SANDSTORM sf-1

by James Rollins

  Still, Omaha had not been happy about his assignment. Since Safia’s arrival, he had followed her every step, sat next to her, his eyes seldom leaving her face. She had felt a flush at his attention, half embarrassment, half irritation. But she understood his relief at discovering her alive and didn’t rankle against his attention.

  Painter, on the other hand, held back from her, dispassionate, clinical. He kept busy, listening to Safia’s story without any reaction. Something had changed between them, become awkward. She knew what it was. She forced her hand not to rub her neck, where he had held the dagger. He had shown a side of himself, a fierce edge, sharper than the dagger. Neither knew how to react. She was too shocked, unsettled. He had closed off.

  Focusing on the mystery here, Safia led her team up a steep trail to the hilltop fortress. As they climbed, the entire system of ruins opened out around them. It had been a decade since Safia had last laid eyes upon the ruins. Before, there had only been the citadel, in disrepair, just a mound of stones, and a short section of wall. Now the entire encircling ramparts had been freed from the sands, partially rebuilt by archaeologists, along with the stumplike bases of the seven towers that once guarded its walls.

  Even the sinkhole, thirty feet deep, had been excavated and sifted through.

  But most of the attention had been devoted to the citadel. The piled stones had been fitted back together like a jigsaw puzzle. The base of the castle was square in shape, thirty yards on each side, supporting its round watchtower.

  Safia imagined guards pacing the parapets, wary of marauders, watch-ful of approaching caravans. Below the fortress, a busy town had prospered: merchants hawked wares of handcrafted pottery, dyed cloths, wool rugs, olive oil, palm beer, date wine; stonemasons labored to build higher walls; and throughout the town, dogs barked, camels brayed, and children ran among the stalls, bright with laughter. Beyond the walls, irrigated fields spread green with sorghum, cotton, wheat, and barley. It had been an oasis of commerce and life.

  Safia’s eyes drifted to the sinkhole. Then one day, it all came to an end. A city destroyed. People had fled in superstitious terror. And so Ubar vanished under the sweep of sands and years.

  But all that was all on the surface. Stories of Ubar went deeper, tales of magical powers, tyrant kings, vast treasures, a city of a thousand pillars.

  Safia glanced at the two women, one old, one young, identical twins separated by decades. How did both stories of Ubar hang together: the mystical and the mundane? The answers lay hidden here. Safia was sure of it.

  She reached the gateway into the citadel and stared up at the fortress.

  Painter flicked on a flashlight and shone a bright beam into the dark interior of the citadel. “We should begin our search.”

  Safia stepped over the threshold. As soon as she entered the fortress, the winds died completely, and the distant rumble of the sandstorm dimmed.

  Lu’lu joined her now.

  Barak followed them, turning on the metal detector. He began to sweep behind her as if wiping away her footprints from the sand.

  Seven steps down the hall, a windowless chamber opened, a man-made cavern. The back wall was a collapsed ruin of tumbled stone.

  “Sweep the room,” Safia directed Barak.

  The tall Arab nodded and began his search for any hidden artifacts.

  Painter and Clay set up the ground-penetrating radar as she had instructed.

  Safia swung her flashlight over the walls and ceiling. They were unadorned. Someone had lit a campfire at one time. Soot stained the roof.

  Safia paced the floor, eyes searching for any clue. Barak marched back and forth, intent on his metal detector, searching floor and walls. As the room was small, it didn’t take long. He came up empty. Not even a single ping.

  Safia stood in the center of the room. This chamber was the only inner sanctum still remaining. The tower overhead had collapsed in on itself, destroying whatever rooms lay above.

  Painter activated the ground-penetrating radar, flicking on its portable monitor. Clay entered the room, slowly dragging the red sled over the sandy stone floor, pulling it like a yoked ox. Safia came over and studied the scan, more familiar with reading the results. If there were any secret basement rooms, they would show up on the radar.

  The screen remained dark. Nothing. Solid rock. Limestone.

