Next, he extracted the Prester John scroll from its leather bag. He dipped his finger in Philip’s wound and used his friend’s blood to draw a diagram on the back of the vellum. As soon as it had dried, he placed the letter back in the pouch and hung it around his neck.
After darkness had fallen, he ordered his men to move all the animals out of the cave. Ropes were tied from four mules to the vertical mine timbers at the entrance. From a safe distance, the mules pulled the timbers out and the entrance collapsed on itself. A massive boulder tumbled from above the cave, sealing the opening.
They made their way to the natural buttresses at the narrowest part of the canyon. Figures were moving around the fires that blocked the only way out. Thomas ordered the men to cut the animals loose and herd them ahead. A balky mule brayed in protest. There were shouts of alarm; their attack had been detected.
Thomas slapped the mule on its haunches with the broad side of his sword. Braying even louder than before, the mule galloped toward the fires. The other animals followed, crashing through the bandit encampment as their hooves kicked up showers of sparks.
Thomas and his men charged in behind the mules, forming a flying wedge with the giant Percheron at the point of the tight formation. Thomas swung his sword as if it were a scythe, feeling its blade bite into flesh and bone until he realized he was hacking away at empty air.
He brought his horse to a halt and looked behind him.
The camp fires were far behind him. His companions were nowhere to be seen.
He was all alone.
He touched the pouch around his neck to see if it was still there, and then urged his horse on into the looming darkness.
The Persian scout could have been forgiven for assuming that the figure in the dust vortex was a monster.
The metallic head was actually a pot-shaped steel helmet and the scales were a cloak of chain mail. The man’s white tunic looked like lacework. His coif, or mailed hood was draped around his neck, further enhancing the reptilian appearance. A ferocious reddish beard caked with sand and dust hid the lower part of the face. Shredded blisters covered the unprotected part of his sun-blasted face and the threads of dead skin gave the man’s skin a fur-like shagginess. His cloudy blue eyes were set in a vacant stare.
The man stirred and brought his right arm toward his heaving chest. The hand groped under the chain mail coat and came out with a leather pouch that hung from a broken cord. The sergeant had assumed that the man was completely blind. But when the Persian reached for the pouch a hand as big as a lion’s paw whipped out and grabbed his wrist with unexpected strength.
The sergeant’s companions raised their swords to strike.
“Wait!” the sergeant commanded.
The swords were slowly lowered.
With his free hand, the sergeant tilted the water bag into the man’s mouth. A few drops made it past the parched lips and the water seemed to revive the man. His fingers uncurled from the sergeant’s wrist.
“Who are you?” the guard said. He knew fragments of several languages and repeated the question until he got a response using Latin.
The cracked lips twitched, and laboriously formed a word.
“Tho-mas,” the man whispered. “My name is Thomas.”
The hollow voice seemed to issue from the grave.
The mouth produced a string of words that made no sense, as if spoken in a delirium. Then the spittle-covered lips froze in place and the words deteriorated into a mumble. The man’s eyes widened in a wild glassy stare. His massive chest heaved spasmodically a few times and went still.
The sergeant removed the pouch from the dead fingers, opened the bag and pulled out a vellum scroll covered with writing and rolled around a wooden spindle.
The helmet and the mail coat were too worn and damaged to be of value. He might sell the vellum to one of the gullible pilgrims in the caravan. He was sure he could convince someone it was a holy relic. The sergeant tucked the scroll back into the pouch, tied the broken cord and looped it around his neck.
He ordered the men to bury the dead body while he rode back to get the caravan moving again. The grumbling guards used their sword points to scrape out a shallow grave and shoved the body into the hole with their feet. The reluctant grave-diggers returned to their place at the head of the caravan.
The hissing sands of the desert began to complete their unfinished task. Within minutes, a grainy shroud covered the huge body. And long before the jingling of harness bells and the shouts of camel drivers faded into the distance the desert had wrapped the man called Thomas in its timeless embrace.
Afghanistan, January, 1989
Georgi Vasilyev was seated on a camp stool in his tent, peering through a magnifying glass at the rock specimens spread out on the table in front of him, when he heard an excited voice calling out his name. Seconds later, his Afghan assistant Raheem threw the flap aside and stuck his head into the tent.
“Dr. Vasilyev. Come quick!”
The middle-aged geologist from the Soviet geological survey mission and his younger counterpart from the Afghan ministry of mining had become close friends, but Vasilyev had specifically requested that he be left undisturbed to catalogue his collection.
Before answering he picked up another specimen and jotted a note into a pad. “What is it?” he growled.
“Sorry, Dr. Vasilyev. I know you wanted no interruptions, but we made a strange find. Come. You won’t be sorry.”
The Russian suppressed a smile at his assistant’s unabashed enthusiasm. He sighed heavily for show, followed Raheem outside and got into the passenger seat of the UAZ-469 parked next to the tent. The rugged all-terrain vehicle was the Russian equivalent of the American Jeep. Raheem drove at subsonic speed and they soon came to a large lake.
Raheem slammed on the brakes and the UAZ fish-tailed to a skidding stop alongside a BTR-152 armored personnel carrier parked a few hundred feet from the cliffs. The vehicle was used to transport the twelve-man squadron assigned to protect the survey party.
