Ark Found

Chapter 23

Jayden was first to reach the lip of the lake basin, which was windswept and barren compared to the lake below. Carter, encumbered by the backpack and not willing to take the gun out of his right hand, was a little behind him. Again, they faced a situation where they had reached the edge of their concealment and now faced an open run. With no signs of their pursuers, they scrambled up the open face with its thin layer of snow. It led to a smooth, wide mountain slope, similar to the one on the other side. From this vantage point they could look out across the entire lake basin to the Treasure, Inc. camp on the other side. Both men dropped to a prone position. Carter handed Jayden the gun while he removed the small pair of binoculars from his pack.

He focused in on the destroyed rope pulley station. Nobody there. He scanned the surrounding camp area, but also saw not only no people, but no sign of them at all — no backpacks, tents, gear, anything. It was as if they had already broken down the site and moved out. While Carter watched through the optics, Jayden kept a naked eye out while holding the pistol, monitoring their nearby surroundings.

“They’re coming up.” His voice was so calm that it belied the import of the words.

“What?” Carter looked away from his binoculars, where’d been scoping the far side of the lake basin, near the snow tunnel to see if he could detect traces of their passage. He could not.

“Where?”

Jayden pointed down at a sharp angle.

“Whoa!” Carter didn’t know what he had been expecting — some sort of tactical approach, he guessed. This might involve Daedalus splitting his team member into two squads of two, perhaps, or even retreating back to town to resupply and come back with more technology with which to track them down, maybe even a helicopter. What he was not expecting was for all four of them to have beelined single file down to the lake basin, and all the way across the bottom of it to climb the far slope at the top of which Carter and Jayden now lay. He eyed them carefully and noticed they carried minimal gear.

“They must have hidden their campsite gear up top, carried it somewhere off site, before moving out to find us.”

“Well, I give them an A for effort,” Jayden said as he turned to look back in the other direction, plotting a potential egress route. “But I don’t want to do it in person. Let’s blow this popsicle stand, shall we?”

Carter stuffed his binoculars back into his pack. “Where to? See any good routes?” He eyeballed the direction Carter had just looked in.

“We’re just going to have to go that way and wing it.”

They could hear the signs of human passage below, as Daedalus and his men trekked their way up the slope. The efficiency with which they had moved this far this fast was frightening, and so Carter and Jayden lit out onto the broad slope, where hopefully they would have sufficient space in which to get lost. The area was a broad one once again, no longer a confined lake basin.

“If we get far enough out in front of them,” Carter said as they started to walk, softly so as not to give away their position, "we can break into a run and then hopefully get far enough away where they won’t be able to tell which way we went.”

“Try not to leave footprints or bend the tall grass,” Jayden said, stepping around a stand of scrub brush as he looked back to see if he could spot their pursuers. Not yet.

Looking ahead, Carter saw only a wide open area sloping gently up, with a few plants over two feet high that struggled to eke out an existence between small boulders and rocks amidst a patchy crust of snow. Once they got farther up the slope….

“I don’t see how we’re going to be safe up here,” Carter said, slowing down. “Once they get to where we are, they’ll be able to see us, even if we’re all the way up there.” He pointed far up the gentle slope, to where the mountain leveled off for some distance before the much steeper peak began its majestic rise.

“Got to make the best of it,” Jayden said.

Carter looked around for some way to set a booby-trap, or to build an impromptu shelter of some sort — anything to temporarily buy them a little more time. But he could see or think of nothing constructive, and he recognized the beginnings of panic beginning to wrap around the edges of his mind. A decent amount of his military training, and he knew that of the SEALs, of which Jayden had been one, dealt with how to recognize and forestall panic. It seemed just as he was about to come up with something, the wind would blow stronger and ruffle his hair in some distracting way, or knock a small stick into him or some trivial thing that normally he could ignore.

“Let’s go this way,” Jayden suggested, pointing out a course that was parallel, around the broad mountain face, rather than straight up it. “Wind’s blowing with us if we go this way, we’ll go a little faster.”

Carter knew they needed every edge they could get. He could hear the Treasure, Inc. killers forcing their way through the uppermost basin foliage now. They were reasonably quiet for four men moving quickly through the brush, but not Navy SEAL silent as Carter and Jayden had been. But now that no longer mattered. They knew they were here, and it had come down to a footrace. A race with the wind, Jayden was telling him. Carter tried adjusting his pack to balance it as best he could with only one remaining strap for the run ahead, and that’s when he thought of it.

The wind! It was really howling now, exposed on the open face like this, and he thought he knew how to take advantage of it. He flung his pack back on the ground and knelt to open it. “Jayden, I need you to cover me while I set something up.”