  Safia straightened. If there was some secret heart to Ubar, it had to lie underground. But where?

  Maybe Omaha was having better luck with his team.

  Safia lifted her radio. “Omaha, can you hear me?”

  A short pause. “Yeah, what’s up? Did you find anything?”

  “No. Anything down in the pit?”

  “We’re just finishing with the sweep, but so far nothing.”

  Safia frowned. These were the two best spots to expect to find answers. Here was the spiritual center of Ubar, its royal house. The ancient queen would have wanted immediate access to the secret heart of Ubar. She would have kept its entrance close.

  Safia turned to Lu’lu. “You mentioned that after the tragedy here, the queen sealed Ubar and scattered its keys.”

  Lu’lu nodded. “Until the time was ripe for Ubar to open again.”

  “So the gate wasn’t destroyed when the sinkhole opened.” That was a bit of luck. Too much luck. She pondered this, sensing a clue.

  “Maybe we should bring the keys here,” Painter said.

  “No.” She dismissed this possibility. The keys would only become important once the gate was found. But where, if not at the citadel?

  Painter sighed, arms crossed. “What if we tried recalibrating the radar, heightened the intensity, searched deeper.”

  Safia shook her head.

  “No, no, we’re looking at this all wrong. Too high tech. That’s not going to solve this puzzle.”

  Painter had a slightly hurt look. Technology was his bailiwick.

  “We’re thinking too modern. Metal detectors, radar, grids, mapping things out. This has all been done before. The gate, to survive this long, undisturbed, must be entrenched in the natural landscape. Hidden in plain sight. Or else it would’ve been found before. We need to stop leading with our tools and start thinking with our heads.”

  She found Lu’lu staring back at her. The hodja wore the face of the queen who had sealed Ubar. But did the two share the same nature?

  Safia pictured Reginald Kensington frozen forever in glass, a symbol of pain and torment. The hodja had remained silent all these years. She must’ve dug up the body, taken it to their mountain lair, and hidden it away. Only the discovery of Ubar’s keys had broken the woman’s silence, loosened her tongue to reveal her secrets. There was a pitiless determination in all this.

  And if the ancient queen had been like the hodja, she would have protected Ubar with that same pitiless determination, a mercilessness that bordered on the ruthless.

  Safia felt a well of ice rise around her, remembering her initial question. How did the gate conveniently survive the sinkhole’s collapse? She knew the answer. She closed her eyes with dawning dismay. She had been looking at this all wrong. Backward. It all made a sick sense.

  Painter must have sensed her sudden distress. “Safia…?”

  “I know how the gate was sealed.”

  9:32 A.M.

  PAINTER HURRIEDback from the cinder-block building. Safia had sent him running to fetch the Rad-X scanner. It had been a part of the equipment taken from Cassandra’s SUV. Apparently Cassandra had even demonstrated it to Safia back in Salalah, showing her how the iron heart bore a telltale sign of antimatter decay, to convince Safia of the true reason for this search.

  Along with the Rad-X scanner, Painter had discovered an entire case of analyzing equipment, more sophisticated than anything he was acquainted with, but there was a hungry gleam in Coral’s eye as she had looked at the equipment. Her only comment: “Nice toys.”

  Painter hauled the entire case. Safia was onto something.

  The storm fought
him as he passed through the wooden gate and into the ruins. Sand peppered every exposed inch of skin, wind tore at his scarf and cloak. He leaned into the wind. The day had turned to twilight. And this was only the front edge of the storm.

  To the north, the world ended in a wall of darkness, flashing in spidery crackles of blue fire. Static charges. Painter smelled the electricity in the air. NASA had done studies for a proposed Mars mission to judge how equipment and men would fare in such sandstorms. It wasn’t the dust and sand that most threatened their electronic equipment, but the extreme static charge to the air, formed from a combination of dry air and kinetic energy. Enough to fry circuits in seconds, create agonizing static bursts on skin. And now this storm was swirling up a giant squall of static.

  And it was about to roll over them.

