The Milestone Protocol

by Ernest Dempsey

  The pandemic hadn’t helped.

  The virus had appeared out of nowhere, popping up all over the globe within the span of a month. It spread like wildfire, and despite a low mortality rate, the contagious nature of the bug pushed the healthcare systems of several nations to the point of collapse. Vaccines were still in the testing phases, with hopeful articles splattering the internet daily, all of which drove stock prices to dangerously inflated heights.

  For a while, no one was certain if the national economy would simply bend, or if it would break. President Gwen McCarthy displayed strong leadership, but even she struggled with all of the problems coming to a head at one time.

  Sandstrom tried to be glad he was out in the country and not in Washington. At least here he could keep his distance from people, and from the news that seemed to be perpetually bad. The only whiffs of it he got were by accident, when he pulled up the Google app on his phone to find a takeout place nearby or to order delivery.

  There was plenty of fresh mountain air—with the exception of his motel room—and this part of the world almost seemed untouched by the madness unfolding everywhere else.

  Still, he felt like he was on a babysitting assignment—not his idea of how best to use his talents. Not that the paperwork he did before was either.

  He watched as the teams of scientists entered and left the airlock connected to the cave. When he initially arrived on the scene, the area was teeming with archaeologists performing a thorough investigation of the site, carefully working through earth and rock to reveal the tiniest scraps of ancient evidence.

  They were less than thrilled when Sandstrom and his team arrived on site to take over operations, effectively forcing the archaeologists off the scene.

  The International Archaeological Agency, headed by its founder, Tommy Schultz, had filed several injunctions and appeals against the FBI and its actions, but Sandstrom knew none of them would do any good. And they hadn’t.

  Schultz, from what Sandstrom heard, had pulled every string he could. Even his connection to the president hadn't helped, and she’d been forced to explain that her hands were tied concerning the matter.

  To be fair, Sandstrom didn’t see why the team of archaeologists couldn’t work in tandem with the scientific group. They were all working toward the same end, as far as he knew. He’d heard about the mysterious occurrences at this place, with lights hovering in midair in the evening, just before dusk. So far, he’d seen nothing of the sort, and had written it off as local folklore or legend. Nothing more.

  He stood, watching for the lead scientist—a woman with the first name of Gertrude and a last name that he, to this day, couldn’t pronounce—to appear from the cave’s airlock. The white tunnel that extended away from the mountain entrance curved over to where he stood as the rest of the scientists entered and exited the quarantined zone.

  He chortled at the notion of quarantining a cave. Much of the world had gone into real quarantine during the last few months, though many were emerging and resuming their day-to-day activities in an effort to jumpstart local economies. Here, in the mountains of North Carolina, they were quarantining a cave.

  Sandstrom didn’t understand, but it wasn’t his job to understand. He was here to gather information. Whatever the science team discovered was to be sent back to his new boss, a man named Martin Forrester, who’d only been in the position of Sandstrom’s division for the last six weeks.

  It was Forrester who’d called Sandstrom in for the fieldwork. And Sandstrom knew better than to make a bad impression with the new boss. He’d survived enough turnover in the Bureau to know how it worked. Whenever a new guy or gal took over, they liked to make waves, splash around in the agency pool a little. Moving folks around gave the impression that they were making changes, and change—in the eyes of the administration—was always positive. Even when it wasn’t.

  So, Sandstrom had said yes to the assignment, but with every passing second and every gnat that tickled his skin, he regretted his acceptance more and more. The truth was, though, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. When told to jump, Sandstrom had to ask how high on the way up. He hated that he’d become a yes man, but he was a survivor—a team player. With every passing day, he neared retirement and a life of leisure—somewhere warm and sunny, with plenty of cheap, strong drinks.

  Despite his resentment or regret toward the current assignment, the thing that truly dug at his nerves was the supervisor overseeing everything. He’d taken the gig under the assumption that he would be in control, not that there was much to do anyway. Still, he’d agreed to come out to the mountains in North Carolina, in part, because Sandstrom hoped it would get him a little pay bump or maybe a promotion that didn’t require much responsibility.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the supervisor. He couldn’t think of anything better to call her. The second he’d agreed to come here, his boss told him that he would be working directly under a specialist in this field, someone who would have total command of the day-to-day operations. From what Sandstrom knew, the woman—who went by the name Darcy Friedman—wasn’t with the Bureau. He’d never seen her before, never even heard of her. Then she appeared out of nowhere to oversee an FBI investigation?

  When Sandstrom met her, she looked the part of a Washington power player, with dirty blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, white blouse, and black suit pressed smooth. Now, though, her shell jacket and water-resistant khaki pants and hiking boots contrasted with his original vision of her.

  Sandstrom sighed, turned around, and sipped his cup of lousy coffee. That was one thing he missed about being in a city more than anything else. The coffee around these parts was pretty awful, and he’d resorted to driving an extra twenty minutes to the local Walmart just to get decent coffee for his motel room.

