DECEMBER 4, 5:55 A.M.
DHOFAR MOUNTAINS
AS THE skies brightened to the east, Omaha slowed the van at the top of the pass. The road continued down the far side…if the rutted, stone-plagued track could be called a road. His lower back ached from the constant bump and rattle of the last ten miles.
Omaha braked to a halt. Here the road crested the last pass through the mountains. Ahead, the highlands dropped to salt flats and gravel plains. In the rearview mirror, fields of green heather spread, dotted with grazing cattle. The transition was abrupt.
To either side of the van lay a moonscape of red rock, interrupted by patches of straggly, red-barked trees, bent by the winds flowing over the pass. Boswellia sacra. The rare and precious frankincense trees. The source of wealth in ages past.
As Omaha braked, Painter’s head snapped up from a light drowse. “What is it?” he asked blearily. One hand rested on the pistol in his lap.
Omaha pointed ahead. The road descended through a dry riverbed, a wadi. It was a rocky, treacherous course, meant for four-wheel-drive vehicles.
“It’s all downhill from here,” Omaha said.
“I know this place,” Barak said behind them. The fellow never seemed to sleep, whispering directions to Omaha as they wound through the mountains. “This is Wadi Dhikur, the Vale of Remembrance. The cliffs to either side are an ancient graveyard.”
Omaha popped the van into gear. “Let’s hope it doesn’t become ours.”
“Why did we come this way?” Painter asked.
In the third row of seats, Coral and Danny stirred, slumped against each other. They sat straighter, listening. Clay, seated beside Barak, merely snored, head craned back, lost to the world.
Barak answered Painter’s question. “Only the local Shahra tribe know of this route down the mountains to the desert. They still collect frankincense from the trees around here in the traditional manner.”
Omaha had never met anyone from the Shahra clan. They were a reclusive bunch, almost stone age in their technology, frozen in tradition. Their language had been studied at length. It was unlike modern Arabic, almost a reedy singsong, and contained eight additional phonetic syllables. Over time, most languages lose sounds, becoming more refined as they mature. With the additional syllables, the Shahri language was considered to be one of the most ancient in all of Arabia.
But more particularly, the Shahra called themselves the People of ’Ad, named after King Shaddad, the first ruler of Ubar. According to oral traditions, they descended from the original inhabitants of Ubar, those who fled its destruction in A.D. 300. In fact, Barak might be leading them down the very path to Ubar that the People of ’Ad had once used to flee its destruction.
A chilling thought, especially shadowed by the entombed graves.
Barak finished, “At the bottom of the wadi, it is only thirty kilometers to reach Shisur. It is not far.”
Omaha began their descent, in the lowest gear, creeping at five miles per hour. To go any faster risked sliding out in the loose shale and rocky scree. Despite the caution, the van skidded all too often, as if traveling on ice. After half an hour, Omaha’s hands were damp on the wheel.
But at least the sun was up, a dusty rose in the sky.
Omaha recognized that hue. A storm was coming. Due to strike the area in a few more hours. Already winds off the sands blew up the wadi, blustering against the less-than-aerodynamic van.
As Omaha rounded a blind bend in the riverbed, two camels and a pair of robed bedouin appeared ahead. He hit the brakes too hard, fishtailed the rear end, and struck broadside into a precariously stacked set of stone slabs alongside the road. Metal buckled. The slabs toppled.
Clay startled awake with a snort.
“There goes our collision deposit,” Danny griped.
The two camels, loaded and strapped with bales and overflowing baskets, gurgled at them, tossing their heads, as they were walked past the stalled van. It looked like they were carrying an entire household on their backs.
“Refugees,” Painter said, nodding to other similarly laden camels, mules, and horses moving up the dry watercourse. “They’re fleeing the storm.”
“Is everyone okay?” Omaha asked as he fought the gearshift knob, punching the clutch. The van lurched, rocked, and finally began to roll again.
“What did we hit back there?” Coral asked, staring at the toppled stones.
Danny pointed to other similar stone piles that peppered the graveyard. “Triliths,” he answered. “Ancient prayer stones.” Each was composed of three slabs leaned against one another to form a small pyramid.
Omaha continued down the road, wary of the stacked stones. This was made more difficult as “traffic” grew thicker the lower down the riverbed they traveled.
Folks were fleeing the desert in droves.
“I thought you said no one knew about this back door out of the mountains,” Painter asked Barak.
The Arab shrugged. “When you’re facing the mother of all sandstorms, you run toward higher ground. Any ground. I wager every riverbed is being climbed like this. The main roads are surely worse.”
They had heard periodic reports over the radio as reception came and went. The sandstorm had grown in size, as large as the Eastern Seaboard, whipping up eighty-mile-per-hour winds, packed by scouring sands. It was shifting sand dunes around like they were whitecaps on a storm-swept sea.
