‘Until it runs out,’ said Nina, examining the map. ‘It’ll take us over this range and into a valley — we go south down it and then turn west again.’
‘I don’t think this first one’ll be it,’ Eddie said dubiously. ‘It’s too close to that village. Somebody would have found it already — I mean, this whole area’s a national park, isn’t it?’ Jared nodded.
‘We still have to check, though,’ said Nina.
The Land Rover picked its way between the peaks, scrabbling up a steep pass before dropping back into a flat, sandy valley. Had Nina stuck with her original theory of the angel’s location, this would have been one of the places to search: it was bone dry at the moment, but alluvial channels carved into the ground proved that when water did flow through this part of the desert, it did so with force.
They headed south. ‘There should be a smaller valley about half a mile away,’ she told Jared. ‘It leads into a canyon; the place we’re looking for is another half-mile along it.’
‘Let me see the map,’ said Eddie. Nina passed it to him. ‘Still don’t think this can be it. It’s too easy to get to. If we turn off and follow this ridge here,’ he pointed to it, ‘we could drive to the bloody place. There’s probably a falafel stand there for tourists.’
‘Soon find out,’ she replied. But he had already convinced her that they were unlikely to find anything on their first try.
That turned out to be the case. Jared took Eddie’s advice and, rather than continue along the canyon floor, ascended a steep rise to the top of one of its sides. From there they had a clear view of their intended destination. Nina was the first to look through a pair of powerful binoculars. ‘You were right, Eddie,’ she admitted. ‘There are no signs of any copper deposits. I can see a sinkhole in the canyon, but it’s not very deep, and the passage in the rock above it is too wide and too shallow to look like, ah…’ Her cheeks flushed as she glanced at the young man beside her. ‘Like what we think it should look like,’ she concluded lamely.
‘She means a woman’s bits,’ Eddie informed him, failing completely to hide a smirk.
Now it was Jared’s turn to look faintly embarrassed. ‘You mean like, uh… breasts?’
‘No, kid,’ said the Englishman, trying not to crack up. ‘The other bits.’ Even Nina couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Okay, okay,’ huffed the Israeli.
‘You do know what I mean, right?’
‘Yes, I do! Tahat.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Jared,’ said Nina, unable to resist a little teasing of her own. ‘I think it’s sweet.’
‘I should leave you two here,’ he muttered. ‘But this isn’t the place, is it?’
She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t match the clues hidden in Revelation. We should move on to the next one.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Eddie. ‘How about we go straight to the one that’s the furthest from anywhere, and work backwards? Like I said, if this place was too easy to find, somebody would have done it by now.’
Nina opened the map. ‘We’re here,’ she tapped one of the marked spots, ‘and the one deepest into the desert is… here. About five miles north-west.’
Eddie examined the contour lines around it. ‘Steep cliffs. Looks like that mountain from Close Encounters.’
‘It’s joined to the rest of this higher range to the north, so it might be reachable that way.’ She looked at the two men. ‘Shall we do it back-to-front, then?’
‘If we’d done that four months ago, you wouldn’t be pregnant,’ said Eddie. It took her a moment to figure it out, and when she did, he hurriedly ducked away from another swat of her hand. ‘But yeah, I’m up for it.’
‘It’ll take us a few hours to get there,’ Jared warned. ‘There isn’t a direct route — we’ll have to follow these valleys and cut through this pass.’ He traced the path with his fingertip.
‘So long as we can get there, that’s the important thing.’ Nina folded the chart back up. ‘Okay, let’s get started.’
She looked towards the distant peaks, catching a glint of light in the cloudless sky. A helicopter, crossing the desert. She watched it for a moment, wondering if her enemies might be aboard conducting their own search, before deciding it didn’t matter. If it was Cross and Dalton, they were some distance from any of her potential sites.
Victor Dalton shifted in his seat, uncomfortable and annoyed. The Bell 430 helicopter was large enough to accommodate all the members of Cross’s expedition, but the window seats were occupied by those scouring the ground below through binoculars. With Paxton piloting and Cross in the co-pilot’s seat beside him, the ex-president had ended up sandwiched between two of the cult leader’s men, without much of a view. ‘It’s too damn hot back here,’ he growled into his headset’s mic. ‘Can you turn on the air con?’
‘It’s already on, Victor,’ Cross told him dismissively. ‘This isn’t Marine One; you’ll have to manage.’
‘There’s a big fan right above us,’ added Simeon, with a mocking glance up at the main rotor. Anna chuckled.
‘Damn right it isn’t Marine One,’ Dalton muttered. He tried to look over the pilot’s shoulder at the desert below. ‘Any sign of what we’re after?’
‘Not yet,’ Cross told him. ‘But we’ve only checked three sites so far. We’ll find it, though. Have faith.’
‘Right now, I’d rather have legroom.’
‘I see a sinkhole,’ Simeon reported. ‘Ten o’clock, thirty degrees down.’ Other binoculars turned to locate it. Paxton slowed the chopper and began to circle.
‘Well?’ Dalton demanded impatiently after a couple of minutes. ‘Is that it?’
‘We’re still checking,’ said Cross. ‘But there’s nothing nearby that might be ruins, or a cave system, and the sinkhole itself is empty, so… I don’t think so,’ he decided, crossing off another marker from the map. ‘Okay, Paxton, take us to the next site. Four down.’
‘Too damn many to go,’ Dalton grumbled as the helicopter wheeled about to begin the next leg of its laborious search.
The other group of explorers were enduring an equally laborious, and considerably less comfortable, journey. Even for a vehicle of the Discovery’s off-road prowess it was hard going, with no roads to follow, nor even tracks.
Eddie had taken over navigation duties from Nina, having much more experience from his military career. Despite this, the map’s lack of fine detail meant they were sometimes forced to backtrack from terrain beyond the Land Rover’s abilities. ‘Shit,’ he exclaimed as he looked ahead, seeing that what on the chart was an open, if narrow, valley was in reality blocked by a near-vertical ridge of rock taller than a man. ‘Okay, Jared, turn us around. We’ll have to head back to that big boulder and try to get up the hill.’
‘It might be too steep,’ the Israeli said as he reversed.
‘If we don’t try, we’ll need to go all the way back around this fucking mountain.’ Eddie glared out of the side window at the offending peak.
Jared retraced their tracks to a large sand-weathered rock, then turned north to face a steep incline. ‘I don’t know if we’ll be able to get up this.’
Eddie assessed it. ‘So long as you put it in low range and keep moving, you’ll make it. And for Christ’s sake don’t go at an angle, or we’ll roll over.’
‘We will? Wow! I’d never know these things without you to tell me. All that time the Mossad spent teaching me how to drive off-road…’
‘All right, don’t be a cheeky twat,’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘Just go for it.’
Jared aligned the Discovery with the shallowest route up the incline, then started his ascent. The big 4x4 managed a reasonable pace at first, before its wheels began to slip and scrabble. ‘There’s more grip over there,’ Eddie suggested, pointing to where the rock had less of a covering of sand.