Juan Gómez-Jurado - Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

‘Yesterday, when we were at the entrance to the canyon, I climbed up that enormous dune on foot. At the top I began taking shots with my telephoto lens and I saw a man.’

‘Where?’ Fowler blurted out.

‘On top of the cliff behind you. I only saw him for a second. He was wearing light brown clothes. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t know if it had something to do with the person who tried to kill me on the Behemoth.’

Fowler squinted and ran his hand over his bald head, taking a deep breath. His face looked troubled.

‘Ms Otero, this expedition is extremely dangerous and its success depends on secrecy. If anyone knew the truth about why we’re here.…’

‘They’d throw us out?’

‘They’d kill us all.’

‘Oh.’

Andrea lifted her gaze, acutely aware of how isolated the place was and how trapped they would be if someone broke through Dekker’s thin line of sentries.

‘I need to speak to Albert immediately,’ Fowler said.

‘I thought you said you couldn’t use your satellite telephone here? That Dekker had a frequency scanner?’

The priest simply looked at her.

‘Oh, shit. Not again,’ Andrea said.

‘We’ll do it tonight.’

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN

Friday, 14 July 2006. 1:18 a.m.

The tall man was named O and he was crying. He had to get away from the other men. He didn’t want them to see him showing his feelings, much less talk about it. And it would have been very dangerous to reveal why he was crying.

It was really because of the girl. She had reminded him too much of his own daughter. He had hated having to kill her. Killing Tahir had been simple, a relief, in fact. He had to admit that he’d even enjoyed playing with him – giving him a preview of hell, but here on earth.

The girl was another story. She was only sixteen years old.

And yet, D and W had agreed with him: the mission was too important. Not only were the lives of the other brothers crowded in the cave at stake, but all of Dar Al-Islam. The mother and daughter knew too much. There could be no exceptions.

‘Meaningless shitty war,’ he said.

‘So you’re talking to yourself now?’

It was W, who had come crawling over. He didn’t like running risks and always talked in whispers, even inside the cave.

‘I was praying.’

‘We have to go back into the hole. They might see us.’

‘There’s only one sentry on the western wall, and he has no direct line of vision over here. Don’t worry.’

‘What if he changes position? They have night-vision goggles.’

‘I said don’t worry. The big black one is on duty. He smokes the whole time and the light from the cigarette stops him seeing anything,’ O said, annoyed that he had to talk when he had wanted to enjoy the silence.

‘Let’s go back inside the cave. We’ll play chess.’

That W… O hadn’t fooled him for a moment. W knew he was feeling down. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen. They had gone through a lot together. He was a good comrade. As clumsy as his efforts were, he was attempting to cheer him up.

O stretched out the length of his body on the sand. They were in a hollow area at the foot of a rock formation. The cave, which was at its base, was only about one hundred feet square. O was the one who had found it three months earlier, when he was planning the operation. There was hardly enough room for them all, but even if the cave had been a hundred times bigger, O would have preferred being outside. He felt trapped in that noisy hole, attacked by the snores and farting of his brothers.

‘I think I’ll stay out here a while longer. I like the cold.’

‘Are you waiting for Huqan’s signal?’

‘It’ll be a while before that comes. The infidels haven’t found anything yet.’

‘I hope they hurry up. I’m tired of being holed up, eating out of tins and pissing into a can.’

O didn’t answer. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the breeze on his skin. Waiting was fine with him.

‘Why are we sitting around here doing nothing? We’re well-armed. I say we go in there and kill them all,’ W insisted.

‘We’ll follow Huqan’s orders.’

‘Huqan takes too many chances.’

‘I know. But he’s clever. He told me a story. Do you know how a bushman finds water in the Kalahari when he’s far from home? He finds a monkey and watches it all day. He can’t let the monkey see him or the game’s over. If the bushman is patient, the monkey ends up showing him where to find water. A crack in the rock, a little pool… places a bushman would never have found.’

‘And what does he do then?’

‘He drinks the water and eats the monkey.’

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN

Friday, 14 July 2006. 01:18 a.m.

Stowe Erling nibbled nervously on his ballpoint pen and cursed Professor Forrester with all his might. It wasn’t his fault that the data from one of the quadrants hadn’t gone where it was supposed to. He had been busy enough putting up with the complaints of their indentured prospectors as he helped them into and out of their harnesses, changed the batteries on their equipment, and made sure that nobody went over the same quadrant twice.

Of course, no one was there to help him put on his harness now. And it wasn’t as if the operation was easy in the middle of the night, with only the light from a camping gas lantern. Forrester didn’t give a damn about anybody – anybody except himself, that is. The moment he had found an anomaly in the data, after supper, he had ordered Stowe to do a new analysis of quadrant 22K.

In vain Stowe had asked – almost begged – Forrester to let him do it the following day. If the data from all the quadrants wasn’t linked, the program wouldn’t function.

Fucking Pappas. Isn’t he supposedly the world’s leading archaeological topographer? A qualified software designer, right? Shit is what he is. He should never have left Greece. Fuck! I bust myself kissing the old man’s ass so he’d let me prepare the headings for the magnetometer codes, and he ends up giving them to Pappas. Two years, two whole years researching references for Forrester, correcting his childish errors, buying his medicine, emptying his trash can full of infected bloody tissues. Two years, and he treats me like this.

Fortunately, Stowe had finished the complicated series of movements and the magnetometer was now on his shoulders and working. He picked up the lantern and placed it halfway up the incline. Quadrant 22K covered part of a sandy slope near the knuckle of the index finger of the canyon.

The ground here was different, unlike the spongy pink surface at the base of the canyon or the baked rock that covered the rest of the area. The sand was darker and the slope itself had a gradient of around 14 per cent. As he walked, the sand shifted as though an animal were moving under his boots. Stowe had to hold on tightly to the straps of the magnetometer as he made his way up the incline in order to keep the instrument balanced.

As he leaned over to place the lantern on the ground, his right hand grazed a splinter of iron protruding from the frame. It drew blood.

‘Ouch – shit!’

Sucking on the cut, he began moving with the instrument over the terrain in that slow annoying rhythm.

He’s not even American. Not even a Jew, dammit. He’s a lousy fucking Greek immigrant. Greek Orthodox before he started working for the professor. He only converted to Judaism after three months with us. A fast-track conversion – very convenient. I’m so tired. Why am I doing this? I hope we find the Ark. Then History departments will fight over me and I’ll be able to find a tenured position. The old man’s not going to last much longer – probably just enough to steal all the credit. But in three or four years they’ll talk about his team. About me. I wish his rotten lungs would just burst in the next few hours. I wonder who Kayn would put at the head of the expedition then? It wouldn’t be Pappas. If he craps in his pants each time the professor even looks at him, imagine what he’ll do if he sees Kayn. No, they’d need someone stronger, someone with charisma. I wonder what Kayn is really like. They say he’s very sick. But then why did he come all the way out here?