Call Me Crazy (Janet Lomayestewa, Tracker)

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  The seventh pillar!

  A sarcophagus, not at all like that of the world-famous one in Cheop’s Pyramid but much more exquisite, held center stage. Yet it was what was behind that captured Craig’s interest. A small four-foot-by-two-foot-by-two-foot box, enameled with what looked to be pure gold. A carved cherub perched at either end.

  He swallowed. Holy shit! The Ark of the covenant!

  Then, the prototype of the modern-day, cyber interface’s click-and-point found its target with a round of the AK-47’s burst of bullets, reverberating again and again.

  * * * * *

  Quickly, Janet, along with the other three, donned the flowing white robes and roped headdresses provided by their Bedouin captors, most anxious to rid themselves of the crazy woman.

  Mounting the provided camels took a little longer. Yasmin, the most experienced, instructed the others. Sam, as short as he was, had the most difficulty. His Bollywood smile faded as he muttered an inaudible oath after each try. Then, loudly, “Damn’t it to hell!” The audible oath propelled him up and into the blanket-covered, wooden saddle. Eventually, with each camel bearing a goatskin of water secured from the pommels, the caravan set off.

  Still in possession of the 4x4’s compass, Janet led the way on her long, slender necked bull camel with its disdaining tread. Riding a camel wasn’t that much different than riding the burros of her youth. Without even the use of her whip, the smelly camels trotted at an inordinately fast past.

  The Bedouins had told Yasmin an oil flare was about twenty kilometers away. By the sun’s position, Janet estimated that it was close to five o’clock. Nuke would soon be meeting with his contact. She could only hope there would be some kind of delay. The one thing on her side was that at this point Nuke would no longer be imagining himself as the quarry.

  She mentally shrugged. Even arriving late, it didn’t matter. She would track Nuke to the ends of the earth. Once she killed him and once she was sure Molly was holding her own in this world, Janet planned to drink herself into oblivion. Well, maybe not. First, she planned to lose herself in Jack’s sex-crazed embrace for several days. If he stuck around for that long. What would become of her and Jack? They both lived intensely, passionately. Could they return to a hum-drum world – and keep their passion for each other alive? Or would the ennui of the Ordinary World smother that precious commodity, passion?

  Ahead, the desert rolled in giant waves of endless sand. The spindly legs of the camels crested each dune, speeding the caravan of four toward its destination. At some points, though, the feldspar-colored sand was so soft, she and the others had to dismount and lead the camels up over the steeper dunes. The sun broiled down on them mercilessly. After a while, her eyes felt like dried dates, her face like sandpaper. An effective and cheap microdermabrasion treatment, she thought, but the Empty Quarter was not your luxury spa resort. She pressed her lips closed to keep her mouth and throat from drying out. Ducking her head, she buried her face in the billowy, protective robe furnished her, and let her camel follow its instinctive trail, the millennium-old Frankincense Road.

  Jack drew up alongside her. He slouched in the saddle like a veteran jockey. “We need to break for water.”

  She glanced behind. Sam was bouncing wildly in the saddle and clutching the pommel as if to shift the camel into its lowest gear. Yasmin rode loosely, but her face showed her utter fatigue. It had been a long day for everyone. Janet nodded, and they all dismounted to shake out the kinks. The image of a frosted can of Bud was so tantalizing she was almost lightheaded with longing.

  “How much longer do you think?” Yasmin asked her.

  She took the barest of sips from the goatskin water bag and wrinkled her nose at the bitter taste. “I don’t know. What do you think?” she asked Jack. “Maybe another ten miles?”

  He spit out the water. “Uuuuhgg! Damn, that’s bitter.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I would think the desert would have to level out somewhere soon for any kind of oil rigging.”

  After several more miles of body-syphoning plodding, the dunes did level out somewhat. It was Sam who first spotted the flare. “Off to your right!” he yelled.

  The flare’s fiery glow was almost lost against the competing brilliance of the lowering sun. Another half mile, and she could feel the flair’s scorching heat. The camels weren’t happy about approaching any closer and began a song and dance composed of coughs and snorts and sidesteps.