  She barely acknowledged him when he looked back at her, as was customary. She was supposedly a scientist, but why would a scientist have this kind of power over him, or over his boss back at the Bureau? When the director introduced her, Sandstrom detected a hint of fear in his voice. Sandstrom had shrugged it off as reading too much into things, but the woman had barely said ten words to him since they’d met more than a month before.

  In most cases, she went over Sandstrom to speak to the people working in the cave, meticulously collecting information and noting which person delivered it.

  Why all the fuss over this weird cave?

  Sandstrom didn’t get it, other than the supposedly bizarre things that happened prior to his arrival.

  An excited voice interrupted his thoughts, cutting through the earpiece he kept in his right ear.

  Other voices joined in the cacophony, and Sandstrom was forced to turn down the volume on the radio, wincing in agitation.

  Friedman strode by him to the entrance of the tunnel and waited, a tablet in her left hand and a phone in the other.

  A swoosh came from the airlock. Footsteps followed soon after. One of the scientists appeared, wearing a white hazmat suit that covered them from head to toe. They held a vial that was roughly five centimeters long and maybe two centimeters wide. Inside it, a shimmering blue sliver of crystal pulsed and glowed.

  Sandstrom took two involuntary steps forward as he peered at the vial and the stone within. “What is that?” he asked.

  Friedman regarded him as she would a naughty child and then turned her attention back to the researcher in the hazmat suit. “Were you able to find any others?”

  The man nodded. “Three others of varying sizes. Our sensors don’t detect anything else, though.”

  Two more scientists in suits emerged from the white tunnel. One held two vials. The other held the third. Each of the glass cylinders contained small blue crystals that pulsed in the morning sunlight.

  “Good,” Friedman said with a nod. “Get back in there and start cleaning up. I’ll make sure these are taken care of.”

  She collected the four vials from the researchers. Then they retreated back into the tunnel, and the
n the cave after another swoosh from the airlock.

  Friedman spun on her heels, stuffing the vials carelessly in her jacket pockets. She tucked the tablet under her armpit and raised the phone to her ear.

  “What are those?” Sandstrom asked as she whisked by.

  This time, she didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken.

  “Get the site cleaned,” she said into the phone. “Immediately.”

  Sandstrom stopped following her mid-stride and put out his hands wide in question. “What is that supposed to mean? What is going on? Are you going to tell me what’s in those vials?”

  She halted, and her shoulders slumped.

  Sandstrom waited, staring at her intently. He’d been given very little information about this job, only that he was to help oversee the collection of evidence from an archaeological site. When he’d asked his boss more probing questions, the man had simply offered, “It’s a national security issue. That’s all you need to know.”

  Now, Sandstrom wanted to know more. He wanted to understand why he’d been stationed out here in the middle of nowhere with a team of scientists who apparently didn’t need him. The only thing he could figure was that the science team only needed his badge in case they were questioned by either local authorities or perhaps hikers who’d wandered off the trail and stumbled onto their site.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on here or not, Darcy? I’m tired of being kept in the dark. I want to—”

  A muffled pop muted him permanently. She’d spun around so quickly, he didn’t have time to react. The pistol in her hand fired the bullet before he could finish his sentence, and the bullet ended his life, zipping through his skull just over the right eye.

  Sandstrom’s body dropped to the ground, landing on the knees first, and then falling over onto its side. The man’s hollow eyes stared out at the trees beyond where Darcy stood. The gun in her hand leaked a thin trail of smoke from the suppressor’s muzzle.

  She lowered the weapon as a team of eight people in black suits and masks appeared from behind the research tent. All of them moved with quick, singular precision, like the tentacles of an octopus, controlled by one mind.

  They entered the tunnel in pairs. The airlock whooshed seconds later. Then the screams came. The sounds were faint, dimmed by the seal around the entrance. But Friedman could still hear them among the distant sounds of gunfire. Then, within ten seconds of the massacre’s onset, it was over. Silence returned to the mountain slopes, providing an odd sort of serenity.

  Friedman placed the weapon back inside the folds of her jacket, concealing it once more. The first two of her team emerged from the tunnel, followed by two more sets. The last pair, she knew, were rigging the cave entrance with explosives, as she’d instructed.

  When the two demolition experts appeared at the tunnel’s entrance, they merely gave her a confirming nod and continued up the hill to join the rest of the team. Friedman barely acknowledged Sandstrom’s body as she pivoted on her heels and marched up the hillside toward the road.

  She and the others reached their black SUVs at the top of the slope. One of her men held a door open for her on the back passenger side of the second in the line of three vehicles. She paused, looked down at her watch, and then heard the explosion.

  The mountain earth beneath them rumbled for two or three seconds. The booming sound echoed out over the hills and valleys beyond, but only momentarily. Then the noise was gone. The earth stilled. And the forest returned to its previously serene state, with only a narrow plume of smoke rising from the treetops as evidence of their deed. The smoke would be gone soon, and unless a forest ranger was driving by on the road, no one would realize what happened for days, perhaps weeks.

  This little mountain demolition had lit the main fuse, and nothing could stop it now.

  4

  Plovdiv, Bulgaria

  Kevin Clark had never been so afraid in his life.