Jayden looked wide-eyed at his friend. “Now’s not the time for experimental stuff, Carter. I can see the first guy coming up now.” He lined the gun sight up and stared down it at the oncoming foe.

“One minute…”

“Are you kidding, me? They’ll be here by then. What’ve you got?”

Carter didn’t answer with words, but removed their tent’s nylon ground cover from the pack. He unfolded it rapidly, spreading it out to its full length. “Need you to stand on one end to hold it down,” he told Jayden, who begrudgingly did as he was asked.

“This thing doesn’t exactly blend in with the ground, Carter, if your plan is to hide under it,” Jayden said, frowning at the dark green tarp, which contrasted sharply against the white snow and light brown rocks and soil.

“Bear with me while I get this going….” They heard voices now, able to recognize the Greek language. Carter unspooled a length of rope and threaded one end through one of the grommets on the ground cover.

“Bear with you?” Jayden’s voice betrayed his exasperation now. “Carter, you’re not giving a PowerPoint presentation at a conference, you know that? There are four armed men coming through those bushes to kill us right now.”

Carter didn’t look up from what he was doing with the ground tarp, but continued threading the rope through the grommets. “You still got that Swiss Army Knife handy?”

Jayden frowned while aiming the pistol toward the oncoming threat. The wind had picked up to the point it was impossible to tell if the plants were moving due to wind or because people were moving through them.

“Here. But that thing and one pistol against whatever they have, I’m guessing three pistols and—”

Carter made several quick cuts into the tarp with the knife and handed it back to Jayden. Then he threaded the rope through the new cuts he’d made. The entire assembly he’d just worked on almost blew away when he tried to shake it out and open it up. But he had it by both ends of the rope, which pulled it together sort of like a jellyfish bell.

And then the first gunshot rang out.

“Times up, Carter, what’s our move?” Jayden answered the round with one of his own fired into the foliage, where the Treasure, Inc. team was just now emerging.

Carter tossed the nylon sheet up into the air and let the wind fill it out, expanding it to a full form that was constrained by the ropes Carter had woven into it. He held the trailing end of the rope while the tarp started to take off into the air.

“Go fly a kite! That’s your response?” Jayden said angrily.

“Here, take this, wind it around your left hand so you can still shoot. Don’t let go of it or you’ll be left behind and there won’t be anything I can do. Here it goes!”

Jayden knew from past experience that when Carter had a plan, it didn’t always seem to make sense but that it was usually best to go with it. Now, facing a gun battle against three angry black market antiquities dealers who would prefer he had never existed, Jayden took the end of the rope and wrapped it around his left wrist a few times, then gripped the end with his left hand, so that he could let it unravel if he needed to but it couldn’t accidentally slip out. Then he aimed the gun toward the oncoming adversaries while Carter finished grappling with his odd construction.

Carter tossed the material into the air as another Treasure, Inc. gun blast went off. This time the wind caught the expanded surface area of the contained tarpaulin and lifted Carter a little into the air, allowing the bullet to smash into the rock he had had his right foot on only a moment earlier.

“Whoa!” Jayden wasn’t expecting the sudden acceleration as the wind filled the tarp and began pushing it along like a sail. Unlike sailing, though, he was being dragged along the ground, ankles bashing into raised boulders which he couldn’t look out for since he was still aiming the gun at the oncoming pursuers. “We’re sailing, Carter, but you forgot the boat, and the bikini babes and the margaritas. This cruise really leaves a lot to be desired!”

He fired a round as Daedalus came out of the bushes, the only one of his team wearing a woodland camo pattern jacket. “Smug jackass!” he yelled as he was dragged up the hill. It was uncomfortable going, but he had to admit that it was saving his life at this point, as they were moving along at a good clip, faster than a human could run on the uneven, sloped ground.

Whether Carter could control where they were going was another matter, but right now neither of them cared as long as they were being taken away from their assailants. Daedalus’ crew shot more bullets at them, but they were out of range and landed harmlessly into the dirt behind them.

They were being blown in the same direction as the wind, which was sideways along the face of the mountain. But Carter found that by pulling the rope in his left hand (he had another in his right) that he could somewhat steer the jerry-rigged parachute. He pulled the ‘chute down to the left and the wind filled it at an angle, blowing them slightly up slope as well as laterally. He faced the direction in which they travelled, while Jayden faced the rear so as to monitor and defend from their aggressors.

