The Blood Gospel (11 page)

A helicopter lifted off. She glanced around the plateau. The teenager had gone, along with most of the crew and the body bags. It looked like only a dozen people worked in the lengthening shadows.

Jordan came around to her front. He reached down and tightened straps around her upper thighs in a way both by-the-book formal and incredibly personal. The webbing cinched against her, pulling her toward him. She looked up into his blue eyes, which were darkening as the sun set.

“If there’s anything I need to know before we go down there,” he said, “now is the time to tell me.”

“Nothing.” She wanted to stay up here alone among all the bodies even less than she wanted to go down into the hole. “Bad day.”

“Sanderson’s got a chair warmed up for you.” He studied her face. “With the ROV in place, you could monitor our progress from up here.”

Summoning up courage she thought she’d lost, she forced a smile. “And let you have all the fun?”

He gave her one more worried look before returning to his men.

On either side, men tossed ropes over the edge. Blue blankets laid along the fissure’s lip cushioned the ropes and lessened friction between the rope lines and sharp, broken stone. They seemed to know what they were doing. She double-checked the ropes anyway.

Sanderson stepped up behind her. He wasn’t going down, only helping the others gear up. He passed her something the length and width of a pen.

“Sarge told me to give you an atropine dart,” he said. “Best to stick it in your sock.”

“What does it do?”

“If you’re exposed to the mystery gas, pop the cap and jab yourself in the thigh.”

Fear fluttered in her chest at the idea of that. “I thought there was no active gas down there.”

“It’s just a precaution, but be careful. Stuff’s strong. Don’t use it unless you
know
you’re exposed. Atropine jacks your heart rate through the roof. Strong enough to blow up your ticker if you’re not poisoned. Quick, too.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing biocontainment suits?”

“Too bulky to rappel in. And the straps would tear the fabric. Don’t worry, at the first sign of symptoms—nausea, bleeding—just use the needle. You should live long enough for us to pull you out.”

She scrutinized his freckled face to see if he was joking, trying to scare her.

He squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

She didn’t feel
fine
. Breathing a bit faster, she lifted her pant leg and wedged the dart deep into her sock.

Lieutenant Perlman, along with two other soldiers—a young Israeli and an older American—walked up to the fissure. The American had bushy brown hair and carried a satchel over one shoulder. She read the name stenciled on his fatigues:
McKay
.

On his bag were three prominent letters:
EOD
.

He caught her looking. “Explosive Ordnance Disposal. I blow stuff up.”

They must be planning on detonating any intact canisters they found down there. She should be more worried, but the shock of Heinrich’s death had left her too numb to panic.

McKay held out a hand. She shook it. He was a large man, a few cheeseburgers away from having a gut, and a decade older than the others. She guessed he was in his early forties. He smiled broadly while shaking her hand.

“Best-looking climbing partner I’ve had in ages.” He winked, and she tried to smile back.

He moved to the edge of the fissure as if stepping up to a curb. She stepped next to him and looked down. Shadows obscured the bottom. The fissure was broad enough to rappel down without worry, but she still shivered. The jagged, ugly thing didn’t belong on this mountain.

McKay and Cooper secured their rappelling gear to a pair of ropes.

She stepped to a free line and did the same, pulling it tight twice to check.

Another of Jordan’s team—a woman named Tyson—knelt beside the crevasse. She had fed a long hose down into the hole. Next to her camouflaged knee rested a gas chromatograph.

“What’s the reading, Tyson?” Jordan called.

“Spikes of nitrogen, oxygen, argon.” She kept her eyes on her screen. “A trace of everything you’d expect. No bad gases, Sarge.”

“Keep monitoring, Corporal.” Jordan faced them. “And everyone keep your atropine at the ready.”

“What’re we waiting for, Sergeant?” Cooper hung over the abyss. His line looked too thin to support his bulk, but his eyes danced with adrenaline. A born climber.

