The Blood Gospel (9 page)

She tripped over a stone brick, kept going. He admired her grit. “Nerve gas? Is that why the American military is involved?”

“The Israelis asked for our help because we’re experts in this field. So far, we haven’t confirmed the nature of the gas. It most closely resembles sarin. Rapid effects, quick dispersion. By the time the first responders arrived on Masada, the gas was already inert.”

A bit of luck there, Jordan thought, or the casualty count would have been much higher. The Israelis had thought the earthquake was their biggest problem. The first responders hadn’t donned suits until they found the first bodies.

“Who would do that?” Her voice carried the shocked tone of one unused to confronting everyday evil firsthand. He envied her.

“I wish I had an answer for you.”

Even the gas was a mystery. It had none of the markers of a modern, weaponized agent. In breaking down the gas’s essential components, his team had found bizarre anomalies. Like cinnamon. Who the hell puts a spice into a nerve agent? His team was still trying to track down several other equally odd and elusive ingredients.

It unsettled him not to know the gas’s true origin. That was his job, and he was usually damn good at it. He hated to think he’d found a previously unidentified nerve gas with this kind of killing power, especially in the Middle East. Neither his superiors nor the Israelis would be happy to hear that.

He had to step over a body bag. He reached for Dr. Granger’s hand, both to steady her and as a gesture of reassurance. Her grip was more muscular than he expected. She must be lifting more than pencils.

“Was this a terrorist attack?” Her voice remained firm, but he felt the fine tremor in her arm. Best to keep her talking.

“That’s what the Israelis initially thought.” He released her hand. “But the toxic exposure coincided exactly with the earthquake. We suspect old toxic canisters might be buried underground here, and the tremor cracked them open.”

Her brow furrowed. “Masada is a sacred archaeological site. I can’t see the Israelis dumping anything like that here.”

He shrugged. “That’s what my team and I are here to find out.”

He had his orders: find the source and safely remove or detonate any remaining canisters.

He and the doctor walked a few steps in silence. He heard a thump as someone dropped a body bag into a helicopter. They’d better work faster. Night would fall soon, and he didn’t want to waste a man on jackal patrol.

He noted that the doctor’s eyes had grown glassy and wide, her breathing harder. He needed to keep her talking. “Almost to camp.”

“Were there any survivors?”

“One. A boy.” He gestured toward the mobile P3 containment lab, the billowing plastic tent where the teenager was being held.

“Was he here alone?” she asked.

“With his parents.”

The boy allegedly inhaled several large gulps of the chemical agent and survived. He had described the gas as a burnt reddish orange with a sweet, spicy smell to it. No modern nerve gas fit that description.

Jordan glanced back to her. “His parents didn’t make it.”

“I see,” Erin said quietly.

He stared across the rubble to the containment tent. Through the clear plastic walls, Jordan watched the priest kneel next to the boy. He was glad to see someone with the kid. But what priestly words could the man come up with to comfort him?

Suddenly his own job didn’t seem so hard.

“Is that your camp?” She pointed in front of him to a makeshift canvas lean-to pitched at the edge of the fissure.

Camp
was a generous description. “Be it ever so humble.”

He spared the fissure another glance. It cut through the ground like a giant scar, five yards wide, perhaps a hundred long. Even though a simple earthquake created it, it felt unnatural.

“Is that a mass spectrometer?” the archaeologist asked as they reached the site.

He couldn’t help but grin at the surprise on her face. “Didn’t think they’d let us grunts work with such ivory-tower toys?”

“No … it’s just … well …”

He liked watching her stutter. Everybody assumed that if you wore a uniform you had checked your brain at the recruiter’s office. “We just bang on it with rocks, Doc, but it seems to work.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. And please call me Erin. ‘Doc’ makes me feel like a pediatrician.”

“Good enough.” He aimed for the tent. “Almost there, Erin.”

Two of his men huddled under the meager shelter.

One stood near the computer, sucking hard on a canteen. The other sat in front of the monitor, fiddling with joysticks that guided the team’s remote-operated vehicle. The little robot had been lowered by its tether into the crevasse an hour ago.

As he led her into camp, both men turned. Each gave him a brief nod but took a far longer look at the attractive blond doctor.

Jordan introduced her, emphasizing her title.

The freckled young man returned his attention to his joysticks.

Jordan gestured at him. “Dr. Granger, that’s our computer jockey, Corporal Sanderson, and the man over there drinking all our water is Specialist Cooper.”

The husky black man snapped on a pair of latex gloves. A dozen bloodstained pairs filled the nearby garbage can.

“I’d stay and chat, but I gotta get back to cleanup duty.” Cooper looked to Jordan. “Where you hiding the extra batteries? McKay’s camera is almost dead, and we have to get everyone photographed before we bag ’em.”

Erin winced. She went pale again. Being in-country for so long, Jordan realized how easy it was to forget the sheer horror of what surrounded him every day.

Not much he could do for her right now. Or the bodies outside. “Blue pack, right pocket.”

Cooper dug a lithium ion battery from the zipper compartment.

“Damn it!” Sanderson swore, drawing their attention.

“What’s wrong?” Jordan asked.

“The rover is stuck again.”

Cooper rolled his eyes and left the tent.

The corporal frowned at the image on the color monitor like it was a video game he was about to lose.

Erin leaned over his shoulder and stared at the four monitors, each displaying footage from one of the ROV’s cameras. “Is that from inside the crevasse?”

“Yeah, but the robot’s jammed up tight.”

The screen displayed the reason for Sanderson’s frustration. The rover had wedged into a crack. Fallen grit and pebbles obscured two cameras. Sanderson pressed the sticks and the tank treads spun ineffectively, kicking up more debris. “Army piece of crap!”

