The Voynich Cypher

CHAPTER 34

Heat waves shimmered off the tarmac as the private Hawker executive jet set down on the runway of the Queen Alia airport in Amman, Jordan, its wheels smoking as they struck the scorching surface with a series of screeches. The summer temperatures were just beginning to hit the mid-nineties during the day, and temperatures could easily climb into the triple digits nearer the desert. Fortunately, the dust clouds from the freak winds, the notorious khamsins, had settled over the last few hours, and the flight arrived on time.

Steven and Natalie deplaned along with Luca, trailed by two Templars that Luca had selected for the detail. Both were in their late twenties and had seriously athletic bearings. The most obviously out-of-place member of the group was Luca, who was the oldest and also the least agile.

Natalie powered on her phone and made a quick call as they moved to customs, where the group was passed through as a formality. Luca had worked his magic, and they were welcomed as dignitaries in Jordan — a key archeological team associated with the Church, which had just made several lavish donations to some of the King’s favorite charities. Their luggage trundled in a cart towards the charter lounge baggage claim, and within several minutes they were outside in the arid day, watching for their ride to appear.

A passenger van pulled to the curb followed by a Ford Expedition. The driver of the van got out, rounding the hood to greet Natalie with a hug before shaking hands with Steven.

“Robert. Good to see you. Everything going okay?” she asked. Robert was Moody’s agreed upon cover name for the trip.

“Been in beautiful Jordan for two days, and so far, no worries. Let’s get you loaded up and into the air-conditioning. You want to introduce me now, or later?” he asked, glancing at the rest of the group.

“Robert, this is Luca,” Natalie said. “Luca, Robert. He’s an old friend and will be facilitating things for us on the trip.”

Luca shook hands and eyed Moody warily. “I believe we already met on the train. Always nice to have facilitators helping out,” he said noncommittally.

“Nice to meetcha.”

“And these two are Arturo and Francois,” Natalie continued, gesturing to the young men.

They quickly got the bags into the back of the SUV, and soon they were on the road, departing the city. The two vehicles moved at a moderate pace down the well-maintained highway as Moody briefed them.

“We’ll be heading to the Dead Sea, then down the coast until we get to the parking area for the Wadi Al Mujib. There, we have a helicopter that will fly us to the coordinates Steven selected for the base camp. It will bring us in, and then return to Amman for the remainder of the supplies. It would take far too much time to hike to the camp location — days, in fact — and ATVs won’t make it due to the water depth in some of the sections. I have a satellite phone for communications; cells won’t work where we’re going.”

“What’s the weather been like?” Steven asked.

“Hot during the day and hot at night when the wind’s blowing off the desert. Otherwise, you see a thirty-degree drop in a matter of a few hours. Which sounds like a lot, but if it’s a hundred during the day that means it gets down to maybe seventy-two at night, if we’re lucky. So think of this as a warm-weather holiday, but without the nice hotel rooms, restaurants, or bathrooms and showers. We’ll haul our own water in — you don’t want to drink the water in the stream. It’s probably okay for bathing, assuming there are no parasites in it, but I’d advise using our water supply for that, too. The helicopter will keep it coming, and we’ll have a one week emergency supply in case the weather doesn’t cooperate.” Moody turned to Steven. “Any idea how long we’ll be in for?”

“My guess is weeks. But no way of knowing.”

“Then we should plan on establishing as comfortable a base camp as we can. It would have been nice to get more guys on the ground, but that was a problem, correct?” Moody asked, leaning his head towards where Luca was sitting.

“Yes. On such short notice we were limited. The agreement was that we wouldn’t use any machinery or power tools, that we’d be discreet, and would leave the land largely as we found it. Six was the maximum number of people they would allow on the dig. Believe me, I pushed for another dozen, but it wasn’t possible,” Luca said.

“Sounds like they were concerned about having a big camp tearing up the hills,” Natalie commented.