And that was not the worst. The high pressure system off the coast had begun to move inland. The two storm systems would meet over the Omani desert, a rare combination of conditions that would whip up a storm unlike any seen in ages before.
Even as the sun dawned, the northern horizon remained cloaked in a smoky darkness. As they descended the mountain road, the storm ahead grew taller and taller, a tidal wave cresting.
They finally reached the bottom of the wadi. The cliffs fell away to either side, spilling out into the sandy salt flats.
“Welcome to the Rub‘ al-Khali,” Omaha announced. “The Empty Quarter.”
The name could not be more fitting.
Ahead stretched a vast plain of gray gravel, etched and scoured with pictographic lines of blue-white salt flats. And beyond, a red ridge marked the edge of the endless roll of dunes that swept across Arabia. From their vantage, the sands glowed in pinks, browns, purples, and crimsons. A paint pot of hues.
Omaha studied their fuel gauge. With luck, they’d have just enough gas to reach Shisur. He glanced over to the Desert Phantom, their only guide. “Thirty kilometers, right?”
Barak leaned back and shrugged. “Thereabouts.”
Shaking his head, Omaha turned forward and set off across the flat-lands. A few straggling folk still trudged toward the mountains. The refugees showed no interest in the van heading toward the storm. It was a fool’s journey.
No one in the van spoke, eyes fixed forward on the storm. The only sound: the crunch of sand and gravel under their tires. With the cooperative terrain, Omaha risked pushing the van up to thirty miles per hour.
The winds unfortunately seemed to pick up with every half mile, blowing streams of sand from the dunes. They would be lucky to have any paint on the van when they reached Shisur.
Danny finally spoke. “It’s hard to believe this used to be a vast savannah.”
Clay yawned. “What are you talking about?”
Danny shifted forward. “This wasn’t always desert. Satellite maps show the presence of ancient riverbeds, lakes, and streams under the sand, suggesting Arabia was once covered by grasslands and forests, full of hippos, water buffalo, and gazelle. A living Eden.”
Clay stared at the arid landscape. “How long ago was this?”
“Some twenty thousand years. You can still find Neolithic artifacts from that time: ax blades, skin scrapers, arrowheads.” Danny nodded to the wastelands. “Then began a period of hyperaridity that dried Arabia into a desert wasteland.”
“Why? What triggered such a change?”
“I don’t know.”
A new voice intervened, answering Clay’s question. “The climatic change was due to Milankovitch Forcing.”
Attention turned to the speaker. Coral Novak.
She explained. “Periodically the Earth wobbles in its orbit around the sun. These wobbles or ‘orbital forcings’ trigger massive climatic changes. Like the desertification of Arabia and parts of India, Africa, and Australia.”
“But what could cause the Earth to wobble?” Clay asked.
Coral shrugged. “It could be simple precession. The natural periodic changes in orbits. Or it could be something more dramatic. A flip-flop of the Earth’s polarity, something that’s occurred a thousand times in geologic history. Or it might have been a burp in the rotation of the Earth’s nickel core. No one can really say.”
“However it happened,” Danny concluded, “this is the result.”
Before them, the dunes had grown into massive hummocks of red sand, some stretching six hundred feet high. Between the dunes, gravel persisted, creating winding, chaotic roadways, nicknamed “dune streets.” It was easy to get lost in the maze of streets, but the more direct route over the dunes could bog the hardiest vehicle. Something they could not chance.
Omaha pointed ahead, directing his question to Barak, meeting the Desert Phantom’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “You know your way through there, right?”
The giant of an Arab shrugged again, his usual response to everything.
Omaha stared at the towering dunes…and beyond them, a wall of churning dark sand rising from the horizon, like the smoky edge of a vast grass fire sweeping toward them.
They had no time for wrong turns.
7:14 A.M.
SAFIA MARCHED beside Kara down another tunnel. The Rahim clan spread out ahead and behind them, traveling in groups, carrying oil lanterns in the darkness. They had been walking for the past three hours, stopping regularly to drink or rest. Safia’s shoulder had begun to ache, but she didn’t protest.
The entire clan was on the move. Even the children.
A nursing mother strode a few steps ahead, accompanied by six children, whose ages ranged from six to eleven. The older girls held the younger ones’ hands. Like all the Rahim, even the children were bundled in hooded cloaks.
Safia studied the young ones as they sneaked glances back at her. They all appeared to be sisters. Green eyes, black hair, burnished skin. Even their shy smiles carried the same dimpled charm.
And while the adult women varied in minor ways—some were wiry, others heavier built, some long-haired, others shorn short—their basic features were strikingly similar.
Lu’lu, the tribal hodja, kept pace with them. After announcing their journey to the Gates of Ubar, she had left to organize the clan’s departure. As guardians of Ubar for centuries, none of the Rahim would be left out of this momentous occasion.
