The Lucifer Gospel

15

The plane rolled on, slowing quickly as Hilts backed off on the throttle and dropped his flaps. He turned the plane into the wind and brought it to a full stop, letting the engine run for a full two minutes before switching off. The propeller whirled to a stop and then there was nothing but the sound of the wind brushing against the fuselage and lightly rocking the wings. Directly in front of them, half a football field away, was a high cliff face, cracked and broken, the notch of a canyon prominently etched in shadows just to their left.

“You’d never know there was anything there,” said Hilts.

“Maybe there isn’t anything,” Finn cautioned.

“Right,” Hilts said, “they come out here every day with their yoga mats for a bit of meditation and a few updogs.”

“You really are a very cynical man, Mr. Hilts.”

“Cynical is a fool’s word for a realist.” Hilts unlatched the top-hinged, large-windowed door and pushed it up toward the wing. He ducked through the opening and stepped out into the blistering sun. Finn did the same on her side, then walked around and joined Hilts.

“How long do you think we have?”

“They never leave before two in the afternoon, and we’re at least an hour away by Hummer. So we’ve got at least an hour and a half before we should be gone.”

“It would help if we knew what we were looking for.”

“The Hummer tracks lead right into that canyon.”

“What about our tracks? Will they see them?”

“The plane weighs less than a ton. The Hummer weighs four times that much.” He pointed. “Look at the ruts; they’ve broken through the surface crust and left a trail you could probably see from the space shuttle. Not the most environmentally friendly vehicle in the world, and you can see they’ve been out here half a dozen times. Our track is barely noticeable.”

“Cynical and very sure of yourself.”

“Quit worrying; they’ll never know we were here.” He went back under the wing, ducked into the plane and came out again with one of the old Nikons he’d had with him in the City of the Dead and a couple of canteens. “Just in case we do find something,” he explained, rejoining her. He handed one of the canteens to Finn and she slung it across her shoulder. Together they headed down the deep ruts that marked the recent trail of Adamson and his companions into the desert canyon.

“It’s more than just the Hummer,” said Finn, staring down at the hard-packed, rock-strewn grit. “There’s other tracks here, faint ones.”

“Deserts aren’t quite the empty places you imagine,” said Hilts in reply. “Even before the war this whole area was like Grand Central Station. Brits, French, archaeologists, petroleum geologists. The Italians were here even before that… Graziani laying down hundreds of miles of barbed wire to catch the Senussi rebels, Bagnold exploring, and then with the LRDG.”

“LRDG?”

“Long Range Desert Group, aka the Desert Rats. Small commando forces sent out into the desert to harass the Germans and the Italians.”

“I thought that kind of thing only went on in the north.”

Hilts bent down and used his fingers to dig at a small lump of rock. It turned out to be the bottom edge of a small tin. He tugged it up out of the dirt. There was still part of a blue-and-white printed label visible, with a twist of metal and a key-style attached. He handed the tin to Finn.

“Swift’s Plate Corned Beef,” she read.

“Some time before Adamson got here the Brits came through. Either military or even before.”

“Why here specifically?”

“We’re close to three borders, Sudan, Egypt, and what used to be called French Equatorial Africa. Back then there was some strategic importance to a place like this, especially if there was water close by. A wadi in one of the bigger canyons maybe.” He shook his head. “Strange how things change over time. It’s like Normandy: just a bunch of beaches on the coast of France now, but sixty years ago the fate of the world was focused there.”

“Nothing’s focused here by the looks of it,” said Finn.

“Never can tell,” Hilts replied.

They kept moving forward until finally they reached the entrance to the canyon. The opening was barely fifty feet across, one side jutting out a little more than the other so that in anything less than full sunlight shadows would make the opening virtually invisible. Finn and Hilts continued onward into the canyon itself, the rock cliffs rising claustrophobically on either side, narrowing so that the tracks of the Hummer came within a foot or two of the enclosure.

“They weren’t first in,” said Hilts, nodding toward a number of other, fainter tracks. “Someone knew about this place a long time ago.”