The guards stood in a rough circle with their AK-47s slung on their shoulders, alongside a group of Russian and Afghan surveyors, around the perimeter of a pit approximately fifteen feet across and a yard deep. Two Afghan laborers who’d been hired by the survey stood in the shallow crater leaning on the handles of their shovels. The hard sunlight glinted on a flat, diamond-shaped object a couple of feet long.
“What is this?” Vasilyev asked Raheem.
“Not sure. One of the men discovered it a while ago. The wind blew away the sand.”
Vasilyev didn’t have to be reminded of the wind blowing off the lake. The sharp-edged breeze stabbed at his ribs and penetrated the mushroom-shaped woolen hat to his bald scalp. Vasilyev scrambled down into the pit. He was in his 60s, but ten years of field work in the harsh environment of Afghanistan had toughened him. He had shed many pounds tromping around the rugged countryside and hardly ever drank the vodka that many of his countrymen sucked down like water.
He borrowed a shovel from one of the laborers and dug around the object. Then he got down on his knees to examine what appeared to be a large winch. The name etched into the metal revealed that the winch had been manufactured in Colorado. Coiled around the winch drum were the frayed remnants of a cable. Next to the winch were some old gray wooden beams. Eye bolts had been screwed into the wood.
Vasilyev got to his feet and signaled the Afghans to widen the excavation.
There was a hollow tung sound as one Afghan sank his shovel blade into the earth. A minute later, he had uncovered a round metal object. Vasilyev squatted and ran his fingers over the shiny brass surface and around the glass vision ports. He furrowed his brow. A diving helmet was the last thing he expected to find in the desert.
He glanced off at the glittering waters of the lake trying to picture a diver descending into the depths from a boat. Why the heavy-d
uty winch? He had worked on mine projects and had seen similar pulleys suspended over the earth. On impulse, he stood and began to walk back and forth, moving closer to the lake with each pacing turn.
He had developed a sharp eye for detail as a geologist. After a few passes he saw a dark line in the ground. He brushed the sand away with his hand and called the laborers over. Within seconds they had uncovered a metal plate around four feet square. They removed the plate and Vasilyev looked down into a dark shaft.
One of his Russian colleagues said, “I wonder where this goes.”
“Let’s take a look,” Vasilyev said. He ordered Raheem to round up some rope and electric torches.
As the Afghan went to carry out the request, Vasilyev heard the sound of an aircraft engine. A black dot appeared in the clear blue sky, growing in size until it morphed into the transport helicopter that brought supplies in every week. It was three days early.
The chopper landed near the troop carrier, sending up clouds of dust. A man in an army sergeant’s uniform stepped out. He engaged the squad leader in conversation, then both men came over to Vasilyev.
“We have to return to Kabul,” the squad leader said.
“When?”
“Now”
“I can’t go now,” Vasilyev said with a glance at the open shaft. “We have survey work to do.”
The sergeant spoke, his voice tinged with weariness. “The survey is over. The Soviet army is leaving the country. All civilians are being evacuated.”
As survey leader, the well-being of his fellow scientists was Vasilyev’s responsibility. He ordered his men to cover over the shaft opening, then told the Russian and Afghan geologists to return to the base camp and gather up their belongings. He paid off the laborers and said they could keep any equipment the survey left behind.
With all the scientists aboard, the helicopter rose into the air and hovered over the abandoned jeep and troop carrier. The Afghan laborers waved at the departing chopper as it gained altitude and flew over a steeply rounded hill that rose from the generally flat terrain bordering the lake.
Kabul had been at the eye of the storm as fighting between the Soviets and Afghans raged around it. But now rockets were hitting the city on a daily basis. An army truck was waiting on the tarmac when the helicopter landed. A representative from the Soviet embassy stood next to the truck with a handful of diplomatic personnel.
He greeted Vasilyev and the other Russian geologists and handed them each a packet of papers, saying, “These are your tickets home. This is my last official job.”
“I have to go back into the city to get my files,” Vasilyev said.
“Impossible.” The man pointed to a giant Ilyushin jetliner. “This will be your last chance to leave Kabul on a normal flight. Thirty thousand insurgents are massed around the city. Our troops are leaving the country. Kabul will soon fall. You don’t want to be here when the mujahideen take over.”
Vasilyev thought about the metal cabinets lining the walls of his office at the ministry. The files stuffed into the drawers bulged with maps, charts and detailed reports gathered over ten years of field expeditions to every part of the country. He turned to Raheem.
“You and the other ministry geologists must gather together the files in my cabinets and hide them. You can’t let the insurgents get their hands on this material. Do you understand?”
“I’ll tend to it as soon as you’re safely off.”
Vasilyev gave his colleague a rib-cracking Russian hug. He had sent his wife and children home weeks before his last field trip and had vacated his apartment as soon as the Soviet Union signed an accord agreeing to leave the country. The embassy staffers had climbed into the truck and were yelling at him to hurry up.