Once they were under way, Lu’lu had gone silent, leaving Kara and Safia plenty of time to discuss the revelation of their sisterhood. It still seemed unreal. For the past hour, neither had spoken, each lost to her own thoughts.
Kara was the first to interrupt the silence. “Where are all your men?” she asked. “The fathers of these children? Will they be joining us along the way?”
Lu’lu frowned at Kara. “There are no men. That is forbidden.”
Safia remembered the hodja’s comment earlier. About how Safia’s birth had been forbidden. Did permission have to be granted? Was that why they all looked so identical? Some attempt at eugenics, keeping their bloodline pure?
“It’s just you women?” Kara asked.
“The Rahim once numbered in the hundreds,” Lu’lu said quietly. “Now we number thirty-six. The gifts granted to us through the blood of Biliqis, the Queen of Sheba, have weakened, grown more fragile. Stillborn children trouble us. Others lose their gifts. The world has grown toxic to us. Just last week Mara, one of our elders, lost her blessings when she went to the hospital in Muscat. We don’t know why.”
Safia frowned. “What gifts are these that you keep mentioning?”
Lu’lu sighed. “I will tell you this because you are one of us. You have been tested and found to harbor some trace of Ubar’s blessing.”
“Tested?” Kara asked, glancing to Safia.
Lu’lu nodded. “At some point, we test all half-bred children of the clan. Almaaz was not the first to leave the Rahim, to lie with a man, to forsake her lineage for love. Other such children have been born. Few have the gift.” She placed a hand on Safia’s elbow. “When we heard of your miraculous survival of the terrorist bombing in Tel Aviv, we suspected that perhaps your blood bore some power.”
Safia stumbled at the mention of the bombing. She remembered the newspaper reports heralding the miraculous nature of her survival.
“But you left the country before we could test you, never to return. So we thought you lost. Then we heard of the key’s discovery. In England. At a museum you oversaw. It had to be a sign!” A bit of fervor entered the woman’s voice, so full of hope.
“When you returned here, we sought you out.” Lu’lu glanced down the tunnel, voice lowering. “At first we attempted to collect your betrothed. To use him to draw you to us.”
Kara gasped. “You were the ones who tried to kidnap him.”
“He is not without talents of his own,” the old woman conceded with half a smile. “I can see why you pledged your heart to him.”
Safia felt a twinge of embarrassment. “After you failed to kidnap him, what did you do?”
“Since we couldn’t draw you to us, we came to you. We tested you in the old manner.” She glanced to Safia. “With the snake.”
Safia stopped in the tunnel, remembering the incident in the bath at Kara’s estate. “You sent the carpet viper after me?”
Lu’lu halted with Kara. A few of the women continued past.
“Such simple creatures recognize those with the gift, those blessed by Ubar. They will not harm such a woman, but find peace.”
Safia could still feel the viper draped over her naked chest, as if sunning on a rock, content. Then the maid had walked in and screamed, triggering it to strike at the girl. “You could’ve killed someone.”
Lu’lu waved them onward. “Nonsense. We’re not foolish. We don’t stick to the old traditions in that regard. We had removed the snake’s fangs. You were at no risk.”
Safia slowly continued down the tunnel, too stunned to speak.
Kara was not. “What is all this about a gift? What was the snake supposed to sense about Safia?”
“Those who bear the blessing of Ubar have the ability to project their will upon other minds. Beasts of the field are especially susceptible, bowing to our wishes, obeying our command. The simpler the beast, the easier to control. Come see.”
Lu’lu stepped to the wall, where a small hole opened in the sandy floor. She opened her hands. A gentle buzzing floated about Safia’s head. From the hole, a small vole emerged, blind, whiskers twitching. It climbed, as docile as a kitten, into the hodja’s palm. Lu’lu caressed it with a finger, then let it go. It dashed back into its hole, surprised to be out.
“Such simple creatures are easy to influence.” Lu’lu nodded to Kara as she continued down the tunnel. “As are those minds weakened by abuse.”
Kara glanced away.
“Nevertheless, we have little control over the wakened mind of man. The best we can manage is to cloud and dull their perceptions when we are close at hand. To hide our presence for a short time…and then only of our own form. Even clothes are difficult to whisper away. It is best done naked and in shadows.”
Kara and Safia glanced at each other, too amazed for words. It was some form of telepathy, mind bending.
Lu’lu adjusted her cloak. “And of course, the gift can be used on oneself, a concentration of will directed inward. This is our greatest blessing, securing our line back to Queen Biliqis, she who was our first and last.”