  “If this is it,” Jack said, glancing around the barren sand flat, “if x marks the spot, we’re in trouble.”

  “This isn’t it.” She pointed just beyond the flair’s immediate perimeter. “Tire tracks.” Not more than a couple of hours old, from her vantage point, and leading north. Her gaze followed the direction and spotted in the distance the outcropping of red rock.

  “There she blow!” she said, nodding toward the unusual rock formation, almost like a ship’s prow. She was galvanized by the sighting. The object of her quest was close at hand. She was ready for this trial of endurance to come to an end.

  Within forty-five minutes, the fast-paced camels had covered the straight-away to the rocky ship-like formation. At the entrance, next to the almost faded tire tracks, she dismounted and removed her sunglasses. Palms braced on kneecaps, she studied the prints. A breeze was escalating into wind, make differentiating challenging and reading their thought imprints virtually impossible. “Three people have gone in. One has come out – pulling something solid.” With difficulty, she identified Nuke’s footprints going in, but if it was he who came out, what he dragged with him obliterated his prints.

  “You think that something solid was the Ark of the Covenant?” Yasmin asked from astride her camel. The wind was whipping her head cloth around her narrow face. Her eyelashes were weighted by sand crystals, and her bandaged hands were rags of filth. Janet made a mental note to remove them.

  Jack dismounted and shook his head slowly. “I doubt it was the Ark.”

  Sam joined her and Jack. “Why not?” His voice was a dry croak.

  “Well, think about it. The Ark was bristling with a high voltage energy source. Without proper knowledge of handling the Ark, imagine a body drenched with conductive salts and sweat. Sparks of electricity shoot through the body and you have instantaneous death.”

  Leave it to Jack to think in terms of physical dynamics rather than spiritual. But then he might just have something. “Then you think the Ark of the Covenant is still back in there?” she asked, nodding toward the canyon’s entrance. “In Menelek’s tomb?”

  “Its contents possibly are,” Jack said. “Sam, you remember the Bagdad Battery?”

  Sam’s dark sand-crusted eyes looked bewildered.

  “Hmmm. Well, in ancient Mesopotamia archeologists discovered a terracotta vase containing the residue of vinegar, copper, mercury, gold, and an iron or corrugated nail. Combined correctly, these element could produce a high voltage electrical current. Such a battery would be well within the level of expertise for the ancient people of Moses to construct. And to what better purpose than a built-in, anti-theft device protecting with lethal jolts of energy the most prized and sacred possession of the Israelites, their stone tablet, the Ten Commandments?”

  “And joined with the missing quartz chip from the Hopi’s stone tablet,” Sam pondered, “the outcome could produce an enormous vertical source of energy like Tesla’s magnetic field strength? A nuclear bomb? Or something even more powerful?”

  She shot a glance at Sam. Tesla? Magnetic field strength? Why would a professor of archeology and ‘boring things like linguistics’ possess such knowledge?

  “So what’s it to be?” Yasmin shouted from her camel perch to make herself heard over the rising wind. “Do we go in to see who didn’t come out – or track the one who did?”

  “Bottom line,” Jack said, raising his voice, “Is it the Hopi quartz chip we’re after, the Ark’s contents, or this whacko Nuke?”

  Glances were exchanged. Janet rose
from her squat, taking her camel’s bridle. “Nuke could still be here. I’m going in to find out.”

  “Not without me,” Jack said.

  Yasmin and Sam both nodded they were in on the game plan.

  Quickly hobbling the camels as best they could under the lashing wind, they filed into the canyon’s narrow entrance. The dimming and eerily yellow afternoon light and swirling winds within the walls were making tracking the prints difficult for Janet. She was acutely aware of the possibility Nuke could be hidden somewhere in the rocks above, waiting to bullet-blast her and the others. But then his kind usually believed himself smarter than others. Most likely, he felt he had already shaken her off his trail.

  Nevertheless, she kept her gaze shifting up and down, left and right. The wind drove the sand before her, obliterating prints. The thick cloud of churning sand made sight impossible. The wind’s howl made audible detection difficult. The thick air was ladened with the ominous smell of brimstone.

