Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“What are you getting at?”

“Look,” he said and pointed down toward the floor of the valley. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Look closer.”

She did, and after a moment she saw it. Tracks again, different than the others. Two long lines separated by six or seven feet, with a much narrower line running between them. The tracks ran off into the distance at the far end of the barren valley. Again Finn shaded her eyes against the burning sun. A hot wind was beginning to blow, sending grit into the air. She felt it now in her nostrils and her hair.

“The Waco is a tail-wheel plane just like the Wilga we flew here in. It leaves a track just like that.”

“I don’t get it. How can the tracks be down there and the plane crashed up here?”

“Because those tracks were from a previous visit,” said Hilts. “Pedrazzi had been here before.”

“So they weren’t on some kind of survey flight after all.”

“No, which means they’d found something they didn’t want anyone else to know about.”

“There’s nothing here.”

“There has to be. Pedrazzi, disappearing soldiers, crashed airplanes. Too many coincidences for one anonymous old streambed in the middle of nowhere. And now Adamson and his friends.”

“So what are we looking for?” Finn asked.

“At a guess I’d say a cave,” Hilts answered, looking up at the rock walls, “but that doesn’t make much sense either.” He paused. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“This is all sandstone. Caves usually form by water action in limestone. There hasn’t been water here in a long time.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking about Qumran.”

“The Dead Sea Scrolls?” Finn frowned. “They were written by the Essenes or somebody like that.”

“Essenes or Copts, it doesn’t really make any difference here… but the Qumran caves were used specifically to hide the scrolls from people who wanted to destroy them, and the caves were artificial… holes dug into the stone. When the people who hid the scrolls left Qumran, they walled the cave up and covered the entrances with rubble.”

“You’re saying they did the same thing here?”

“Pedrazzi found something, and those soldiers must be somewhere. It’s a good bet.”

“What are we looking for?” asked Finn.

“An overhang, a shadow that doesn’t look right, something that looks a little too geometric, squared off.”

“That’s nice and vague,” she said and grinned.

“Best I can do.”

They began to search.

It was Finn who spotted it: a combination of all three clues. Halfway up the far side slope of the canyon was a jutting overhang of darker sandstone, and directly beneath it something that looked like a broken vertical line of shadow that was simply too geometric to have been an accident of nature. Climbing the slope, they eventually reached an almost invisible ledge, barely two feet wide, and the narrow remains of a cave entrance that had been bricked up and sanded over long ago. Somewhere along the line, hundreds of years ago, there must have been some kind of seismic activity and one side of the mud brick wall had crumbled and collapsed, leaving an opening. Later a sandstorm or a small collapse of the overhang had disguised and almost flossed the entrance once again.

Sweating, Finn and Hilts stooped in front of the hole in the rock and peered in.

“Can’t see much,” said Hilts.

“Let’s go in,” Finn answered eagerly.

Hilts put a hand on her arm, stopping her.

“Hang on,” he said. “Caves in the desert can be occupied.”

“By what?”

Gripping the overhang with one hand and putting the other hand on Finn’s shoulder to balance himself, Hilts lifted his left leg and hammered his foot into the ancient masonry wall that blocked the entrance. He did it a second time and a large chunk of the wall crumbled inward, raising a sudden cloud of dust. There was a quick, scurrying sound like leaves rustling and then a hundred pale, crablike shapes streamed out of the cave, clicking and scraping over Finn’s hiking boots. She yelped, rearing back, and almost fell off the ledge as the six-inch-long creatures raced away and disappeared.

“L. quinquestriatus,” said Hilts. “The Death Stalker Scorpion. One of the world’s most lethal. They like cool, dark places during the daytime. They come out to hunt at night.”

Finn nodded silently, gritting her teeth. Even the memory of the sound they’d made was terrifying. She stayed well back from the opening.

“Now what?”

“We go in,” he said. “The wall collapsing will have scared them off.”

“What if there’s still some in there?”

“Step on them.”

Grinning, Hilts ducked his head and entered the cave. Swallowing hard, Finn went in after him.

Kicking in the old masonry had flooded the chamber with light. Originally it had obviously been no more than a small concave depression beneath the overhang, offering a respite from the beating rays of the sun. In some indeterminate past ancient tools had been used to deepen the declivity into an oven-shaped depression in the rocks. Once a secret repository for an ancient library, like the caves at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, the chamber here had become a crypt in more modern times. Five mummified corpses, all still wearing the tattered remnants of their Long Range Desert Group uniforms, were huddled in one corner. Two were curled into whimpering fetal positions. One looked as though it had been frozen on hands and knees, half draped over an altarlike stone. Another was seated with its back against one wall, and the fifth was lying facedown, half covered by the rubble Hilts had kicked over it, one spindly, ropy arm gripping what appeared to be a verdigris-covered copper cylinder. The top of the cylinder was gone and the vase was empty. The back of the cave was a sloping pile of sand remaining after a collapse sometime in the distant past.

“The missing soldiers,” murmured Hilts. He bent down and began to carefully go through what was left of the uniform of the dried-out corpse clutching the copper vase. “Careful of the ordnance, some of it could still be live.” There were weapons scattered all around the cave, old Enfield rifles, a huge Lewis machine gun, a Thompson, and half a dozen or more Mills grenades.

“I wonder how they died,” said Finn. “It looks like it was sudden.”

Hilts shifted the leg of the dried-out corpse he was searching, revealing the desiccated shells of half a dozen creatures like the ones that had scuttled over Finn’s boots.

“Disturbed a nest of scorpions; maybe hundreds. It only takes one sting to kill you; they must have been hit dozens of times. Not a pleasant way to go.” He shrugged. “They wouldn’t have had much time except to die.”

Hilts pulled an old billfold out of an inner pocket of the man’s blouse and eased it open. The papery remains of the man’s organs lay like dust in the bony hollow of his rib cage.

“Anything interesting?” Finn asked.

“Bar chit from Shepherd’s Hotel, membership card to the Victory Club. Library pass for the Haddon Library, Cambridge.” He dug deeper into the wallet. “Here’s his ID card. Professor George Pocock, Strategic Operations Executive, Grey Pillars, Cairo. That was HQ, if I remember right.”

“The Haddon is the Cambridge Archaeology Faculty Library. That’s where my dad met my mom.”

“The Strategic Operations Executive were spies,” he said. “This guy wasn’t Long Range Desert Group at all.”

“An archaeologist and a spy, sent out to find Pedrazzi?”

“Looks that way.”

Hilts dropped the man’s wallet into the pocket of his fatigue jacket, paused long enough to take several pictures, and then stood up and went to the rear of the cave. Finn, suddenly feeling almost desperately claustrophobic, went to the entrance of the narrow cave and looked down into the little valley. Nothing had moved and nothing had changed in the warlike diorama laid out below except for the whirling sand billowed up by the freshening wind that was beginning to moan through the canyon. The sky overhead had gone from harsh metallic blue to an ugly saffron color, like an old bruise. The weather was changing. She turned to tell Hilts and saw that he had uncovered something. Faintly uneasy, she turned away and went to the rear of the cave, her eyes scanning the floor for any sign of movement. Reaching Hilts she saw that he had uncovered the top and side of a large stone box. It was rectangular, four feet high, three wide, and appeared to be about six feet long, its front end angled toward the entrance. Carved into the stone was something that looked like the head of Medusa, the hair a mass of writhing snakes. Around the head, like the letters on a coin, was a faint inscription, almost worn away.