Safia remembered tales of the Queen of Sheba, stories found throughout Arabia, Ethiopia, and Israel. Many involved fanciful embellishments: magic carpets, talking birds, even teleportation. And the most significant man in her life, King Solomon, was said to be able to speak to animals, like the hodja claimed now. Safia pictured the leopard that attacked John Kane. Could these women truly control such beasts? Was such talent the source of all the wilder tales surrounding the Queen of Sheba?
Kara spoke into the stunned silence. “What happens when you direct your gift inward?”
“The greatest blessing,” Lu’lu repeated with a wistful edge to her voice. “We ripen with child. A child born of no man.”
Kara and Safia shared a look of disbelief.
“A virgin birth…” Kara whispered.
Like the Virgin Mary. Safia pondered this revelation. Is that why the first key, the iron heart, had been hidden at Mary’s father’s tomb? An acknowledgment of some sort. One virgin to another.
Lu’lu continued, “But our births are not any birth. The child of our body is our body, born afresh to continue the line.”
Safia shook her head. “What do you mean?”
Lu’lu raised her staff and passed it forward and backward, encompassing all the clan. “We are all the same women. To speak in modern terms, we are genetically identical. The greatest blessing of all is the gift to keep our line pure, to produce a new generation out of our own womb.”
“Clones,” Kara said.
“No,” Safia said. She understood what the hodja was describing. It was a reproductive process found in some insects and animals, most notably bees.
“Parthenogenesis,” Safia said aloud.
Kara looked confused.
“It’s a form of reproduction where a female can produce an egg with an intact nucleus containing her own genetic code, which then grows and is born, an identical genetic duplicate of the mother.”
Safia stared up and down the tunnel. All these women…
Somehow their telepathic gift allowed them to reproduce themselves, genetically intact. Asexual reproduction. She recalled one of her biology professors at Oxford, how he had mentioned that sexual reproduction was a relatively strange thing for our bodies to do. That normally a bodily cell divided to produce an exact duplicate of itself. Only the germ cells in ovaries or testicles divided in such a manner to produce cells with only half of their original genetic code—eggs in females, spermatozoa in males—allowing for the mix of genetic material. But if a woman could somehow, by sheer will, stop this cellular division in her unfertilized egg, the resulting offspring would be an exact duplicate of the mother.
Mother…
Safia’s breath caught in her throat. She stopped and searched the faces around her. If what Lu’lu said was true, if her mother was from this clan, then all around her stood her mother. She was seeing her in all her possible incarnations: from newborn babe suckling on a teat to the mother who nursed that child, from the young girl walking hand in hand with her older sister to the elder at her side. All her mother.
Safia now understood the cryptic words of the hodja earlier.
All of us. We’re all your mother.
It wasn’t metaphor. It was fact.
Before Safia could move or speak, two women marched past. One carried the silver case holding the iron heart. The next bore the iron spear with the bust of the Queen of Sheba. Safia noted the iron countenance on the statue. The face of Sheba. The face of these women.
Sudden understanding struck Safia, almost blinding her. She had to lean against the tunnel wall. “Sheba…”
Lu’lu nodded. “She is the first and the last. She is all of us.”
An early exchange with the hodja echoed in Safia’s mind: We are the Queen of Sheba.
Safia watched the cloaked women march past. These women had been reproducing themselves asexually far back into history, tracing their genetic code to one woman, the first to produce a child in this manner, to regenerate herself.
Biliqis, the Queen of Sheba.
She stared into the face of Lu’lu, into the green eyes of the long-dead queen. The past living in the present. The first and the last.
How was this possible?
A shout rose from the front of the line.
“We’re through the mountains,” the hodja said. “Come. The Gates of Ubar await.”
7:33 A.M.
PAINTER SHIELDED his eyes as he stared at the stalled van, at the rising sun, at the walls of sand all around. This would not be a good place to be trapped when the coming sandstorm struck. He imagined those mountainous dunes spilling over them like crashing waves against rocks.
They had to get moving again.
A few minutes ago, the van had been careening along a stretch of flat sand, riding along the edges of dunes, a Volkswagen surfboard. The graveled “streets” they had been following had finally vanished completely, requiring them to furrow through hard-packed sand.
Only not all of the sand was packed.
“Camel wallow,” Barak commented, on his knees, staring at the back end of the van. Its front and rear tires were mired to the axle. “Sand here is very loose. And deep. Like quicksand. Camels roll in them to clean their bodies.”
“Can we dig the van out?” Omaha asked.
“There’s no time,” Painter said.
Barak nodded. “And the deeper you dig, the deeper the van will sink.”
“Then we’ll have to unload what we can. Travel on foot.”
Danny groaned from his seat in the sand. “We really have to be choosier with our means of transportation. First the flatbed truck, now this junker.”
Painter stepped away, too full of nervous energy, or maybe it was the electricity in the air, some cloud of static charge pushed ahead of the sandstorm. “I’m going to climb that dune. See if I can spot Shisur. It can’t be more than a mile. In the meantime, clean out the van. Weapons, equipment, everything.”
