Kealey did not stay on the grooved trail that had been worn in this section of the desert by the constant press of camels, very few of which were to be seen. That path was visible here and there at the whim of the winds, impossible to follow unless your feet knew the way. Instead, he journeyed southwest, sixty-three kilometers, until Durst confirmed what he already knew: they were near the site.
What Carla had jokingly described as “the caravan of one” reached a sprawling, rundown stockade that had once been used to herd horses. It looked like it hadn’t been used in thirty or forty years. It was about the size of two football fields. The old chicken wire fence was torn and flapping, the metal finely pitted from years of windblown sand, and the thick oak posts were dark and brittle from nearly constant cooking by the sun. The posts sloped this way and that, victims of the shifting desert surface. The wood troughs that lined the interior of the fence were filled with sand.
Durst’s lips pressed together when he saw the corral. His granddaughter took one of his hands in both of hers and held it tightly.
“The owners built it to sell horses to both sides,” Durst said, leaning forward so he could be heard over the hum of the engine. It was as though he were seeking a blanket absolution for everything the Nazis had done here, since even the natives were corrupt. “The well is to the northwest, about a quarter-kilometer.”
Kealey nodded. He drove past the structure, keeping careful watch on the compass since he wasn’t sure how visible a landmark might be from their position. He noticed that whatever misgivings Phair had were gone now, as the chaplain sipped water and looked out eagerly at the horizon. The notion that he might be close to something that had been touched by God had seemed to have a transformative effect.
Phair turned. “Herr Durst, why didn’t you bring the Staff to the castle at Wewelsburg?”
“Ah, you know of this?”
Phair nodded.
“We knew the Allies would find out about it. That is why we hid the most prized items.”
“What else did you hide?” Kealey asked.
“Books, mostly, as well as the führer’s personal mandrake that he used for protection.”
“He believed that a plant root could protect him?” Phair asked.
“It did,” Durst insisted, as though accustomed to Hitler’s sanity being questioned. “It saved him when von Stauffenberg detonated a bomb under the conference table in the Wolf’s Lair. Erik Hanussen blessed the root in 1932 and accurately predicted the day and date it would bring Hitler to power. Hanussen also forecast that if Hitler stopped believing, the Reich would fall as swiftly. Hitler’s faith in the occult faltered when the blood sacrifice fell short of his goals.”
“Blood sacrifice,” Kealey said. “You mean the war.”
“Ja.”
The war was tragic enough, but comprehensible in terms of conquest. But it was demented to imagine that it had been fought as a kind of pagan ritual, that there was a quota of blood to be filled and they had simply derived the most efficient methods of fulfilling it. Kealey wanted to throw the old man from the vehicle into the sand and drive away.
“There!” Durst said suddenly.
Kealey looked where he was pointing, at a two-o’clock position. About two meters of a rusted assault gun poked from the sands at a forty-five-degree angle. Durst was right about the location and right about the fact that no one would have thought to go probing beneath that monstrosity, a twenty-ton panzer.
“It used to be the color of the sands themselves, healthy and strong,” Durst said ruefully.
“I’m surprised it can still be seen,” Kealey said.
“Ach, that is the genius of our selection of this place,” Durst declared. “There is a draft from the dry well. The wind rushes up forcefully and with some regularity and prevents the sand from accumulating.”
Phair was still strangely silent.
“I thought you’d be more excited,” Kealey said to him.
“When the Staff has been recovered, I will be,” Phair assured him.
Leaning forward, Durst was smiling as decades of age slipped from his face and shoulders. Kealey could hear and see the young untersturmführer, eager to serve the cause, charging through the sands in this panzer or some other desert vehicle, willing to trade for information or necessities with the locals to retain their goodwill—or crush them if they got in his way.
They pulled up to the tank, which was partly exposed on the northern side. Metal plates and gear had been removed by Arab traders or souvenir hunters before the sands had corroded and rendered them useless. Durst left the vehicle as it crunched to a halt on the dry dune beside it. His aged eyes were like those of a predatory bird, sharp and fixed on the wheel that once held the powerful tank treads. Below it was the crushed stone wall of an old well. Carla followed him and Phair swung from the vehicle. After shutting off the engine, Kealey joined him.
There was a low, constant wind that strangely enhanced the silence of their surroundings. Now and then something clanged inside the dead hull of the tank, stirred by a local gust.
“The tank was crippled and we struggled to get it here,” Durst said as his granddaughter walked beside him, helping him to negotiate the thickly piled but porous sands. “We knew it would be stripped but that the heavy frame would never be moved, thus protecting our secret—”
He stopped, and while the others watched he did something that Kealey had not been expecting.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
JEBEL MUSA, SINAI PENINSULA
The sun cast long afternoon shadows among the multitude gathered in the Wadi el-Deir. Lieutenant Adjo moved among them, looking at faces that covered the spectrum from curiosity to reverence. He saw a few vehicles with people who were well dressed and seemed to have come from cities. What he did not see, which surprised him, were caravans of the sickly in search of healing, or news crews from any of the cities. Word was limited to the people the organizers had wanted to be here, and admission seemed to be restricted.
