The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection

by Carolyn McCray

  “What the hell?” Harvish stated in an almost reverential tone. Really? The guy had made fun of St. Basil’s tomb.

  Then Brandt looked up.

  What the hell…was exactly right.

  * * *

  Aunush brushed away the dust as the sniper helped her up.

  They’d wanted to blow the damn metal, not the whole facility. She shoved the sniper’s hand away. “What have you done?”

  She stalked down the hallway to the storage room. To her surprise it was still intact. The grenades had done their job and taken down the large metal blockade. But what was revealed beyond made her take pause.

  Even with all the destruction, the chamber clearly had been a salt cave. Tentatively she stepped over the threshold and into the most hallowed chamber.

  “There is still the risk of a complete cave-in,” the Chinese guard warned.

  Aunush ignored him. She also ignored the smashed refrigerator with its petty contents. She had eyes only for the small alcove. Stepping over mounds of salt and rubble, she made her way to the resting place of the tablets.

  Her hand hovered over the sacred spot. Even though the air was choked with dust and smoke, Aunush sucked in a deep breath.

  They had found it. The ark that was no ark.

  The house that God had built for his greatest gift to man.

  “The Rinderpest is gone,” the Chinese guard snarled. “This has been a waste of time.”

  Aunush swung around, pulling her gun in the same motion, shooting the guard in the forehead. As the man dropped, dead before he hit the salt-covered ground, his guards pulled their weapons. She noticed though they did not even attempt to fire as the sniper had a gun on each of them.

  She indicated to the far wall where there clearly had been a passage.

  “I’d suggest you put down those weapons and start digging.”

  The two men looked to each other, then turned over their guns.

  Smart men.

  Aunush looked past the men to find Nannan at the opening. His eyes sought hers.

  “How does it feel to be the first Watcher to actually touch the Words?” she asked.

  For the first time since she’d met the pinched-faced man, Nannan smiled.

  As he had every right to.

  * * *

  Brandt leaned against the chalky wall still trying to get his bearings.

  “You guys are seeing this too, right?” Brandt asked, not sure if the sight before him wasn’t just the result of a major concussion.

  But as Talli walked around, slowly spinning in a circle, looking overhead, it became clear this was no mirage.

  Above them stood—well, not stood because it was above them. No, what hung above them was a city. A full-on city.

  Covered in pristine white salt was an ancient city. If you tilted your head just so, you could make out the city’s wall. The shops, the guard tower, and much farther down the cavern, the palace.

  Again though…what the hell?

  This was impossible, right? A salt-encrusted statue should not be above your head. And the place reeked of sulfur too. What was up with that?

  As much as Brandt tried to dismiss the sight before him he couldn’t. These were no random stalactites. What covered the cavern was man-made. Those were real houses. Real markets. Real people?

  He squinted, his vision finally expanding past a pinpoint. Amongst the buildings were people. Or at least the extremely detailed forms of people. Their robes flowed as if they were running down the street. Only they were frozen midstride, coated in salt.

  “This is…” Talli’s voice shook and then took on the tone of a prayer. “And He shall turn the city upside down, and rain down on them brimstones hard as baked clay, spread layer on layer, marked from your Lord.”

  “I don’t recognize the passage,” Brandt admitted, but with his head throbbing both from the explosion and the sight before him, he probably couldn’t recognize the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Because it’s from the Quran,” Talli said in a rush. He turned to Brandt. “This all around us, above us…this is Sodom.”

  CHAPTER 22

  ══════════════════

  GID Outpost, Jordan

  11:04 p.m. GMT

  “That was not me,” Davidson said, again.

  Rebecca believed him. That explosion had been like ten thousand times worse than their little C-4 mini-bombs. The sound of crashing walls had filled the desert air. Sand and rocks bounced along the ground, dancing to the tune of the explosion.

  Then nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  She scanned the world around them. No light came from any of the vents. They were all dark.

