by Greig Beck
The game was in play. He was aware the Harvard professor had been engaged by the van Helling widow. It was too late to recruit the man himself, but he could certainly keep tabs on his movements.
Najif sucked in a huge and painful breath and levered his bulk forward. There was a panel of buttons set into an ornate table, and he jammed a stubby finger onto one of them. Almost immediately the gilt doors behind him were pushed open and a tall, young man stepped inside.
Najif turned to him. The tall man had black hair swept back and olive skin betraying his Arabic heritage. Although his finer features made him look more European, his coal black eyes were of Saud, and they missed nothing.
The young man bowed. “My prince, is it time?”
Najif smiled at his younger cousin. Khaled ibn Al Sudairi had a weakness for the ladies, but he was probably the most honorable young man he knew. Khaled was distant in his lineage to the Saudi throne, but he was invaluable as a family warrior. He had been trained since youth to be a defender of their faith and family.
Khaled went to one knee beside the stricken prince, and Najif raised himself slightly. He pointed at the television screen.
“They go to Canada; I want to know everything that Professor Kearns does there. Use every informant and source we have.”
“The FBI are involved,” Khaled said.
“Then use them. We have influence there too. Use whatever pressure you need to bring to bear. Tell the FBI we’ll assist in tracking the killers; I don’t care who we pay or what we pay, just make sure we know everything that they do.”
“Should I go there?” Khaled asked.
“No,” Najif said quickly. “It is but one thread in the tapestry of knowledge that is being woven.” He laid his hands on his stomach. “What news from Turkey?”
“The expeditions are moving forward, but slowly,” Khaled said. “We have lost two of them to the local militias – one is being held for ransom, the other has already been tortured and killed. We also lost our translator.”
Najif sighed, the breath sounding like a long, slow whistle. “Down to three.” He nodded, “Still acceptable. And where are they now?”
“Approaching the mountain range. But there is a lot of territory, and a lot of possible places to search. Unfortunately, the satellite images are not conclusive. There is confusion now.”
Najif nodded. “They need someone who is not distracted by indecision – you. Go to Turkey and consolidate the remaining teams. Only you are qualified with your skills of antiquities. They are close, but need some strong leadership now.” Najif gripped Khaled’s hand. “You must not let anything distract you, and you must hurry.”
Khaled straightened. “It shall be so.” He bowed and then strode quickly from the room.
Chapter 6
Mount Qardū, Southern Turkey
Khaled ibn Al Sudairi stood looking up at the peak. It rose nearly 7000 feet above a fertile plain that had once been farmland. Hostilities between warring tribes dating back centuries had always made the place one of danger, but now with the rise of the well-financed terror groups, the danger had become intolerable.
Their guides would only deliver them so far and had long since departed. That suited Khaled just fine as for every loyal guide there was another who would sell you to the militias for a song.
“Let’s do this.” He and his six-strong team had narrowed their search down to this last peak. It was 200 miles south of Ararat, but local stories related how it was also rumored to have been the final resting place of something special – the Ark, he hoped.
He sighed, knowing that most of the tall mountains in the area carried the same legends. After all, the biblical references to the Ark were to the “Mountains of Ararat”, and in Genesis, that was only a general region, not a specific mountain. But Khaled had a feeling about this peak – it was the only one rumored to have had an ancient Christian monastery somewhere on the mountain. One that was supposed to have been destroyed by lightning in the year 776 AD, and any trace of its remains long since disappeared.
Khaled looked up. Why would you build a monastery in a place so remote? Because maybe you had something sacred you wished to protect, he guessed.
The climb to the snow line took all day, and as the sun fell, they arrived at an overhang of stone that was their shelter for the evening. They passed a long, cold, dark night huddled beneath a makeshift tent of nylon sheets secured against the rockface.
On the western slope of the mountain the sun rose slowly. But it lit up the plains behind them to the horizon. Abed Hameel, Khaled’s closest friend, lifted his field glasses to his eyes, and he slowly scanned them for movement as the rest of the group packed their belongings and prepared to depart.