He began to be very impressed by, and fearful of, the planning that had gone into this.
He sidled up to a group of young men and women having a breakfast of bread and sun-warmed coffee in the back of a beaten-up pickup truck. White feathers were stuck on splinters of wood on the side panels.
“You were able to make it through,” Adjo said to a young man whose legs were dangling over the side.
The man nodded.
“It took me the longest time.”
“You took the Nuweiba Road?” the man asked.
Adjo didn’t know whether to answer yes or no. He made a noncommittal face. “Which way did you come?”
“Through the Raha Plain, as someone suggested when we left Port Said,” he replied. He thrust a thumb behind him, toward the cab. “My parents heard of this from a friend at church and insisted we all come.”
“I thought, being on a motorbike, it was best to stay on the paved roads,” Adjo replied.
“I travel Nuweiba when I carry chickens,” he said. “With so many people, we were afraid that one breakdown would hold up the traffic. With two, no one would move for hours. And that would cause more vehicles to overheat and die. A nightmare,” he said, shaking his head. “Is that what happened to you?”
Adjo nodded. That was the way news crews would have come. He suspected that at first, the organizers strategically blocked the road to make passage impossible. After that, as crowds grew, the MFO would have blocked the road to prevent a potential humanitarian crisis. Adjo knew from experience that the desert was impossible to plug, especially at night. The United Nations troops would also have restricted airspace around the mountain to leave it open for possible military action.
Either the organizers want any and all images of this event to come from the pilgrims, or they don’t want professionally shot video that can be studied, Adjo suspected. Probably both.
As for the infirm, Moses was not a healer. He was the mouthpiece of God, a miracle-worker. The sponsors of
this pageant would not want their party spoiled by cripples who remained crippled. But how did they keep them out?
Adjo gratefully accepted a piece of bread from the young man, then moved on. He wanted to talk to someone who was alone, and tired. Someone who would give unguarded answers. As he moved through the tightly packed crowd he saw license plates from Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. These people had come great distances through the sieve that was Egypt’s border—holes created by geography, force of numbers, inattentiveness, bribes. He had to fight down the anger he felt. His work, the ongoing work of his team, had amounted to nothing. He wished they were here with him to form a wedge and begin to drive these people out.
Adjo swallowed his anger. He had to regard this as an opportunity to fix what was wrong; with so many people gathered here, it would be difficult for Cairo—indeed, for the region, for the world—to overlook the problem such unfettered access posed to the stability of his government.
He stopped beside a middle-aged man who was sitting on a rock and wriggling severely blistered toes. Adjo took a swig of water.
“I don’t know if I can move another step, either,” Adjo said, flopping heavily on the ground beside him.
“The prophet will renew us, as he did for the Israelites,” the man replied with a single, confident shake of his head.
“If it is the will of Allah,” Adjo said with affected reverence. He was still angry about this entire operation. “Have you seen the Gharib Qawee?”
“He has not yet shown himself,” the man said.
“I pray that he does,” Adjo said. “It is the fondest wish of my poor mother to see him.”
“Where is she?” the man asked, looking around.
“Alas,” Adjo said, “she could go no farther. I left her back in the plain.”
The man regarded him with horror.
“There were many others who were infirm,” Adjo said pointedly. “She was in no danger.”
“Why are you not with her?”
“She begged me to see the prophet on her behalf, and to bring her word of his divinity,” Adjo said as humbly as possible.
“Did they not tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“The Care Trucks will bring the sick to the front of the crowd at the appointed time.”
“Blessings to you for this information,” Adjo said. “There were so many people that I—”
Adjo never got to finish the interrogation, or to ponder why the sickly would be brought to a position of prominence. Surely they were not going to be healed. It wasn’t possible.
Moving as one with the surrounding field of humanity, the man was suddenly on his feet. There was no cheering. The silence was profound. Adjo turned his eyes toward the mountain, toward the peak he had watched so clinically through night-vision glasses. If ever there was proof that it was faith that informed faith, and not the object of the veneration itself, it was the mood that washed over him as he stood there. He felt as though he were in the presence of something great, even though he could not see anything exceptional. The belief of the crowd was a real, nearly palpable thing.
On the mountaintop, obviously the result of the sun, was a radiance striking a highly polished object.
“The Staff of the Prophet,” reverently muttered the man to whom Adjo had been speaking. He wasn’t speaking to Adjo but to himself, involuntarily. Then he made a humming sound, a wordless prayer of thanksgiving that quavered with humility and excitement. Around him, like deep-throated birds in the grasslands, Adjo heard others say prophet and Moses with the same helpless awe.
There was no evidence that this is what they were seeing, but that didn’t seem to matter. At this distance, video images from phones would show nothing substantial. It would be interesting to see if the occupant of the cave came down the mountain and, if so, whether the Staff would continue to glow.
Adjo did not get a chance to find out.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
SAHARA DESERT, MOROCCO
Durst dropped forward on his knees.
