The Genesis Plague

44

Though Jason wasn’t fond of Crawford’s leadership style, he had to admit that the colonel’s platoon was a well-oiled machine. In less than fifteen minutes after relaying Crawford’s command to Staff Sergeant Nolan Richards, a human chain of twenty marines outfitted with respirators stretched through the cave’s passages and began ferrying out the blast debris. Camel, Jam and Meat joined them. The remainder of Crawford’s platoon went about securing the camp.

With Crawford focused on interrogating Al-Zahrani and the platoon set to work, Jason was intent on having a closer look at the cave’s burial chamber. He grabbed a flashlight and filed past the marines lined up in the entry tunnel. At the T, he split right from the marines and moved swiftly through the winding passage.

Drawing lessons from the PackBot’s earlier exploration, he tried to avoid the tunnel branches that led to dead ends. But the further he progressed into the mountain, nothing differentiated one passage from the next. Twice he forked off down passages terminating in solid rock and had to backtrack. Each time, he pulled out his knife and scraped an ‘X’ into the wall on either side of the passage.

Along the way, he managed to locate one of the surveillance cameras the bot had detected in the ceiling. Surprisingly, there was no visible wiring. Surrounded on all sides by rock, wireless signals would be near impossible. So where did the wiring run to? He didn’t have time to investigate the matter. He had to keep moving before Richards came looking for him.

The subterranean atmosphere was completely disorienting; the air cool and loamy, thin on oxygen. It felt as if the earth had swallowed him whole. Imagining Al-Zahrani groping through the pitch black with no hope of escape gave Jason bitter satisfaction. It was hard to believe that after so many months chasing ghosts, the A-list madman was now their prisoner — bound like an animal.

Over the past months, the intelligence Jason’s unit had pieced together through monitoring chatter and milking informants had pointed to a band of heavily armed operatives moving furtively from south to north, bouncing from one safe house to the next. Certainly cause for concern. But none of the intel even remotely suggested that Fahim Al-Zahrani might be among the group.

That was how the dirty business of counter-terrorism functioned: for every truth there were provocative rumours. Like the claim made by an informant in Baghdad which suggested that these phantom operatives had acquired two Soviet suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (over sixty of which were still unaccounted for after the fall of the Motherland) and were planning to erase Jerusalem and Washington DC from the map.

Accepting ‘intelligence’ at face value was anything but smart. ‘Nothin’ but a bunch of drama queens,’ Meat had once said.

The tedious process of sifting good information from bad information had persistently put Jason’s unit one step behind their quarry. Only when Jason moved on to more aggressive tactics did a clearer picture begin to take shape. Case in point: the tips extracted from a former Ba’ath Party lieutenant who’d sung like a canary after only one night of sleep-deprivation in a brightly lit windowless room with Britney Spears’s ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ playing in a loop at blaring volume. Among other titbits, Britney got him to confess that he’d helped arrange transport for the quarry, from Mosul to Kirkuk, and that travelling with the group were senior Al-Qaeda members seeking safe passage to Iran. All true. Thanks, Britney.

From there, Hazo’s contacts in Kirkuk pointed them to a local imam who’d been rumoured to have briefly hosted a number of unsavoury guests. Enter bright lights, Britney Spears and one sleepless night and the imam had provided detailed descriptions for the four-wheel-drive vehicles he’d procured for the operatives. Shortly after Jason requested aerial surveillance support from one of the Predator drones flying reconnaissance rounds over the northern plain, the caravan had been spotted heading east towards the Zagros Mountains. An hour later Jason’s unit had staged a hasty ambush.

Now Jason was certain that the only contraband the Arabs aimed to smuggle over the mountains was far more ominous than plutonium: it had been Fahim Al-Zahrani himself. And Jason still feared that Al-Zahrani was plotting an escape. Crawford had better call for backup, he thought.

Finally, the passage widened and yielded to the cave.

At the opening, Jason paused and moved the light beam left to right. All along the walls the bone piles were stacked high — a circle of death.

What happened to these people? Jason wondered as he paced forward and shone the light on the skeletal remains. There had to be thousands of skeletons stashed unceremoniously in this cave. This was definitely not a modern mass grave, like Crawford wanted to believe. But it certainly was evidence of a large-scale burial. There was no telling if the bodies had been buried at the same time.

Working the cave counterclockwise, he walked the perimeter while using the light to scan the bones. Every few feet, something would catch his eye and he’d paused to examine the remains and hunt for clues. Even if these bones came from victims of an ancient war or genocide, there’d be signs of trauma — broken bones, cleaved limbs, gouges left behind by sharp blades. But there was nothing extraordinary about anything he was seeing.