  Painter ducked toward the low hill, burrowing through the wind and blowing sand. As he reached the area, he headed down instead of up, following the steep trail that descended into the sinkhole. The deep pit stretched east to west along its longer axis. On the west end, the citadel sat atop its hill, maintaining a vigil over the sinkhole.

  Safia and her team crouched on the other side, at the eastern end of the chasm. By now, the Rahim had gathered, too, around the rim of the pit. Most lay flat on their bellies to lessen their exposure to the wind.

  Ignoring them, Painter slipped and slid down the sandy path. Reaching the bottom, he hurried forward.

  Safia, Omaha, and Kara were bent over the monitor of the ground-penetrating radar unit. Safia was tapping at the screen.

  “Right there. See that pocket. It’s only three feet from the surface.”

  Omaha leaned back. “Clay, drag the radar sled back two feet. Yeah, right there.” He bent over the monitor again.

  Painter joined them. “What did you find?”

  “A chamber,” Safia said.

  Omaha frowned. “It’s only a remnant of the old well. Long gone dry. I’m sure it’s already been documented by other researchers.”

  Painter moved closer as Omaha clicked a button on the monitor. A vague three-dimensional cross section of the terrain under the radar sled appeared on the monitor. It was conical in shape, narrow at the top and wider at the bottom.

  “It’s only ten feet at its widest,” Omaha said. “Just an uncollapsed section of the original cistern.”

  “It does look like a blind pocket,” Kara agreed.

  Safia straightened up. “No, it’s not.” She faced Painter. “Did you bring that radiation detector?”

  Painter lifted the case. “Got it.”

  “Run the scanner.”

  Painter opened the case, snapped the detection rod on the Rad-X scanner’s base, and activated it. The red needle swept back and forth, calibrating. A blinking green light steadied to a solid glow. “All ready.”

  He slowly turned in a circle. What was Safia suspecting?

  The red needle remained at the zero point.

  “Nothing,” he called back.

  “I told you-” Omaha started.

  He was cut off. “Now check the cliff face.” Safia pointed to the rock wall. “Get close.”

  Painter did as she directed, the scanner held out before him like a divining rod. Sand swirled around inside the pit, a mini-dust bowl, stirred by the winds overhead. He hunched over the scanner as he reached the cliff face. He ran the detection rod over the rock face, mostly limestone.

  The needle shimmied on the dial.

  He held the scanner more steadily, shielding it from the wind with his own body. The needle settled to a stop. It was a very weak reading, barely shifting the needle, but it was a positive reading.

  He shouted over his shoulder. “I got something here!”

  Safia waved back. “We have to dig where the sled is positioned. Three feet down. Open the pocket.”

  Omaha checked his watch. “We only have another twenty minutes.”

  “We can do it. It’s just packed sand and small rocks. If several people dig at the same time…”

  Painter agreed, feeling a surge of excitement. “Do it.”

  In less then a minute, a ring of diggers set to work.

  Safia stood back, cradling her arm in the sling.

  “Are you ready to explain yourself?” Omaha said.

  Safia nodded. “I had to be sure. We’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We all know the sinkhole opened under Ubar’s township and destroyed half the town, driving folks away in superstitious fear of God’s wrath. After this disaster, the last queen of Ubar sealed its heart, to protect its secrets.”

  “So?” Kara asked, standing beside the hodja.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the gate was conveniently spared during the devastation here? That as the city folk fled, the queen stayed behind and performed all these secret acts: sealed the gate in such a manner that it has never been discovered, forged and hid keys at sacred sites of that time.”

  “I suppose,” Kara said.

  Omaha brightened visibly. “I see what you’re getting at.” He glanced to the diggers, back to Safia, grabbing her good arm. “We’ve been looking at this ass-backward.”

  “Would someone care to explain it to us layfolk?” Painter asked, irritated at Omaha’s understanding.

  Omaha explained. “The chronology has to be wrong. Chicken-and-egg scenario. We’ve believed the sinkhole was the reason Ubar was sealed.”