A hundred feet along, the canyon suddenly took a sharp turn to the right, straightened, and then became narrower still. Looking at the sandstone walls, Finn could see definite gouges where the heavy bumpers of a truck had dug into the rock. As quickly as it straightened the canyon curved again, this time to the left. A hundred yards farther on the narrow gauntlet broadened into a small, high-sided valley. Hilts and Finn stopped in their tracks, staring into a frozen moment from events that had happened long before they were born.

“My God, what happened here?” Finn whispered, lifting a hand to shade her eyes. The valley floor before them was a tableau of horror. Hilts lifted his Nikon, popped the lens cap and began shooting.

Directly in front of where they stood was the carcass of some sort of military vehicle, an open truck riding on what must have been enormous tires if the size of the rims and the huge curving fenders were any indication. The tires themselves had disappeared, whatever was left of the rubber having disintegrated long ago. The vehicle had been crewed by three men, a driver, a machine gunner beside him, and a man operating a heavy-barreled antitank gun in the rear. The remains of those three men were still in the truck. The mummified body of the driver was thrown back in his seat, his skull grinning, still covered with a parchment of skin and a few ragged strings of scalp. The eye sockets were filled with caked grime and grit from more than half a century of sandstorms and exposure. The machine gunner was a crumpled sack of bones on the cracked leather seat beside the driver, held together by nothing more than the tattered remnants of his uniform. An old ball-shaped helmet sat askew on a headless spine. The third member of the crew might have lived a little longer than his companions; what was left of his body was crouched against the tailgate of the vehicle, head ducked down, the leathery sticks of his arms still wrapped around the empty shell of his desiccated rib cage, as though trying to fend off the chill of death throughout eternity.

Hilts stepped forward and ran his hand over the flank of the vehicle. There were dozens of bullet holes puckering the metal, the holes just big enough to poke his pinkie finger into. Forty-five caliber or less. A light machine gun. The truck was riddled like a tin can used for target practice.

“Italian,” the photographer said, stooping to inspect a faded unit designation on the rear of the vehicle. “One hundred and third Compagnie Arditi Camionettisti, a jeep scouting company. They called these trucks Sahariane. It was pretty much the first vehicle specially designed for the desert.” He stood up.

“Who shot them?” Finn queried.

“They did,” answered Hilts, pointing. A hundred yards farther down the valley was a second tableau, this one made up of two trucks, a smaller jeep-like vehicle, and a rough camp spread out on the valley floor, complete with the skeletal remains of several small tents laid out in a half circle around a built-up fire pit, a row of abandoned jerry cans, and a long slit trench. The jeep looked as though it had suffered a direct hit from the big antitank gun on the Italian vehicle. It was blasted and charred, the windshield disintegrated, the wheel rims sunk into the ground. The other two larger trucks were in better shape, their tires vanished but the camouflage markings still visible.

Reaching the vehicles and the ghostly remains of the campsite, Hilts began taking more photographs, concentrating on the work unit markings on the trucks and the old equipment scattered around the camp.

“Red and black stripes with a white scorpion. Guards unit, LRDG. The truck is a thirty hundred-weight British Chevy.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“I built a lot of models when I was a kid. There was even a TV series about these guys called the Rat Patrol I watched in reruns. It starred Christopher George, if you remember him. Kind of like a cut-rate George Peppard.”

“No.”

“So much for his career.”

“There’s no bodies,” said Finn, looking around the campsite. “There should be bodies.”

Hilts turned and looked back at the Italian truck. He saw immediately that the bullets that had killed the three-man crew probably hadn’t come from the direction of the camp. In the first place, the trucks and the burnt-out jeep were placed wrongly, and in the second place, the machine guns on the British vehicles were too heavy: big Vickerses and Brownings as well as an even larger Boys Anti-tank gun mounted on the rear of the second truck. Hilts looked up at the surrounding ragged walls of the steep little valley and then he knew.

“It was an ambush,” he said finally, kicking one of the old stamped tin Shell Benzene brand fuel containers with the toe of his boot. “They heard the Italians coming so they went up into the rocks and waited for them. That’s why they never got any farther into the valley. Picked them off from above.”

Finn walked through the camp, stooping every now and again to examine a rusted piece of equipment or some other faded artifact. “Two trucks and that jeep thing. How many men would that be?”

