Covenant

22

Ethan moved across to the second tent and peered into the shadowy interior as Rachel led him inside.

The tent contained a number of boxes and crates, along with a satellite receiver dish and a small laptop computer. Ethan moved between the crates, glancing at plastic containers filled with brushes and small metallic trowels, a vacuum pump and plastic specimen jars, several of which contained what looked like bones. Ethan peered at one of the tags inside a jar alongside a small bone.

Right metacarpal.

Ethan slipped the small jar into his pocket.

“These are the tools of a paleontologist,” Rachel said. “This is Lucy’s equipment.”

Ethan nodded, taking a picture of the specimen jars and the array of equipment. He wondered why it had not been returned to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Beyond the smaller crates was another crate some nine feet long and three feet deep sitting on a pallet. Ethan moved across to it, reaching for the lid. He shared a glance with Rachel and then hefted it aside, and as he did so he felt a shock wave of surprise hit him.

A huge block of sandstone had been hewn from the living rock, probably using power tools, and placed in the crate. Ethan knew that scientists like Lucy did not use power tools to excavate ancient remains, preferring instead to diligently remove bones one by one and catalogue their type and position as they went along.

Entombed in the rock lay the skeletal remains of an enormous humanoid, nearly eight feet tall and powerfully built. Ethan stared in awe at the figure. At first glance the remains looked perfectly human to Ethan’s untrained eye, but he could remember Karowitz’s fossils. A gust of hot desert wind moaned through the tent as he stared down at the remains, encased beneath the earth for more than seven thousand years. Now, he saw the strangely oval eye sockets in a skull that was far too elongated to be human, the massive chest plate of fused bone splitting into ribs near the spine, the immense arm bones built for carrying muscle far greater than that of a human being.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“You still think Lucy was mistaken?” Rachel asked.

Ethan shook his head, taking photographs as Rachel gestured to the remains.

“Look at the skull cap,” she said. “It’s elongated, twice as tall as a human’s.”

“A bigger brain or something?” Ethan asked, snapping a shot of the skull. “Karowitz mentioned infrasound communication, like some dinosaurs.”

“That might explain it,” Rachel replied, “and there is a human practice going back thousands of years where the skulls of newborn infants are tightly bound, distorting them as they grow into exactly this kind of shape.”

Ethan frowned.

“Maybe some kind of religious practice?”

“Not likely,” Rachel said. “Such skulls have been found all across the ancient world: Incas in Peru, eastern Germanic tribes, Tahiti and Samoa in the South Pacific, the Atacamero culture, and others. Even the Egyptians practiced it: Tutankhamun, Nefertiti, and Akhenaten all show signs of skull deformation. Hippocrates mentions an entire population, the Macrocephales, who deformed their skulls in worship of ancient sky gods.”

“You think they did it to emulate these things?” he asked, gesturing to the remains.

“It’s possible,” Rachel said. “Why else go to such lengths for something as painful and dangerous?”

Ethan gently replaced the lid, and was about to leave when his eye caught upon several smaller boxes stacked near the rear of the tent. He moved across to them, squatting down and prying the topmost box open as Rachel examined Lucy’s specimen jars nearby.

Inside, a small block of a pale-colored material about the same size as a cigarette packet was encased in a transparent sack filled with a gel, the gel packed with ball bearings. A metal rod passed through the gel and into the block. Ethan’s eyes traced a wire fused to the end of the rod, running into a small device made from black plastic. From the device a second, thinner wire ran into the bottom of a cell phone.

“IED,” Ethan whispered to himself, suddenly feeling cold.

An improvised explosive device — the weapon of choice for insurgent groups across the world — it contained everything required in order to slice, puncture, dismember, or maim its unsuspecting victims. Ethan had seen a hundred such devices while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he had not seen was one so incredibly small and encased in the strange gel package.

Ethan opened the two cases beneath and found several more of the devices, each identical and attached to cell phones of various different types. What the hell are these people doing?

Ethan quickly fired off several photographs of the IEDs, before on impulse grabbing four of them from the box at the bottom and shoving them into his pockets. He closed the remaining boxes and carefully stacked them as he had found them, then turned and crept toward the tent flaps.

“Come on,” he whispered to Rachel, who got up to follow him.

If he could get these samples back to Jerusalem undetected, then Israel would have to listen to him and—

“Halt!”

The word punched through the silence like a gunshot. Ethan and Rachel froze barely a meter from the tent flaps.

“Come out with your hands in the air! No sudden movements!”

Shit. Ethan checked his pockets for the IEDs and cursed himself for staying too long in one place. He’d disregarded too many of his own golden rules from his days as a journalist working in hostile environments.

“Move, now!”

Ethan sighed and walked to the tent flaps, reaching out and hoping that the MACE soldiers weren’t the sort to shoot first and ask questions later.

“Get down on your knees!”

Ethan hesitated at the entrance and looked at Rachel, wondering how the soldier could see him standing in the interior.

“Stay down! Guys, I’ve got him!”

With a sudden rush of realization Ethan backed up from the tent entrance, listening as heavy boots thundered past outside. Shadows flickered frighteningly close past the tent, and a flurry of curses followed.

“Who the hell is this?”

A voice muffled by the dust of the desert floor spoke out.

“My name is Ayeem.”