by James Becker
Bronson shook his head and adjusted the dashboard vents so that the stream of ice-cold air was directed towards his face and chest.
‘Sorry,’ he replied, as the cool air started to have an effect. ‘The heat was a bit of a shock. I was expecting it, obviously, but it still kind of took me by surprise. How on earth do you manage to work in it?’
Angela shrugged her shoulders. ‘You get used to it, at least to some extent, and we do what we can to keep the sun off our backs at the excavation site. Ideally we’d live somewhere here in the city, but we don’t really have any option,’ she continued. ‘The site is too far away for us to commute there on a daily basis from anywhere half-civilized, and being on site all the time means that we can get a lot of work done first thing in the morning before the sun gets too high in the sky, and carry on late into the evening until the light finally goes. We each spend at least two nights in a hotel in Kuwait every fortnight, just to wash off the dust and dirt. Showering in the desert isn’t the easiest thing to do.’
‘Isn’t it a hassle going back and forth across the border between Kuwait and Iraq so often?’
‘We do have to cross the border, obviously, but there’s absolutely no indication apart from the GPS’ – she pointed at a unit attached to the windscreen with a suction cup – ‘and possibly a couple of border guards patrolling the area in a 4x4 to tell you where you are and when you’ve crossed into Iraq. I can promise you that the desert in Kuwait is absolutely identical to the desert in Iraq. The dig is in a kind of empty quarter, so that’s why we need a professional standard GPS to navigate by lat and long. There are only a handful of roads out there.’
‘Makes sense,’ Bronson said. ‘So we’re heading straight out there, are we? I saw you’ve already got all the gear in the back of the truck.’
‘We are, yes, but we’ve got to stop and pick up somebody before we leave Kuwait City. Stephen Taverner – another archaeologist from the British Museum. I gave him a lift here a couple of days ago for an appointment and it’s easier for us to all go back together.’
‘So you didn’t just drive down to meet me?’
Angela nodded.
‘Well, sort of. The main reason I drove down was to collect you, obviously, but one of our vehicles does a supply run at least once a week, and we also had to deliver some of the relics we’ve uncovered to the museum in Kuwait. The staff there are collating what we’ve found, and they’ll then arrange to transport everything up to Baghdad.
‘Normally, of course, we’d expect to take the stuff straight to the museum that authorized or sponsored the dig, but Baghdad is just too far away to make that feasible in this case. Where we’re digging is about three hundred miles from Baghdad as the crow flies, and probably over four hundred by road – not that there are many of them, or not proper roads anyway. But Kuwait City is only about sixty miles away in a straight line, and a bit over one hundred on the route we drive. And don’t forget that this is a joint expedition. We have both Iraqi and Kuwaiti archaeologists involved in the dig, plus the three of us from the British Museum and a couple of French experts from a Paris museum, so it really does make sense to use Kuwait City as our base.’
Bronson switched his gaze from Angela’s profile to the view through the windscreen. It was the first time he’d been to Kuwait, though he had on occasion visited Dubai and Muscat, albeit briefly, and he could immediately see the similarities. The skyline in front of them was dominated by skyscrapers and there were signs of recent construction everywhere; the roads were wide and in good condition, most of the vehicles looked quite new, and the driving was universally awful, vehicles swapping lanes at random and without the use of indicators or mirrors, and all driving far too close to one another, and far too fast.
‘The driving doesn’t bother you?’ he asked, looking at a car moving alongside them.
‘It terrified me at first, but after a week or so I got used to it.’ She broke off and hit the horn hard as a white Nissan saloon dived across two lanes of traffic and pulled in front of them with only inches to spare, before swinging off on to an exit slip road.
Bronson lifted his foot from the imaginary brake that he had applied as the car appeared, and shook his head.
‘I thought Cairo was bad,’ he muttered, ‘but this is probably worse, and everything’s moving a hell of a lot faster.’
‘We won’t be in it for very long,’ Angela said, slowing down slightly as the vehicles ahead began bunching up, brake lights flaring into life. ‘Once we’ve collected Stephen we’ll be heading out of town, and the roads should be fairly empty.’
About fifteen minutes later she pulled the Toyota to a stop directly outside a hotel on a side street and tooted the horn briefly.
Almost immediately, a tall, thin man with sandy hair and what looked to Bronson like three days’ growth of beard walked out of the hotel and over to the Land Cruiser. He’d actually stretched out his hand to the front passenger door handle before he registered the fact that the seat was already occupied. Instead, he opened the rear door and pulled himself into the back seat, a gust of hot damp air accompanying him.
‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there. I’m Stephen Taverner,’ he said, and extended his hand for Bronson to shake.
‘Nice to meet you. I’m Chris. I’m Angela’s former other half, if you can call me that.’
‘Oh, of course, Chris Bronson. She’s told us all about you.’
‘Nothing good, I expect,’ Bronson said.
‘No, not really,’ Stephen replied, deadpan. Then he grinned, but immediately grimaced and put the palm of his hand against the side of his face. ‘This blasted tooth,’ he said. ‘The dentist hacked out the old filling and put in a new one, but it’s still giving me gyp. No, actually, Angela was quite complimentary about you, given the fact that you’ve been divorced for so long. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, maybe?’
