‘I know, I’ve seen it!’ the younger man replied testily as he turned the wheel. ‘Did the SAS give you training in stating the obvious?’
‘No, just in taking the piss out of kids who think they know everything.’
Nina was more interested in something to one side. ‘Look, over there,’ she said. Jared kept his eyes on the climb, but Eddie followed her gaze. A cluster of loose stones had built up in a dip: stones of a very distinctive tint. ‘Those rocks — you see the greenish colour on them? That’s copper, oxidised copper. There must be deposits higher up.’
Eddie peered up the hillside. ‘Can’t see anything. They might have rolled half a mile to end up here, though.’
‘It’s still a promising sign. Let me see the map again.’ Eddie handed it to her; she perused it, so deep in thought that she was oblivious to the Land Rover’s lurches as it clawed its way up the hill.
The slope finally eased. ‘I wouldn’t relax yet,’ Jared told Nina as she looked up from the map. ‘We still have to get back down.’
‘But we’ve found it,’ she said. ‘This is the valley!’
Spread out before them was a winding gorge. Its walls grew higher in the distance, the pale sandstone cliffs almost vertical as they passed out of sight around a bend. ‘If my theory’s right, that the line “clothed with the sun” from Revelation refers to somewhere with copper deposits facing east, then it should be at the top of a cliff down there,’ said Nina. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
The Discovery set off again. They headed along the canyon, before long rounding the bend to see…
‘There!’ exclaimed Nina. ‘It’s up there!’
The valley opened out before them, creating a broad natural amphitheatre several hundred feet long. It forked at the far end, one leg turning north-east and the other almost due south, closing off the western end of the great open space with a towering cliff. A couple of taller peaks rose beyond it, forming a massif surrounded by ravines.
Jared stopped the 4x4. Its occupants got out, Nina scanning the barrier through binoculars. A vertical cleft in the rock was obvious even to the naked eye, and under magnification she glimpsed beyond it a narrow, twisting passage cutting deep into the sandstone, blue sky visible at its top. The channel was about sixty feet deep, the base of its entrance almost two hundred feet above the canyon’s floor.
But it was not the shape that had caught her attention; it was the colour. Patches of shimmering turquoise-green stood out clearly on the surrounding rock where veins of copper had been exposed to the elements. There were also streaks and spots of a darker golden hue. The soft stone was being relentlessly scoured by the desert winds, gradually revealing new deposits of raw, unoxidised copper as the surface layers fell away. Even with the sun high in the sky they shone with a warm light; at dawn, Nina imagined, the reflected glow would be quite spectacular.
‘Is that what we’re after?’ Eddie asked.
‘Looks like it,’ she said. ‘A narrow passage — the, ah, woman’s place — high up where someone would need wings to reach it, surrounded by copper that would catch the dawn light. It fits what John of Patmos wrote in Revelation, after being filtered through his hallucinogenic visions.’
Jared squinted up at the opening. ‘Where does it go?’
‘There was definitely a sinkhole on its far side in the satellite photos,’ said Nina. ‘Let’s get a closer look.’
They drove the rest of the way down the valley. Reaching the cliff, they found that a steep pile of scree had built up along its foot, reducing the distance to the bottom of the crevice by some forty feet. ‘Still a fair old climb,’ said Eddie.
‘Fifty metres? No worse than that cliff we climbed in Italy,’ Jared said.
‘The one you almost got killed on when you slipped and fell?’
‘I caught myself.’
‘I caught you.’
The young man frowned, then reluctantly admitted: ‘Huh. Yeah. You did.’ Eddie gave him a smug look.
‘But you can get up there?’ asked Nina.
‘Looks straightforward enough,’ her husband assured her. ‘Although we’ll need to use ropes if the rock’s that crumbly.’ He looked at Jared. ‘You up for it?’
‘Any time, old man,’ the Mossad agent replied. He opened the Discovery’s tailgate and began to take out the climbing gear.
25
‘Nothing here either,’ reported Cross, marking another site off his map. ‘Okay, Paxton, let’s move on.’
Behind him, Dalton had by now abandoned any attempt to disguise his irritation. ‘All this time, and nothing down there but sand and potholes. I should have gotten out when we went back to Ovda to refuel. How long before we have to gas up again?’
Paxton checked the gauges. ‘Another two hours, sir.’
‘Two hours! Christ.’ The exclamation brought disapproving glances from Simeon and Anna. ‘How about we refuel early so I can get out?’
‘We’re not going to disrupt the search because you’re uncomfortable, Victor,’ said Cross. ‘We have work to do — God’s work.’
He spoke politely, but it was perfectly clear to all that a challenge had been issued. ‘Now wait one damn minute, Cross,’ Dalton rumbled. ‘I don’t intend to be jolted around in this sweatbox for another two hours just because it interferes with your schedule. And my title is still “Mr President”, thank you very much.’
‘Of course… Mr President.’ Cross managed to keep all but a tinge of disdain from his voice. ‘But it’s your schedule too. And considering how the timing has worked out perfectly for us, we need to stick to it.’ He looked back at the former politician. ‘It’s in both our best interests. Don’t you agree, Mr President?’
Dalton became acutely aware that he was surrounded by his partner’s most loyal disciples, and that all of them were armed. ‘I suppose so, yes,’ he said, trying to salvage some decorum. ‘But if I can’t even look out of a window, I’m not contributing much.’
‘That you’re not, Mr President. That you’re not.’ Dalton glared at him, but the cult leader had already turned away.
With a loud grunt, Eddie pulled himself up into the cleft in the rock face. He caught his breath, then stood. The passage was narrow, about six feet wide at its entrance and barely half that deeper within.
Huffs and scrapes from behind. He turned to see Jared’s head appear over the edge. ‘Need a hand?’ the Englishman asked.
‘No, I’m fine.’ The Mossad agent hauled himself on to level ground and shrugged off the long coil of rope he was carrying before detaching his climbing harness from the line. ‘That wasn’t hard.’
‘I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t,’ Eddie replied as he removed his own gear, then took a walkie-talkie from his belt. ‘Nina? We’re both up here and safe.’
Nina’s voice crackled from the radio. ‘What can you see?’
‘So far, nothing. The passage twists too much.’
‘According to the satellite, it should go back a couple of hundred feet before opening out at the sinkhole.’ A mix of eagerness and anxiety entered her voice. ‘You will be able to get me up there, won’t you?’
‘Oh, I dunno, might be too risky,’ Eddie told her, knowing full well that he and Jared would be able to bring her up the cliff with no risk to the baby. He smiled at the yelp of complaint that was audible from below even without the radio, then went on: ‘Yeah, we’ll be able to. We’ll see what’s back there first, though. No point hauling you all the way up here for nothing.’