The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  She tried to brush the memories away, but images kept flooding back from mid-December 2002. She and her father had left the house for work together as usual, both heading through the biting cold to the Firm’s colourful and iconic Babylonian-ziggurat headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. At the end of the day, as usual, she had returned home.

  He never did.

  The next time she saw him was at his snowy funeral a few days before Christmas, when she, her mother, and her brother buried the man they had all loved so much.

  Dozens of his work colleagues had packed the intimate service at the triangular-windowed and white-blanketed Saxon church in the small Somerset village, but a wall of official silence had already descended around the exact circumstances of his death. ‘On her Majesty’s service’ was all the family was ever told.

  And DeVere reminded her too painfully of that time. She had left the Firm not long after, severing all ties, disenchanted with its covert world for a growing number of reasons. DeVere had stayed on, and in the following years she had not been able to bring herself to see him.

  The emotions were all still too raw.

  As she shifted under the hot water, the sound of a jet coming in to land on the strip outside pulled her back to the present.

  Aware her flight to Kazakhstan would take off soon, she quickly towelled herself dry and dressed. Before leaving, she gratefully drained the cup of black coffee Prince had left out for her, and polished off the two Hooah! energy bars lying beside it on the tray.

  When she was done, she headed out onto the hot tarmac, still lost in thought.

  Scanning the darkened desertscape that greeted her, she could see the outline of a jeep waiting to ferry her to the sleek military Learjet C-21A parked further out on the apron. In the gloom, she could just make out a shadowy ground crew finishing the refuelling and last minute checks.

  Glancing at the rugged field watch she always wore, its illuminated hands told her it was just gone 8:00 p.m. The sun had set an hour and a half earlier, and she was surprised to feel the air temperature had barely changed.

  She gazed up at the desert night sky, losing herself for a moment in its enormity. Unlike Baghdad, there was almost no light pollution, and the stars shone with spectacular brightness and clarity in the blue-black sky.

  “So, what are the chances this Ark is real?”

  She had not noticed Ferguson walk up beside her. He had changed for the trip, and was in a pair of blue jeans and a light jacket.

  The same question had been gnawing away at her ever since Hunter told her why he had brought her to Qatar.

  Like many starry-eyed and indomitable archaeology students, she had spent her first years at university dreaming of finding the Ark.

  In the rare spare moments she had to herself between learning everything from ancient Egyptian human embalming techniques to the similarities between Genesis and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, she had fantasized about the Ark.

  In her mind it had always topped the list of biblical archaeology’s greatest prizes—Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, King Solomon’s Temple, the Holy Grail dish used at the Last Supper, and the True Cross of the crucifixion. They were the greatest icons of western archaeology—elusive, quasi-mythical quests.

  But as her student days had faded into memory and the professional archaeologist’s world of museums, libraries, private collections, and digs had increasingly consumed her, thoughts of these larger-than-life artefacts had receded to the realms of her youthful fantasies. For years now, like all experienced archaeologists, she had accepted they were not going to surface any time soon—still less on her watch.

  So General Hunter’s revelation that a hostile group claimed to be holding the real Ark of the Covenant in Kazakhstan had reignited a spark in her that had lain dormant for many years. It was as if a childhood dream, long ago abandoned as make-believe, had suddenly come to life again—but this time for real.

  She had never doubted the Ark had once existed. But she now felt herself being torn between two worlds. The seasoned professional in her was aware the Kazakh Ark was guaranteed to be a hoax—a waste of everyone’s time and effort, and quite possibly a highly dangerous venture. But the optimistic and exuberant young archaeologist in her had never quite died, and she was finding herself irresistibly drawn towards the thrill of being on a once-in-a-lifetime hunt for the genuine Ark of the Covenant.

  “Well is it?” he asked. “Real?”

  She dug her hands deeper into her pockets, enjoying the desert’s night-time breeze across her face. “Honestly?” She paused. “I don’t know. But if there’s the slightest chance it’s genuine, then we have to do whatever we can to prove it one way or the other.”