He said his sad good-byes to the Afghan geologists he’d worked with since his arrival in 1968 and climbed into the back of the truck which joined a line of vehicles pulling up to the plane to discharge refugees. The refugees loaded their own luggage in the baggage compartment and hustled up the gangway.
Chaos reigned inside the cabin. Panicked passengers claimed their unreserved seats against a backdrop of arguments and crying children. The passengers had been dressed for the cold weather and the overheated cabin reeked of perspiration and unwashed bodies.
Georgi found an empty row at the rear of the cabin, next to the bathroom, which smelled as if it hadn’t been emptied in between flights. A heavy-set man squeezed in next to him. Georgi was on the portly side, but the man overflowed the arm rests and the geologist had to lean toward the bulkhead.
The man had been a bureaucrat in a government-run building company. He talked non-stop until he was cut off by the applause greeting the announcement that the plane was ready to take off. The jetliner taxied down the runway and rose at a steep angle that would gain it altitude out of gun range as quickly as possible.
Vasilyev stared morosely at the magnificent snow-capped mountains that ringed the city. He would miss Afghanistan. The country was a geologist’s playground. Sitting astride massive tectonic plates, the country had some of the most complex geology in the world. He looked at the rugged terrain the same way some men might take in the curves of a beautiful woman.
“Tovarich.”
His seat companion waved a bottle of cheap vodka under Georgi’s nose.
“No thank you,” the geologist said.
The man jiggled the bottle. “You must drink to our comrades who have died.”
Thousands of young Russians had been killed in the nine years since the Soviet Union invaded the country. Georgi took a swig of the vile concoction and handed the bottle back. When he looked out the window he saw only clouds.
He prayed that Raheem would heed his advice. Even after trekking from one end of the country to the other, there was much he didn’t know about the ancient land. But there was one thing that he was absolutely certain of. If the material in his filing cabinets got into the wrong hands, there would be many more toasts to countless dead who were yet to be born.
CHAPTER ONE
Alexandria, Virginia, the Present
Cait Everson was running for her life.
As she raced down the center of a quiet street, the only sounds she could hear in the sleeping suburban neighborhood were the pad-pad of her bare feet on the tarmac, the quick intake and exhalation of her breath and the menacing scuffle of footsteps from behind.
She didn’t know who her pursuers were, but her instincts told her that the men trying to catch her were no mere rapists or muggers. It went beyond their freakish appearance, the platinum hair and icy blue eyes. It was the sheer, predatory relentlessness she’d detected in their identical faces since the twin men had started stalking her weeks before.
The alarms clanged in her brain, urging her to greater speed, warning that if they caught Cait she would be as good as dead.
She gulped energizing mouthfuls of air into her lungs and put all her strength into her long-legged strides.
Only minutes before she had driven her five-year-old Honda Accord from Georgetown University across the Potomac River on the Francis Scott Key Bridge to Arlington, Virginia where she lived in a neat two-bedroom condo. Traffic had tapered off as she left the city, and as she stopped at a red light in a quiet residential neighborhood near her condo, hers was the only car around.
Headlights suddenly flared in her rear-view mirror.
Whump!
A big vehicle had slammed into the Accord’s rear bumper. Her head snapped forward. The impact failed to activate the car’s air bags, but it triggered a string of colorful oaths more suited to a sailor than a college history professor.
Cait got out of her car and strode back to inspect the damage. The bumper was a crumpled mess. She stepped out of the glare of headlights from the offending Cadillac SUV and shielded her eyes. In the reflected light, she saw the driver’s blue eyes and white hair. And sitti
ng in the passenger seat was a man with identical features.
She dashed back to her car and went to open the door. The SUV driver snapped the transmission into gear and hit the gas pedal. The door handle was ripped from her hand as the impact propelled the Honda forward several yards. The SUV’s doors opened. The identical twins stepped out and walked toward her.
There was only one thing she could do.
Run.
She kicked off her low-heeled leather work shoes and sprinted along the street. Two pairs of rapid footsteps pounded the pavement behind her. Cait was in good shape—she ran five miles every day—and she slowly outdistanced her pursuers. The footsteps faded. A moment later she heard car doors slam shut and the squeal of tires from the accelerating vehicle as it took off after her.
The SUV would catch up within seconds. She ran down a dark street. The SUV followed. She could feel the headlights burning into her back. Cait changed course like a jack-rabbit being chased by a coyote and ran across the manicured front lawn of a ranch style house. The SUV drove onto the lawn. She ran around behind the house to the back yard and skirted a swimming pool. The Cadillac followed and almost drove into the pool before the driver hit the brakes and threw the SUV into reverse.
She crossed into another yard and then onto a parallel street. The SUV’s engine growled in the distance, and she heard the screech of its protesting tires as it navigated a tight corner. Cait ran up to a house, punched the doorbell, and plastered herself against the wall.
The SUV sped past, braked, backed up, stopped, and accelerated. The commotion had attracted attention. Lights were starting to come on in the row houses along the street and figures could be seen in the windows. The vehicle kept moving until the sound of its engine faded.
Cait fumbled her cell phone out of her jacket and called the number the campus police officer had given her earlier that day. A sleepy female voice answered at the other end of the line.
The Emerald Scepter Page 3