  Had Brandt survived? Had Davidson’s bombs detonated the much larger one? Had she doomed Brandt and Harvish and Talli? Had she doomed them all?

  “I think we should—” The words weren’t out of Lopez’s mouth when a shot pinged off the hood of the car. The corporal gunned the engine and as usual the SUV responded, leaping forward, but then it came to a stop. A hard stop.

  Lopez revved the engine as the SUV finally made it over a hump of some kind. But what kind of hump? Wasn’t this desert flat as a board?

  More shots as Rebecca felt the sensation of sinking. Literally sinking, not metaphorically.

  “Damn it,” Lopez cursed. “We’re in a sinkhole.”

  And with each passing second they were sinking even farther. Far deeper than their four-wheel drive was going to be able to overcome. They couldn’t exactly flee out into the desert, not with a gunman, make that two gunmen, as a shot ricocheted off the shattered rear window.

  Davidson held up the remaining block of C-4.

  Lopez stopped gunning the car. “Looks like the only direction we can go is down.”

  “Oh God, this isn’t happening,” Bunny moaned.

  Clutching the younger woman, pulling Bunny farther down into the well of the car, Rebecca squeezed her eyes shut because yes, this really was happening.

  * * *

  Brandt couldn’t have heard right.

  Sodom. As in Sodom and Gomorrah. From the Bible. Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt and all that.

  He’d asked Talli a few times to clarify, but the man had just wandered deeper into the cavern. Harvish too seemed mesmerized, nearly running into a wall because he was looking straight up.

  Shaking his head, Brandt forced himself to snap out of it. Sodom or not. A city turned upside down and turned to salt or not, they needed to get the hell out of here. They still had an enemy on their tail. They still had team members topside. They still had to get home.

  With the Rinderpest destroyed their first priority was to—

  Lashing out, Brandt caught himself on the wall as the cavern shook violently.

  “Get down!” he yelled as the other men snapped out of their trance and hit the deck.

  A loud crack emanated from above. Rocks and chunks of Sodom fell from the ceiling, crashing all around him. Brandt backed as far as he could until a wall stopped him. He normally wasn’t a Chicken Little, but it didn’t just sound like the world was coming down all around them, it was coming down all around them.

  Covering his head, Brandt waited for the inevitable.

  Something besides huge pieces of the city fell from overhead, landing with a reverberating boom not a few feet from him. Wan moonlight streaked from above, mottling the dust that clogged the air.

  He wiped his hand in front of him trying to clear his vision.

  Again it seemed that blow to the head was messing with his mind because he was pretty damned sure there was an SUV in front on him. That was not inevitable.

  Then Rebecca’s face popped up in the window.

  “Brandt!” she cried. “Look out!”

  * * *

  Rebecca reached a hand out as if she could do anything to save Brandt from the man with the gun.

  Luckily, Davidson could.

  One shot and the man was no longer a thre
at. That didn’t stop the other men from coming out of a passage, nor did it stop the men from ground level from shooting down at them.

  She popped open the door. “Get in!”

  Shots pinged from all sides as everyone with a gun shot at something. Brandt dove into the vehicle as Lopez stepped on the gas. The momentum of their sudden acceleration slammed the door closed behind the sergeant.

  “Get ready, Bunny,” Lopez said as he sped straight toward Harvish and Talli.

  “Ready for what?” Bunny asked, but then as Lopez swerved to the side, bringing her door right alongside the men, it became obvious.

  Bullets pierced the roof as Bunny opened her door and the other two men piled inside. They weren’t even seated when Lopez fishtailed them again, driving deeper and deeper into the cavern system.

  “Where are we going?” Brandt asked.

  “How would I know?” Lopez asked, never taking his foot off the gas. “I just figured the direction with less bullets was better than the direction with more bullets.”

  Next to her Brandt checked his arm, dabbing blood away from a bullet’s trail. “Yeah, good idea.”

  “I second that,” Harvish said as Bunny ripped off a part of her sleeve for him to use on the wound on his neck.

