SEPTEMBER 27. 2100 HOURS.
The private who stood guard outside the cave snapped to attention as Colonel Joseph Logan walked up the moonlit trail. Black Canyon had turned hazy, the air filled with dust and debris from the bombing campaign. “At ease, Private. Anything unusual to report?”
“No, sir. The MEDINT team has been in there for about two hours.”
MEDINT. Medical Intelligence.
“All right. Carry on, Private.”
Logan ducked into the cave. As he straightened, he took in the scene. Five fluorescent floodlights had been set up and gleamed around the circumference of the cave. Three illuminated the stone ossuaries. One aimed at the floor, and the last pointed up at the ceiling. The arrangement threw the wall inscriptions into strange relief. He scanned them. They were meaningless to him, though he found the different scripts beautiful.
After Hazor’s team went down, they’d sent in the backup team, Beta Four, to capture Taran Beth-Gilgal. Beta Four did not find the priest at the church. Instead, they’d found the trail of ten zealots heading out into the dunes. They’d followed it, surrounded Taran Beth-Gilgal and the zealots, and captured them. It had taken the interrogation team four ugly hours to extract the information on the ointment and the cave’s location from Taran Beth-Gilgal.
Logan turned toward Captain Maris Bowen, who leaned over one of the ossuaries, her gloved hands collecting samples. A burgeoning pile of sealed sample bags rested in a sterile container beside her. Every ossuary had been opened. The lids leaned in a line against the far wall. From what Logan could tell, most of the artifacts had already been bagged.
Except for the boxes of ammunition. There must be twenty thousand rounds in here.
“SITREP, Captain,” Logan called.
“We’re almost done here, sir. What’s happening out there? Anything I should know from the briefing?”
Bowen had her short black hair stuffed into a plastic cap. In her late thirties, the style gave her face a blocky appearance, almost cubist. Her nose was a perfect triangle, her mouth a long thin rectangle. Plastic covered her khakis. She looked up at him with severe brown eyes. Bowen had a PhD in microbiology from Stanford, but she was career military.
“Operational activities are winding down. A cargo helo is coming ASAP, and will be ready to remove your samples from this cave. NSA wants these ossuaries powdered to dust and analyzed for chemical and biological information.”
Bowen expelled a breath and nodded.
It had been a long, difficult night for everyone. They all wanted to get back to their command post aboard the USS Langtree. “How much is left to do?”
“Very little in the way of objects, but there are thousands of wall inscriptions. We’ve photographically documented everything, but—”
“Mount of Olives is more concerned with material objects.”
Bowen gave him a sidelong look. “Colonel, I swear to you, the analysts are wrong. Asher wasn’t looking for an object, and certainly not a revolutionary new weapon. Hakari had been raving about the coming plague for years. He must have set her on the path to find the cure, and it led her here.”
Two hours ago, at the briefing, Logan had been allowed to read the classified air force intelligence reports about Asher. The military had become aware of her strange activities six months ago. She was canny, though. Every odd request or curious usage of equipment could be tied in some manner to her assigned cryptographic duties. Nonetheless, they were oddball enough to draw attention. Both the CIA and FBI had been tasked with monitoring her movements. Asher had used every military asset she could to locate this ancient cave, then, about three months ago, she’d gone AWOL from the air force without telling a soul that she’d found it. They’d searched everywhere for her to no avail.
“You’re not the first person tonight to surmise that, Captain. So, let’s say you’re right. Why didn’t she call in military analysts to assist her in the search? Was it just greed? Did she hope to make a fortune? Was she ill?”
Bowen shook her head. “Her annual medical reports were flawless. She was healthy as an ox. She never took a single day of sick leave. Not in the five years she worked in cryptography, or her four years of service before that. She constantly worked overtime. Her performance reviews were outstanding.” Maris heaved a sigh and looked away, toward the cave entry. The air vibrated with the sound of choppers coming in. “So, she wasn’t ill. Any word on Anna’s whereabouts?”
“Negative. But we’ve traced her path, and that of her companion, through the satellite feeds. They made it all the way to the Nile before we lost them. JWICS is still processing the data.”
The Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System was a sensitive, highly compartmentalized portion of the Defense Information Systems Network that analyzed multipoint information exchange involving voice, text, graphics, data, and any available video.
Bowen rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “You’re not going to find her.”
“Of course we will. NSA considers it a matter of urgent national security.”