The
equipment
wasn’t the problem. The ROV was state-of-the-art, packed with enough sensing and radar instruments to detect a mouse farting in a warehouse. The problem was that Sanderson hadn’t yet mastered the art of manipulating the dual joysticks. Jordan couldn’t run them either.

Erin glanced at him, eyes curious. “Is that an ST-20? I’ve logged hundreds of hours on one. Could I give it a shot?”

Might as well give her something to do. Sanderson didn’t look like he’d get the robot out. Plus Jordan respected anyone who was willing to jump in and help. “Sure.”

Sanderson lifted his hands in obvious disgust and rolled his chair out of the way. “Be my guest. The only thing I haven’t tried doing is crawling down that hole and kicking it.”

Erin stood where Sanderson’s chair had just been and took both joysticks like she knew what she was doing. She alternated between the front and rear controls, inching the ROV forward and backward much like she was trying to parallel-park.

“I tried that,” Sanderson said. “It’s not going to—”

The ROV abruptly pulled out of the crack. Jordan saw Erin smother a quick smile of victory, and respected her all the more for trying to spare Sanderson’s feelings.

Sanderson stood and put his hands on his hips. “Dude! You’re making me look bad in front of my CO.”

Then he smiled and pushed his chair behind her like it was a throne. Once she got settled, she looked up at Jordan. “What are we looking for?”

“Our team’s been commissioned to find the source of the gas.”

“Let me guess,” she said with a true smile. “I’m here to assure the Israeli government that you don’t destroy any millennia-old artifacts in the process?”

Jordan matched her smile. “Something along those lines.”

He didn’t take it any further than that, but her presence here was at the request of Israeli intelligence, not the antiquities department. He wasn’t sure why yet. And he hated unsolved mysteries.

All eyes were on the monitors as she steered the ROV over a pile of rocks.

“What are you doing in Israel anyway?” Sanderson asked her.

“I have a team digging in Caesarea,” she said. “Routine stuff.”

Jordan suspected by the tone of her voice that it wasn’t routine. Interesting.

The rover slid down a rocky outcropping, then entered what appeared to be a straight passageway.

“Look at the walls.” She rotated the rover’s cameras. “Sharp-edged chipping.”

“So?” Jordan prompted.

“This tunnel is man-made. Dug out by hand and chisel.”

“Way down there? At the heart of the mountain?” He stepped closer to her. “Who do you think dug it out? The Jewish rebels who died here?”

“Maybe.” She leaned away from him. Personal space issues. He moved back a fraction. “Or the Byzantine monks who lived on the mountain centuries later. Without more evidence, it’s impossible to say. I’m guessing this little guy might be the first one down this passage in a very long time.”

The ROV climbed over a pile of rubble, halogen headlamps painting the pitch-black crevasse sickly white.

“Damn,” Erin said.

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

She turned the rover fully to the right to show a pile of broken stones.

“And?” To Jordan, it didn’t look that different from any other pile of rocks.

“Look at the top.” She traced the image on the monitor with her finger. “That was a tunnel, but it’s collapsed.”

“So has a lot of stuff,” Sanderson put in. “Why is that a big deal?”

“Look at the sides,” she said. “Those are fairly modern drill marks.”

Jordan leaned forward excitedly. “Which means?”

“It means that someone cut their way into this tunnel sometime in the last hundred years or so.” Erin sighed. “And probably stole anything of value.”

“Maybe
they
left the gas.” Jordan wasn’t sure why he felt relieved that it might be a modern nerve gas and not an ancient one, but he did.

She turned the rover forward again, and it rolled down the path, eventually reaching an open area.

“Stop there,” Jordan said. “What’s this place?”

“Looks like an underground storage chamber.” Erin turned the rover around to get a look at the empty room. No broken canisters yet.

Focusing on his corporal, Jordan asked, “How are the readings?”

Sanderson hunched over a neighboring monitor. He might have trouble piloting the ROV, but the kid knew his instrumentation. “Plenty of secondary breakdown products. No active agent. Still, these are by far the hottest spikes I’ve seen here. I’d say that chamber is the source of the gas.”

A camera angled up to display an arched ceiling.

“That looks like a church,” Sanderson said.

Erin shook her head. “More likely a subterranean temple or tomb. The building style is ancient.” She touched the screen, as if that would help her feel the stone.

“What is that box?” Jordan asked.

“I think it’s a sarcophagus, but I can’t be certain until I get closer. The light doesn’t go that far.”

She sent the ROV forward, but it stopped. She pushed on both joysticks, then let go with an impatient sigh.

“Stuck again?” Jordan asked. They were so close.

“End of the line,” she said. “Literally. That’s as far as the ROV’s tether can reach.”

She left the camera pointed at the sarcophagus. “Definitely appears to be a burial container. If so, somebody important must be interred there.”

“Important enough to booby-trap the chamber?” That might explain it.

“It’s possible, but Egyptians—not Jews—were notorious for engineering elaborate traps.” She rubbed her lower lip. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Nothing does here.” Sanderson snorted. “Like cinnamon-scented nerve gas.”

She swiveled her chair around. “What?”

Jordan scowled at Sanderson, then admitted what they’d found. “One of the anomalies about this gas. We’ve detected traces of cinnamon in it.”

“Well, that makes
some
sense with the tomb.”

“How so?” It didn’t make any sense to Jordan.

“Cinnamon was a rare spice during ancient times,” she lectured. “For the rich, it was burned in funeral rites as a scent favored by God. It’s mentioned multiple times in the Bible. Moses was commanded to use it when preparing an anointing oil.”

“So the cinnamon is probably a contaminant?” Jordan was grateful for the information. All he knew about cinnamon was that he liked it on French toast.