by Alex Archer
Theresa was young, and though she’d been on digs before for the BBC, this was the first time she’d been in danger. She’d probably gone down where she’d been kneeling.
Annja felt guilty that she hadn’t thought to reach out for the young woman.
She worked swiftly, heaving sand and loose rocks over to the tunnel’s side. With the flashlight on, she saw that the ceiling had given way, dropping what looked like at least three feet of earth onto them.
At present, they were thirty feet underground, so that left plenty of earth above them to either provide support—or to collapse. That wasn’t a pleasant thought, so she concentrated on finding Theresa as she dug a shallow trench across the area where she thought the woman had gone down.
Less than a minute later, movement shifted one side of the trench. Annja focused her energies on that spot, seizing handful after handful of earth. The sand and rock felt coarse against her skin and she was thankful for the years of calluses she’d built up through martial arts and her archaeological work.
Annja uncovered Theresa’s back, then managed to run her hands down either side of the woman’s body and grab hold around her middle. Pulling steadily, Annja lifted Theresa out. Gasping, the young woman came free of her impromptu tomb.
“Are you all right?” Annja shined her flashlight over the woman. She checked her pulse, which seemed strong—if a little wild.
Theresa nodded and coughed. She tried to talk but couldn’t.
Trusting that the intern was going to be all right, Annja turned back to the pile of sand and tried to remember where the two irrigation workers had stood. One of them had been the older man’s son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Souad. He loved Japanese manga, she remembered. His father had been training him to be a muqanni because there was always work for a man who could build irrigation tunnels for the farmlands. Without those tunnels, drought would force people to move or starve. The excavations were dangerous, though.
Clearly.
Fear stole over Annja as she dug, driving her hands into the dirt. She didn’t want to uncover the boy’s lifeless body.
Souad’s father, Nadim, pulled the other muqanni out of the dirt, then dove back in. This time he couldn’t keep his fear at bay. He cried out his son’s name over and over again and his voice reverberated along the khettara.
A moment later, Annja’s hand struck flesh. She shifted closer and ran her hands into the pile until she made certain she had hold of the teen. Hauling him up by herself proved impossible. She looked up at the others.
“Here. He’s here.”
Nadim scrambled over to her. The other muqanni was only a half step behind. Annja felt along the boy’s body, figuring out how he lay beneath the dirt.
“This way.” She indicated with her hand and they fell to.
Annja didn’t like how limp Souad was as they uncovered him. Panic would have made him struggle.
Unless he’d been knocked unconscious.
Judging from his position, he’d borne the brunt of the collapse.
A moment later, they managed to pull the teen out into his father’s embrace.
He wasn’t breathing.
“Give him to me.” Annja took him from Nadim’s trembling arms. She laid Souad on the ground on his back. Dirt caked his face, but when she opened his mouth, there was no blockage. More dirt crusted his nostrils. She wiped that clean, then leaned in and put her mouth on the boy’s mouth, breathing air into his lungs.
His chest rose and fell as she breathed into him again and again. Then she knelt beside him and started chest compressions, counting off in her head. “C’mon! You’re young! You’re strong! You can do this!”
Still seeing no response, Annja leaned down and breathed into his mouth again, filling his lungs with more air. This time Souad coughed and choked, and blinked his dark eyes open in panic that quickly dissolved to surprise.
Annja placed her fingers on the side of the boy’s neck. His pulse beat strong and steady beneath her fingertips. His breathing rasped and came rapidly, but he was doing it on his own now. “How do you feel?”
Souad grinned up at her. “I am in love.”
Annja smiled back at the teen, then gave way as his father bulled in and crushed Souad to his breast. Tiredly, she sat back against the khettara wall and stared at the father and son as they embraced.
“Well, that was bloody close.” Smythe sat beside Annja and knocked dirt off his shirt.
“It was.” Annja gazed around at the khettara. “This puts us behind schedule.”
Smythe sighed and leaned his head back. “Ready to call it quits?”
“Are you kidding?” Since she’d left the New Orleans orphanage where she’d been raised, she’d never felt any more at home than on a dig site or prowling through a musty library or museum. Morocco had all of those. She’d spent the past few days in heaven. A little cave-in hadn’t put her off.
Smythe took off his hat and banged it against his knee. He grinned ruefully. “Me, too. But we’d be better off getting above. The kid needs fresh air, and it wouldn’t hurt us, either.” He stood and offered Annja his hand.
She took it and let him help her to her feet even though she could have managed easily on her own. She was five feet ten inches tall, an inch or so shorter than Smythe, and more athletically built. She pulled her chestnut hair off her neck and enjoyed an all-too-brief breeze that entered the chamber from above.
Ten feet away, a rope hung from the nearest mouth of the subterranean ditch. The muqannis first located an underground water supply by digging wells in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Once the water table was determined, they sank a vertical shaft down to it, then began the process of digging toward the farmland at a lower level. New shafts were dug every sixty to one hundred feet, depending on what was needed and how easy the soil was to work. Fresh air and potential rescue avenues always figured into the time needed to construct the waterway.