  She was watching him, noticing his quick intelligent expressions as she was talking, as if he was taking in everything—not just what she was saying, but how she was saying it.

  Intrigued by his curiosity, she turned the question back on him. “Why, what’s your interest in it?”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter to me if it’s real or not. More important is who has it. In the wrong hands, a fake is just as dangerous if people believe it’s real.”

  Ava raised her eyebrows. “Dangerous?” It was not a word she would have used to describe it. She very much doubted the tales of Yahweh striking down those who touched it.

  Ferguson stopped walking, and turned to her. His tone was sombre. “We believe the group holding the Ark stole it to order. But we think they reneged on the deal and have now gone freelance, using the Ark for their own political ends.”

  Ava returned his gaze. This was new information. “What sort of ends?”

  He looked grim. “They’re threatening that unless we meet their demands, they’ll sell it to the Iranians, who will unquestionably use it in their propaganda war to humiliate the Israelis. Maybe the mullahs in Tehran will parade it in front of the international cameras as booty. Or perhaps they’ll destroy it on prime time global television. Either way, it’ll be received as an outrage to Israel and its allies.”

  Ava did not need Ferguson to explain the implications any further. After all her years in the Middle East, she was acutely aware of the knife-edge relationships that kept the many delicate diplomatic balances from tipping over into chaos and carnage. She knew the Jerusalem-Tehran faultline was one of the most sensitive, and could instantly see how Iranian possession of the Ark, Israel’s former symbol of glory and might, would be cataclysmic.

  She took a deep breath of hot night air. That explained the high-level military interest. This was not about archaeology. It was a political question of Israel and Iran, of the stability of the brittle region—and potentially the world.

  As she and Ferguson neared the dark green jeep waiting to take them out to the Learjet, a desert-camouflaged open-backed Humvee coming the other way pulled up sharply beside them.

  As the six-and-a-half-litre turbodiesel engine cut out, four uniformed and heavily armed U.S. soldiers jumped down from the back of its modified flatbed. A fifth stood on the vehicle’s back platform, beside a man shackled to the beige roll-bar fitted along the rear of the cab.

  The man was Middle Eastern, Ava could immediately see, wearing crumpled black jeans, faded beige baseball boots, and a tired-looking ragged blue shirt, out of which was sticking an unusually long neck and a thin unshaved face. Even by the runway’s distant lights, he looked gaunt and haggard.

  Squinting to see clearly, the soldier on the flatbed unlocked the man’s handcuffs from the roll-bar.

  Suddenly, in a blur of confusion, she saw the man in the blue shirt snatch at the soldier’s chest, pulling a pistol from a holster set into the complex webbing of pouches and equipment bound around his torso.

  With a speed that could only come from a massive surge of adrenaline, the man grabbed the startled soldier by the shoulder and spun him round, pinning the front of his chest against the roll-bar, jamming the pistol’s muzzle into the back of the infantryman’s shaved head just under the
line of his desert-brown helmet.

  Instantly, the scene around her erupted into pandemonium, and before she could react, she was pushed hard, face down onto the tarmac.

  Winded, she looked up from her sprawling position to see the soldiers had all brought their black M-4 assault rifles up to the firing position, and were pointing their short but lethal barrels directly at the gunman.

  Ferguson still had his left hand on Ava, but was rapidly rising from his crouch with a small steel-blue automatic pistol in his other, also trained on the gunman.

  Everyone was yelling at once.

  The gunman was shouting in Arabic, grinding the pistol hard into the back of his prisoner’s skull. The other soldiers were frantically ordering him to drop the weapon and release the hostage.

  Despite the chaos, she could make out that the gunman was repeating the same phrase again and again, a look of desperation on his face. “Rajj'ouni a'ala beiti! Rajj'ouni a'ala beiti!”