A few feet in at the back of their shelter, Hisham rubbed a stubbled face, hard, and Saeeb yawned loudly. “Mountain number five – this is getting boring.”
“Boring? Then perhaps you’d like to lead us up?” Khaled said over his shoulder as he hefted his pack onto his back. He went outside and walked a few hundred feet along under the snow line, looking upwards. In the better light, he could see there were several routes they could take. He chose one that had the least snow and ice. His men were ex Special Forces commandos, Airborne Brigade, and had basic climbing experience, but trying to ascend over ice sheets was another skill entirely.
It was almost noon when the last of them crested the final jagged piece of cold stone, and stood on the peak, a misty, flattened cone-like surface the size of 20 football fields. A low cloud had moved in, dropping visibility down to a dozen feet and obscuring the view.
Abed grinned and Khaled slapped his friend on the shoulder as they walked around the peak. His exhalations escaped as small ghosts rushing to mix with the other frozen vapors on the flat mountaintop. He looked slowly around.
“Does anyone see something that resembles an ark?”
Saeeb grinned. “Or even a few pairs of animal skeletons – giraffes, elephants maybe.”
Khaled pivoted – where to start, he wondered? The peak was not insurmountable and so it had been explored before, probably many times over the centuries. Satellites had mapped the area, and his only hope was to find something conclusive. Something the others had missed.
“Spread out,” he called.
His team moved out over the peak. In some areas it was flat, and in others huge sails of stone thrust upwards like icebergs from a foggy ocean. In the more level places there were deep drifts of snow packing down on ice, so anything buried was probably deep.
Each of his team had brought extendable hiking poles, and now had them telescoped to prod and poke at the ground. Rocks were examined in case there were fragments, even minute ones, embedded in their geology. Khaled trusted his team and did the same as them, following a sweep pattern of his quadrant, examining everything in as much detail as he could give it.
They moved slowly and methodically, trying to stay focussed as the hours passed. Abed joined Khaled.
“Nothing.” He pointed his pole out over the flat misty mountaintop. “The story goes that around 1300 years ago there used to be a Christian monastery up here – but where is it now?” There’s not even a single foundation stone remaining.”
Khaled exhaled. “I remember the records – it was supposed to have been ‘consumed’ by lightning.” He turned slowly. “If I was going to build anything up here, it’d be where there is a semblance of evenness in the geology. “There’s nothing here now. But after 1300 years, maybe it’s been weathered down to sand.”
They spent another hour searching the mountaintop, and then more time investigating the slopes on all sides to ensure that there was nothing embedded in the rock further down. Khaled would have been happy with some deep gouges in the stone, or anything to indicate that a ship over 500 feet in size had once rested there.
He checked the time and then called his team in. There were just a few more mountain peaks to check, but as these were quite minor, barely rising 5000 feet and not even snowc
apped, he doubted there would be anything there of interest.
His team stood in a semi-circle around him, and when he looked to each of them, they returned a shake of the head or shrug. Nothing.
“As I thought.”
He looked around at the mist-covered mountaintop. The cloud had dropped completely now, and it was more like a London fog. He could smell the moisture that remained locked up in the cold mist. It was prickly cold against his skin, and its only advantage was that it was like a blanket shielding them from prying eyes.
He sighed. “Well, coffee, and then we go.” They could chance a small fire, and it would warm their bellies before the long trek down the slope and then back to the base camp to plan their next mission.
Rizwan and Zahil began to dig into the frozen earth to sink a small pit to place a kerosene burner inside. Saeeb and Yasha then gathered scraped snow into an old jug for melting.
Abed and Khaled walked to one of the peak’s edges. Below them the plains and even the sheer slope was lost in fog. It could have been a drop of five feet or a thousand.
Abed leaned one elbow on a spire of rock. “Do you think there was ever an Ark here?” He looked out over the billowing fog. “Or ever an Ark at all?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there was, but given it was supposed to have existed over 4500 years ago, then who knows what is fact and fiction now.”