  There was only one way to go and that was straight on through the canyon -- beyond the boulders, past the rubble of rocks and pebbles, across the sand flats. After nearly thirty minutes of fighting the stinging, rotating sand, they arrived at the canyon’s boxed end, which was only somewhat better protected against the wind. In its center was a blue-green spring-fed pond canopied by towering date palms, their fronds whipping wildly.

  “We should have brought our goatskin bags,” Yasmin groaned at the sight of water.

  Janet’s eyes were straining to distinguish the various prints in the sand around the pond. Prints that tracked back and forth between it and the sheer rock wall – prints of those seeking shade from the earlier heat? They could have remained beneath the relief offered by the palms.

  While the other three knelt to quaff the fresh water, she followed the sets of prints. In one set, the rolling movement of the feet were compensating for the slow turning of the head and body, as if in searching.

  Novice agents found it mind blowing that she could identify emotions like anger, apprehension, or happiness in the footprint. When a person was happy, they tended to hold their head up, and conversely, when sad they tended to bow their head and slump their shoulders. This would show up in the pressure release of the print. Through pressure release prints, she could even tell when a person last ate. She could also detect an injury or disease, because the body made compensating movements. It was like looking into the person’s soul – which Nuke didn’t have.

  The nearly-concealed entrance into the tunnel didn’t surprise her. The fact that Jack was right behind her didn’t surprise her either. He was always there for her. Had her back. Or did he? Was self-interest a greater motivation for him to stick close to her? Damn, she wished she didn’t care about him so much. But she had cared about other men . . . and had come to realize they weren’t worth her suffering.

  And yet it was Jack to whom she kept surrendering at every turn. What a fool she was.

  Ducking, she stepped inside. The familiar dry, musty air, a perfect preservative, flashed her back to Arizona’s Three Mesas. She was on familiar ground.

  “Holy crap,” he muttered as she forged ahead into the darkness. “We’ve got to be walking back at least three-thousand years in time.”

  Sam and Yasmin caught up with them. Fingers touching the cold stone wall, Janet proceeded almost blindly, guided only by the feel of the spiky, raveled rope anchored into the damp wall. Then, after less than a hundred yards, she perceived a pinpoint of light. At last, the tunnel opened into an enormous limestone cavern, lit by an opening to the outside several stories high overhead and several feet in diameter. Through it poured yellowish green light and the unholy sound of groaning wind.

  “The column,” Jack murmured, distracting her. “You were right, sweetheart. Seven pillars!”

  Her gaze was fastened, not on the rectangular stone column but on the bullet-riddled body of the man crumpled beside a resplendent sarcophagus at the top of a low marble staircase. She climbed the set of stairs. She knelt and felt the neck. Still warm. Whoever it was had been dead less than a couple of hours, at most.

  “The man’s not Nuke,” Yasmin said in disappointment close behind her, as she scooped up the man’s AK-47. He wouldn’t need it now.

  Some distance in back of the sarcophagus was an oblong rise of marble. Something rectangular had recently set upon it, and its removal had displaced the millennium of accumulated sand. “Nuke has the Ark and the chip,” Janet said, pointing toward evidence where a box had once been. “He double-crossed our carcass here.”

  “What if,” Jack said, nodding at the alabaster lid of the sarcophagus, “Moses’ stone tablets are inside that along with the electrical-based energy source instead? What if the Queen of Sheba hid them inside her son’s coffin before she left for Ethiopia. What better place to hide something than a harsh, remote environment like The Empty Quarter?”

  “And the Ark was left as a red herring?” Sam said. “It’s contents imitations? We can solve that now – open the sarcophagus.”

  “You of all people should know about the curse of the Pharaohs,” Jack taunted.

  In the rapidly dimming chalky light, Sam’s grin was pure wattage. “Ahhh, but Menelek was not a pharaoh.”

  Something about Sam’s smile made Janet think of the Artful Dodger. “You’d need crow bars to pry that lid off.”

  Jack shrugged. “Check it out at your own risk. I’m for going after the quartz chip.”

  “And our Nuke,” Yasmin reminded them in a tone akin to a feline’s warning purr. “Let’s not forget him.”