  As she watched, the soldiers continued to bellow over him, the strain audible in their voices as the tension mounted by the second.

  Looking around quickly, she could instantly see that no one appeared to be in charge, and everyone was panicking. She knew from experience this was the type of situation that could rapidly go fatally wrong.

  Pushing the hair back from her face, she looked up at the soldier nearest her. He was short, with close-cropped brown hair visible under his helmet at the temples. “Do you know what he’s saying?” she yelled, pointing to the gunman.

  The soldier’s eyes swivelled to her. He tapped the side of his helmet with the first two fingers of a gloved hand, as if trying to get the earpiece to work properly. “No ma’am,” he answered crisply, “no interpreter.”

  Ava rose to her knees.

  “Down!” Ferguson pushed her back onto the tarmac again.

  Surprised by the sudden movement, the gunman’s eyes flitted to her, unsure of her intentions.

  Ava brushed Ferguson’s hand off her shoulder. “Stay here. I’ll be right back,” she countered, standing up and striding over to the brown-haired soldier, focusing in on his rank insignia and the sand-coloured name-strip fixed onto his combat jacket. “Sergeant Kozinski?” she asked, shouting over the noise.

  He nodded.

  She put her mouth up to his helmet, speaking slowly and clearly to be heard over the mounting noise. “The man is saying ‘Take me home’.”

  Kozinski took a moment to process the information. He leant close to Ava’s ear to reply. “We are, ma’am. He’s going on a flight back to Fallujah. Mistaken identity. Negative intel value.”

  Ava had seen enough.

  She turned and shouted something in Arabic up to the gunman.

  Immediately, a large soldier with a corporal’s stripes a dozen feet to her right swivelled his gun, training it directly onto her. Through the confused yelling, she could hear another voice now barking, “Do not communicate with the enemy.”

  It took her a few moments to realize the order was coming from the large corporal pointing his carbine at her.

  She looked back at his young face peering at her from behind the weapon. He was anything but calm. There were beads of sweat running down his mud-caked face, and the deep rings around his eyes suggested he had not slept in days.

  She knew every second was critical. There was no time for lengthy explanations.

  She turned away from the soldier threatening her and yelled something else in Arabic to the gunman, who was still repeating the same phrase over and over, more frantically now, his hand shaking as he ground the pistol into the back of his captive’s head.

  The large corporal advanced on her, covering the distance between them in quick strides. He was pointing the assault rifle straight at her head, screeching now. “Do not communicate with the enemy!”

  “Get him off me!” Ava bellowed across at Kozinski, motioning to the corporal. But Kozinski was not listening. He was glued to the scene unfolding on the truck, focusing through his Aimpoint sights, oblivious to what was going on around him.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Ferguson switching his aim from the gunman to the soldier threatening her. She shook her head at him urgently. She did not need that kind of complication. The situation was already fractious enough.

  She took a deep breath and concentrated on shutting the threat out of her mind. She shouted something else to the gunman. It was unintelligible to the others, just a string of guttural and aspirated noises.

  On the flatbed, the man looked at Ava hesitantly, seemingly unsure how she fitted into the emerging picture, and clearly confused by the fact that an American was advancing on her with a weapon aimed directly at her head.

  After what felt to Ava like an eternity in which the gunman was visibly assessing his options, he finally seemed to make up his mind. Hesitantly at first, he answered her, speaking in rapid panicky bursts.

  Ava turned to Kozinski and began translating. “He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wants to be released.”

  Kozinski was not listening. All his attention was locked onto aiming at the gunman.

  With her frustration mounting, Ava called something else out to the gunman, more urgently this time. He answered immediately, the words tumbling out in a stream of Arabic.

  The large corporal with his gun on Ava continued to screech at her, but what had been a warning was now an unambiguous threat. “You have three seconds to disengage or you will be treated as hostile!”

  Ava continued talking in Arabic to the man on the flat back of the Humvee.

  A conversation of sorts was developing.