“That was a part of it. But it also was really more the timing than anything. That, and we had to agree to leave anything we found in place, which we all know isn’t going to happen. So the fewer people around, the fewer witnesses, from our perspective,” Luca underscored.

“I’d imagine the Jordanians will take the position that whatever we find is their property, being as it’s on their soil,” Steven pointed out.

“Yes, but we’ve already taken care of that. We have been assigned an inspector from the state, who you’ll soon learn is nowhere to be found. He’s probably sitting at home counting his blessings at the newfound wealth he’s come into for filing reports saying nothing was located.”

The highway came to an abrupt T intersection at the shores of the Dead Sea. They headed south, past numerous large hotels and spas. The area had been developed into a thriving tourist area, where locals and international visitors alike flocked to the complexes in droves.

“Was that a Marriott?” Natalie asked as they sped by yet another massive group of buildings.

“Yup. Unfortunately, we won’t be staying there. It’s tents and air mattresses for us,” Moody said.

The four lane highway narrowed to two and became a steep drop off into the sea. Traffic was light, and once they passed the tourist zone it thinned to nearly nothing. Even with the air-conditioning belting out, they could all feel the heat radiating off the windows, and it ran through everyone’s minds that this would probably be the last time they’d be in a cool environment for a long while.

Eventually, the vehicles pulled off at a dirt parking lot along the east side of the road, in front of a group of dilapidated red-painted buildings — bathrooms for the tourists. A few vehicles were parked abreast of them, but there was nobody to be seen other than a wizened old man who acted as the parking attendant.

“We’re here,” Moody sang out as he shut the motor off.

When they opened the doors, the withering heat that greeted them was like the blast from an oven, and the group reluctantly crawled out into the harsh glare of the afternoon sun. Moody made a call on his satellite phone, then turned to Steven. “Helicopter will be here in a few minutes.”

Steven studied the entrance to the Wadi — a magnificent canyon, carved from the light limestone rock, easily towering hundreds of feet overhead on either side.

“There will be snakes and scorpions and poisonous spiders galore, so try not to get bitten by anything that will kill you. By the time we can get you out of here, you’ll be long gone,” Steven said.

“He’s not kidding,” Moody stressed. “There’s a first aid kit in one of the bags, but it’s not going to do a lot of good if you get the wrong kind of bite, so pay attention to where you’re walking. There are enough deadly critters around here to kill us a hundred times over, so remember at all times that this isn’t downtown Los Angeles.”

“L.A.’s no picnic either,” Natalie said. “You obviously haven’t been there for a while.”

Everyone laughed, relieving the stress that was building from the remorseless ravages of the sun.

A Jordanian military truck pulled off the road and an officer stepped out. He approached the group gingerly, and then deferred to Luca, as the oldest. In broken English, he welcomed them on behalf of the Jordanian government and assured them that their vehicles would be watched over by the attendant, twenty-four hours a day. He seemed uncertain what else to say, so Moody addressed him in Arabic, thanking him for the attention and the courtesy of stopping to see them off.

That seemed to satisfy the officer, who strutted back to the truck and climbed in, patting the roof as a signal to drive on. The message was clear — the military was watching them.

“This is a nature preserve, and you need a permit from the government to hike it. They’ve stopped handing those out until we’ve finished with our excavation,” Luca said.

Natalie came to stand by Steven’s side, gazing up into the canyon. “Steven. It’s magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She was right. It was incredible, and humbling. The small stream of erosion had taken millions of years to cut through the rock, and the effect was breathtaking. Few people alive would ever get to experience it as they were about to.

The solitude of the moment was shattered by the beating of rotors, and a medium-sized gray military helicopter hovered over the area before slowly descending. Leaning into the swirl of dust, the group toted their bags to it. The flight crew stowed the luggage, everyone boarded, and they lifted off to make the short flight.

