Operation: Sahara

-Banks-

Banks led the squad along the short corridor and inside the entranceway to the city itself. More scratches and gouges covered all the ground he could see in the dim light.

Ancient sconces hung on the walls, but they wouldn’t need them; the sun was at their backs now, and providing more than enough illumination to show the entrance to a wide left-hand corridor; Banks remembered the Victorian tale and led them through. As he expected, it opened out into some kind of temple, a large hall with a high vaulted rock roof curving far overhead supported by twin rows of giant columns that stretched back against the cliff, narrowing where the box canyon into which it was built came to a point.

At the far end some thirty yards and more away, stood a tall, monstrous statue of a giant beetle. It was carved of a single slab of black stone that seemed to swallow all light but it was what was laid out beneath it that got Banks’ attention.

They had found their lost lambs, and more besides by the look of it.

A score of bodies, or what was left of them, lay at the statue’s base, laid out in what appeared to be ritualistic fashion, their rib cages burst open and spread, their insides hollowed out and organs removed. Where clothing could be determined, those nearest the door were in modern dress, those nearest the statue wore faded red serge tunics and the remnants of kilts. Banks counted the more recent ones; there were ten, no more, no less.

There was nobody alive here to be rescued.

Banks forced himself to undertake the gruesome task of an inspection of the bodies. The ones clad in the red serge were obviously the mortal remains of the Victorian squad. The more recent could only be the people he’d been sent to look for. From the state of the corpses, they’d all been dead for some time; any blood spilled was long since congealed and dry and the bodies were starting to take on the desiccated look of corpses left out in the sert air.

“What the fuck happened here, Cap?” Wiggo said at his side.

Banks didn’t answer at first. He stood away from the dead and looked around the chamber. Off to his left, at the foot of a long flight of stone steps, lay a tumbled mound of discarded clothing, rucksacks, satchels, cameras and laptops, all mingled with rusted Lee-Enfield rifles, British Army issue sabers, empty ammunition boxes and a forlorn set of broken bagpipes.

“Put one of the lads on guard at the door. The rest of us will sift through the pile. Maybe there’s something in that lot that’ll tell us.”

A search through the pile did not yield much that they did not already know; the research team had obviously split into two groups, six had come here, four stayed at the oasis but, by some means as yet unknown, all ten had ended up eviscerated and laid out in front of the black stone idol. Banks set Wiggins to work on the laptops and cameras in the hope of more info then Wiggo and he turned their attention to the remnants of the Victorian squad’s expedition. There was not a lot left to show of them; old bones, used cartridges and rusted weapons. Somehow the bagpipes were the worst, broken and discarded, the airbag rotted in the desert air, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong for them.

“And yet,” Banks said softly, “somebody got away.”

“How do you make that out, Cap?” Wiggo said.

“Yon old journal entries we found. Somebody wrote them, and they weren’t found here, were they? The camel came from the oasis group, not the group that came up into the hills; you’d never get yon beast up that track we climbed in the night.”

“So how come the story’s news to us? Surely, kenning auld sodgers, somebody would have passed it on over a drink? It would have made it into legend.”

“Not unless the man who wrote it never intended for it to be read,” Banks said.

Their search through the detritus of old lives was interrupted by a shout from Wilkins.

“I might have something here, Sarge.”

They walked over to where the private was crouched over one of the laptops. The casing was battered and cracked but the screen had remained intact and Wilkins had got it working. He showed them a series of photographs; the most recent showed a grinning team of six standing in front of the main entrance gate to the city.

“There’s a couple of emails back and forward to the oasis camp too,” Wilkins said. “The latest is nearly a week ago. After that, nowt from either end.”

“No Mayday calls from either?”

“Nope. Zilch.”

“Anything else?”

“Only this,” Wilkins said. “It looks like a scanned version of that journal you were telling us about. And you’ll want to read the rest of it. I had a quick fly through it. It’s relevant.”

Wilkins showed Banks how the document reader’s page up and down function worked and left him and Wiggo to read while he joined Davies in the doorway.

Banks found the point where the earlier pages had stopped and went on from there. Soon, both he and Wiggo were lost, captured in the old soldier’s tale.