  The SUV was clearly feeling the punishment of the nearly two-story fall, rattling and creaking as Lopez asked it to accelerate faster than even at its best it wasn’t designed to go.

  “Something doesn’t seem weird to you?” Brandt asked Rebecca.

  What didn’t seem weird? The brightest idea they had to get away from armed gunmen was to blow a hole in the ground and hope that they landed somewhere safe only to find Brandt and the others about to be attacked.

  “Nope, nothing.”

  Brandt point up.

  Craning her neck, Rebecca looked out of the front window. Wait. Did the ceiling have bas-reliefs? Was it an elaborate work of art? No. This was no scaled-down version of an ancient city. It was an ancient city.

  “What the hell?”

  * * *

  Brandt couldn’t help but chuckle. “That is the question of the hour.”

  But Rebecca’s mind worked far faster than his or even Talli’s. She reached out and picked a large chunk of salt from his shoulder.

  “Sodom,” Rebecca breathed out. “That is Sodom above us.”

  “From the Quran,” Bunny added. “The description from the Quran.”

  “Of course,” Rebecca answered. “The Quran made mention of the city being turned upside down. Of course, most scholars thought that was metaphorical…”

  Even though Rebecca didn’t finish her statement, it was pretty damned clear. Most scholars, of course, were not driving under the city itself. With the exception of the salt being crunched under their tires and the groaning of the engine, the car fell silent as they raced beneath the biblical city.

  “I thought Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a rain of fire?” Harvish asked.

  Rebecca shook her head, preparing to answer, but Davidson beat her to it. “It depends on which passage you read and its interpretation.”

  Brandt was well aware of this fact. It was what had set him to study the Bible on his own. His own questions about how could the Bible contradict itself, yet still be the true word of God? Seldom were you ever afforded the opportunity to see the reality in the flesh.

  Or in this case the salt.

  * * *

  Davidson stared up at the wonder above them. Raised by the Knot, he had been exposed to some of the world’s most cherished religious relics. Yet this, this Sodom surpassed nearly it all. Not just in size but in magnitude. This was God’s might incarnate. His power shone in each and every grain of salt.

  He’d turned an entire city upside down.

  He knew that others would debate that fact. Try to claim this was some kind of re-creation. But there was no doubt in Davidson’s mind. God’s hand was clear. If he had been looking for a sign from the Father above, Davidson was pretty sure he could stop searching.

  Then a bullet parted his hair. Ducking down, he swung his vision to the rear window. A speck at the other end of the cavern prepped for another shot. Davidson didn’t need his scope to know that it was the sniper.

  Perhaps Davidson shouldn’t have been so quick to assume that God’s message for him was one of mercy. Perhaps God had meant this a warning for all of his wrongdoing with the Knot.

  The only thing Davidson knew for sure was that sniper needed to get taken out. Pronto.

  Before he could grab his rifle, Lopez yelled, “Window! Up!”

  Davidson had absolutely no idea what the corporal meant until he turned around to see where they were headed. An extremely narrow archway lay ahead, and Lopez wasn’t slowing down. Davidson had no idea if the SUV could even make it through the gap, but the side mirrors certainly weren’t.

  Hand cranking, Davidson brought the window up just as they hit the pass. Metal screeched against the salty walls as the mirrors snapped off like late autumn branches. They were nearly through the gap when the rear bumper snagged. With a horrendous metallic scream, the bumper was ripped off.

  They were free though, and Lopez swerved to the right, out of sight of the sniper.

  “That is how you do it!”

  “Look out!” Rebecca yelled from the backseat, pointing to an object ahead of them.

  But Lopez had no time to brake. They ran straight into…

  “A salt donkey?” Lopez asked as granules of salt rained down upon them. “Was that really a salt donkey I just hit?”

  Apparently it was. And the farther they got into this cavern the more “objects” were in the way. Lopez swerved and cursed, then swerved again.

  “Slow it down,” Brandt instructed.