“True.” Abed opened his thick jacket and pulled out a Saudi flag and shook it out straight. The deep green background with sword and Arabic inscription hung limply in his hands.
“Well, no use being shy about our presence now.” He looked up and grinned. “And why not piss our Turkish brothers off even more, huh?”
Abed walked to the center of the flat peak, fixed the flag to his hiking pole and used a rock to begin pounding it into the ground. The stake shuddered at first as it tried to penetrate the combination of rock and frozen soil, but then suddenly sunk about three inches and then stuck.
Abed wiggled it, finding it a bit loose, began to pound again. This time the pole never budged so he raised the rock an extra foot, steadied the pole, and then brought it down hard. The pole dropped away, but then with gunshot-like cracking, so did the ground around him.
Abed vanished.
Khaled and his team rushed to where their compatriot had been seconds before. They skidded to a stop and saw where there had been snow and rock, there was now black hole. Khaled threw himself down and peered into the void. There was silence for several seconds, before there came the faint sound of an impact that echoed back up at them.
“Abed!” Khaled waited. “Brother!” He and his men moved even closer to the edge when caution held him in his place. “Get back – it may all collapse under us.”
The men froze, arms out like tightrope walkers. Their gaze went from the dark hole to each other, and then back to Khaled. They slowly backed up. Only Khaled remained on his belly, peering down.
He slowly reached back for his belt and pulled out a long flashlight, which he angled downwards. There was nothing illuminated, meaning the entire mountaintop might be hollow.
“Abed!” He waited for several seconds. To his relief a moan wafted back up toward him. “He’s alive.” He yelled over his shoulder and then began to use his light to track the sound to its source. In a few seconds he could just make out the crumpled form of his friend lying among piles of debris some 60 feet down and to the side.
“Can you hear me?”
A single hand was raised. “My leg.” Abed groaned again.
Khaled lifted the beam to the edge of the rock he lay on. His side was perched on the top of a cliff wall that gave him support. But closer to his team there was a two-foot skin of rock and ice – exactly like where Abed had punched through. Strangely the stone skin over the void looked quite uniform, almost like bricks.
“Rizwan.” Khaled rose up slightly. “Get the spare rope. We’ll need to climb down.” He pointed. “Over there, tie us off.”
Rizwan rushed to a ragged spar of stone and looped his rope around it, tying it securely. He threw the coil of rope to Saeeb who carefully walked it back to Khaled.
Khaled looked to his men. “Hisham, Zahil, Yasha, you three with me. Rizwan and Saeeb, stay on guard, and be ready to haul us out on my word.”
As they prepared to drop, a bread loaf-sized piece of stone dislodged and fell into the darkness. Khaled lunged forward to watch it drop. It struck the bottom not six feet from his friend and then bounced heavily away into the gloom. He looked up, jaw set in a hard line. “By all the prophets, everyone be careful.”
Khaled was first over the lip, and he dropped down quickly to the floor of the cavern. He unhooked himself and stepped away from the drop zone as his next man came down fast. It was dry, and even the sound of the rope zizzing through gloved hands echoed in the vast chamber. He lifted his light, scanning the cavern floor.
“Abed?”
“Here.” The reply was faint.
Khaled quickly located his man and stepped carefully toward him. While he edged over the tumbled stones, another melon-sized boulder fell from above to impact against the rocks like a small bomb going off.
“Sharmouta!” he cursed as he shielded his face from the shrapnel.
Zahil then came down fast, slipping and landing hard. “Ouch.” He unhitched himself, shook his head and then held the rope to steady it as Yasha, and then Hisham rappelled down.
Khaled found his friend and crouched beside him. Abed’s face was covered in blood from multiple abrasions, and there was a small dent in his forehead. He gripped Khaled’s forearm and painfully pulled himself to a near-sitting position.
He groaned in pain. “My leg.”
