Ahead in the darkness, something was moving.
Writhing.
‘Best to turn around, my friends,’ Stokes muttered, his left eyebrow tipping up.
The audio crisply picked up scratching and clicking.
The procession halted abruptly as the ringleader made the first visual confirmation.
When he spotted the horror that lay ahead, he screamed out in terror and wheeled around so fiercely that he barrelled into the two men behind him. He stumbled and the cell phone fumbled out of his grasp, clattered along the rocky ground.
Then the panic infected the others.
‘Go back! Go back!’ the ringleader was pleading as he regained his footing. He shoved at the others, trying to speed them along. Spinning, he attempted to retrieve the cell phone, but it disappeared beneath the slithering mass that crashed into him like a violent wave. He recoiled, levelled the AK-47, and opened fire. The weapon’s consecutive muzzle bursts flashed brilliant white in the infrared images on Stokes’s monitor; the deafening retort squelched the computer’s speakers.
‘No …’ Stokes grumbled.
Comfortably ahead of the others, Al-Zahrani was now back in the previous camera frame, blindly clawing his way through the darkness. But something scurried beneath his feet and caused him to trip and fall. He screamed out when something took a chunk of flesh out of his hand.
Then Stokes’s eyes bounced back to the other frame where the gunman lost his footing and suddenly tumbled backwards, forcing the assault rifle to swing up over his head, spraying bullets along a wild arc. The lethal barrage strafed the two men trailing behind him about the face and chest, sending the pair crumpling to the ground.
An instant later, a ferocious explosion ripped through the passage and obliterated the camera.
38
‘What in God’s name—’ the combat engineer gasped. ‘What happened to those people?’
On the LCD panel, the bot’s camera swept slowly side to side for the second time, panning over the ghastly bone pile forming an enormous ring ten feet high.
‘Looks like a fucking mausoleum,’ Crawford grumbled.
Jason looked up at Hazo, knowing that for him, the images would slice deep. It was a similar portrait of mass death that drove Hazo to become an ally to the Americans.
The Kurd stared emptily at the screen.
In 2006, US forces had used satellite imagery to scan the Ash Sham Desert for undulating mounds that hinted at the presence of mass graves. Over 200 sites had been identified for potential exhumations. One of the first confirmed graves contained three dozen male skeletons wearing Kurdish attire, all of which had been blindfolded and bound with arms tied behind the back. Every skull bore an executioner’s bullet hole. Though most of the bodies could not be identified, Hazo’s father — formerly an industrious carpet retailer — had been carrying business cards in his vest pocket. The name on the card, Zirek Amedi, enabled forensic investigators to match dental records for the partial denture still affixed to the skeleton’s jawbone. The positive identification brought bittersweet closure for the victim’s surviving family members who’d already suffered tremendous loss at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
‘You should take a break,’ Jason said to Hazo in a low tone. ‘Have something to eat with the guys.’ He pointed to the cave entrance where Meat, Camel and Jam were blissfully spooning rehydrated beef stroganoff from foil packs.
Hazo sighed wearily and nodded. Then he went over to join the others.
‘Looks to me like another hiding place for evidence of Saddam’s genocide,’ Crawford said.
‘No,’ Jason said. The only similarity he saw here was the sheer number of bones. ‘Doesn’t look anything like Saddam’s handiwork.’
‘How so?’ Crawford challenged.
‘First off, not one of the skulls we’ve seen on that screen shows signs of execution. No bullet holes, fractures—’
‘Hey, smart guy, Sarin doesn’t leave its mark on bones,’ Crawford countered smartly.
Crawford was right. Sarin attacked the nervous system synapses. So once a victim’s soft tissue decomposed, evidence of the toxin would be erased. ‘There aren’t any clothes on those bones. No jewellery, nothing. How do you explain that?’
‘Maybe they burned the clothes, Yaeger,’ Crawford said. ‘Maybe they were a bunch of sick perverts who liked playing games with naked Kurds. Does it really matter? And we both know that soldiers have sticky fingers, would have confiscated any jewellery and valuables. For all we know, these bones might have been exhumed from another site and moved here for safekeeping.’
Jason wasn’t buying the colonel’s argument, but held back a rebuttal. Crawford was clearly determined to see things his way.
‘Wait …’ the engineer interjected. ‘Look at this,’ she said.
Crawford and Jason turned their attention back to the screen.
‘See this?’ she said, pointing to something on the wall just to the right of where the bot had entered the cave. ‘Looks similar to the pictures and writing on the wall of the entry tunnel.’
Jason examined the image. A section of the wall had been hewn flat, then covered in relief images and lines of wedge-shaped text.
‘More pictures and scribble,’ Crawford said. ‘Let’s cut the—’
But the colonel was cut short by a bellowing blast that echoed out from the cave and shook the ground.
39
Professor Brooke Thompson stared out the jet’s cabin window at the angular patchwork of docile farmland that blanketed the flat Midwest landscape in squares and circles hued in russet and ochre. The layout repeated itself as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by a random village or a grove of naked trees surrounding a rural home.
Even here, far from encroaching cities, humankind had dramatically altered the environment to suit its needs and ensure survival. Come spring, the fields would be sowed with plant seeds not native to this land. Over the centuries, America’s hardy varieties of wheat, oats and various other grains had been imported from Europe. And long before those food staples had been transplanted in European soil and selectively bred over millennia, they’d been naturally thriving in the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent — a veritable paradise for early humans.
Similarly, horses, cows, sheep, chickens and pigs — none of which had been native to the Americas — were brought in by early European settlers. But every one of these domesticated animals and beasts of burden originated from the Middle East.
The same pattern applied to humans themselves. Over 60,000 years ago, the first hunter-gatherer groups ventured out from North Africa and crossed the land bridge into the Middle East (an exodus across the Sinai long before Moses fled Egypt) to embark on their intercontinental migrations.
Though she marvelled at how this jet so smoothly cut the air to move her across a continent in mere hours, humans had been moving around the globe for millennia before planes existed — first by foot, then on the backs of animals, then by boats and ships and trains. Technology had quite literally sped things along. Technology had even permitted modern cities, like Las Vegas, to rise up in the heart of a desert.
All this moving around, she thought. All this trading of ideas and things.
This brief reflection on the pace of progress had her contemplating the fate of the ancient Mesopotamians who’d once inhabited Iraq’s northern mountains. They too possessed sophisticated technology. But where had they gone after the floods had for ever changed the land? Did they go west into Europe? Or did they trek east to India or China? What happened to them?
The bigger mystery was that their incredibly sophisticated language hadn’t made the journey from that cave. If it had, it would have spread like wild fire and set commerce and technology on a fast-track. The world as humans now knew it could be fundamentally different — possibly far more advanced.