The Lucifer Gospel

14

They flew over the endless desert, heading west, seeing nothing. The cockpit of the little high-winged aircraft was cramped and the rear two seats had been replaced with a variety of bulky camera equipment and a long-range fuel tank to give the pilot the extra in-flight hours needed to fly large-scale grid series.

Finn stared out through the large side window. “You were right,” she said. “Absolutely nothing. More rocks than sand, I’d say.”

“It’s more hamada than erg.”

“Easy for you to say,” Finn said and laughed.

“Hamada is a rocky desert, an erg is one made up of dunes. Out here the hamada usually is a function of altitude. The higher the elevation the stonier the ground. Mind you, it hasn’t always been this way.”

“It looks like it’s been this way since time began.”

“Probably less than four or five thousand years. You mentioned the English Patient a while back… remember the Cave of Swimmers?”

“The cave that Almasy found.”

“It’s real. And they really are swimming. The actual cave is at a place called Wadi Sora in Egypt. Five thousand years ago there was no desert here, just hills and plateaus and rivers and lots of animals. Think about all those lion safari movies you’ve seen and you’ll have it right.”

“Hard to believe.”

“That’s what they used to say about global warming too. Take it back far enough and you’ll find that all that sand started out on the Atlantic beaches in Morocco. When we get back from our little spy mission I’ll show you some infrared satellite images that’ll knock your socks off. You can still see the markers where the old rivers used to flow, enormous ones that used to irrigate the whole of northern Africa.”

“Maybe that has something to do with what Adamson and his pals are after, some kind of site like the Cave of Swimmers?”

“Zerzura, that old fantasy? I doubt it very much. He has aspirations as an archaeologist, not as a paleontologist, and I don’t think Brother Laval, our cheerful monk from Jerusalem, cares much about cave art.” Hilts shook his head. “No, I think it might be something from the war.”

“Which one.”

“World War Two. It would explain Kuhn’s involvement.”

“But why?”

“This whole area was crawling with Germans, Brits, and Italians during the early part of the war. There was also a lot of Italian activity even before that. Pedrazzi, the Italian I told you about, was a well-known archaeologist, but he could have been a spy too. Just about everybody was back then.”

“Things don’t seem to have changed much,” said Finn dryly.

“We’re not really spying, we’re just satisfying our curiosity.”

“That’s what got the cat in trouble, as I recall.”

On the horizon a darker line began to grow, slowly resolving itself into a rough, lifeless plateau of rock, cracked and broken into a thousand narrow valleys and trackless canyons leading nowhere. Hilts had used a smart cable to plug the cell-phone-sized GPS locater into the larger version on the airplane’s instrument panel. As they approached the plateau he scanned the color display, watching the readout and adjusting the plane’s small, doughnut-shaped control wheel, making small adjustments to bring them to the exact coordinates.

“Almost there,” he muttered, veering slightly to the right. “See anything?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m going to take it down.” Hilts dropped the nose and the small plane responded almost instantly, gliding downward so smoothly it seemed to Finn that they were sliding along some invisible wire. Whatever else Hilts was, he certainly knew how to fly, she thought. She stared out through the side window and then she saw it, almost directly under them.

“There!”

“What?”

“Tracks. I can see tire tracks.”

Hilts tilted the plane into a slow turn, staring out his own side window. After a moment he spotted the same broad tracks below them. “Follow the trail of breadcrumbs,” he said and took the plane down again, flying along above the tire tracks at less than a thousand feet now. The twin lines were almost perfectly straight, heading directly for a narrow canyon entrance visible in the distance.

“Where do we land?”

“Just about anywhere. My girl here is the ultimate in short takeoff and landing. The landing gear has underinflated tires and we only need five hundred feet or so to take off in. I’ll take us in as close as possible.”

“How accurate is that GPS thing?”

“Spitting distance. Plus or minus ten, fifteen yards in any direction.”

Finn watched as Hilts concentrated on his flying, his fingers on the control stick as light as a lover’s. His eyes flickered between the rapidly approaching surface of the stony desert and his instruments. It was almost like watching an impresario playing the violin. He started whistling under his breath and Finn recognized the tune; it was the theme music for The Flintstones. She smiled, watching as he made a few final adjustments, compensating for a tugging wind that shuddered through the airplane briefly as they sank to the ground. The wheels touched with a barely noticeable thump and then they were down, tail wheel first, the sturdy mains a moment later.