  Even slower the going was still difficult. They passed sodium chloride cows, pack mules, and the worst, people. All encrusted in salt. Then they crested a ridge. Lopez slammed on the brakes. Their SUV stopped at the lip of a valley. A valley with a city tucked within its borders.

  “Well then,” Lopez said, leaning his arms against the steering wheel. “Welcome to Gomorrah.”

  * * *

  “Do it!” Aunush yelled to her men above. She could hear the engine roar. What were they waiting for?

  The demolished Jeep in front of her was probably why. Their first attempt to get a vehicle down here had ended rather, well, messy. This time they had weighed down the back of the Jeep so it didn’t land nose-first. Or at least that was the hope.

  Even through their fear, the men must have sensed how very close they were to the prize. They had found Sodom. It was all around them. The Ten Commandments could not be far behind. And the enemy was ahead of them. That could not be let to stand.

  Finally the Jeep’s brake was released and the vehicle sped toward the sinkhole. They must have given it enough acceleration since it hit the slight incline and sailed, airborne for a moment, then fell through the large hole. The rear axle tilted down just as she had predicted, and the Jeep hit the ground hard, but intact.

  Her team, so very thinned since convening in Bulgaria, loaded into the Jeep.

  They did not have much farther to go. Not as the signal on her screen blinked at a slower and slower rate.

  Time to play catch-up.

  * * *

  Rebecca studied the salt figure before her as the SUV made its way slowly through the heart of Gomorrah. Every feature of the woman in front of her was captured perfectly by the grains. Even the tiny crow’s feet at the edge of her eyes stood out. The folds of her dress draped against her leg. The shocked O that her lips formed. No one that day so long ago had expected to be turned to salt.

  Stop it, Rebecca rebuked herself. She was a scientist, not a tourist. She did not take things at face value. Her mind searched for a biological reason these cities had been encased in salt. Perhaps the climate? The hypersalinity of the Dead Sea? Scholars had long debated the factual reason for Sodom and Gomorrah’s demise. From famine to earthquakes to plague
, each had been floated as the possible cause, but without proof it would be an argument to last the ages.

  Now though it got a little tougher to chalk it up to natural disaster. Especially with Sodom upside down. That would take some interesting physics to explain. If they ever could. It would take teams of scientists decades to sort through the findings here.

  So preoccupied by the mystery, Rebecca hit her temple against the seat in front of hers as the SUV lurched forward.

  “Lopez,” Brandt rumbled, “I said ‘at a crawl.’”

  “Wasn’t me, Sarge,” the corporal said as the SUV rolled to a stop. Lopez turned over the ignition several times. The engine knocked loudly yet wouldn’t turn over.

  “What’s wrong?” Brandt asked.

  Lopez indicated to the hood of the car that was dented and cracked, then to the trail of gasoline they had left behind them. “Take your pick. A jacked-up engine block or the leaking fuel tank.”

  “Does it really matter?” Harvish queried, pointing to the clogged city street in front of them. “We’re in the worst phantom traffic jam known to man.”

  “Hike out?” Talli asked.

  Bunny groaned audibly beside Rebecca. The younger woman might not want to have to walk, but Rebecca was secretly thrilled. To have all of this history around her, yet not be able to get out and investigate? To not see so much in passing, her muscles ached to get out and explore, really explore the cavern.

  However, she knew exactly what Brandt would have said to that request. “Hell no,” would have been the politest of the various responses. Now though? Rebecca waited with bated breath for his answer to Talli.

  Brandt shifted in his seat, looking behind them and then in front of them. Finally he sighed. “Looks like we’re hoofing it.” He turned to his men. “Pack what you can easily carry, destroy the rest.”

  Rebecca’s enthusiasm was slightly dampened as Brandt’s words harshly reminded them all that they were being followed. Hounded, really. And the Disciples could not be taken lightly. Especially not here. If they really were as connected to the days of Moses and beyond, Gomorrah was practically their home court.