Painter set off up the hill. Omaha trudged after him. “I can check by myself,” Painter said, waving him off.
Omaha kept climbing, every step pounded deep, as if he were punishing the sand. Painter didn’t feel like arguing with him. So the pair trudged up the dune face. It was more of a trek than Painter had imagined down below.
Omaha drew a step nearer. “I’m sorry…”
Painter’s brow crinkled in confusion.
“About the van,” Omaha mumbled. “I should’ve spotted the wallow.”
“Don’t worry about it. I would’ve hit it, too.”
Omaha continued upward. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
Painter sensed the man’s apology covered more than the mired vehicle.
At last, they reached the knife-edged crest of the dune. It crumbled underfoot. Runnels of sand coursed down the far side.
The desert held a perfect crystal stillness. No birdsong, no chirp of insect. Even the wind had subsided momentarily. The calm before the storm.
Painter gaped at the expanse before them. Dunes stretched to all horizons. But what held his attention was the roiling wall to the north, a hurricane of sand. The dark clouds reminded Painter of stacked thunderclouds. He spotted even a few bluish flashes. Static discharges. Like lightning.
They needed to reach cover.
“There,” Omaha said, and pointed his arm. “That cluster of date palms.”
Painter made out a tiny patch of greenery about half a mile away, buried among the dunes, easy to miss.
“The oasis of Shisur,” Omaha said.
They were not far.
As he turned away, movement caught his eye. In the sky to the east. A black gnat flew, limned in the morning sunlight. He lifted his night-vision goggles over his eyes, flipping up the ordinary lenses rather than the low-light feature. He telescoped closer.
“What is it?”
“A transport helicopter. United States Air Force. Probably from Thumrait. It’s circling to land out there.”
“A rescue mission, because of the storm?”
“No. It’s Cassandra.” Painter heard her voice in his head. Did you really think that I’d believe you were heading to the border of Yemen? Here was more confirmation of how high up Cassandra’s group had its teeth and claws in Washington. How could Painter hope to win out here? He had only five people with him, few with military training.
“Are you sure it’s her?”
Painter watched the helicopter rotor down to the sands, vanishing among the dunes. “Yes. That’s the spot on the map. Six miles off course.”
Painter lowered his goggles. Cassandra was too close for comfort.
“We have to get moving,” he said.
Painter fixed the bearings and headed back downhill. The two men slid their way down, making faster time. Reaching the bottom, Painter eyed the stacked gear. It was a load. But they dared not leave anything they might need.
“How far?” Coral asked.
“Half a mile,” Painter said.
Looks of relief spread among the others.
But Coral stepped to his side, noting his tension.
“Cassandra’s already here,” he said. “Off to the east.”
Coral shrugged. “That’s good. When the sandstorm hits, she’ll be pinned down. It might buy us another day or two out here. Especially if that coastal high-pressure system crashes on top of us. The predicted megastorm.”
Painter nodded, taking a deep breath. Coral was right. They could still pull this off. “Thanks,” he mumbled to her.
“Anytime, Commander.”
They quickly divided the gear. The largest crate held the ground-penetrating radar unit. Painter and Omaha hauled it between them. It was monstrously heavy, but if they were to search the ruins for buried treasure, they might need such a tool.
So they set off, winding around a vast dune that crested two football fields in height, then slogged up and over smaller ones. The sun continued its climb, heating the sand and the air. Soon their pace became a crawl as they were drained of adrenaline, bone-tired and exhausted.
But at last, they climbed a low dune and discovered a cluster of modern cinder-block buildings, wooden structures, and a small mosque in the valley beyond. The village of Shisur.
Down in the valley, the endless red of the Rub‘ al-Khali was interrupted by green. Acacia bushes grew alongside the buildings, stretches of yellow-flowering tribulus spread across the sand, along with thickets of palmetto. Larger mimosalike trees trailed flowering fronds to the ground, creating shaded arbors. And the ubiquitous date palms climbed high.
After the desert trek, where the only vegetation had been a few straggly salt bushes and wan patches of tasseled sedge, the oasis of Shisur was Eden.
In the village, nothing moved. It appeared deserted. The winds had kicked up again as the forward edge of the storm pushed toward them. Bits of refuse spun in dust devils. Cloth curtains flapped out open windows.
“No one’s here,” Clay noted.
Omaha stepped forward, scanning the tiny township. “Evacuated. Then again, the place is pretty much abandoned during the off-season. Shisur is mostly a waystation for the wandering Bait Musan tribe of Bedouin. They come and go all the time. With the discovery of the ruins just outside the town and the beginning of tourism here, it has grown into a somewhat more permanent village. But even that’s pretty seasonal.”
“So where exactly are the ruins?” Painter asked.
