“Here,” Purdue heard a man's voice report in a very heavy accent. “Up here is where he hit the Arab. We did not see them flee, so we think our bullets did their work on them both.”
“Right, then let's get up there. I want the Ark,” Purdue heard Medley say. He didn’t know what to do. If he as much as moved, they would discover him. However, staying would seal his demise. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel and rock as they climbed the steep slant up to the ledge. Medley and three men moved swiftly up to where the so-called Ark was last seen.
One of the men with her suddenly yelped in pain from some sort of impact and fell down the slope next to her.
“What the hell just happened?” she shouted, but the man did not answer. In the light of her flashlight she could see the awful evidence of a crushed skull and a bloody rock lying next to him. Before Medley could convey her next orders, her men scattered in panic, protectively pulling her with them. Thundering down the mountain slope in the dark the tumbling rocks fell, propelled higher and faster each time they hit the slope with force and velocity. A few men were struck, some fatally, by the apparent rock fall they could not outrun in time. So fierce was the danger, they didn’t have a chance to glance back up where Purdue was sitting at the top of the chaos he’d started by dislodging one large round rock that had been holding a few more together in the bed of sand.
Causing the deadly tumbling of geological canon balls onto his enemies was all he could do to mar their discovery of him and his claimed prize. It was, after all, his life at stake, so he’d had to find a way to combat them and buy time for his pilot to arrive and rescue him. It was a successful strike, for now.
Like a sight from a Biblical tale of mercy, the sharp spotlights of Sphinx-1 appeared in the evening sky. Purdue's ears had not heard such a sweet melody in a long time as the clapping of the rotor blades echoed in the valley below where the three vehicles of Medley's people had been decimated by rocks. Larsen took care not to give them a clear shot at his craft, landing it on the other side of the summit just above Purdue. Larsen's co-pilot came out to Purdue to assist him in getting the wooden relic on board the craft before Medley could alert the local authorities about their presence.
As the helicopter lifted off, Purdue looked down to where its lights were illuminating the terrain. It broke his heart to see Adjo's bloody body left in the long grass like an animal carcass, knowing that he would never see the money he’d been promised to benefit his family.
Chapter 8
Across the border of Ethiopia, traversing Eritrea's eastern region, northeast bound, Purdue fled with his illegitimate prize. The way he saw it, it could not be construed as a capital crime to steal an artifact that was, in fact, a cheap knock-off of the item spoken of in history. If he had stolen the Holy Grail he would absolutely be demonized by the world's academic society as a plain grave robber, but to procure a very bad duplicate of a legendary relic was hardly worthy of guilt.
Still, he felt guilty about the men who had lost their lives and livelihoods because of his zealousness for the item, not to mention the contrition for shaking the faith of a thousand years for the men of the village. But above all this, Purdue felt only relief at his own escape. He couldn’t wait to return to his home, Wrichtishousis, in Edinburgh, to investigate the contents of the wooden chest.
If he could find anything interesting inside it, he would feel that, to some measure, Adjo's death would be vindicated. Purdue still fully intended to remunerate the Egyptian's family as he had promised. Dave Purdue was wealthier than a sultan, yet he never forgot those who helped him or those who saved him when he’d naught but a glimmer of hope and a whole lot of craziness to go on. A sick sadness filled him when he looked over the sporadic lights on the desert surface, where only a few tents or bungalows served as shelter. The noise of the helicopter lulled him to a strange numbness, after the close calls he had endured during the day.
First, the tabernacle had collapsed and he’d been cussed and cursed out by locals for intruding. Then he’d had to leave the failed excavation with empty hands after months of careful financial funding, followed by the bad threat under the mountain. Finally, his insatiable need to feed his curiosity and his obsession with history had caused a good man his life. It was a day Purdue wished he could redo, relive, and ultimately change to be quite different. He imagined the news of Adjo's death reaching the man's family and it depressed him deeply.
“Where are we now, Larsen?” he asked the pilot.
Larsen's green eyes moved to the instruments before he confirmed, “Just passed Rama, sir. We should reach the border in the next fifteen minutes.”
“The border with Eritrea?” Purdue asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Purdue sighed. “As soon as we get to Asmara, we can load this relic onto the cargo plane. You did book the cargo plane, right?”
“Of course, Mr. Purdue,” Larsen replied, sounding every bit as surprised as he was that his boss still thought to ask such a thing. After all, Larsen had been one of Purdue's pilots for many years and knew the protocols of retrieval flights and jet-setting very well by now.
“I'm sorry.” Purdue exhaled hard. “It’s just been a trying day and I want to get back home as soon as possible. Nothing more needs to go wrong on this excursion. I should know better than to hire only men from local and surrounding settlements. This time I did just that, because I’d gotten tired of putting my friends' lives in danger whenever I wanted to chase after something like this, you know?”
“I agree, sir. Better to pay people to risk their lives, I say. That way they’re not doing you a favor or a service. That way, they agree that what is coming to them is entirely business,” Larsen comforted his boss. These were words that Purdue needed to hear, however loosely cemented they were on a foundation of sycophantic consolation.
But what Larsen was saying was, in fact, was the opposite of what Purdue was admitting — that involving close acquaintances and friends was actually the best way to go about it. He agreed with what Larsen had said, but using strangers posed many threats: threats of betrayal, threats of assassination, and threats of employing double agents to cheat him out of his finds. “Either way is a conundrum, Larsen. Using hired hands could get me jailed or killed… have my finds stolen from under me; while using my friends for peace of mind runs the risk of baring the guilt of their possible demise in the process.”
“It’s a difficult decision, sir. One would think mixing the two would yield the answer, but instead of doubling your capabilities during such an expedition, one would just be increasing the risk of both problems coming to fruition. I suppose it’s a gamble, no matter how you work it, sir,” Larsen explained, giving his honest opinion this time. “So what are you going to do?”
“We cannot let them take this item from me. I have to prove it a fake if only to get to keep it. Once the authorities know that this is not the Ark of the Covenant as spoken of in legend and Biblical contexts, the Ethiopian government and the International Historical Societies will cease to write me up as a common grave robber and stop trying to arrest me.” Purdue was reciting the good alibi he’d been formulating for stealing another country's historical relic.