“Hard to say, as many as a dozen, but since there’s only three tents it was probably more like six-two men to each. Shorthanded. Maybe they’d lost a few.”

“Six against three and they didn’t win?”

“Who said they lost?”

“The trucks are still here. Why didn’t they leave? No fuel, no water maybe?”

Hilts shook his head. “These were pretty smart people. They had fuel dumps everywhere and they always left themselves enough gas to get to one, or back to base, whichever was nearer. And all the trucks had condensers for their radiators. Water wouldn’t have been a problem.”

“Something happened, that’s for sure.” Finn did a slow, three-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. “It’s an interesting little mystery, but surely this isn’t what Adamson was after?”

“I doubt it,” agreed Hilts.

“We should keep looking,” said Finn. “And we should keep an eye on the time.” She looked at her watch. They’d been on the ground for almost half an hour.

Hilts looked into the remains of the tents and then climbed up on the trucks. He jumped down from the bed of the second vehicle and joined Finn, who was looking into the narrow, shallow trench that stood behind the blockading row of sandbags that faced the canyon entrance to the valley.

“Find anything?”

“Tin cans-more corned beef-condensed milk, looks like a weird Birkenstock, a stove made out of a ten-gallon drum with holes punched in it, and this.” She handed up the remains of what had once been a black beret. There was a tarnished, sand-scarred badge clipped on the front.

“A scorpion in a circle.” He nodded. “Non Vi Sed Arte-Not by Strength, by Guile. It’s an LRDG cap badge and beret.” Hilts reached out and helped her up out of the pit.

“What would have made the Italians come into the canyon in the first place? How would they have found it?” Finn asked as they made their way through the camp and continued to explore.

“Same way we did, I guess,” said Hilts. “They followed the tracks of the LRDG trucks.”

“Okay, then why did the Brits come in?”

“Looking for a place to camp?”

“Or maybe they were following someone else’s tracks as well.”

“We’ll never know,” said Hilts. He stopped. Halfway up the right-hand wall of the valley they saw the wreckage of an airplane. “What the hell…?”

The old biplane looked as though it had tried to land, lost control on approach, and ran up the side of the valley before it stopped. The engine cowling had ruptured, shattering the propeller, and the lower wing had crumpled and torn, leaving half the upper wing and a few struts. The undercarriage had completely vanished. Over time the desert had taken its toll and the fabric covering on the fuselage was in tatters. What was left showed no signs of national identification.

“Maybe that’s what the Brits were after,” said Finn, staring at the ruined aircraft. The door of the plane was sagging open and she could see up into the cockpit. The windscreen was cracked but unbroken.

“Maybe that’s what Adamson was after too,” said Hilts. He climbed up toward the wreckage, pulling himself steadily up the steep slope with his hands digging into the stony sandstone.

“Why would Adamson be interested in an old airplane?”

“Because Lucio Pedrazzi was a flyer. He was one of the first archaeologists to use aerial surveys, and he flew an airplane just like this, a Waco UIC.”

“That sounds American.”

“It was,” Hilts answered. “William Randolph Hearst used to fly one. The Citizen Kane guy. It was popular all over the world.” They finally reached the wreck, and hanging on to one of the wing struts, Hilts peered into the cockpit. Finn followed suit. There were two bucket seats, the leather rotted, leaving only the springs, a Y-shaped yoke and two Bakelite wheels, one for the pilot, the other for the copilot beside him. The rear section had been enlarged and turned into a cargo bay. It was empty except for an odd skeletal cube formed out of welded aluminum. In the center of the boxlike arrangement was something that looked like a simplified version of a child’s gyroscope. At the base of the cube was a metal sleeve that led down into the fuselage.

“A camera mount?” asked Finn.

Hilts nodded. “A Bagley, or maybe a K-5. But no camera.”

“Adamson.”

“Could be.”

“I thought Pedrazzi was looking for our Coptic monastery.”

“Maybe he was looking for something else as well.”

“When exactly did Pedrazzi disappear?” asked Finn, staring into the empty cockpit.

“In 1938.”

“In a sandstorm?”

Hilts nodded. “That’s the story.”

“Was he alone?”

“Actually, no. There was a Frenchman with him, as a matter of fact. A man named Pierre DeVaux.”