Conversely, modern genocide wasn’t about torture: its focus was annihilation — speed and efficiency. It wasn’t uncommon for dozens or hundreds to be gunned down en masse by automatic weapons. Or if ammunition was slim, the modern executioner might opt to work his way along a line-up and deliver single-round headshots. Like Saddam’s henchmen had done to Hazo’s dad. There was no evidence of that here. Not one bullet hole. Even if shots had been delivered to the torso, once the flesh decomposed, the slugs would drop out from the bones.

Furthermore, the lack of clothing or personal effects strongly countermanded Crawford’s chemical-weapons hypothesis. Not to mention that not a trace of flesh remained on these bones. That pointed to an event long, long ago. Well before Kurds were victimized by Saddam and his Ba’ath Party goons.

There definitely was a story to be found in these bones. But what could it be?

The bot sonar hadn’t picked up any other exit tunnels branching out from this cave. Seeing how the bones were piled so high, however, Jason wondered if the sonar signal had been obstructed. Maybe there was something to be found behind the bones? There was only one way to determine if that was the case.

‘They’re only bones,’ he told himself. ‘Nothing but bones.’

Having witnessed plenty of battle zone carnage — from blown-off limbs to bullet-riddled and decapitated corpses — Jason wasn’t squeamish when it came to blood and gore. But bones evoked a different, unsettling feeling.

To Jason, naked bones underscored the impersonal, undiscriminating finality of death — the living being stripped of flesh to its crude frame. Like a vandalized car stripped down to its chassis and left sitting atop cinderblocks.

The ancients revered bones as a vessel for resurrection or reincarnation. As such, they built pyramids and lavish tombs and even mummified themselves to preserve the body’s sacred framework. This place, however, reflected a much deeper reality: death was cruel. Bones were nothing but remnants of a fleeting physical life. That’s what Jason had to believe. Because for the sorriest souls, like his brother Matthew, who’d been incinerated by ignited jet fuel in the World Trade Center on a crystal-clear September morning, nothing physical remained. Jason needed to believe that, in the end, bones didn’t determine one’s ultimate salvation.

Cringing, Jason placed his free hand on a knobby femur to get a feel for it. ‘Not so bad,’ he tried to convince himself. ‘Just like wood.’

Groaning, he tossed the light up on to the pile. Then he threw himself up on to the bones and began clambering his way to the top, using the skulls as steps.

‘Sorry, fellas …’

Halfway to the top, the pile partially collapsed under his weight as hollow rib cages buried deep beneath him folded inward with a series of brittle snaps. As if he had just cracked ice on a pond, he spread his weight flat. Once the bones settled again, he cautiously continued his ascent. Near the top there was more cracking and popping. A dust cloud of decomposed flesh wafted into his nose and mouth. ‘Aah!’ He spat out the dust, but a foul taste lingered on his tongue. That’s truly nasty, he thought.

He held the flashlight high and aimed the light into the shadowy gap behind the bone pile. Moving the light along the wall’s arc, he was able to scan about a third of the cave’s circumference. For good measure, he checked the ceiling too. Definitely no holes or openings.

He slid down the pile, sending a pair of skulls clattering across the ground. Then he continued slowly along the circle, shining the light on the skeletons. At the circle’s midpoint, he grappled to the top of the pile again and checked the rear wall and ceiling. Nothing.

Again he slid to the floor, continued along the pile. Three-quarters of the way around the circle he climbed the pile for a final inspection.

‘Okay. No way out,’ he muttered.

As he came to the end of the circle, he noticed something peculiar: dozens of jawbones had been neatly stacked in a separate pile. Upon closer examination, he discovered that none of them had teeth.

That’s odd, he mused.

Either these specimens were extreme examples of bad oral hygiene, or someone had extracted the teeth. But why would someone take them?

Then something on the ground glinted in the light. Jason bent down for a better look and at the foot of the pile saw a sharp silver edge covered in heavy dust. When he swept some of the dust away with his finger, he found something that was definitely not from long ago.

He picked up the object and held it under the light. It was a tool that resembled a hi-tech surgical instrument. Something a dentist might use to—

‘Extract teeth.’

Had to have been left behind by one of the scientists brought in for the 2003 excavation. He pocketed the plier-like forceps.

There was one item left, and Jason remembered the bot had spotted it to the right of the exit. Shining the flashlight waist-high, Jason ran the light along the curve of the wall until he found the spot that had clearly been smoothed by tools for a very obvious purpose: to prepare the surface for etching. And the image etched into stone made his jaw drop open.