As soon as the door closed, the jeep started to move once again, circling around both the group of terrified archaeologists and the armed men surrounding them, and headed over towards the excavation where Mohammed was standing.
The jeep stopped a few yards away, and the driver — his face virtually invisible because of the tinted wind-screen and side windows — switched off the engine. The two doors on the driver’s side opened simultaneously and two men climbed out, both wearing shoulder holsters over their military-style clothing and each carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle. They looked at Mohammed and then scanned the entire area, presumably checking for any sign of danger. Apparently satisfied, the driver turned back towards the vehicle and nodded. Only then did the other two doors open.
The young bearded man climbed out and walked over to Mohammed. He was followed by a man in late middle age who was wearing a somewhat crumpled white linen suit, and who immediately began mopping the sweat from his forehead with a large red handkerchief.
Mohammed stared at the man in disbelief, forgetting his state of terror for an instant.
‘You,’ he said, his voice quivering with emotion. ‘You’re involved with these people? Why?’
The man in the suit looked at him with a dismissive expression and shook his head.
‘You mean you haven’t worked it out yet? Never mind. It’s too late for you anyway. I don’t think we need your services any further.’
He turned slightly and issued a brief instruction to the driver.
Mohammed didn’t hear what he said, but there was no mistaking the meaning of his order.
As the driver began raising his Kalashnikov, Mohammed started to run. He had always been built for comfort rather than speed, and he’d only covered about ten yards before the driver pulled the trigger.
The man wearing the suit nodded in satisfaction as he watched the senior archaeologist’s body tumble clumsily to the ground and lie still.
‘Tell your men to get rid of the others, Farooq,’ he said. ‘No word of this must be allowed to get out.’
And as he began to climb down the aluminium ladder into the temple, he heard the sound of the Kalashnikovs opening up.
3
‘So tell me about this temple,’ Bronson said, as Angela steered the Land Cruiser along the highway that headed south-west away from the city and towards the border — not in fact the border with Iraq, but the one between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the first thing you need to understand is that we don’t really know whether or not it is a temple. We’ve been calling it that ever since we found it, but really only because it’s a convenient name. We could be quite wrong about what it was used for.’
‘Agreed,’ Stephen said from the back seat, ‘but the signs are that it was some kind of a place of worship or veneration. Why don’t you tell Chris exactly how we found it?’
Bronson looked at his ex-wife, and she glanced at him and smiled, then returned her attention to the road in front.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘There are more potential sites dotted around the world than there are archaeologists to investigate them. This particular area of southern Iraq was identified as being of interest perhaps twenty years ago because the Marsh Arabs lived there, and not a huge amount was known about their early history. This was also the height of Saddam Hussein’s regime so for several reasons — mainly political — nobody did anything about it. And as he seemed to be determined to wipe out the Marsh Arabs there was no way any expedition could possibly be mounted while he was in power. And then, of course, there was the turmoil after he’d been deposed, when it still wasn’t safe to travel or work there.’
‘So what’s the site?’ Bronson asked. ‘A Marsh Arab village or something?’
‘It might have been,’ Stephen interjected, ‘but we really aren’t sure what it is. The initial reports had only stated that there were signs of habitation there, and clear physical evidence in the form of pottery fragments on the ground. The assumption was that it was probably the site of a settlement that had been abandoned some considerable time ago. That deduction was based on the type of pottery people had picked up there, none of which appeared to have been made within the last couple of hundred years or so, and the absence of any recent artefacts. No plastic or metal objects, I mean.’
‘Anyway,’ Angela continued, ‘when the situation in Iraq seemed to be a bit more stable, the Baghdad Museum decided it was worth sending a team down to do a test excavation, and because the location is so close to the Kuwaiti border they invited the corresponding museum in Kuwait City to take part, and also asked for a handful of Western specialists to join the group. The British Museum sent Stephen and me, and a chap called George who you’ll meet at the dig.
‘It really didn’t look all that promising when we got there, but that’s the thing about archaeology. Until you get below the surface you genuinely have no idea what you’re likely to find. The site is a fairly level area, but when we set up our tents and stuff I couldn’t see any obvious signs that there had been a village there. No outlines on the ground or anything like that, but there were quite a few bits of pottery lying around, all quite ancient.’
‘Of course, we are talking about a desert here,’ Stephen said, ‘and that particular area is a mixture of sand, rock and earth, so it’s quite conceivable that there could have been a substantial village there, but after only a few months drifting sand could have completely buried it. Or, and this might be more likely, the people who built the settlement there might have decided for whatever reason — better grazing for their animals, their normal water source drying up or something of that sort — to dismantle everything and move somewhere else.’
‘So you pitched your tents and started digging?’
‘Basically, yes. And in fact, what we found was pretty much what we had expected to find. Quite a lot of pottery, the dates consistent with what we had anticipated, a few ritual ornaments and the like, and clear indication of the remains of a building in one trench — rotted sections of cut timber, that kind of thing. But nothing exciting until a few days ago. And then, at the very end of one trench, we found something different: worked stone.
‘It was just a right-angled piece of rock on the left-hand side of the trench, and we thought at first it was the base of an individual object, a stone carving or something of that sort, but when we shifted more of the earth from around it, we realized it was nothing of the sort. It was actually a step carved into the bedrock that ran beside the trench. Even before we’d fully exposed that length of stone, we did the obvious and checked to see if there was another step below it. There was, and there was a third one under that. What we were looking at was the beginning of a rough-hewn staircase that descended below the desert floor.
‘As you can imagine, that changed the mood on the team quite dramatically. What we’d expected to be nothing more than a perfectly routine excavation of a long-abandoned village had suddenly turned into a treasure hunt. We had no idea what might be waiting for us at the bottom of that stone staircase. We did it properly, though, documenting and photographing each phase of this unexpected turn the excavation had taken, but we were all caught up in the excitement of the moment, and I think that most of us believed we might have stumbled upon something of real importance. After all, it was a buried stone staircase that had led Howard Carter to the untouched tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.’