“Ich bin hier!” he cried.
Carla gasped softly and darted after the elderly man, but he wasn’t hurt. He flopped onto his chest and scurried forward, pushing with his knees, brushing sand aside with swimming motions of his arms, clearing the way to a spot across from where his eyes were fixed like little machines. He reached a place where the missing tank tread would have rested on the stone wall of the well.
“I’m all right,” he said with annoyance as Carla fell in beside him. “Get me a flashlight! A flashlight!”
Phair and Kealey were both nonplussed by his actions. Kealey had a penlight hooked to his key ring. He slipped it off and handed it to Carla, who gave it to her grandfather. Shaking as though he were stricken, Durst probed the darkness with the light. He swept the beam left to right, right to left, then up and down. Kealey had a sick feeling at the top of his throat.
“Gone,” the German said at last.
Kealey walked to Durst’s side and squatted. He glanced into the well. The light was still now, as though Durst had stopped living. Kealey saw a dark rectangle among the stones, an opening in the well wall. There was nothing inside.
The agent’s first and most frightening thought was that the bad guys had it. If that was the case, the problem just became different and far more difficult. His mind raced through the ramifications, none of them hopeful.
Durst just lay there, moaning, oblivious to the sands blowing over him. He had not been speaking to his granddaughter nor to the men who stood over him. He was lamenting to no one in particular.
“Come,” Carla said.
Durst rose unsteadily, helped by Kealey and Carla. His eyes suddenly looked tired. With hardly any effort, as though he were all bones, they helped him to the vehicle. Kealey crouched beside him. He recovered his small flashlight, tucked it in his shirt pocket, and tried to get Durst’s attention by moving his eyes to align with the German’s dull, staring ones.
“Talk to me,” Kealey said. “How do you know it’s gone? It might have just fallen into—”
“I saw the missing stone under the opposite tread wheel,” Durst said. “It had been lifted away.”
“How is that possible?” Kealey asked. “Who else knew about this?”
“No one living,” Durst replied dully.
Kealey rose and walked around the tank. He leaned against it, pushing to check for stability, as much as a push could determine. Then he lowered himself onto his belly and wormed underneath along the line of the other missing tread. The way the tank was positioned, he couldn’t go far enough to reach the opening. The tank had obviously been damaged by a mine—there were scorch marks along a hole in the undercarriage—and then backed over the well, ending up with its tail angled down like this. The relic must have been concealed afterward. The men in the tank wouldn’t have wanted to carry anything they didn’t have to, walking from the desert.
A spike had been driven into the top side of the well. Recently, since the steel was still silver and unpocked by sands. The flashlight revealed hemp threads snagged by the topmost block of the well. Someone had come here, lowered himself over the side, and taken the Staff of Moses.
But how the hell did anyone know it was here?
His first conclusion, perhaps as unfair as it was instinctive, was that Durst had an ally whom he had called during the night. But the German seemed as surprised as the rest to find the hiding place violated. Kealey didn’t think he was that good an actor. But who else could have done this? If this had been a professional operation, something run by Harper or someone else at the CIA—for reasons Kealey couldn’t quite fathom—they wouldn’t have been careless enough to leave traces of the intrusion. Everything would have been replaced and properly aged so that when Kealey and company went in, sand would have fallen from the cracks when they removed the block, suggesting that the object had been taken years before, the trail cold.
No, Kealey thought, this was recent and nonprofessional.
Which raised an alarming possibility: that the artifact being employed on Mt. Sinai was the genuine Staff of Moses. Not that Kealey believed it could perform miracles, but what he believed didn’t matter. If the people behind that movement had the actual Staff and some kind of provenance to go with it, the problem he faced just got a whole lot worse. In fact, if anyone had followed them, photographed them, the images could be used as evidence to support the claim that this was the genuine article. Why else would the government of the United States be out here with the Nazi who had stolen it?
Phair ambled over. “This could be the work of a religious organization,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The Vatican’s Safe Harbor League, the Sons of Joshua, some group that has field operatives,” he said. “For all we know they’ve been watching Durst for decades, waiting for him to make his move. They may have picked off this information at any time since we landed.”
“Why not just go to his house and beat it out of him?” Kealey asked, a little angry at himself. Perhaps they hadn’t been as secretive as they should have been.
“In the case of the Church, these material missionaries are men of peace,” Phair replied in a venerating tone. “They acquire merit through patience and charity.”
“Or they knew he was under the protection of a gangster, too,” Kealey said, abruptly dismissing Phair’s thick piety.
Kealey studied the well and removed a few of the strands from the stone wall before wriggling back out. He tucked them in his passport and walked over to the others.
“I don’t understand how anyone could have known,” Durst said. He looked as if he were in a daze.
“Could your satellites tell us anything about who has been out here?” Carla asked Kealey.
“There is so much going on in this part of the world, we’re not able to keep satellites trained on every region,” he said. “Absent a specific reason, we tend to watch the trouble spots, and the Western Sahara isn’t one of them.”
Threatcon Delta Page 28