Khaled shone his flashlight along the man’s body. One of his feet was lying sideways at an odd angle, the ankle obviously broken. He reached for it, but paused.
“Steel yourself, brother; this is going to hurt.”
Abed grinned. “It already hurts.” The man gritted his teeth and nodded. “I’m ready.”
Khaled pressed on the limb, feeling the bones in the lower leg, foot and then the ankle. It felt unnaturally lose, but thankfully the skin hadn’t broken.
Khaled moved back up the man, checking his head, and then shining the light into his eyes. “You might also have a concussion. Also a broken ankle; so no dancing for a while.” He patted his friend on the shoulder. The ankle was bad, but the dent in his head was the bigger worry. More than likely, there would be pressure building in his skull and pushing on his brain. He was liable to drop into a coma at any moment.
Yasha and Hisham knelt beside their fallen team member, as Zahil continued to wave his beam slowly around the huge cavern.
“What is this place?”
Khaled rested his elbows on his knees as Yasha helped Abed sip some water.
“Like a bad tooth; the mountain seems to have a cavity, and our friend managed to fall into it.”
“Look.” Zahil pointed.
Khaled followed his light beam, and then stood, squinting. He turned back to Yasha. “Stay with him.”
He stepped across the broken stones, and after another few moments, the rubble disappeared and he found himself standing on smooth, fitted stonework.
“This… is a path.” He walked slowly around what he thought was a large misshapen boulder, until he saw what it was from another angle – a massive rough-hewn stone figure, crouching on a table-sized stone plinth. He shone his light up into its face. The thing was ugly, deformed, and was more gargoyle than anything else. He leaned in closer.
Hisham joined him. “Friend of yours?”
“Ack!” Khaled jumped, but then chuckled softly. “Not even on a good day.”
“Hey, look.” Zahil was smiling, holding his light momentarily on himself, before lifting it away to point off into the dark. His beam was just strong enough to light up a small building, all of fitted stone, the remains of a crucifix on its top. “Did you say there used to be a monastery here that was destroyed
by lightning?” He grinned.
Khaled shook his head in awe. “A Christian one, built about 1300 years ago – and yes, supposedly destroyed by lightning. Or at least ‘consumed’ by lightning, as the legend goes.”
“Maybe the translation was wrong.” Zahil said. “Maybe it didn’t mean consumed as in destroyed, but instead meant consumed as in swallowed by lightning. That it somehow fell into this cavern.” He turned. “It was swallowed up by this cave.”
Khaled lifted his light to the ceiling over a hundred feet above them. “And fell all this way and remained intact? I think not. It’s no Ark, but it’s something very interesting.” Khaled turned and whistled, waving to Yasha. “We need to check this out. Get Hisham, and then help Yasha with Abed.”
Whump! Behind them came a ground-shaking thump that reverberated through to the soles of their boots. The men crouched as shrapnel spattered over them.
“Another gift from above,” Khaled said as dust and snow rained down through the gap. “We must be quick and then get out. This entire place could collapse on us.”
Two of his men bracketed Abed, who hopped sluggishly between them with his head partially lolling on Yasha’s shoulder.
“I think his back is damaged as well.” Yasha said, easing his grip lower. “Maybe not broken, but he’ll be spending some time in traction when we get back.”
“I’m fine; just a little dizzy,” Abed responded.
Khaled turned toward a pair of huge doors. They’d probably been oak once, but their monstrously thick beams were now rotted through, leaving empty shells and rust marks where iron bands and rivets had once been. Perhaps the freezing air had preserved them for many centuries, but time had still eaten away at their heart.
Khaled pushed at the doors, and one fell inward, thumping to the ground. Inside it was as dark as Hades. The men slowly moved their beams of light over the interior. For a place of worship it seemed strangely empty – not a bench, an altar stone at the front, statue or crucifix anywhere. There was but a single object placed in the center of the room – a stone coffin – a sarcophagus. Its formidable sides seemed to grow from the floor of the building like it was a single piece of stonework. It was as if the church and the casket were one.