Omaha pointed off to the north. A small tower of crumbling rock poked above the flat sands.
Painter had thought it a natural outcropping of limestone, one of the many flat-topped mesas that dotted the desert. Only now he noted the stacked stones that composed the structure. It look like some watchtower.
“The Citadel of Ubar,” Omaha said. “Its highest point. More of the ruins are hidden below, out of sight.” He set off toward the empty township.
The others began the final push to shelter, leaning against the stubborn wind, faces turned from the gusts of sand.
Painter remained a moment longer. They’d made it to Ubar at last. But what would they find? He stared at the danger looming to the north. The sandstorm filled the horizon, erasing the rest of the world. Even as he stared, Painter watched more of the desert being eaten away.
Again crackles of static electricity danced where the storm met the sands. He watched a particularly large discharge roll down a dune face, like a balloon cast before a stiff wind. It faded in moments, seeming to seep into the sand itself and vanish. Painter held his breath. He knew what he had just witnessed.
Ball lightning.
The same as had ignited the meteorite at the British Museum.
They had come full circle.
A voice spoke at his shoulder, startling him. “The blue djinn of the sands,” Barak said, having noted the same natural phenomenon. “Storms always bring out the djinn.”
Painter glanced to Barak, wondering if the man believed they were evil spirits or just a story to explain such phenomena.
Barak seemed to sense his question. “Whatever they are, they’re never good.” He set off down the hill after the others.
For a moment longer, Painter studied the monstrous storm, eyes stinging from the blowing sand. It was just beginning.
As he headed down the slope, his gaze cast off to the east. Nothing moved. The roll of dunes hid everything. A vast sea. But Cassandra and her team waited out there.
Sharks…circling and circling…
8:02 A.M.
SAFIA HAD not expected this mode of transportation, not from an ancient clan whose bloodline ran back to the Queen of Sheba. The dune buggy ramped up the sandy face, its huge knobby tires finding good traction. They shot over the crest, flew airborne for an extended breath, then landed solidly on the downward slope. Tires and shock absorbers cushioned their impact.
Still, Safia clung with her one good arm to the roll bar in front of her, like the security latch on a roller-coaster car. Kara held fast in the same manner, white-knuckled. Both women wore matching desert cloaks, hoods pulled up and secured with a sand scarf over their lower face, protecting skin from the scouring wind. They also wore polarized sun goggles, pinched over their eyes.
In the passenger seat up front, Lu’lu rode next to the Rahim driver, a young woman of sixteen named Jehd. The driver—or pilot, as the case was at times—held her lips in a firm, determined line, though a glint of girlish excitement lit her eyes.
Other dune buggies followed, each loaded with five of the clan women. They crisscrossed one another’s paths to avoid the sand cast up by the vehicles in front. To either side, flanking the buggies, rode a dozen sand bikes, motorcycles with ballooned wheels, chewing through the larger vehicles’ wakes, making huge leaps over the crests of dunes.
The caravan’s speed was born of necessity.
To the north, the sandstorm barreled toward them.
Upon leaving the subterranean warren of tunnels, Safia found herself on the far side of the Dhofar Mountains, at the edge of the Rub‘ al-Khali. They had crossed under the entire mountain range. The passages they had traversed were old river channels, worn through the limestone bedrock.
Free of the tunnels, the buggies and bikes awaited them. Kara had commented on the choice of vehicles, expecting camels or some other less sophisticated means of transportation. Lu’lu had explained: We may trace our lineage into the past, but we live in the present. The Rahim did not live their entire lives in the desert, but like the Queen of Sheba herself, they wandered, educated themselves, prospered even. They had bank accounts, stock portfolios, real-estate holdings, traded in oil futures.
The group now raced toward Shisur, trying to beat the storm.
Safia had not argued against such haste. She did not know how much longer the ruse she had used to deceive Cassandra would last. If they were to gain the prize before Cassandra did, they would need every advantage.
Lu’lu and the others were counting on Safia to lead the way. In the hodja’s words: The keys revealed themselves to you. So will the Gates. Safia prayed the woman was right. She had used intuition and knowledge to lead them this far. She hoped her expertise would carry her the rest of the way.
In the front seat, Lu’lu lifted a Motorola walkie-talkie and listened, then spoke into it. All words were lost to the growl of motors and torrents of winds. Once done, she swung around in her seat-belt restraints.
“There may be trouble,” Lu’lu yelled. “The scouts we sent ahead report a small band of armed strangers entering Shisur.”
Safia’s heart leaped to her throat. Cassandra…
“Perhaps they are just seeking shelter. The scouts found a vehicle. An old van stuck in a camel wallow.”
Kara leaned forward, intense. “A van…was it a blue Volkswagen?”
“Why?”
“It may be our friends. Those who were helping us.”
Kara glanced to Safia, eyes hopeful.