‘Not in my case,’ Angela piped up, swinging the Land Cruiser around a corner to head back the way they’d come. She gave Bronson a wry smile. ‘But Chris can be useful, especially in a tight corner.’
‘So if you’re not here for some kind of reconciliation with the fair Angela,’ Stephen asked, ‘why are you out here at all?’
‘I had a couple of weeks’ leave due, and I thought I needed a change of scene from rural Kent, so when Angela suggested I come out to see what she was up to in Iraq, I booked a flight and packed my shorts. I would have packed a bucket and spade, but she told me not to bother.’
Stephen nodded. ‘Quite right too. Archaeologists almost never use anything as crude as a spade. Our tool of choice is usually a brush or, if something is particularly reluctant to come back into the light of day, a small trowel.’ He paused for a moment, then added: ‘So are you looking forward to seeing the temple?’
‘Temple?’ Bronson demanded, his interest piqued. ‘What temple?’
2
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
The tailgates of the lorries slammed down almost simultaneously, sounding like two ragged gunshots, and from the back of each vehicle a group of about a dozen men jumped down to the ground and began walking steadily towards the encampment. They were clad in a wide variety of clothing, everything from classic but rather grubby Arabian jellabas up to military-style camouflage clothing.
But the new arrivals shared one characteristic: they were all carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. Many of them also wore shoulder or belt holsters containing pistols of various types, and a couple were hefting rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
As the men approached the encampment in two straggly lines, the members of the archaeology team stood and watched, frozen to the spot, the expressions on their faces ranging from merely puzzled to frankly terrified.
Suddenly, one of the younger Iraqi archaeologists turned on his heels and ran towards the small vehicle park at one side of the encampment.
He didn’t get far.
A shouted command came from somewhere in the line of men approaching
from the east, and two of the figures dropped to their knees, aimed their Kalashnikovs at the fleeing figure, and opened fire.
Two sudden flares of blood discoloured the man’s clothing, one on his left leg and the other on his back. He took another couple of steps, probably driven by nothing more than momentum, and then collapsed in an untidy tangle of limbs on the desert sand. For the briefest of instants there was silence, and then the fallen man began screaming as he tried to crawl away. One of the approaching men walked unhurriedly over to where he lay, took a pistol from a holster and fired two shots into the fallen man’s legs. He began screaming even more loudly, and the sound only stopped when the terrorist bent over him, took a large knife from his belt and slowly, methodically, sawed through the man’s throat. Blood pumped out of the ragged wound as the major arteries in the neck were severed and for a few seconds the only sound in the camp was the scrape of steel on bone as the knife was worked through the Iraqi’s vertebrae. Once he’d finished, the killer wiped the blood from his blade on the dead man’s clothing, then picked up the severed head by the hair and placed it in the middle of the corpse’s back.
If there had been the slightest doubt before about the intentions of the approaching men, the casual and almost incidental but still ritualized murder of the young archaeologist comprehensively removed it. These people were clearly terrorists, perhaps a splinter of the Islamic State, the ruthlessly murderous group that had risen to prominence as ISIS or ISL a few years earlier and which had terrified members of all the nations in the Middle East, including those that followed Islam.
But that really didn’t make sense. The Islamic State was a political entity, determined to impose Islam on every nation it could, the choice being offered to people simply comprising an option: ‘follow Islam or we will kill you’. The group had left a trail of bodies, thousands of them, across the Middle East, a mute testimony to their implacable resolve and total ruthlessness.
This, however, didn’t seem to have a political motivation. Taking over a village and insisting that the inhabitants converted to Islam was one thing, but surrounding a dozen or so people involved in an archaeological dig tens of miles from anywhere seemed completely pointless. There had to be some other reason, some overriding objective, for these men to have driven so far out into the desert.
The two lines of approaching men stopped, now completely surrounding the group of archaeologists. Two of them had fallen to their knees and were visibly quaking, while most of the others were just staring wide-eyed at the intruders, trying to make sense of what had happened just seconds before.
One of the newcomers, a young man with a thick black beard and wearing a military-style camouflage uniform, stepped forward and looked at the group of unarmed men they had encircled.
‘Who is in charge here?’ he asked softly in English, his voice educated and the tone almost conversational.
Nobody responded, and with a deceptively casual gesture the newcomer pointed at an archaeologist standing to one side of the group, a brush and trowel held forgotten in his hands.
The man standing on the right of the apparent leader of the newcomers raised his Kalashnikov and fired three rounds straight at the archaeologist at virtually pointblank range. The impact of the bullets slammed his body backwards, knocking him off his feet, and he was dead before he even hit the ground. A chorus of ragged screams rang out as the terrified archaeologists stared in fascinated horror at his broken body and the slowly expanding pool of blood around him.
‘I’ll ask you once again,’ the bearded man said, just as quietly as before. ‘Who is in charge here?’
For about a second, nobody spoke, but several people in the group looked straight at the man in their centre. Then one of the archaeologists pointed at him.
