Suddenly, one of the younger Iraqi archaeologists turned on his heels and ran towards the small vehicle park at one side of the encampment.
He didn’t get far.
A shouted command came from somewhere in the line of men approaching from the east, and two of the figures dropped to their knees, aimed their Kalashnikovs at the fleeing figure, and opened fire.
Two sudden flares of blood discoloured the man’s clothing, one on his left leg and the other on his back. He took another couple of steps, probably driven by nothing more than momentum, and then collapsed in an untidy tangle of limbs on the desert sand. For the briefest of instants there was silence, and then the fallen man began screaming as he tried to crawl away. One of the approaching men walked unhurriedly over to where he lay, took a pistol from a holster and fired two shots into the fallen man’s legs. He began screaming even more loudly, and the sound only stopped when the terrorist bent over him, took a large knife from his belt and slowly, methodically, sawed through the man’s throat. Blood pumped out of the ragged wound as the major arteries in the neck were severed and for a few seconds the only sound in the camp was the scrape of steel on bone as the knife was worked through the Iraqi’s vertebrae. Once he’d finished, the killer wiped the blood from his blade on the dead man’s clothing, then picked up the severed head by the hair and placed it in the middle of the corpse’s back.
If there had been the slightest doubt before about the intentions of the approaching men, the casual and almost incidental but still ritualized murder of the young archaeologist comprehensively removed it. These people were clearly terrorists, perhaps a splinter of the Islamic State, the ruthlessly murderous group that had risen to prominence as ISIS or ISL a few years earlier and which had terrified members of all the nations in the Middle East, including those that followed Islam.
But that really didn’t make sense. The Islamic State was a political entity, determined to impose Islam on every nation it could, the choice being offered to people simply comprising an option: ‘follow Islam or we will kill you’. The group had left a trail of bodies, thousands of them, across the Middle East, a mute testimony to their implacable resolve and total ruthlessness.
This, however, didn’t seem to have a political motivation. Taking over a village and insisting that the inhabitants converted to Islam was one thing, but surrounding a dozen or so people involved in an archaeological dig tens of miles from anywhere seemed completely pointless. There had to be some other reason, some overriding objective, for these men to have driven so far out into the desert.
The two lines of approaching men stopped, now completely surrounding the group of archaeologists. Two of them had fallen to their knees and were visibly quaking, while most of the others were just staring wide-eyed at the intruders, trying to make sense of what had happened just seconds before.
One of the newcomers, a young man with a thick black beard and wearing a military-style camouflage uniform, stepped forward and looked at the group of unarmed men they had encircled.
‘Who is in charge here?’ he asked softly in English, his voice educated and the tone almost conversational.
Nobody responded, and with a deceptively casual gesture the newcomer pointed at an archaeologist standing to one side of the group, a brush and trowel held forgotten in his hands.
The man standing on the right of the apparent leader of the newcomers raised his Kalashnikov and fired three rounds straight at the archaeologist at virtually pointblank range. The impact of the bullets slammed his body backwards, knocking him off his feet, and he was dead before he even hit the ground. A chorus of ragged screams rang out as the terrified archaeologists stared in fascinated horror at his broken body and the slowly expanding pool of blood around him.
‘I’ll ask you once again,’ the bearded man said, just as quietly as before. ‘Who is in charge here?’
For about a second, nobody spoke, but several people in the group looked straight at the man in their centre. Then one of the archaeologists pointed at him.
‘He is,’ he said, an obvious tremor in his voice. ‘His name is Mohammed. Please don’t shoot me. Please.’
Mohammed nodded, took a half step forward and slowly raised his left hand.
‘Good. Now, that wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ The bearded man smiled slightly. ‘We have been told that you have discovered a hidden temple. An important hidden temple. I would like to see it. Now.’
Mohammed shook his head.
‘It’s just an empty room,’ he said, his voice sounding bewildered. ‘There’s nothing in it. Well, almost nothing. But of course you can see it,’ he added hurriedly, desperate not to antagonize the young man. ‘It’s this way.’
He turned and pointed towards one of the trenches that ran arrow straight across the irregular rocky ground of the desert. It was marked by flags at regular intervals, and its vertical sides also bore markings to indicate both the excavated depth and the areas where particular artefacts had been discovered. At the far end of the trench, one of the sides displayed a large bulge, a kind of semicircular shape, out of which the top of an aluminium ladder protruded.
Mohammed started nervously across the rock towards the ladder and then stopped right beside it.
‘It’s down there,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to go down first?’
The bearded man shook his head.
‘That will not be necessary. I know what I’m looking for. Do you have lights down there?’
Mohammed swallowed and nodded.
‘We do,’ he replied, ‘but only when the generator’s running. I can have it started for you, if you wish.’
‘No. I have a torch.’
The man checked that the base of the ladder was firm, then swiftly climbed down it.
Mohammed peered nervously down into the opening, seeing the flickering light as the torch beam swept around the interior of the abandoned cave they had uncovered just four days earlier.
He glanced around, wondering if there was any possibility of him reaching one of the vehicles and making his escape, but when he looked more closely at the two parked trucks he realized that to do anything of that sort would simply hasten his own death. He had assumed that the two lorries had been abandoned by the armed men, but now he saw that this was not the case. In the back of each vehicle, standing in the loading area but directly behind the cab, he could see a single figure, and beside each person was the unmistakable shape of a mounted heavy machine gun. With those weapons, even if he somehow managed to reach one of the 4x4s, get it started and drive it away, they could still cut him to pieces from half a mile away.
Mohammed’s mind raced and he started to shake as he accepted the inevitability of what was likely to happen. They couldn’t hide, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight: the fate of everyone in the group rested entirely on the whims of the armed men who had invaded the camp. All they could do was exactly what they were told, and just hope that some of them would still be alive when the terrorists finally left.
He didn’t dare to move and, after about a minute, the ladder began to vibrate as the man started to climb up it again to emerge from the opening.
He glanced at Mohammed as he stepped back on to the ground.
‘Wait here,’ he ordered, and strode away, heading towards the jeep that had accompanied the two lorries and was still parked some distance away. As he approached it, the vehicle began to move towards him, closing the distance between them, and then came to a halt again.
Mohammed hadn’t moved an inch from his position beside the entrance to the temple, and he watched closely as the armed man held a brief conversation with somebody inside the vehicle. Then the back door of the jeep opened and the man climbed inside.