Jordan circled his arm in the air. “Rangers lead the way!”

With a whoop from Cooper and a tired sigh from McKay, the pair walked backward down the cliff face, as easily as if they were on horizontal ground.

The Israelis clipped on next and dropped over the edge.

Tyson fiddled with her monitoring equipment. She wasn’t harnessed up, so she must be staying up here, too.

That left Erin and Jordan. He came forward with a large weapon slung over his back, then secured himself on the rope next to her. Once set, he leaned over and tugged on her line. “Good tie-on.”

“You bet.”

Jordan flashed a quick grin, leaned back, and took a big step down. He stared up, face serious, words firm. “Anytime now. I’ll be right next to you.”

She leaned out, felt her hands open and close, letting rope slide through her gloved fingers as she backed up—and next thing she knew she was standing next to Jordan on the cliff face.

4:54
P.M
.—Three minutes before sunset

When his boots hit the ground, Jordan did an automatic inventory of his weapons. He patted the holstered sidearm on his hip, a Colt 1911, then checked the KA-BAR dagger strapped to his ankle. But his primary weapon—a Heckler & Koch MP7—hung on a strap over his right shoulder. The machine pistol fired hardened steel rounds to the beat of 950 per minute, capable of turning Kevlar armor into Swiss cheese.

He quickly checked the weapon’s safety, clip, and optics, ensuring he didn’t bump it against anything on the way down. He caught Erin staring.

“You need that much firepower down here?” Erin folded her gloves in half and crammed them in her back pocket.

He shrugged. “It’s standard carry for my team.”

Before he could explain more, Sanderson’s voice crackled over the radio in his earpiece. “
Sarge, we’ve got an Israeli cargo chopper coming in. I’m guessing they’ve come for the rest of the bodies.
”

The evacuation chopper was early, but just as well. Jordan wanted everyone off this bloody mountain as soon as possible. He touched his earpiece. “Got it.”

He and Erin joined the rest of the team gathered at a thin seam in the cliff face. The ROV cable trailed down it and vanished into the darkness.

He glanced over at Erin. What the hell had happened to her in the lean-to? At first he’d thought maybe she was scared of heights and worried about the rappel, but she’d handled that without blinking an eye. He suspected she did have more than a hundred climbs behind her. So she must have seen or heard something during the few minutes she was alone that knocked her down. He didn’t think she’d told him the whole truth about it. She seemed better now, but he hoped whatever it was wouldn’t affect the mission.

Cooper pulled his head out of the two-foot-wide crack the ROV had run through and tossed a glowstick, lighting the way ahead. “That man-made tunnel opens just past this seam.”

Hands on his hips, McKay eyed the small opening.

Jordan clapped him on the shoulder. “Tight fit, but you should make it.”

McKay shook his head. “Spoken by a skinny guy who can barely bench-press his weight.”

Jordan wasn’t skinny, and he could certainly bench much more than his weight. But he’d fit through. For McKay in full gear, it would be a tight squeeze.

Cooper smiled an overly broad grin. “You can always strip to your skivvies and rub yourself in grease.”

“And give you a free show? Not likely.”

Lieutenant Perlman stood with his arms crossed, frowning. The other Israeli soldier shifted from foot to foot.

Jordan saw no reason to delay. The sun was setting, and he wanted to get done here soon. He adjusted his shoulder lamp.

“Let’s move.”

4:57
P.M
.—Sunset

Kneeling, Erin watched the others file into the crack. She drew in a cautious breath. She expected a chemical odor, even though Tyson and Sanderson had given the air a thumbs-up. Instead, it smelled musty, mingled with a staleness that came from places unoccupied for a long time. The familiar and oddly comforting scent of an old tomb.

She patted the dart in her sock and stood to follow Jordan into the narrow opening. Rough stone walls pressed against both shoulders, and she turned sideways, hoping that McKay would make it through without losing too much skin.