‘He is,’ he said, an obvious tremor in his voice. ‘His name is Mohammed. Please don’t shoot me. Please.’
Mohammed nodded, took a half step forward and slowly raised his left hand.
‘Good. Now, that wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ The bearded man smiled slightly. ‘We have been told that you have discovered a hidden temple. An important hidden temple. I would like to see it. Now.’
Mohammed shook his head.
‘It’s just an empty room,’ he said, his voice sounding bewildered. ‘There’s nothing in it. Well, almost nothing. But of course you can see it,’ he added hurriedly, desperate not to antagonize the young man. ‘It’s this way.’
He turned and pointed towards one of the trenches that ran arrow straight across the irregular rocky ground of the desert. It was marked by flags at regular intervals, and its vertical sides also bore markings to indicate both the excavated depth and the areas where particular artefacts had been discovered. At the far end of the trench, one of the sides displayed a large bulge, a kind of semicircular shape, out of which the top of an aluminium ladder protruded.
Mohammed started nervously across the rock towards the ladder and then stopped right beside it.
‘It’s down there,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to go down first?’
The bearded man shook his head.
‘That will not be necessary. I know what I’m looking for. Do you have lights down there?’
Mohammed swallowed and nodded.
‘We do,’ he replied, ‘but only when the generator’s running. I can have it started for you, if you wish.’
‘No. I have a torch.’
The man checked that the base of the ladder was firm, then swiftly climbed down it.
Mohammed peered nervously down into the opening, seeing the flickering light as the torch beam swept around the interior of the abandoned cave they had uncovered just four days earlier.
He glanced around, wondering if there was any possibility of him reaching one of the vehicles and making his escape, but when he looked more closely at the two parked trucks he realized that to do anything of that sort would simply hasten his own death. He had assumed that the two lorries had been abandoned by the armed men, but now he saw that this was not the case. In the back of each vehicle, standing in the loading area but directly behind the cab, he could see a single figure, and beside each person was the unmistakable shape of a mounted heavy machine gun. With those weapons, even if he somehow managed to reach one of the 4x4s, get it started and drive it away, they could still cut him to pieces from half a mile away.
Mohammed’s mind raced and he started to shake as he accepted the inevitability of what was likely to happen. They couldn’t hide, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight: the fate of everyone in the group rested entirely on the whims of the armed men who had invaded the camp. All they could do was exactly what they were told, and just hope that some of them would still be alive when the terrorists finally left.
He didn’t dare to move and, after about a minute, the ladder began to vibrate as the man started to climb up it again to emerge from the opening.
He glanced at Mohammed as he stepped back on to the ground.
‘Wait here,’ he ordered, and strode away, heading towards the jeep that had accompanied the two lorries and was still parked some distance away. As he approached it, the vehicle began to move towards him, closing the distance between them, and then came to a halt again.
Mohammed hadn’t moved an inch from his position beside the entrance to the temple, and he watched closely as the armed man held a brief conversation with somebody inside the vehicle. Then the back door of the jeep opened and the man climbed inside.
As soon as the door closed, the jeep started to move once again, circling around both the group of terrified archaeologists and the armed men surrounding them, and headed over towards the excavation where Mohammed was standing.
The jeep stopped a few yards away, and the driver – his face virtually invisible because of the tinted wind-screen and side windows – switched off the engine. The two doors on the driver’s side opened simultaneously and two men climbed out, both wearing shoulder holsters over their military-style clothing and each carrying
a Kalashnikov assault rifle. They looked at Mohammed and then scanned the entire area, presumably checking for any sign of danger. Apparently satisfied, the driver turned back towards the vehicle and nodded. Only then did the other two doors open.
The young bearded man climbed out and walked over to Mohammed. He was followed by a man in late middle age who was wearing a somewhat crumpled white linen suit, and who immediately began mopping the sweat from his forehead with a large red handkerchief.
Mohammed stared at the man in disbelief, forgetting his state of terror for an instant.
‘You,’ he said, his voice quivering with emotion. ‘You’re involved with these people? Why?’
The man in the suit looked at him with a dismissive expression and shook his head.
‘You mean you haven’t worked it out yet? Never mind. It’s too late for you anyway. I don’t think we need your services any further.’
He turned slightly and issued a brief instruction to the driver.
Mohammed didn’t hear what he said, but there was no mistaking the meaning of his order.
As the driver began raising his Kalashnikov, Mohammed started to run. He had always been built for comfort rather than speed, and he’d only covered about ten yards before the driver pulled the trigger.
The man wearing the suit nodded in satisfaction as he watched the senior archaeologist’s body tumble clumsily to the ground and lie still.
‘Tell your men to get rid of the others, Farooq,’ he said. ‘No word of this must be allowed to get out.’
And as he began to climb down the aluminium ladder into the temple, he heard the sound of the Kalashnikovs opening up.
3
Kuwait
‘So tell me about this temple,’ Bronson said, as Angela steered the Land Cruiser along the highway that headed south-west away from the city and towards the border – not in fact the border with Iraq, but the one between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