Lu’lu lifted her walkie-talkie and carried on a brief conversation. She nodded, then turned to Kara and Safia. “It was a blue Eurovan.”
“That’s them,” Kara exclaimed. “How did they know where to find us?”
Safia shook her head. It seemed impossible. “We should still be careful. Maybe Cassandra or her men captured them.”
And even if it was their friends, a new fear clutched Safia’s heart. Who had survived? Painter had attempted to rescue her, risked all, stayed behind to cover her retreat. Had he made it out? The exchange of gunfire she had heard as she fled the tomb echoed in her head.
All answers lay at Shisur.
After another ten minutes of dune racing, the small township of Shisur appeared over a ridge, in a slight valley, surrounded by the rolling desert. The village’s tiny mosque poked its minaret above the tumble of shacks and cinder-block buildings. The buggies all stopped below the ridgeline. A few of the women climbed out and up to the sandy crests. They dropped flat, their cloaks matching the sands, clutching sniper rifles.
Fearing a volley of accidental gunfire, Safia exited the buggy. Kara followed. She crossed up to the ridge. Caution drew her to hands and knees.
Across the village, she saw no sign of movement. Had they heard the approach of the dune buggies and gone into hiding, fearing the unknown group?
Safia surveyed the area.
To the north, ruins covered fifteen acres, surrounded by crumbling walls, excavated from the sands and reconstructed. Guard towers interrupted the walls at regular intervals, roofless stony circles, a story high. But the most dramatic feature of the ruins was its central citadel, a three-story structure of stacked stone. The castle perched atop a low hill that overlooked a deep ragged cleft in the ground. The hole encompassed most of the land within the walls. Its bottom lay in shadows.
Safia knew that the ruins of the hilltop fortress were only half of the original structure. The other half lay at the bottom of the hole. Destroyed when the sinkhole opened up under it, taking down sections of walls and half the castle. The tragedy was explained by the continual drop of the land’s water table. A natural limestone cistern lay underneath the city. As the water inside it dropped from drought and overuse, it left behind a hollow subterranean cavern that eventually collapsed in on itself, taking out half the city.
Movement drew Safia’s attention back to the village fifty yards away.
From a doorway below, a figure appeared, dressed in a dishdasha robe, his head wrapped in a traditional Omani headdress. He lifted a mug into the air.
“I just put a fresh pot on. If you want a cup of joe, you’d best get your butts down here.”
Safia stood. She recognized that flash of a rakish grin.
Omaha…
A flush of relief washed through her. Before she knew it, she was running down the slope toward him, eyes blurry with tears. Even as she ran, the depth of her reaction surprised her.
She stumbled across the gravel roadway.
“Hold it right there,” Omaha warned, backing up a step.
From windows and neighboring doorways, rifles suddenly bristled.
A trap…
Safia stopped, stunned, wounded. Before she could react, a figure swept out of hiding from behind a low wall, grabbed her, swung her around. A fist snatched a handful of hair and yanked back, baring her neck. Something cold touched her flesh.
A long dagger glinted, pressed.
A voice whispered with an icy ferocity. It chilled her more than the knife at her throat. “You took a friend of ours.”
Omaha stepped to her shoulder. “We spied you coming. I wouldn’t forget the face of someone who tried to kidnap me.”
“What have you done with Dr. al-Maaz?” the voice hissed at her ear as the dagger pressed harder.
Safia realized her face was still covered by scarf and goggles. They thought her one of the women, bandits perhaps. Breathless from fright, she reached up and pulled down her scarf and goggles.
Omaha did a double take. He gaped at her face, then lunged, and pushed the man’s arm away, freeing her. “Ohmygod, Saffie…” He hugged her tightly.
Fire flared in her shoulder. “Omaha, my arm.”
He dropped back. Others appeared in doorways and windows.
Safia glanced behind her. A man stood there, the dagger in his hands. Painter. She had not even recognized his voice. She had a hard time reconciling this man with her image of him. She still felt the blade against her skin, the fist twisted in her hair.
Painter backed up a step. His face shone with relief, but his blue eyes also glowed with an emotion almost too raw to read. Shame and regret. He glanced away, to the neighboring slope.
Cycles and buggies now lined the ridge, engines revving. The Rahim had been preparing to come to her rescue. Women, all dressed and cloaked like Safia, appeared around nearby corners of buildings, rifles on shoulders.
Kara stomped down the slope, arms in the air. “Everyone back down!” she called loudly. “It was only a misunderstanding.”
Omaha shook his head. “That woman doesn’t need to remove her mask. I’d recognize that screech of command anywhere.”
“Kara…” Painter said, stunned. “How?”
Omaha turned to Safia. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she managed to squeak out.
Kara joined them. She removed her scarf. “Leave her be.” She waved them off. “Give her some room to breathe.”