“Who was he?”

An archaeologist. A monk, just like Laval. He was there to help Pedrazzi translate Aramaic inscriptions.”

“From l’Йcole Biblique? The Jerusalem School?”

“I’m not sure,” said Hilts. “Probably.”

Finn found herself thinking about Arthur Simpson, the man in her hotel room. The man who knew her archaeologist father. The man who’d been a British spy. The man whose own father had been an archaeologist as well. Three generations all digging up the same past.

“Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“After sixty years?” The photographer made a face. “Not really.” He frowned. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not sure, but there sure does seem to be a lack of bodies. There’s no sign of Pedrazzi or the Frenchman. Just like the British soldiers. Weird.”

“This isn’t science fiction. They either walked out of here and died in the desert or they’re still here.”

“Where?”

Hilts looked around the valley. Finally he nodded to himself.

“What?” asked Finn.

“Pedrazzi took off from the old Italian airfield at Al-Kufrah. According to the reports he and DeVaux were heading off to finish a survey of some rock formation along the border with French Equatorial Africa. It was supposed to have been clear and sunny. Perfect flying weather, but a couple of hours later, which is about right, this huge sandstorm came up out of nowhere.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Look,” he said and pointed down toward the floor of the valley. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Look closer.”

She did, and after a moment she saw it. Tracks again, different than the others. Two long lines separated by six or seven feet, with a much narrower line running between them. The tracks ran off into the distance at the far end of the barren valley. Again Finn shaded her eyes against the burning sun. A hot wind was beginning to blow, sending grit into the air. She felt it now in her nostrils and her hair.

“The Waco is a tail-wheel plane just like the Wilga we flew here in. It leaves a track just like that.”

“I don’t get it. How can the tracks be down there and the plane crashed up here?”

“Because those tracks were from a previous visit,” said Hilts. “Pedrazzi had been here before.”

“So they weren’t on some kind of survey flight after all.”

“No, which means they’d found something they didn’t want anyone else to know about.”

“There’s nothing here.”

“There has to be. Pedrazzi, disappearing soldiers, crashed airplanes. Too many coincidences for one anonymous old streambed in the middle of nowhere. And now Adamson and his friends.”

“So what are we looking for?” Finn asked.

“At a guess I’d say a cave,” Hilts answered, looking up at the rock walls, “but that doesn’t make much sense either.” He paused. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“This is all sandstone. Caves usually form by water action in limestone. There hasn’t been water here in a long time.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking about Qumran.”

“The Dead Sea Scrolls?” Finn frowned. “They were written by the Essenes or somebody like that.”

“Essenes or Copts, it doesn’t really make any difference here… but the Qumran caves were used specifically to hide the scrolls from people who wanted to destroy them, and the caves were artificial… holes dug into the stone. When the people who hid the scrolls left Qumran, they walled the cave up and covered the entrances with rubble.”

“You’re saying they did the same thing here?”

“Pedrazzi found something, and those soldiers must be somewhere. It’s a good bet.”

“What are we looking for?” asked Finn.

“An overhang, a shadow that doesn’t look right, something that looks a little too geometric, squared off.”

“That’s nice and vague,” she said and grinned.

“Best I can do.”

They began to search.

It was Finn who spotted it: a combination of all three clues. Halfway up the far side slope of the canyon was a jutting overhang of darker sandstone, and directly beneath it something that looked like a broken vertical line of shadow that was simply too geometric to have been an accident of nature. Climbing the slope, they eventually reached an almost invisible ledge, barely two feet wide, and the narrow remains of a cave entrance that had been bricked up and sanded over long ago. Somewhere along the line, hundreds of years ago, there must have been some kind of seismic activity and one side of the mud brick wall had crumbled and collapsed, leaving an opening. Later a sandstorm or a small collapse of the overhang had disguised and almost flossed the entrance once again.

Sweating, Finn and Hilts stooped in front of the hole in the rock and peered in.

“Can’t see much,” said Hilts.

“Let’s go in,” Finn answered eagerly.

Hilts put a hand on her arm, stopping her.

“Hang on,” he said. “Caves in the desert can be occupied.”

“By what?”