“I worked with her in D.C. for three years, sir. She certainly knows you’re looking for her. She knows the equipment you’re using and how it functions. And she knows how to avoid detection.”
Logan propped his hands on his hips and looked away. “We’ll find her. The top brass have committed a lot of resources.”
Bowen’s brows pulled together. “You look worried, Colonel. Things are cascading pretty fast out there, aren’t they?”
They were. At an alarming rate. But Logan didn’t want to affirm or deny any rumors, so he simply said, “We should all be worried.”
Voices murmured on the ledge outside, soldiers discussing something.
Logan folded his arms across his chest to ease the painful thudding of his heart. “What have they told you, Captain?”
“No one in the military is talking. But…” She brusquely stripped off her plastic gloves. As she flexed her fingers, she said, “Inside the medical community scuttlebutt is rampant. Cases of LucentB have cropped up on four continents, and nobody can figure out how the virus works.”
“Why not? What’s the problem?”
“LucentB is a genetic mystery. The vaccines that were developed to combat the disease are totally useless against it. Obviously, pharmaceutical companies are still working, but…”
“I hadn’t heard that part.”
Bowen wiped her forehead on her sleeve. “What’s the military saying behind closed doors, Colonel? Can you give me any information?”
He hesitated. “Don’t know much. China just blocked the South China Sea to try and stop the plague from entering their country. The U.S. is threatening war to keep the shipping lanes open so we can get medical supplies through. Don’t know anything else.”
He frowned down at the ossuary where her gloves rested. Inside, white bones lay like sticks beneath a small skull with a strange brown patina. The skull had been tipped upward. Logan could see inside the dark hole at the base of the skull. A crown of twisted grass rested above the figure’s head, and another at the bottom of the ossuary.
He gestured. “Female?”
Bowen lifted a shoulder. “The contents of this stone box are a mystery to me. I think the skull belongs to a young boy, around twelve or thirteen. See the pelvis—the hip bones? Looks male to me. Women have a wider opening to ease birthing. However, the long bones, especially the femurs, leg bones, appear to be those of an elderly woman. But I’m a microbiologist, not a forensic anthropologist. I’m no expert on sexing ancient skeletal remains.”
Logan took a deep breath and let it out slowly, before he said, “NSA says LucentB is tied to some sequence in our junk DNA, Captain.”
She stared at him. “The term ‘junk DNA’ is a misnomer, Colonel. There’s just DNA we don’t understand yet. What about the religious kooks in Bir Bashan? They were supposed to have info about the plague.”
“Well, they didn’t. All Cozeba got out of their leader, Beth-Gilgal, was the location of this cave and the fact that he’d seen a woman meeting Asher’s description.”
“Must have made Cozeba livid. I assume he handled the interrogation personally?”
“He did, and he is. Livid. Apparently this crazy religious order specializes in healing formulas that rely on plant poisons. The general is cursing himself for not doing more research. If he had, he’d have realized the old priest might carry some kind of poison as a last resort to prevent him from revealing too much. We’re just lucky the truth agent took hold before the poison did.”
Distaste twisted Captain Bowen’s mouth. There was no love lost between Bowen and Cozeba. They detested each other. And, if the truth be told, Logan agreed with her. Cozeba was an amoral bastard who didn’t care one whit for human life—which was probably what made him such an extraordinary general. The man had no ability for empathy. To him, human beings were little more than blinking cursors to move around a computer screen; he used them to achieve military objectives, or he killed them at his earliest convenience. The general’s personality disorder, however, had allowed him to win great battles. Which, in the end, may have saved the lives of millions of U.S. soldiers.
“I’m worried about Asher, Colonel. Is there really no news—”
“Captain, according to the reports, she went AWOL with information vital to stopping this plague. She’s a traitor who should be shot on sight.”
Bowen clamped her jaw.
She and Asher had been close friends in D.C. Rumors said that when Asher’s treachery became apparent, Bowen had tried to defend her, and Cozeba had exploded. He’d transferred Bowen to another department to keep her quiet.
Bowen propped her hands on her hips while she gazed at the inscriptions that covered the cave. “I wish I knew what all this says. I’ll bet Anna knew.”
Dirt gushed into the cave when the choppers arrived outside. Bowen threw up an arm to shield her face. Two soldiers dressed in plastic suits crawled through the opening, and snapped out salutes.
Logan returned the salutes and pointed. “Bag the ossuaries first. The sooner we start analyzing them, the sooner we’ll know if Asher found anything useful here.”