Omaha pushed back. He nodded to the slope. Warily the Rahim had begun to march down. “So who are your friends?”
Kara shrugged. “That may take some explaining.”
8:22 A.M.
OPEN DESERT
CASSANDRA STEPPED up to her tent, a U.S. Army desert survival model, meant to withstand winds up to eighty miles per hour. She had reinforced it with a wind-and-sand shield on the windward side of the tent.
The team here had similar accommodations. The larger transport trucks had also been positioned as a windbreak.
At her tent, Cassandra shook sand from her fatigues. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, tied down around her ears, a scarf over her face. The winds gusted now, snapping tent lines, causing sheets of sand to course underfoot. The sandstorm rumbled like a passing freight train.
She had just returned from a final inspection of their deployment, ensuring all the copters were battened down. The men had already planted the GPS beacons to fix their position, coordinated with the fixed orbital satellites. Feed should be flowing into her computerized mapping system.
Cassandra had a couple hours before the static electricity of the sandstorm would threaten the electronics, requiring them to be shut down. Plenty of time to intercept the data from the LANDSAT satellite as it focused on her GPS beacons. The satellite’s radar had the capability of delving sixty feet under the sand. It would give her an overview of what lay underfoot. Some indication of where to begin digging. As soon as the sandstorm blew itself out, her team would set to work with dozers and backhoes. By the time anyone was aware of their excavation, they’d be long gone.
That was the plan.
Cassandra pushed through the tent flap. The interior of the tent was spartan. A cot and a duffel. The remainder of her tent was an elaborate satellite communication system. She had other electronic gear stored in carryalls.
She crossed to the laptop computer and used her cot as a seat. She linked to JPL in Houston and fed the proper authorization to access LANDSAT data. The pass should have been completed five minutes ago. The data awaited her. She tapped the keys and began the download.
Finished, she sat back and watched the screen slowly fill with an image of the desert. She spotted her trucks, tents, even their trenched latrine. It was the survey pass. Perfect alignment.
A second image slowly fed into her laptop. The deeper scan.
Cassandra leaned in closer.
The terrain stripped away to display a different conformation, revealing the bedrock under the sand. It was a fossil of a different time, preserved in limestone. While most of the terrain was flat, it was etched by an old riverbed coursing along one corner of the image. It drained into an ancient lake bed buried under their site.
Cassandra studied the landscape, a snapshot from another time.
She saw nothing significant. No meteor crater, no artifact that intrigued.
She sat back. She would forward it to a pair of geologists on the payroll with the Guild. Perhaps they could read more into it.
A noise at her tent flap drew her attention around.
John Kane limped into her tent. “We’ve picked up Dr. al-Maaz’s signal.”
Cassandra swung to face him. “When? Where?”
“Eight minutes ago. It took another few minutes to get a fix. Her signal blipped into existence ten miles west of here. By the time we triangulated, she’d stopped moving. She went to ground about six miles from here.”
He hobbled over to the map on her worktable and tapped. “Right here.”
Cassandra leaned next to him, reading the name. “Shisur. What’s there?”
“I asked one of the techs at Thumrait. He says it’s where the old ruins of Ubar were found. Back in the nineties.”
Cassandra stared at the map. Her lines in blue and red still looked fresh. The red circle marked her present position. She put her finger on the circle and followed the red line backward.
It crossed Shisur.
She closed her eyes. Again picturing the curator’s expression when Cassandra had drawn the circle. She had continued studying the map. Her eyes had been distant, calculating in her head.
“The goddamn bitch…” Cassandra’s finger on the map closed to form a fist. Anger burned through her. Yet deeper down, a flash of respect flared.
John Kane stood with his brows crinkled.
Cassandra stared back at the LANDSAT image. “There’s nothing here. She fucked us. We’re at the wrong place.”
“Captain?”
She faced Kane. “Get the men up. We’re heading out. I want the trucks moving in the next ten minutes.”
“The sandstorm—”
“Fuck it. We’ve just enough time. We’re moving out. We can’t let ourselves get pinned down here.” She herded Kane toward the doors. “Leave the equipment, tents, supplies. Weapons only.”
Kane swept out of the room.
Cassandra turned to one of her carrying cases. She snapped it open and removed a handheld digital radio transmitter. She flipped it on, dialed in the proper frequency and channel to match the curator’s implanted transceiver.
She held a finger over the transmit button. One touch and the C4 pellet in Dr. al-Maaz’s neck would explode, severing her spine and killing her instantly. She felt an overwhelming urge to press it. Instead she switched the unit off.
It was not compassion that held her hand. Safia had proven her prowess at riddle solving. Such skill might still be needed. But more than that, she didn’t know for certain if Painter was at the woman’s side.
That was important.
Cassandra wanted Painter to see Safia die.