“We’ll never know,” said Hilts. He stopped. Halfway up the right-hand wall of the valley they saw the wreckage of an airplane. “What the hell…?”
The old biplane looked as though it had tried to land, lost control on approach, and ran up the side of the valley before it stopped. The engine cowling had ruptured, shattering the propeller, and the lower wing had crumpled and torn, leaving half the upper wing and a few struts. The undercarriage had completely vanished. Over time the desert had taken its toll and the fabric covering on the fuselage was in tatters. What was left showed no signs of national identification.
“Maybe that’s what the Brits were after,” said Finn, staring at the ruined aircraft. The door of the plane was sagging open and she could see up into the cockpit. The windscreen was cracked but unbroken.
“Maybe that’s what Adamson was after too,” said Hilts. He climbed up toward the wreckage, pulling himself steadily up the steep slope with his hands digging into the stony sandstone.
“Why would Adamson be interested in an old airplane?”
“Because Lucio Pedrazzi was a flyer. He was one of the first archaeologists to use aerial surveys, and he flew an airplane just like this, a Waco UIC.”
“That sounds American.”
“It was,” Hilts answered. “William Randolph Hearst used to fly one. The Citizen Kane guy. It was popular all over the world.” They finally reached the wreck, and hanging on to one of the wing struts, Hilts peered into the cockpit. Finn followed suit. There were two bucket seats, the leather rotted, leaving only the springs, a Y-shaped yoke and two Bakelite wheels, one for the pilot, the other for the copilot beside him. The rear section had been enlarged and turned into a cargo bay. It was empty except for an odd skeletal cube formed out of welded aluminum. In the center of the boxlike arrangement was something that looked like a simplified version of a child’s gyroscope. At the base of the cube was a metal sleeve that led down into the fuselage.
“A camera mount?” asked Finn.
Hilts nodded. “A Bagley, or maybe a K-5. But no camera.”
“Adamson.”
“Could be.”
“I thought Pedrazzi was looking for our Coptic monastery.”
“Maybe he was looking for something else as well.”
“When exactly did Pedrazzi disappear?” asked Finn, staring into the empty cockpit.
“In 1938.”
“In a sandstorm?”
Hilts nodded. “That’s the story.”
“Was he alone?”
“Actually, no. There was a Frenchman with him, as a matter of fact. A man named Pierre DeVaux.”
“Who was he?”
An archaeologist. A monk, just like Laval. He was there to help Pedrazzi translate Aramaic inscriptions.”
“From l’Йcole Biblique? The Jerusalem School?”
“I’m not sure,” said Hilts. “Probably.”
Finn found herself thinking about Arthur Simpson, the man in her hotel room. The man who knew her archaeologist father. The man who’d been a British spy. The man whose own father had been an archaeologist as well. Three generations all digging up the same past.
“Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“After sixty years?” The photographer made a face. “Not really.” He frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure, but there sure does seem to be a lack of bodies. There’s no sign of Pedrazzi or the Frenchman. Just like the British soldiers. Weird.”
“This isn’t science fiction. They either walked out of here and died in the desert or they’re still here.”
“Where?”
Hilts looked around the valley. Finally he nodded to himself.
“What?” asked Finn.
“Pedrazzi took off from the old Italian airfield at Al-Kufrah. According to the reports he and DeVaux were heading off to finish a survey of some rock formation along the border with French Equatorial Africa. It was supposed to have been clear and sunny. Perfect flying weather, but a couple of hours later, which is about right, this huge sandstorm came up out of nowhere.”
“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.”