The Jericho Deception: A Novel (38 page)

Had they been anywhere else, Axe would have ripped the finger from his hand and then snapped his neck.
The first to go?
He would show all those pussies how powerful he was.

He’d lasted twelve days. He hadn’t been the first to leave, but ultimately his greatest asset, his size, had been his downfall. He recalled how fucked up the
Navy’s requirements were. Any program that would weed out someone of his stature was horribly flawed.

The O-course was the bane of the big men. Lieutenant Mills had explained that while strength was crucial for a SEAL, more important were speed, agility, and stealth. The fifteen sections of the obstacle course required the recruits to climb, crawl, jump, and run over, under, and through ropes, steel bars, and barbed wire. The problem for Axe occurred at the same point on each of his three attempts: the sixty-foot cargo net. About two-thirds of the way up, his muscles just tied up, refusing to cooperate, leaving him stranded with his arms and legs dangling, exhausted, from the thick rope. Lieutenant Mills sat at the top of the net on the round telephone pole that supported it after he’d scaled it with the speed of a spider.

“Get your steroid-inflated ass up here!”

Not only was Axe carrying an extra fifty to seventy pounds compared with most of the other men there, his muscles were composed predominantly of fast-twitch fibers. These fibers gave him explosive power during his lifting sessions, but once the energy from the fibers was depleted, they simply refused to fire.

On his third and last O-course attempt, the California sun had seemed magnified, causing sweat to pour from his head, stinging his eyes.

“You might be big, Axe, but you’re just not strong enough, are you?” The voice jeered at him from the top. “Just give up and ring the bell.”

He grunted and willed his hands to reach for the next higher rope. He was closer than he’d been on his previous attempts. Lieutenant Mills’s foot dangled from the side of the pole just ten feet above him. Just a little farther and he would grab the foot and jerk the bastard down. But he had nothing left. His thighs quivered, causing the rope to shake. The burn in his forearms didn’t bother him; it was nothing compared to the pain he’d suffered as a boy. The problem was that he couldn’t get his fingers to move. They were frozen like those of an arthritic patient. He pried one hand loose while pushing up on the toes of the opposite foot.

He didn’t remember the fall, only waking up moments later surrounded by men. He got over the concussion, but not the humiliation of washing out
of SEAL training. He’d been relegated to a ship in the Gulf for the next two years. To make matters worse, the nightmares he’d suffered since the fire became more frequent. He awoke each night in the ship’s narrow bunk, drenched in sweat after dreaming of the fires of hell melting the skin from his legs.

His temper on the ship had earned him numerous reprimands, but then the call had come. A quasi-governmental organization was looking for recruits. They had wanted Special Forces types, but with the ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military couldn’t spare their most elite soldiers, so instead they were looking at men who had an interest in such things but had not quite made it. His commanders were happy to transfer him.

His new position as one of Wolfe’s first hires had suited him perfectly. With everything off the books, he had even more flexibility than if he were a SEAL. He didn’t have to worry about rules of engagement. He made his own rules. Plus, he believed in his mission. Wolfe was a genius, the smartest man he’d ever met, and he had more balls than his sorry excuse for a father could ever have hoped to have. All of the billions that the US had spent on military actions in the Middle East had done nothing to produce any lasting results. But Project Jericho would change the world.

He peered out the helicopter’s window into the blackness of the night. Then he pulled on the pair of headphones hanging from a hook behind him and clicked on the microphone. “Hit the floods,” he told the pilots.

His thermal scope wouldn’t show the tire tracks. As the helicopter banked to the left, he felt his stomach lurch. He’d never had problems with motion sickness before; such a condition was only for the weak-minded.

Must be vertigo from the drugs,
he thought.

It felt as if the sedative and the stimulant were battling each other inside of him, neither wanting to give in. He tried to stare at the horizon, but he could barely make out the outline of the dunes against the moonless sky.
Where are the damn lights?

Suddenly, his perception changed. The rhythmic thumping of the rotors, the smell of oil and metal, and even the dim landscape outside the window disappeared as if a plug had been pulled and his sensations of the world had
drained from him. He thought he was losing consciousness again, but soon realized he’d only lost his senses; his mind was still with him.

What’s happening to me?

He willed himself to clear his head, but nothing shifted. An undefined fear began to crowd out his rational thought. The world around him began to dissolve. He was becoming part of the same dark void that was outside the chopper. Suddenly he was back in the chapel and sitting in the cathedra, his reality dissolving. Just as the sensation threatened to consume him, the helicopter’s halogen lights lit up his world. The intensity hurt his eyes, causing him to blink rapidly, but he welcomed the pain that brought back his sense of sound and smell. He breathed in as deeply as his chest could inflate. His heart raced inside his ribcage.

