he continued slowly along the circle, shining the light on the skeletons. At the circle’s midpoint, he grappled to the top of the pile again and checked the rear wall and ceiling. Nothing.
Again he slid to the floor, continued along the pile. Three-quarters of the way around the circle he climbed the pile for a final inspection.
‘Okay. No way out,’ he muttered.
As he came to the end of the circle, he noticed something peculiar: dozens of jawbones had been neatly stacked in a separate pile. Upon closer examination, he discovered that none of them had teeth.
That’s odd, he mused.
Either these specimens were extreme examples of bad oral hygiene, or someone had extracted the teeth. But why would someone take them?
Then something on the ground glinted in the light. Jason bent down for a better look and at the foot of the pile saw a sharp silver edge covered in heavy dust. When he swept some of the dust away with his finger, he found something that was definitely not from long ago.
He picked up the object and held it under the light. It was a tool that resembled a hi-tech surgical instrument. Something a dentist might use to—
‘Extract teeth.’
Had to have been left behind by one of the scientists brought in for the 2003 excavation. He pocketed the plier-like forceps.
There was one item left, and Jason remembered the bot had spotted it to the right of the exit. Shining the flashlight waist-high, Jason ran the light along the curve of the wall until he found the spot that had clearly been smoothed by tools for a very obvious purpose: to prepare the surface for etching. And the image etched into stone made his jaw drop open.
45
LAS VEGAS
As the Cessna’s engines whined down for final descent into McCarran International Airport, Thomas Flaherty’s BlackBerry chimed. He checked the display. ‘It’s from Jason,’ he told Brooke Thompson. When he brought up the text message, he noted a handful of icons for picture attachments. ‘Says: “Al-Zahrani in custody. Have Brooke review pix from inside cave. Is this Lilith?’’’
Brooke sat bolt upright, not sure what to be most excited about. ‘Wait. Is he saying that Al-Zahrani has been captured? Fahim Al-Zahrani?’
Realizing he just slipped up big-time, Flaherty’s eyes went wide. Oops. ‘Yeah. About that . . .’ He cast his eyes to the BlackBerry, thinking how he could change the subject.
‘Go on . . . you can tell me,’ Brooke said. ‘You know I’m really good at keeping secrets.’
He glanced up at her. ‘I suppose.’
Flaherty briefly explained how Jason’s team had been tracking Al-Qaeda operatives for the past few months leading up to the ambush that forced Al-Zahrani and his surviving posse to take cover in the mountain.
‘Wow. That is huge,’ she said, mouth agape. ‘That’s like catching the Devil himself.’
Flaherty tried to wrap his brain around it too. ‘It’s ten million dollars huge,’ he murmured.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ He shook his head. ‘Wow. I just hope he’s okay.’
‘Al-Zahrani?’
‘No . . . Jason. See, Al-Zahrani is Bin Laden’s new right-hand man. And, of course, Bin Laden was responsible for what happened at the World Trade Center. Jason’s brother had been an insurance broker for Marsh USA. Went to work early that morning . . . to his office on the ninety-fifth floor of the North Tower. They never found the body. So indirectly, one could say that Al-Zahrani, or at least what he stands for, was also responsible for killing Jason’s brother,’ he explained.
She nodded.
‘Jason must be freaking out.’
‘I bet he is.’
‘I hope he doesn’t do something drastic.’
‘What, like kill him?’
Flaherty nodded. ‘Not that anyone would shed a tear for Al-Zahrani. But Jason could get himself in a lot of trouble.’
‘I doubt he’d be anything but a hero,’ she disagreed.
‘I suppose. God, imagine when people find out about this. It’s amazing.’
‘So let’s see those pictures,’ she said, anxiously eyeing the BlackBerry.
‘Sure, let’s have a look.’ Flaherty read aloud the name Jason had assigned the first attachment, ‘Mass Grave’. He exchanged an uneasy glance with Brooke, then opened the file. When he saw it, he cringed. ‘Yikes. Take a look at this.’ He handed the BlackBerry to her.
The picture clearly showed a dense pile of human bones. Brooke wasn’t sure how to react. ‘This is what Frank’s team had been studying?’
‘Seems so. There are a few other pictures here,’ he said, showing her how to open the remaining files.
There were two more shots of heaped bones showing wider angles that Jason obviously had taken to emphasize the magnitude of what he’d found. The continuous death pile seemed to circle the cave. In the images, Brooke could make out the rocky walls and ceiling.
‘It’s pretty spacious in there,’ Flaherty noted as he looked on.
‘And it’s packed full of bones,’ she muttered. ‘God, look at all that . . . There’s got to be hundreds, maybe thousands . . .’
‘I’d go with thousands.’
The next picture Brooke brought up hit her like a sledgehammer. ‘Look at this,’ she said, turning the display to Flaherty.
He squinted to make out the details. ‘What are those?’
‘Mandibles.’
‘Mandibles?’
‘Jawbones,’ she said, grabbing her own chin.
‘I know what a mandible is. It’s just that . . .’ Still looking confused, his eyes went back to the picture. He pointed to his own mouth and said, ‘There aren’t any—’
‘Teeth!’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course! This is where Frank got the teeth. From these bones.’
‘All right, smarty. I would have figured that out. Still don’t understand this bizarre fascination with teeth.’
‘Me neither,’ she admitted.
Three more p
ictures remained.
The next image took Brooke’s breath away.
‘What is that?’ Flaherty said, tipping his head to see the image. It wasn’t at all what he might have expected. ‘Hubba hubba. Who’s that?’
At first, Brooke didn’t respond. She was absorbed in the image – a wall etching that depicted a voluptuous, naked woman in full-frontal. Flaring out from beneath her raised arms were bird-like wings and she wore an elaborate conical headdress. In her left hand, she held a serpent. Perched on her right hand was some kind of bird. And beneath her feet was a pile of human skeletons.
Flaherty tried to be more specific: ‘This supposed to be the same woman whose head got lopped off?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘Why would they behead an angel?’
Without taking her troubled gaze off the image, Brooke sharply shook her head. ‘No. Not an angel. Protective spirits . . . the good spirits,’ she explained, ‘are always shown with upward-pointing wings. See here how her wings are pointing down?’
‘Okay. So what does that mean?’
Brooke took a deep breath and looked up at him. ‘It implies that she is a demon.’
46
‘A demon?’ Flaherty said, smirking. Glancing at the naked woman portrayed in the picture on his BlackBerry, he felt like he was looking at the primitive equivalent to a centrefold model.
‘That’s right,’ Brooke said.
‘Hmm. Too bad,’ he said in jest.
She rolled her eyes. ‘I’m sure it’s a real tragedy that such a nice pair of boobs went to waste,’ she grumbled, grabbing the BlackBerry from him.
He held up his hands as if to declare his innocence. ‘What?’
She held the picture close to her eyes and squinted.
‘I can show you how to zoom in on it,’ Flaherty offered. ‘What are you trying to see?’
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