  “Now think about it in a new light,” Safia added. “As if you were the queen. What would such a disaster matter to the royal house anyway? The true wealth of Ubar, the source of its power, lay elsewhere. The queen could’ve simply rebuilt. She had the wealth and the power.”

  Omaha chimed in, the pair working as an experienced team. “The town was not important. It was only a mask hiding the true Ubar. A facade. A tool.”

  “One turned to a new use,” Safia said. “A means of hiding the gate.”

  Kara shook her head, clearly as confused as Painter.

  Omaha sighed. “Something truly terrified the queen, enough to drive her from the wealth and power of Ubar, force her and her descendants to live a nomadic existence, existing on the fringe of civilization. Do you really think a simple sinkhole like this would’ve done it?”

  “I guess not,” Painter said. He noted the excitement growing between Safia and Omaha. They were in their element. He was excluded, on the outside looking in. A flare of jealousy prickled through him.

  Safia picked up the thread. “Something terrified the royal family, enough that they wanted Ubar locked from the world. I don’t know what that event was, but the queen did not act rashly. Look at how methodical her preparations were afterward. She prepared keys, hid them in places sacred to the people, wrapped them in riddles. Does this sound like an irrational response? It was calculated, planned, and executed. As was her first step in sealing Ubar.”

  Safia glanced to Omaha.

  He filled in the final blank. “The queen deliberately caused the sinkhole to collapse.”

  A stunned moment of silence followed.

  “She destroyed her own town?” Kara finally asked. “Why?”

  Safia nodded. “The town was only a means to an end. The queen put it to its final use. To bury Ubar’s gate.”

  Omaha glanced all around the rim. “The act also had a psychological purpose. It drove folks away, frightened them from ever approaching. I wager the queen herself spread some of the stories about God’s wrath. What better way to hang a religious ‘Do Not Trespass’ sign on these lands?”

  “How did you figure all that out?” Painter asked.

  “It was only a conjecture,” Safia said. “I had to test it. If the sinkhole was used to bury something, then there must be something down here. Since the metal detectors discovered nothing, either the object was too deep or it was some type of chamber.”

  Painter glanced at the diggers.

  Safia continued, “As with the tomb sites, the queen cloaked clues in symbols and mythology. Even the first key. The iron heart.
It symbolized the heart of Ubar. And in most towns, the heart of their community is the well. So she hid the Gate of Ubar in the well, buried them in sand, as the iron heart was sealed in sandstone, then dropped the sinkhole on top of them.”

  “Driving people away,” Painter mumbled. He cleared his throat and spoke more clearly. “What about the radiation signature?”

  “It would take dynamite to drop this sinkhole,” Omaha answered.

  Safia nodded. “Or some form of an antimatter explosion.”

  Painter glanced at Lu’lu. The hodja had remained stoically quiet the entire time. Had her ancestors really utilized such a power?

  The old woman seemed to note his attention. She stirred. Her eyes were hidden by goggles. “No. You cast aspersions. The queen, our ancestor, would not kill so many innocent people just to hide Ubar’s secret.”

  Safia crossed to her. “No human remains were ever found in or around the sinkhole. She must have found some way to clear the city. A ceremony or something. Then sank the hole. I doubt anyone died here.”

  Still, the hodja was unconvinced, even taking a step back from Safia.

  A shout rose from the diggers. “We found something!” Danny yelled.

  All their faces turned to him.

  “Come see before we dig further.”

  Painter and the others all shifted over. Coral and Clay stepped aside for them. Danny pointed his shovel.

  In the center of the trenchlike hole, the dark red sand had turned to snow.

  “What is that?” Kara asked.

  Safia hopped down, dropped to a knee, and ran her hand over the surface. “It’s not sand.” She glanced up. “It’s frankincense.”

  “What?” Painter asked.

  “Silver frankincense,” Safia elaborated, and stood up. “The same as what was found plugging the iron heart. An expensive form of cement. It’s stoppered the top of the hidden chamber like a cork in a bottle.”

  “And below it?” Painter asked.

  Safia shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out.”