He glanced toward Dawkins, who stared out his own window as if nothing were wrong. Then he understood what had happened. It wasn’t the drugs, it was the damn Logos machine. He thought about the professor’s explanation that the Logos could cause a negative reaction in ambidextrous people. A new feeling of dread began to spread through him, radiating out from his core, undeterred by the layers of muscle that usually protected him.

Am I losing my mind?

The coffee was thick, bitter, and hot, and was served in a small china cup that held no more than a single shot’s worth. Ethan welcomed the jolt of caffeine. Between sips he tore into the plate of hummus with chunks of pita his hosts had placed in front of him.

The other six men sitting on the pillows around him took turns on the hookah. He politely declined when they passed it in his direction. Although it was after three in the morning, the sheikh and the two guards had been joined by three other Bedouins, who’d risen to see the American doctor who had walked out of the desert. The boy’s father flashed an appreciative smile at him. The boy was sleeping in the rear section of the tent with his mother.

“You are free to take refuge with us for a few days,” Josef said. “We have plenty of food and room in the tent for you to rest.”

“Thank you, but I need to get to Luxor as quickly”—he paused for a moment —“and as discreetly as possible.”

A knowing smile crept across the sheikh’s face. Ethan suspected it wasn’t unusual in their trading culture to encounter people who might not want attention drawn to their activities.

“If you could drop me at a village by Lake Nasser, maybe I can grab a ride.”

Josef turned to his men, who debated how best to get him on the road to Luxor. All he could understand was that their idea had something to do with a camel and a
felucca,
though he didn’t know what a
felucca
was.

As he ate and listened to the occasional translations from the sheikh, Ethan wondered about Rachel and Mousa. Had their journey into the desert rather than into the city eluded the men from the Monastery? Once he reunited with Rachel, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight again.

Suddenly the boy’s father raised a hand to silence the group. He rose to his feet, cocked his head, and spoke in Arabic. The sheikh stood.

“Stay in here and don’t talk,” Josef said before walking outside the tent.

The other men stared at him. Then Ethan heard the distinctive sound of a helicopter approaching.

“Fuck the rules of engagement!” Axe yelled to Dawkins as he opened the door to the Black Hawk. His M4 was locked and loaded.

If the hand that closed around his shoulder hadn’t belonged to a fellow operative, he would have ripped it off at the wrist.

“Hey man,” Dawkins said, “Wolfe will shit a brick if we rile up the locals. We’ve got to keep this low-key.”

Axe glared at his partner, weighing his options. As if sensing his hesitation, Dawkins said, “I’ve got your back. You question the natives. I’ll cover you from here.”

“If you see one of them so much as flinch, smoke his ass.”

He flicked the safety on his rifle with his thumb and swung it over his shoulder. They’d lost the tracks of the SUV forty-five minutes earlier, but at least they’d learned something. They’d briefly spotted footprints in the sand.
One of them,
probably the professor
, he thought based on his fuzzy memory of the firefight, was out on foot. They’d crisscrossed the desert in a radius he’d estimated a man could walk in the hours since the escape. The only sign of life, other than the villages of Lake Nasser, was the Bedouin tent camp they’d spotted from the air. Because the footprints led into the desert rather than to the lake, he decided to investigate the Bedouins first.

Ethan barely breathed as he listened to the harsh voices outside the tent. He couldn’t make out the specifics through the roar of the still-spinning helicopter rotors, but he heard a mixture of English and Arabic. The sheikh seemed to be pretending not to understand anything being said to him. He wondered where the helicopter had come from. Then he caught the voice speaking in English:
James Axelrod.
His eyes darted around the tent, evaluating where he could hide if Axe decided to come inside. He felt the helplessness of having his life depend on men he’d only just met.

Then he heard the whine of the engine become higher pitched. The tent shook as the helicopter flew directly overhead. For a moment, he worried the fabric might fly apart, leaving him exposed in the night. But the sound of the aircraft faded into the distance. When he could no longer hear it, the opening to the tent parted. His breath caught in his chest.

Only the sheikh and the boy’s father entered.

“We must leave before the sun,” Josef said. “Your
friends
”—he emphasized the word—“are determined to find you.”

A wave of relief passed through him. “Thank you. Those men are dangerous.”

“Your kindness with the boy means much to us, and”—Josef shuddered—“the man asking for you had an evil look in his eyes. I’ve never seen a creature that size before.”

Ethan allowed himself to feel a ray of hope. Axe was randomly searching the desert. Maybe he hadn’t found Mousa and Rachel either.

E
than had finally adapted to the strange motion. He’d only been on a horse once in his life, on a trail ride in New Hampshire. The camel’s rhythm was different: it rocked forward and back. He shifted in the saddle to relieve the chafing on his thighs. Because a camel’s back was too wide to straddle like a horse’s, he was sitting at the front of the saddle and crossing his ankles on the animal’s neck. He yawned. More than once, he’d almost dozed off. The lack of sleep had caught up to him, especially now that his sympathetic system had stopped pumping hormones into his body.