The soft scuff of leather shoes on the polished-tile hospital floor accompanied Eli Grazier as he walked down the hall at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Finding the right room, he stepped inside. Sam Savage lay in the hospital bed, a look that promised mayhem on his face as he glared up at the television.
“Major?”
Savage snapped off the best salute he could, given the angle at which he lay. “Hello, Eli. Why am I not surprised that it would be you who walked through my door?”
“How are you?”
“After all their tests I was told exactly what I knew the moment they unloaded me from that damned ambulance. I’ve got bumps and bruises.”
“We had to be sure.”
Savage waved it away. “What’s the status of Farmer, France, and the sarcophagi?”
“No sign of them.”
“Shit!” Savage leaned his head back in the pillow. “Level with me, Eli. One minute I was in Saballah village, wearing a dishdash, talking to an Afghan elder. The next I’m putting together an extraction team in Kabul. Before I can catch so much as a catnap, I’m on a carrier in the Red Sea. I barely blink, and I’m infiltrating Egyptian airspace and dropping my team smack into a firefight with American contractors. We take out the contractors, who have killed twenty-some Egyptians.
“I find a blocked passageway in an Egyptian tomb with what’s left of a guy sliced in two by a big fucking rock. I blow the rock, extract France and Farmer, and have to fit two sarcophagi to my choppers. We barely beat feet out of there before the Egyptian Air Force splashes us all over the rocks.
“I get fast-tracked to Andrews, load the archaeologists and coffins into trucks—and then the whole shittaree gets whacked on fucking Pennsylvania Avenue? By people who not only know we are coming, but have a perfectly executed snatch?” He paused. “You following me on this, Eli? Hearing how bizarre and crazy this sounds?”
“The hijacking hit us out of the blue,” Grazier admitted.
“Eli, they had every detail. Trucks, time, route. And it was a very professional job. I couldn’t have organized and executed a better snatch.”
Grazier nodded. “It’s not the first time I’ve had my communications compromised. My problem is that I can’t figure out how. That they’d sacrifice an advantage like that? Just to get the anthropologists and sarcophaguses? That tells me how important that damn Egyptian tomb really is.”
“It’s just a tomb, sir.”
“It shouldn’t exist. Period. We took your vid-cam to an Egyptologist at the Smithsonian. The guy jazzed over the chariots and a lot of the artifacts, but as soon as he saw the stuff painted and carved on the walls, he stopped cold and said, ‘Whose idea of a joke is this?’”
“Farmer and France said the same.”
“He also told us that the Roman script wasn’t right for the tomb’s purported age, and that the airplane drawing, the weird symbols on the walls, and that schematic in the burial chamber were, and I quote, ‘Someone’s sick fantasy.’”
“Eli, those mercs-for-hire killed more than twenty Egyptian nationals to get at that tomb. But for one of their guys tripping that deadfall and sealing the burial chamber, they’d have had it all. They were willing to die trying to keep it. Now, whoever hired them, they’ve figuratively given it to us up the ass and taken the goodies back. As Uncle Buck would have told me, ‘This whole thing just ain’t normal.’”
Grazier’s smile thinned. “No, it’s not. And the two guys you captured alive make no bones about it. They’re employed by Talon Group, just doing the job they were given. Their orders were to take out the security, grab the scientists and all the artifacts they could truck out. They had a rendezvous with a couple of heavy-lift aircraft in the Western desert. Orders left no room for interpretation: defend the spoils from seizure by any and all parties.”
“Pay must have been good.”
“The guys you grabbed said it was. And, most interestingly, Talon Group’s not answering their phone these days.”
“Who’d have thought?”
Grazier nodded, hesitated. “Do you want in on this, Sam? If so, I can have you reassigned. But pay attention here: I know you think you’ve been living under glass while you’ve been working for the Activity. But given the stakes and the information you’ll be privy to—”
“Over a fake Egyptian tomb?”
“Once you tell me you’re in, you’re in all the way.” Grazier raised a cautionary finger. “It’ll be like you don’t exist. Sam, you might want to take a couple of days and think—”
“I’m in.”
“Sam, I mean it, you—”
“I just got bitch-slapped on Pennsylvania Avenue. They took my anthropologists and my fancy Egyptian coffins.”
“They call them sarcophaguses.”
“Yeah, well, I want them back. And I want to nail the slick-assed suckers who did this.”
“Is that your Indian talking?”
“Hell, General, you’ve got Seminole in your ancestry. Seminoles came from Creek blood in the beginning. We’re probably related way back there somewhere. You gonna just take this lying down?”
At Grazier’s faint shake of the head, Savage said, “Thought so.”
“From here on out, you’ll officially vanish. Life, as you knew it, will be over.”
“Ani’ inhickita.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Creek Indian. It’s my most solemn oath. Now, get me the hell out of here so I can start hunting.”