Steven watched as they traversed the canyon, veering to the right when they hit the fork in the rivers. After what he knew to be roughly four miles they arrived at the dry, relatively flat area where Steven had calculated they could make camp, at the base of what was going to be their work area. The river bed was gray gravel, with an inclination of twenty feet over its surface of three hundred foot length, but it was large enough to land a helicopter if there was no wind, and he reasoned that they could set up a base camp on the edge and not have the tents blow away by the rotors.

The chopper set down and the small group disembarked, taking their bags from the flight crew. The hold contained several drums of water, as well as various other duffel bags and containers. Ten minutes after arriving, the helicopter was empty, and the crew waved to them as they lifted off. Once the aircraft had departed, the silence was deafening — there was literally no sound but the burbling of the meager river beyond. After only a small amount of exertion everyone was already bathed in sweat — the temperature in the canyon was into the triple digits due to lack of any breeze.

Steven had brought a handheld outdoor thermometer; when he pulled it out of his pack, it read a hundred and seven Fahrenheit. At eleven-thirty a.m.. Anyone with doubts as to whether this was going to be easy duty quickly lost them, and it was with a certain sluggish determination that they unpacked. Several of the unidentified cases contained their camping gear, and they doggedly pitched tents and built a ready-made enclosure for the two latrines. Moody handled the creation of the area for the food and water, and once they were well on their way, he made another call on his satellite phone.

Forty minutes later, the quiet in the canyon was again fractured by the thumping of rotor blades as their chopper approached, loaded with the remainder of their supplies. They were fortunate there was still no wind to speak of, and the landing occurred without drama. The three man flight crew hopped out of the cabin and hurriedly unloaded yet more boxes and crates, which Moody and the two Templars moved to the little camp area.

Ten minutes after it had set down, the helicopter lifted off again, not to return for three days, at the earliest. The muggy air settled on the group like a blanket as they watched it crest the hill towards Amman, their last link to civilization severed. After a few minutes of rest, they returned to setting up the camp for the night before it started to get dark. There were still a few hours of light, and they needed to get the kitchen area up to speed. The helicopter had brought them a small gas-powered generator with several five gallon tanks of fuel, so they could have limited refrigeration in the oversized ice chests using several deep-cycle batteries they could then charge with the generator.

It wasn’t Club Med, but it would do.

Steven took bearings with the rangefinder, then retrieved the handheld GPS he’d brought to calculate positions. He powered it on, but nothing happened. Checking the batteries, he tried again, but with no success. After a half hour of fiddling with the device, it was obvious that something had malfunctioned. The adventure wasn’t starting off well. Without the GPS, they’d be down to dead reckoning from approximate points on their campsite. That wouldn’t work very well, Steven knew, but he would make the best of it for now.

The afternoon wore on as they put the finishing touches on the camp. Just before dark, Luca approached him as he stood near the bottom of the slope, studying the north face of the canyon through his binoculars.

“It’s a huge area, isn’t it?” he said.

“It is. That’s what I was trying to explain on the plane. It’s one thing to read the Scroll’s directions, but quite another to be on the ground. The place is vast,” Steven agreed.

“Do you see anything promising? It all looks the same to me,” Luca said, his face red from exertion and sun.

“No. But we have no idea what we’re looking for. Whatever it is has been exposed to the elements for many hundreds, or even thousands, of years. So this isn’t going to be a matter of seeing two columns from an old temple sticking out of the cliff. If it hasn’t been discovered by now, it’s because it doesn’t look like anything special. Countless generations of nomads have been down this creek, and they’d have noticed.” Steven lifted a thermal canteen to his lips and drank some water. “It’s not going to be easy. It will be luck, more than skill, that gets us results, I’m afraid. And hard work. A lot of digging. Starting at first light tomorrow.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Oh well. Goodnight, Dr. Cross.”

“Goodnight. And it’s Steven.”

“Ah. Right then. Goodnight, Steven. Say goodnight to Natalie for me. And it’s Diego,” Luca said and moved off in the direction of his tent, walking stiffly, in the wake of the day’s demands.