The air felt much cooler than on the mountaintop. Underfoot, her sneakers sank in the sand. The glowstick cast an eerie yellow pall along the tunnel. When she reached the stick, she resisted the urge to pick it up and shove it in her pocket. They were littering an archaeological site. She made a note to get it on the way back. She kept one hand running along the top of the crack, making sure that her head wouldn’t bump into the fissure’s roof as she forged on, anxious to get to the tomb and start exploring.

Ahead McKay let loose with a string of curses as he cleared the seam, mostly involving the tightness of the squeeze. Cooper laughed gleefully.

Erin found herself smiling. She frequently worked with soldiers, often at sites located in areas of conflict. In the past, she had regarded the military as a necessary evil, but she already felt an odd bond with this group, forged by horror and bloodshed above and by tension below.

At last, she and Jordan reached the end of the narrow seam. He stepped out into a man-made tunnel, then helped her to climb free. Out in the passageway, he held up a hand, indicating she should stand pat.

“We wait for the all clear from the team.”

He was in charge down here, for now. She stopped and touched the tunnel wall, feeling sharp-edged gouges, picturing chisels and hammers and sweating men. She dropped to a knee and touched the path, pinching up dirt and letting it run through her fingers.

Someone had dug this out thousands of years ago. Who had walked through here? And why?

A few feet away, chunks of rocks closed up the modern tunnel she’d seen on the rover’s cameras. The tunnel must have collapsed. She touched the drill marks on the edges. Twentieth century. But when?

She spotted what looked like the elastic straps and the plastic faceplate of a modern-era gas mask crushed under a boulder. She walked toward it, drawing Jordan with her. If this had been an official expedition, she would have known about it. If it was unofficial, how had they concealed that large of an undertaking at such a famous site? There would have to have been a lot going on at the time.

Like a war.

Before they could examine anything further, Jordan’s radio buzzed. It was loud enough that she heard Cooper’s tinny voice say, “
Chamber is secure, Sarge. You might want to get your asses in here. Some fucked-up shit went down.
”

“Heading over.” Jordan waved for her to continue with him. “Stick to my side, Doc.”

She followed, making a mental checklist of things to do: use a metal detector to search for tools, scrape soot from the ceiling to judge the type of torches employed by the workers, apply a plaster cast to the wall to discern what tools were used to dig here.

The kinds of things Heinrich had been good at. She stumbled a step, and Jordan caught her arm, his hand warm and reassuring, his eyes concerned. “Doc?”

She shook her head and waved him on.

After another ten yards, they arrived at the entrance to the underground chamber she had just seen through the ROV’s cameras. An ancient and well-made doorway.

The doorway was too narrow for two people to enter at once. She hung back and let Jordan duck through first. She estimated the entryway at a hair over six feet tall and reached one hand up to lightly touch the arch, then stepped over the threshold behind him.

Goose bumps rose on her arms. The air was even cooler here. The muted light of three yellow glowsticks that had been tossed randomly inside revealed a well-made limestone floor, tall, soot-streaked ceilings, close-fitted stone blocks on the walls. She would have loved to be able to take pictures of the dust on the floor, maybe see the footprints of the grave robbers who had opened the sarcophagus. But Jordan and his men had already tramped through and overlaid ancient footprints with their own.

The others gathered across the room, huddled on the far side of the sarcophagus, facing the wall. There must be something very interesting there. As soon as she got a better sense of the overall site, she’d let herself join them.

“Please touch nothing,” she called, fully expecting them to ignore her.

She entered, stepping past the ROV, and crossed to the stone sarcophagus. As she expected, it was carved from a single stone, the sides finely wrought, each corner perfectly angled, each side perfectly flat. She marveled anew at the workmanship of those ancient craftsmen. Their tools might be considered primitive, but the results certainly weren’t. She glanced at the polished top where it lay in one piece on the floor beside the grave it had covered for so long. Odd to see it intact, as grave robbers usually broke the lids of sarcophagi when they pulled them off.