Men stationed around the well mouth above called down in concern. Midafternoon sunlight slanted into the chamber.
Annja couldn’t keep up with the rapid-fire dialect, but she picked up enough of it to know the men on the surface had felt the quivering earth and known immediately what it meant. Several of them knelt at the side of the well and peered down.
Souad walked under his own power now, but he lacked his usual surefooted grace. He smiled at her shyly as he stood woozily under the well mouth. Nadim carefully tied a padded rope under his son’s arms, then called to the men to lift him.
Directing her flashlight beam to the end of the irrigation tunnel that led back to the underground water source, Annja saw the dark water lapping at their makeshift dam. The water was already two feet deep. With the setback they’d incurred, the dam was going to have to be higher to hold back the water. The farmers at the other end of the khettara wouldn’t be happy.
And the crops suffering from the drought would have to go a few days longer without water. That would be the biggest problem and the one most complained about.
The men at the top of the well swiftly hauled Souad out. Then the rope loop was thrown back down. Nadim picked it up and handed it to Annja, who wriggled into it.
One of the men called, “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” She held on tight and resisted the impulse to kick her feet against the side of the shaft as they pulled her up. Any impact might trigger another cave-in. The sides would have to be shored up before they could return to the dig.
On her way up, though, she stared into the hollow left by the falling earth. The concavity ran for a dozen feet or more and had been at least six feet thick. She couldn’t even guess at the raw tonnage that had dropped on them. She shone her flashlight into the concavity out of curiosity.
Above, the workers set themselves to hauling again. “Wait.” She’d seen something.
Without answering, she shifted in the rope loop until she hung upside down by her feet. She caught hold of the concavity gently and pulled herself toward it. In her other hand, she held the flashlight steady. The yellow beam revealed long bones embedded in the chamber’s new roof. “I found something.”
“What?” Smythe shifted below her, tracking her movement cautiously, striving not to get under the treacherous section.
Annja played the flashlight along the ulna and radius to the humerus, knowing immediately she was looking at a human arm that had been reduced to bone. Above the humerus, she spotted the dark eyeholes of the skull that lay sideways, as though the skeleton had turned its head to glare at her.
“A body.”
Chapter 2
“Careful. Careful,” Smythe said anxiously as he stood below Annja.
Rigged in climbing gear now, Annja hung upside down in the concavity the khettara’s collapse had revealed. The harness secured her to a rope that ran between two fixed points in the chamber that Nadim had judged stable. The points didn’t allow her easy access to the skeleton, but she could reach it from her position on the rope with difficulty.
Smythe had wanted to accompany her but Nadim hadn’t wanted to risk putting any more weight on the line.
In addition to the flashlights Annja and Smythe held, Nadim and his companions had affixed lanterns in the tunnel. The bright light from Cory Burcell’s camcorder was almost blinding. Souad stood beside his father, who knelt a short distance away with a trench tool clasped in one hand. The other muqannis stood behind them.
Annja placed the toes of her hiking boots against the concavity’s rough surface and placed her left hand against the roof to brace herself. With a stiff brush in her right hand, she knocked away loose dirt from the skeleton. Gradually, the long bones of the lower arm came more prominently into view as streams of dirt and dust fell gently to the chamber floor.
“How close is the skeleton to the lower surface?” Smythe took another step to the right and angled his flashlight along the arm as it was revealed.
“Two or three inches.” Annja kept brushing. The body had been buried beneath eight feet of earth. “I’m surprised it didn’t fall with the rest of the roof.”
“Yes, but doubtless the body buried there helped cause the collapse of the roof.”
Annja shoved the brush into the space above the skull. The stink of death had long since vanished. “That was definitely the case.”
“Cool.” That came from Souad, in English, and was immediately followed by an admonishment from his father in their native tongue. Annja smiled to herself, totally understanding the boy’s fascination with the buried skeleton. Stories about archaeologists had been some of Annja’s favorites back in the orphanage, and she’d loved the Discovery Channel specials involving Egyptian tombs. Those mysteries had seemed imminently more soluble than those surrounding her own birth parents.
Theresa hadn’t regained enough confidence in the roof’s stability to stand under the weakened section, but she took a step closer. “Do you know if it was a skeleton that was buried?”
Annja returned to her efforts with the brush. “No. There was definitely flesh on it when it was put here. See the hollow that formed around the body? It took a while for beetles and other carrion feeders to strip the corpse down to bone. That loss of flesh is what left the spaces around the bones.”
“Well, that’s gross.” Theresa looked mortified, then sighed and shook her head. “Sorry. I’ll edit that out of the final cut.”
“By that time the earth over it had hardened and taken on the shape it’s held all this time.” A small shower of debris trickled from around the skull as Annja revealed more of the features. Slowly, the back of the skull started to come into view, and she knew immediately that something was wrong with it.
