“Was it rebels?” Maggie asked but when he replied, it wasn’t to answer the question. He looked sweaty and puffed, hair standing on end and his eyes wide and wild.
Bloody hell. What did he see out there?
“I got a message out on the radio,” White said, his voice little more than a croak. “And I got us some supplies. We need to hide out here until the cavalry come for us. It’s a fucking mess out there.”
“Did you get a reply at the other end?” Maggie asked. “When will they get here?”
But White had spoken his last words between then and now. His eyes rolled up and he fell into a faint. They’d made him up a rough bed from the rucksacks once they’d emptied them of several bottles of water, two loaves of unleavened bread, and a bag of cheeses and meat that was all he’d managed to recover in time.
Since then, they’d settled into a routine of taking turns watching the man, sleeping and having circular conversations that could never come to any conclusions. Their only light came from two portable LED lamps they’d been using on the dig and even only using one at a time, they were visibly starting to dim. It wouldn’t be long now until they would be left in the dark entirely. When that happened, the scratching was going to sound a whole lot worse.
The noise had started an hour after White fell into his semi-conscious state, a hard rasping as if someone stroked roughly with a stick or knife at the bottom of the door on the outside.
“Who’s there?” Reynolds shouted and the rasping had turned into frantic scratching. Maggie had a cat back home in Edinburgh and it made similar sounds trying to get under the bathroom door when Maggie had the temerity to try to get some personal time in there.
I doubt that’s a cat out there.
Reynolds had looked like he might call out again but Maggie shushed him with a finger to his lips.
“I don’t think it’s trying to get in to help us. Do you?”
Reynolds looked like that was a thought he hadn’t considered and it was enough to keep his mouth shut, for now. After a few minutes, quiet had descended again.
“Rebels,” Kim whispered. “It has to be. Jim said it was rebels.”
“Does that sound like fucking rebels?” Reynolds replied and laughed bitterly until the scratching started again, driving them all to silence once more.
Now all they could do was wait and hope. At least they had air, which was flowing freely, a breeze coming in through a crack in the wall high up in one corner. But the bread was gone, as was the meat. All they had left was about a gallon of water and some cheese.
Even at that, White needed most of the water in an attempt to keep his fever from becoming a raging fire. The wound in his leg was suppurating, far beyond what might be expected in the time since he’d been hurt. At first, Maggie had thought it was a bullet wound but it looked more like a slashing cut from a rough-edged knife and now the lips of flesh were blackening, parting to show the flesh inside all the way down to the bone.
“We should bandage that,” Kim said.
“We don’t have anything clean enough,” Maggie replied. “We might be doing more harm than good.”
She didn’t say what they were all thinking; a bandage wasn’t going to conceal the fact that they shared an enclosed chamber — a cell — with a man who was likely to be dead before he took too many more breaths.
The scratching came every time one or the other of them so much as moved. While Kim took her turn sitting by White, Maggie sat on the lip of the dig, looking down at where they’d been working. Their excitement seemed so long ago now but at least the mosaic would be there after this was over. The chamber they were digging in had long been known to be a Roman military temple to their god Mithras but it had been thought that its treasure had all been looted. That was until the team had gone down into the floor and found the colors that had lain there hidden for centuries. So far, they’d only uncovered a quarter of it but White had hoped that it extended underfoot the whole length and width of the chamber. The bit they had uncovered so far looked complete, unbroken and protected through the centuries by the impacted sand above it. It would be a major find and as supervisor of the dig, the bulk of the credit would be going to White.
It’s a pity he won’t live to see it.
As if in reply to her thought, the sick man moaned loudly and that brought a fresh bout of scratching at the door.
If anybody’s coming, please hurry.
— 3 —
Banks caught up with the squad at the foot of a pile of tumbled stone that had at one time been part of the town’s main defensive wall. The only movement in the night was themselves, no light showed in any of the small windows and there was no sound but the soft pad and scrape of their feet on rock and sand. It was a cool night, with a slight breeze off the river and could have been any such night here for the past thousand years or more, untouched by any concerns of modernity. Banks felt like an interloper from the future as he strode up to join the others.
“Seems all clear, Cap,” Wiggins said. “At least, nobody’s shooting at us yet.”
“Climb up and over the top, Wiggo,” Banks said. “Have a shufti and let us know if it’s safe to go in.”
While Wiggins and Davies clambered up over the rubble, Banks and the others checked the high points for a possible ambush. But Wiggins reached the top of the rock fall without incident and waved them forward with an all-clear signal. Soon all six of them walked up through the gap in the wall to look over an internal square that had obviously been the market area of the old town in some distant past.
Now it was empty and quiet. There was no sign of life but there were numerous indications that there had been a recent firefight. Weapons fire had punched holes in walls, shell casings lay scattered around and blood, black in the night under the stars, was splashed liberally over ground, walls, doorways, and window frames. There were no bodies to be seen.
“That has to be the tidiest fucking gunfight you ever did see,” Wiggins muttered in Banks’ earpiece, then went quiet after being given a sharp glance. Banks sent him west along the wall with Davies, sent the sarge and Brock to the east, and motioned that Wilkins should follow him, walking slowly down the middle of the square. They found more blood, more shell casings, but nobody shot at them and nothing moved in the shadows.
After a few minutes, they reached the south end of the square, where three different exits led into a warren of high sandstone alleyways. The other four men joined them, Hynd and Wiggins both shaking their heads to indicate they’d found nothing untoward. Banks was loath to split the team up in the alleys, so he sent them all forward as one, while he once again brought up the rear.
They crisscrossed their way through the ancient town, finding nothing but darkness and dust and shadow.
They were making their way down another tall, empty, alleyway and Banks was beginning to think they’d been sent on a wild goose chase when Wiggins brought the squad to a halt and motioned Banks forward. Banks walked up to stand at the corporal’s shoulder and looked out of the alleyway and into a courtyard beyond.
They’d found their first sign that the place wasn’t completely empty, although the body that lay in the center in the courtyard was in too many pieces to be alive. Banks left Hynd with the new lads in the alleyway and walked over with Wiggins to investigate. Blood lay in three separate pools around a dismembered torso, the limbs of which looked to have been snipped off by a giant pair of scissors. One arm lay ten feet from the body but of the other arm, the legs, or the head, there was no sign. The scraps of ragged military-grade clothing and leathery skin on the torso told Banks it probably wasn’t one of the archaeologists they were after but beyond that they had no more clues as to the dead man’s identity. If he’d had a weapon, there was none to be found in the immediate area.