  The corporal was now so close he was obscuring her view, and she could clearly hear the strain in his voice as he continued to shout at her. “I’m now treating you as hostile!” His trigger finger was no more than a metre and a half from her, and the gun’s muzzle was so close it felt as if it were burning a hole in her head. She concentrated on blocking the image out of her mind completely, and looked back at the man on the flatbed, conscious she was now on borrowed time—the soldier could open fire on her any moment.

  “Yalla! Qarrir bsor'aa!” she urged the gunman, aware it was probably her last chance. At pointblank range, if the soldier next to her pulled the trigger and shot her in the head, she would be dead before she hit the floor.

  Ava looked expectantly at the gunman, hoping she had done enough.

  From his wild-eyed look, she was not at all sure.

  Agonizingly slowly, he began to pull the muzzle of the pistol away from the back of his hostage’s skull.

  With a look of resignation mixed with terror, he held both his hands in the air as a sign of surrender, before bending down and placing the gun on the floor of the flatbed.

  The immediate danger averted, Kozinski seemed to snap out of his trance and burst into action, issuing authoritative commands. “Tell him to step off the truck and lie on the ground.”

  Ava translated the command, and the gunman slowly climbed down from the back of the vehicle and lay face down, prostrate on the tarmac.

  One of the soldiers roughly handcuffed him, before placing a boot hard in the middle of his back.

  Ava saw the pain register on the man’s lean face as she turned to Kozinski. “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “Like I said, ma’am,” he answered, sweat dripping from his grimy face, “we’re taking him home.”

  Ava looked Kozinski directly in the eye. “I’ve just given him your personal assurance no harm will come to him now.”

  Kozinski blinked slowly at her. “Were you not looking?” There was a new aggression in his tone. “He just seriously assaulted a U.S. soldier.”

  The other men exchanged uneasy glances.

  Ava continued, undeterred. “He thinks he’s about to disappear into your network of undisclosed prisons and never get out. I’ve given him your word that will not happen, and he will be taken directly home.”

  “On what authority?” Kozinski looked unsure.
r />   “You told me he was going home?” she continued, ignoring the question.

  He nodded.

  “I assume ‘negative intel value’ means you have nothing on him?”

  Kozinski did not respond. She could see his jaw tightening.

  She lowered her voice so that only Kozinski could hear her. “I’m sure you’re aware that for the last decade western forces haven’t had a great reputation for due process around here?”

  Kozinski stared blankly back at her.

  Ava changed tack. “Are you seriously telling me that if one of your men was in his shoes, he wouldn’t do anything to avoid detention and interrogation at a foreign army’s black site?”

  Kozinski pursed his lips.

  “I hope you’ll do the right thing.” She gave him one long last hard stare before turning and walking back over to where Ferguson was still standing.

  “I can see I’m going to have to watch you,” Ferguson nodded towards her, his body visibly relaxing. “What did you say to Mr Blue Shirt?” He sounded mystified.

  Ava shrugged. “I gave him my guarantee he would see his family soon if he put his weapon down.”

  “I thought you just said you gave him Kozinski’s word?” Ferguson asked, opening the jeep’s low side door for Ava to get in.

  “Why would he trust that?” Ava shot the question back at him. “He’s been lifted off the streets, held in military custody, no doubt subjected to torture, and all apparently for no good reason. He’s never going to trust another soldier again for as long as he lives.”

  Ferguson looked bewildered. “So he put his gun down? Just like that? Because you gave him your word?”

  Ava shook her head. “I also told him the soldiers aiming at him couldn’t hit a barn door with a cannon, so they weren’t going to risk shooting their colleague. But I said you were a British spy who would kill him cleanly with one shot between the eyes, and you wouldn’t even have to file a report about it.”

  Ferguson raised an eyebrow. “You really said that?”

  “It’s true isn’t it?” She pulled the jeep’s door closed. “You field guys don’t do paperwork, do you?”