Gripping the overhang with one hand and putting the other hand on Finn’s shoulder to balance himself, Hilts lifted his left leg and hammered his foot into the ancient masonry wall that blocked the entrance. He did it a second time and a large chunk of the wall crumbled inward, raising a sudden cloud of dust. There was a quick, scurrying sound like leaves rustling and then a hundred pale, crablike shapes streamed out of the cave, clicking and scraping over Finn’s hiking boots. She yelped, rearing back, and almost fell off the ledge as the six-inch-long creatures raced away and disappeared.

“L. quinquestriatus,” said Hilts. “The Death Stalker Scorpion. One of the world’s most lethal. They like cool, dark places during the daytime. They come out to hunt at night.”

Finn nodded silently, gritting her teeth. Even the memory of the sound they’d made was terrifying. She stayed well back from the opening.

“Now what?”

“We go in,” he said. “The wall collapsing will have scared them off.”

“What if there’s still some in there?”

“Step on them.”

Grinning, Hilts ducked his head and entered the cave. Swallowing hard, Finn went in after him.

Kicking in the old masonry had flooded the chamber with light. Originally it had obviously been no more than a small concave depression beneath the overhang, offering a respite from the beating rays of the sun. In some indeterminate past ancient tools had been used to deepen the declivity into an oven-shaped depression in the rocks. Once a secret repository for an ancient library, like the caves at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, the chamber here had become a crypt in more modern times. Five mummified corpses, all still wearing the tattered remnants of their Long Range Desert Group uniforms, were huddled in one corner. Two were curled into whimpering fetal positions. One looked as though it had been frozen on hands and knees, half draped over an altarlike stone. Another was seated with its back against one wall, and the fifth was lying facedown, half covered by the rubble Hilts had kicked over it, one spindly, ropy arm gripping what appeared to be a verdigris-covered copper cylinder. The top of the cylinder was gone and the vase was empty. The back of the cave was a sloping pile of sand remaining after a collapse sometime in the distant past.

“The missing soldiers,” murmured Hilts. He bent down and began to carefully go through what was left of the uniform of the dried-out corpse clutching the copper vase. “Careful of the ordnance, some of it could still be live.” There were weapons scattered all around the cave, old Enfield rifles, a huge Lewis machine gun, a Thompson, and half a dozen or more Mills grenades.

“I wonder how they died,” said Finn. “It looks like it was sudden.”

Hilts shifted the leg of the dried-out corpse he was searching, revealing the desiccated shells of half a dozen creatures like the ones that had scuttled over Finn’s boots.

“Disturbed a nest of scorpions; maybe hundreds. It only takes one sting to kill you; they must have been hit dozens of times. Not a pleasant way to go.” He shrugged. “They wouldn’t have had much time except to die.”

Hilts pulled an old billfold out of an inner pocket of the man’s blouse and eased it open. The papery remains of the man’s organs lay like dust in the bony hollow of his rib cage.

“Anything interesting?” Finn asked.

“Bar chit from Shepherd’s Hotel, membership card to the Victory Club. Library pass for the Haddon Library, Cambridge.” He dug deeper into the wallet. “Here’s his ID card. Professor George Pocock, Strategic Operations Executive, Grey Pillars, Cairo. That was HQ, if I remember right.”

“The Haddon is the Cambridge Archaeology Faculty Library. That’s where my dad met my mom.”

“The Strategic Operations Executive were spies,” he said. “This guy wasn’t Long Range Desert Group at all.”

“An archaeologist and a spy, sent out to find Pedrazzi?”

“Looks that way.”

Hilts dropped the man’s wallet into the pocket of his fatigue jacket, paused long enough to take several pictures, and then stood up and went to the rear of the cave. Finn, suddenly feeling almost desperately claustrophobic, went to the entrance of the narrow cave and looked down into the little valley. Nothing had moved and nothing had changed in the warlike diorama laid out below except for the whirling sand billowed up by the freshening wind that was beginning to moan through the canyon. The sky overhead had gone from harsh metallic blue to an ugly saffron color, like an old bruise. The weather was changing. She turned to tell Hilts and saw that he had uncovered something. Faintly uneasy, she turned away and went to the rear of the cave, her eyes scanning the floor for any sign of movement. Reaching Hilts she saw that he had uncovered the top and side of a large stone box. It was rectangular, four feet high, three wide, and appeared to be about six feet long, its front end angled toward the entrance. Carved into the stone was something that looked like the head of Medusa, the hair a mass of writhing snakes. Around the head, like the letters on a coin, was a faint inscription, almost worn away.