  “I don’t think we’re going anywhere until this sand storm passes,” Janet said, nodding upward at the ceiling hole, where the sun’s waning light had been significantly diminished by the sand storm.

  “How long does a sand storm last?” Sam asked.

  “Two hours, two days, who knows,” Yasmin said. “But they go as quickly as they come. Meanwhile out there,” she nodded back toward the tunnel exit, “that sand storm will nearly peel the skin off a human.”

  “Then Nuke is most likely caught up in the sand storm, as well,” Janet said, feeling her first sense of pleasure in quite a long while.

  “That solves it,” Jack said win a finality that defied challenge, “we hold up here until the storm passes.”

  For the next six hours, the wind growled with a ferocity that was petrifying. Against the cave’s wall, she wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her head atop them, forcing herself to relax, forcing each knotted muscle to let go. Jack hunkered next to her. She could tell his mind was busy assessing, categorizing, ticking off possibilities. Yasmin curled on the steps as if to try to sleep, and Sam took up his watch next to her. At one point, he rose from his perch on the steps to circle Menelek’s fabulous sarcophagus. After a moment’s hesitation, his fingers cautiously reached out to tap-tap around its lid’s edges.

  Janet knew that on each of their minds as they waited out the storm was what indeed was in the sarcophagus.

  However, after the wind had abruptly ceased, she and the others found that the camels had not waited out the storm but had been stampeded by its blasting winds.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “I’m telling you, I’m coming with you!” Jack insisted.

  She slung the AK-47 over her shoulder. “You’ll only slow me down. Stay here. There’s water and shade. If you feel like you just have to do something, try to round up the camels – and the goatskin bags. But don’t venture too far away.”

  She thought about returning to the pond for water, but the roundtrip would waste a precious hour or more and, worse, she couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t leak like a sieve. A shoe, perhaps, but the water would either slosh out or dry up all too soon.

  He shook his head in exasperation, then drew her to him and kissed her fiercely. This was a man with an unwavering strength. A man who believed in his destiny and in his ability to conquer all obstacles. Was she one of the obstacles in his path? Damn�
��t, her lack of hair clouded her judgment, her natural instincts. When he released her, she was breathless. “You’re one hell of a female, Janet Woman-Yes-To-You!”

  Smiling, she groped for her sun glasses. “You’re one hell of a CSD, Jack the Ripper,” she said in a careless voice.

  He gripped both her hands, and for a long moment his eyes probed hers, as if searching for something deep within her. In his eyes she thought she saw not lust but love. The kind of love that calls one home. But like the sand storm that love light was gone as quickly as it had come. She made her farewells to Sam and Yasmin, who stood looking after her like lost lambs.

  The night sky was crystalline, and billions of stars glittered liked diamonds. The half moon was full enough to track by. Except the storm had annihilated Nuke’s tracks. She stopped in her own. What direction?

  If Nuke survived the sand storm, would he head back west over the mountains to Sana’a? South to one of Yemen’s hospitable ports? East toward Oman’s port city of Muscat? Or north through Rub' al Khali, The Empty Quarter. On the other side of it, squatted Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital.

  The phrase “Get the hell out of Dodge,” would imply heading south, the shortest, safest route to escape. North, one of the hottest, driest, and most unyielding places on earth, would be the last place to head. With its desiccating heat, the orange-red sands had long been judged too unforgiving for all but the most resourceful humans.

  But Nuke was one of the most resourceful of humans.

  She turned her footsteps north into the 250,000 square miles of sand. With no water, no transportation, no tracks, she had nothing to guide her but the eternal spirit that talks. Nuke had a four wheeler, most likely water and gas, the Hopi quartz chip and quite possibly the Ark of the Covenant.

  He had chosen to take a path from which few could return with any saneness, far less any humanness. She had to think like him and as a tracker had to become him. It was going to be a deadly chess game between instinct and spirit. He was not foolish. He had a warrior’s survival instincts. If he did as the CIA had taught their covert military groups and secretive spooks, he would plant false trails, backtrack, or make changes in counter-tracking that would consume a lot of her time . . . that was if he knew he was being trailed. But he was a pressure-cooker person – even that was evident in his stride, the way he lunged off the balls of his feet.