Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

45

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN

Saturday, 15 July 2006. 2:34 a.m.

At first, there was absolute stillness in the infirmary tent. With Kyra Larsen sleeping with the other assistants, the breathing of the remaining two women was the only thing that could be heard.

After a while there was a light scratching. It was the Hawnvëiler zip, the most hermetic and secure in the world. Not even dust could penetrate, but nothing could prevent an intruder’s access once it had been unzipped twenty inches or so.

What followed was a series of faint sounds: stockinged feet on the wood; the pop of a small plastic box being opened; then an even fainter but more menacing sound: that of twenty-four nervous keratin legs scurrying around inside the little box.

Then there followed a discrete silence because the movements were almost inaudible to the human ear: the partly opened end of a sleeping bag being lifted up, the twenty-four little legs landing on the cloth inside, the end of the cloth being returned to its original position, covering the owners of those twenty-four small legs.

For the next seven seconds, breathing once again dominated the silence. The sliding of the stockinged feet leaving the tent was even quieter than before, and the prowler didn’t close the zip when he left. The movement that Andrea made inside the sleeping bag was so brief that it hardly produced a sound. It was, however, enough to provoke the visitors to her sleeping bag into discharging their anger and confusion after being shaken about so much by the prowler before he entered the tent.

The first sting drilled into her and Andrea shattered the silence with her screams.