“I can’t read it,” Hilts said.

Finn uncapped her canteen, poured water into her palm and swept her hand around the inscription with a quick wiping motion. The letters darkened, instantly readable.

“Neat,” said Hilts, admiringly. He read the words aloud: “Hic Latito Lux Excito-Vox Luciferus.” He shook his head. “Too bad I never took Latin in school.”

“I did,” said Finn. “My parents insisted. According to them nothing beat a classical education. Good for reading the inscriptions on important old buildings.”

“So what does it say?”

“Here Lies Hidden the Bringer of Light: The Words of Lucifer.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Hilts.

“Non ioco est,” she answered. “No joke.”

“Lucifer, as in the Lucifer?”

“Lucifer was a fairly common name in ancient Rome. It didn’t have the same negative connotation a few thousand years ago.”

“So some Roman named Lucifer is buried inside this thing?”

“His words, anyway.”

“Let’s see.”

Hilts used both hands to scoop the fall of sand away from the top of the box.

“We’re going to open it?”

“It looks to me like a lot of people went to a lot of trouble to find this thing, whatever it is. The least we can do is have a look.”

“What about Adamson and his pals?” Finn asked, frowning.

Hilts checked his watch.

“At least another half hour. We can be out of here long before that.”

It took another five minutes to clear all the sand away from the top of the stone box. When that was done Hilts took a ten-inch “pig sticker” spike bayonet from one of the abandoned Enfield rifles and hammered it with the palm of his hand into the faint crack between the box and its heavy top. He twisted slowly and the top slid fractionally to one side, releasing a puff of stale, dusty air. Together Hilts and Finn manhandled the top of the ossuary to one side and then let it slide down to the floor of the cave, leaning against the side of the stone box. Both of them peered inside.

Stuffed into the heavy stone coffin was the bent figure of a man. He was wearing pale green trousers, a long buttoned jacket the same color, and heavy boots. The face was a leathery brown, but except for a missing ear the general structure of the face was relatively intact. Perched askew on the hawklike nose was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The ear was missing because there was a ragged hole in the right temple big enough to put a fist inside. Part of the jaw was missing as well, showing off a mouthful of yellow teeth. The tongue had shrunken to a black lump. Lying between the legs of the naturally mummified corpse was a copper urn like the one being gripped by the dead man near the cave entrance. Finn reached into the box and took out the small vase. Like the one in the dead archaeologist’s hands, this one was empty. Hilts began going through the pockets of the brass-buttoned fatigue jacket the corpse was wearing.

“Looks like a uniform,” said Finn.

“It is,” Hilts answered. “Italian Desert Forces. No insignia or anything. No rank.”

“There’s a ring,” said Finn. Gingerly she lifted the right hand. A gold band still shone on the leathery hook of the index finger. It fell off into her palm. “There’s a crest engraved into it.”

“Five will get you ten it’s Pedrazzi. Hold on.”

“Find something?”

“He was a smoker.” Hilts grunted. “Lung cancer would have gotten him if somebody hadn’t blown his head off.” He tossed her a small faded cigarette tin. She could still see the enameled illustration of a reclining woman and the name Fatima.

Faintly, more a sense of vibration than a sound, Finn heard something in the distance, rising over the moaning of the wind.

“What’s that?” she asked nervously.

Hilts paused in his examination and listened, frowning in concentration.

“Shit!” It was the first time Finn had heard him swear.

“What?”

“Chopper.”

“Adamson?”

“It’s some kind of gunship.” He ran to the cave entrance and peered out. Finn joined him. She couldn’t see anything except the blowing sand and the old vehicles on the floor of the valley. The sound was getting louder, a deep throbbing tone now. Hilts nodded grimly. “Russian. A Mil-24. It’s the creep in the beret.”

“Colonel Nasif.”

“Must be.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I doubt if we’re going to be given the opportunity to ask.”

“What do we do?”

“Run.”