She took the brush away, sliding it into the tool pouch she wore, and took out her flashlight again. Switching it on, she pointed the beam at the skull.
The bright light revealed broken shards of the back half of the skull. The pieces now lay in a heap under the skull, but she was certain that the bones had been held together by flesh when the person had been laid to rest.
“What is it?” Smythe shifted below and strained to see what she was seeing.
“The back of the skull is caved in.”
“Doesn’t sound like natural causes.”
“Doesn’t look that way, either.”
“A victim of brigands?”
Annja played the flashlight around and spotted a gleam in the debris of the skull. “Brigands wouldn’t have buried the body.”
However long the skeleton had been in the ground, Annja was certain things hadn’t changed much in Morocco. The country’s mountains still harbored a thriving community of thieves and murderers.
“Quite.” Smythe grinned ruefully and wiped his stubbled cheeks. “My bad. So either this was the result of an accident, or whoever put this poor person into the ground didn’t want anyone else to know. Otherwise, they might have packed the body back to whatever village the person came from. Unless someone stumbled across the remains and simply planted them where they found them.” He shook his head. “So many questions.”
“We should be able to get at some of the answers soon.” Annja continued brushing at the skull.
A tremor shivered through the earth again. Annja grabbed hold of the support rope with her left hand and braced herself as best as she could. She held her breath as a small cloud of dust and debris swirled over her.
The skeletal arm came free of its moorings and dangled loosely. The sudden flash of dark metal that spilled among the debris caught her attention. Without thinking, she dropped the brush and flicked her hand out to catch four of the tumbling coins. Twice that many hit the ground.
“Annja?” Smythe played his flashlight over her.
“I’m all right.” She pulled out her flashlight, resting her weight from the support rope, and studied her find.
Despite their dark tarnish, she could read enough of the language to know it was Arabic. There were also a few annulets, small circles that made up the coin’s design. They all looked the same.
Closing her hand over the coins, Annja studied the skeleton. “This body’s been here a long time. Maybe as long as those pottery shards we’ve been digging up.”
* * *
HOURS OF CAUTIOUS WORK later, Annja had exhumed the skeleton piece by piece. None of the connective tissue remained. There were two hundred and six bones in an adult body, and she was convinced she’d gotten all of them, though she had lost count. The skeleton lay on the ground on a blanket a short distance from the open mouth of the khettara.
As Annja had freed the bones and placed them in a bucket Nadim had rigged to raise and lower, Smythe had been lifted to the surface and began reconstruction of the skeleton. The process was labor-intensive and Annja’s body ached.
Smythe knelt on one knee beside the skeleton and looked at Cody Burcell as he rolled video. Theresa knelt next to him.
“Honestly, I’d thought the cave-in was going to be the death of us,” Smythe said matter-of-factly in his clipped British accent, but Annja saw his passion and excitement. He was every bit as drawn to historical mysteries as Annja was. “Then, while we were scrambling for our lives, Annja Creed, my collaborator on this dig, chanced upon a most remarkable discovery.”
Annja stood to one side and sipped an energy drink to replace her electrolytes. She watched the recording with only slight interest. Professor David Smythe was good in front of a camera, and this was his show. Annja knew that she’d be called upon for input, as well.
Notoriety wasn’t her endgame, not when it came to archaeology, anyway. That was something that had just happened along the way. She
wanted the knowledge, the ability to go where others hadn’t in years. Chasing History’s Monsters, the television show she cohosted, had helped create a fan base that was growing larger all the time. Of course, the fact that her costar, Kristie Chatham, often finagled ways to lose her top drew lots of attention. Annja had never appeared topless and never would. But the fan base loved her segments as much as Kristie’s because she usually brought a lot to the historical aspect of the various “monsters” the show explored. Annja won over the watchers through the wonderment of history. Curiosity was a human trait that would never go away.
“Can you tell us what we’re looking at, Professor Smythe?” Theresa sounded very much like the college student she had been probably not so long ago.
“Certainly.” Smythe smiled. He touched the bones on the blanket. “I have determined that from the thick brow ridge and external occipital protuberance, the rear section of the skull, the narrow pelvis, the wide rib cage, as well as the size and density of the arms and legs, that this is the body of a male.” He tapped the skeleton’s chest. “This is the xyphoid process, this small bit of bone at the bottom of the sternum. The xyphoid process here is fused to the sternum, indicating that this person was probably in his early thirties or older at the time of his death.”
“Do you have any idea about the man’s identity?”
Reaching into his shirt pocket, Smythe laid out the coins Annja had caught, as well as seven others that had been found at the bottom of the well where they’d fallen. “He was possibly Arabic, maybe from what is now known as Saudi Arabia. These coins are quite fascinating.”
Theresa waved to Cody. “Bring the camera in for a closer look, please.”
Cody stepped forward. The camcorder’s bright light stood out in the darkening haze of the gathering evening. To the west, over the Atlas Mountains, the sky had turned deep purple with bright stars.
“What can you tell us about the coins?”