  He ran as fast as he could, but athletics had never been his strong suit. A lifelong student and bookworm, the only exercise he usually got was on the stationary bike in his office, and he only did that to maintain decent blood pressure and cardiovascular health.

  His leg muscles burned with every step, and he promised himself if he got out of this alive, he would start working out more regularly.

  A quick look over his shoulder didn’t comfort him. The men following him were no longer in view, and for some reason that only made things worse. Knowing where they were at least gave Kevin hope he could keep an eye on them. Now that they were out of sight, there was no way to know if he’d lost them or if they had simply taken a shortcut. The dark streets of the Bulgarian city offered no comfort, no respite from his fears. Dim lights shone in the windows and on lamps that flickered in the night. A few drunken laughs echoed down the corridors of side streets and into the main promenade. It was as if the city itself had begun to follow him, too.

  He shook off the irrational fears and forced himself forward. The hotel wasn’t far. He could make it there, tell the concierge someone was following him, and they would handle the rest. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect plan, but it would have to do until the person meeting him arrived.

  The flight from Russia to Bulgaria had gone smoothly enough, and thankfully the two nations weren’t that far apart. He’d managed to find a place to stay for the night, and grabbed some food at one of the local street vendors upon arriving—thinking it safer to stay on the move until he reached his lodging. Still, something was off, and Kevin didn’t know what.

  How had this happened? He’d told virtually no one about the discovery. Is that what they were after? The artifact? He’d kept the object secret, for the most part, only emailing a couple of colleagues in the archaeology and anthropology communities about what his research group found at the dig site to the east of Volgograd.

  He and his team had been investigating a location they believed to be the spot where the lost city of Sarai might have stood centuries before. Instead, they had found a burial pit dating to around the fifteenth century.

  What the team discovered had initially surprised them.

  The grave was about twenty feet in diameter. Seven bodies lay inside, arranged in a circle with the feet in the middle where they surrounded a stone box. Kevin and the others from his team believed the object to be a small sarcophagus, possibly for a child, a young royal perhaps. None of the archeologists could figure out why the bodies had been buried in such a manner. They were warriors; that much was clear, and from the look of their weapons and armor, they’d been members of the Golden Horde, as would be expected for the region and timeline. After all, that’s why the team was there—to locate the fabled city of the horde.

  Throughout the years, several archaeology groups had attempted to locate the exact spot where Old Sarai and New Sarai stood. All had failed—until Kevin Clark’s team finally succeeded, at least in part. Their discovery of the burial site east of Volgograd and close to the Akhtuba Channel was the closest anyone had ever come to finding the once-magnificent capital.

  Upon pulling the stone container out of the ground, an English woman and anthropologist from Oxford, named Susan Plimpton, noted the emblem on the side of the container. The crescent moon next to the boxy lines with a hook left no doubt that they were close to Sarai, if not right on top of it.

  The stone box had been sealed shut with mortar, which took painstaking effort to chisel away without damaging the container’s integrity.

  When the lid was finally loosened, every member of the team stood over the table as the box was pried open and the contents revealed. Most had expected some kind of treasure to be hidden within, but what they discovered instead was a rectangular copper tablet.

  The memory caused Kevin to tighten his grip on the satchel as he hurried through the cobbled streets of Plovdiv’s famed Old Town. Roman ruins dotted the cityscape. He knew the Theater of Philippopolis was close by and the stadium of the same name not far to the west. The thoroughfares were n
arrower than in other parts of the city, and while he took a mild measure of comfort from the pedestrians wandering down the sidewalks and on the mismatched street stones, he couldn’t suppress the fear simmering inside him.

  He wondered if he’d done the right thing, securing the copper tablet in the satchel, sealing the artifact in a plastic bag to keep it safe from the elements. Of course he’d done the right thing, he thought. The rest of his team might be dead, and this was the only way to ensure their discovery wasn’t in vain.

  No, he shuddered at the thought. They can’t all be dead.

  Deep down, though, he couldn’t deny the truth.

  He’d taken the tablet to Volgograd to have it properly analyzed by one of the labs at the university. When he returned, he found the dig site’s tents and supplies ablaze. He’d seen the smoke rising from a distance and pulled the car off to the side of the road.

  As he stumbled down the city street, he grimaced at the thought, at the memory of the black and gray plumes billowing into the late afternoon sky.

  He’d gotten out of the car and stared, paralyzed at the sight. In the distance, he’d seen the silhouettes of human figures, dark-clad intruders who looked like they were carrying guns, but from that distance he’d been unable to be certain. At first, his instinct was to run into the fray, find any potential survivors, and get them to safety. But that would have been foolhardy. What difference could he have made? He would have been cut down like the rest. The sound of gunfire kept him from making that mistake. Immediately, he had turned his SUV around and sped back to the city, driving as fast as he could.

  Questions lingered in his mind. He wanted to know who was responsible for this unprovoked attack. His first thoughts flashed to the Russians. They’d been more than generous with time, resources, and permits for the project. Now, Kevin wondered if that had been a ruse. Why, though, would anyone want a group of archaeologists dead? It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Not anymore.