The wind kept up its blustery force, whipping them along the mountain while their pursuers fell more and more behind. Jayden would kick off the ground when he got solid footing, and this would temporarily increase their speed slightly while he was airborne. After a while Carter started doing it too, and when they were both airborne at the same time, their speed increased dramatically for those few seconds. Carter continued “steering” the parachute, and after a while they found that they had made their way significantly up the mountain. Jayden looked down on the Treasure, Inc. group, and saw them as small dots on the barren slope, hopelessly far away now. They could still see them with binoculars, but there was no way they could catch up.

And still they raced along the ground with the wind. Jayden even let out a little whoop, like a surfer catching an awesome wave, so caught up was he in the exhilaration of not just being alive, but of having fun doing it. But even as he was dragged up the face of the holy volcanic mountain, Carter couldn’t help but think of the sacred document stashed away in the backpack that was still slung over one shoulder.

The hidden lines, the fact that it had led to a seemingly unknown artifact site with timbers that appeared at least superficially as though they could belong to a boat as old as the fabled Noah’s Ark. It was all so heady, so enrapturing, that as he stumble-dragged along the ground, pushed by a fierce high-altitude wind, he considered that if he were to die, if a rogue round from Daedalus’ gun were to find his skull, or if the winds became too unpredictable and he was carried aloft in the chute and dashed apart on the side of the mountain somewhere, that he would still be happy with his life and, indeed, with this Omega Team mission. He felt that he was doing what he was born to do and that calmed his demeanor, made his outlook more open and accepting of different possibilities and outcomes…

“Hey Carter, really you run a great parasailing operation, but I feel like I’ve more than got my money’s worth at this point and I’d like to come down now, okay? Don’t worry, you’ll get my five stars on Yelp all the way!”

Carter bounced out of his introspective thoughts and scanned the mountain ahead. They had reached a plateau of sorts, snow and even ice-covered by the looks of it. The terrain changed here, and the mountain became to Carter’s eyes more mountain-like and less giant sloping hill, which could describe much of Mount Ararat. But this section appeared to have an edge they were headed straight for that for all he knew could be a steep drop-off. He lacked confidence in his spur-of-the-moment constructed parasail that he would be able to stop them in time if he waited much longer so he pulled hard left on the cord to send them into a hard right turn, up the mountain. This took them further into the middle of the plateau, which was very rocky and spotted with ice patches.

Carter eyed the landscape up ahead and saw that it was pocked with large rock outcroppings, some of them as tall as he was, and made a decision.

“Okay Jayden, you’re right, we’ve had enough fun for one day. On count of three I want you to let go of your rope, so start unwinding it off your wrist now, copy?”

“What?” Most of what Carter said had been lost to the formidable winds.

“On three, let go of the chute!” Carter bellowed as loud as he could in Jayden’s direction.

At this Jayden nodded with vigor, eyeing with apprehension a crag of rock coming up.

“One!…T—” An exhalation of air replaced the rest of the word as Carter was body-slammed into a boulder, but he continued the count. “Two! And, Three — release!”

Carter let go of his rope smoothly and tumbled away on a relatively level patch of icy ground. Jayden, who had to be a bit more careful, as he was still carrying the handgun, also let go of the rope without incident. He opted for a different, more difficult landing, which was to literally hit the ground running. His legs pedaled fast, pumping high to avoid rocks while maintaining enough speed to keep upright after disembarking at what he guessed to be around twenty miles per hour. Somehow he managed to stay on his feet, gun in his right hand. The only snafu was when Carter’s pack was knocked loose from his shoulder and Jayden nearly tripped over it. He saw it coming, though, and high-stepped over it like a track star, smoothly dodging a cluster of snow-covered rocks after that before coming to a stop, still on two feet, where Carter lay sprawled on a thin sheet of hard-packed snow.

Jayden looked down on Carter, whose sunglasses prevented him from seeing if his eyes were open or not. “You okay?”

“Think so.” Jayden reached out a hand and pulled his friend to his feet. Then he pointed to the edge of the plateau, some twenty feet away, where their parachute was blowing over the side of a sheer drop.

“Hate to see it go. It served us well,” Carter said, watching it blow away.

Jayden nodded, watching until he could no longer see the green tarp as it drifted away in the winds and out of sight over the side of the precipice. “Not to mention we’ll have to set up our tent directly on the cold, wet ground tonight. But Carter, your knack for incredible escapes never ceases to amaze me. I seriously thought we were goners back there, and I’m super-glad to be alive. But right now I’ve got one question.”

“What’s that?” Carter said, picking up his pack and dusting the snow off of it. Jayden looked around the wind-blasted plateau, at the steep drop-ff to their left, the long slope behind them back down to the Treasure, Inc. team, and the edge of the plateau straight ahead, with what appeared to be a sizable gap before the mighty Mount Ararat rose again, this time straight to the summit.

“What now?”