James Becker spent over twenty years in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and served during the Falklands War. Throughout his career he has been involved in covert operations in many of the world’s hotspots; places like Yemen, Northern Ireland and Russia. He is an accomplished combat pistol shot and has an abiding interest in ancient and medieval history. His previous novels, The First Apostle, The Moses Stone, The Messiah Secret, The Nosferatu Scroll, Echo of the Reich and The Lost Testament also feature Chris Bronson and Angela Lewis.
THE FIRST APOSTLE
THE MOSES STONE
THE MESSIAH SECRET
THE NOSFERATU SCROLL
ECHO OF THE REICH
THE LOST TESTAMENT
and published by Bantam Books
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam
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Copyright © James Becker 2017
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To Sally, as always and for everything
Machaerus, Judaea
AD 29
‘The Lord Antipas wishes this event to be performed with dignity, and with a minimum of suffering,’ the chamberlain said, ‘so make sure it takes only a single blow.’
The executioner nodded and walked over to the guards to give them their instructions. Then he stepped back and watched as they led the condemned man forward to the centre of the cleared area, the ground under his tattered leather sandals beaten flat by the passage of innumerable feet and stained dark brown, a silent reminder of countless previous executions performed on the same spot. The victim looked around him calmly, gazing without apparent curiosity at the circle of spectators, people who had been drawn to the palace courtyard by the spectacle of his imminent death. Some fifty or sixty men, and just a handful of women, had assembled to witness this final act at the end of the day’s judicial proceedings. A gentle susurration was clearly audible, a muttering of conversation that had grown in volume as the condemned man was led into position by two soldiers.
The courtyard was bounded on all sides by high walls, constructed from blocks of light-coloured stone. One formed a part of the fabric of the palace, pierced by a wide doorway that led to the building’s interior. A number of palace officials were standing in that opening, also watching the proceedings. Two of the other walls were solid, while the third was fitted with a pair of heavy wooden gates, their tops marked by rows of metal spikes, which stood open to allow the populace to enter freely.
Above the palace, the sky was an almost unbroken palette of solid blue, marred only by a handful of small white clouds. And beyond the courtyard, a fitful breeze drove grey-brown clouds of dust into the open space, lifting and flapping the loose garments worn by the majority of the spectators.
The two soldiers leading the man glanced towards the executioner, waiting for his signal. When he nodded, they gestured to the prisoner to get down on to his knees. In one swift movement, they each took hold of one of his arms and pulled them back so that his head and neck were thrust forward.
The executioner drew his sword from its scabbard and tested the blade against the ball of his thumb. The single-edged blade was longer, wider and heavier than a sword designed for combat, but was very efficient when used for its proper purpose.
He stepped forward, the blade hanging loosely at his side, and bent down to talk quietly to the condemned prisoner.
‘Stretch out your neck and try to look up,’ he said. ‘If you do that, I will only need to strike you once. If you don’t, this will be very unpleasant for both of us. It’s the most I can do for you.’
The prisoner spoke for the first time.
‘I understand.’
The executioner took a half pace back, checked that the guards were holding the man in the right position, then stepped forward again and moved the prisoner’s long dark hair from his neck. Bearing in mind the man’s function at the court, his action showed a surprising and unexpected degree of compassion. Then he stood beside the kneeling figure and lifted the sword above his head.
The crowd now ceased its muttering; their sense of anticipation was almost palpable, their concentration absolute. The executioner waited for a second or two, until the man had done as he’d been asked, pushing his head out and away from his body and tensing the muscles of his neck. Then he swept the blade down in a lethal, glittering arc. The crunch as it met the bones of the man’s neck was clearly audible, but the sound was instantly drowned out by a collective inhalation, a sharp intake of breath from the spectators as the head of the prophet hit the ground and rolled gently from his instantly lifeless body. And almost immediately the crowd began to disperse. The deed they had assembled to witness, for whatever reason, was done; the spectacle was over.
The chamberlain stepped forward, taking care to avoid the spreading pool of blood on the ground, then bent down, picked up the head by its long black hair, and placed it on a silver salver.
He paused briefly to instruct the guards to dispose of the body, then retreated inside the hall to show the head to his master, Herod Antipas.
‘It is done, my lord,’ he said, somewhat unnecessarily in view of the object he held aloft on the platter. ‘I have ordered that the body be disposed of in secret. They will bury it deep in the desert, where no one will ever stumble upon the remains by accident, so the man’s followers will have no relic to venerate. As you ordered, we can retain the head here, where we can keep it under our control, for the same reason.’
Antipas nodded, then stood up and left the hall, followed by his retinue. The day’s business was over.
Two of the men in the crowd outside in the courtyard had watched the execution closely. The event was what they had feared from the moment the prophet had been seized, and although there was nothing they could now do for the dead man – their friend and charismatic leader – there was at least some hope that they could keep his movement going. But only if they succeeded in the next phase of their plan – a plan that they acknowledged had been born of desperation rather than hope.
They left the palace and returned to their village, a walk of about half an hour. A small group, perhaps a little over a dozen men in all, was waiting for them.
The news they conveyed was not unexpected, but the confirmation of their leader’s demise brought sorrowful gasps from the assembled company.
‘And his death?’ one man asked.
‘The beheading was swift. And, as we thought, they will be burying his body somewhere where we’ll never find it, but the head will be staying under Herod’s control. So that at least gives us a chance. A chance to continue our leader’s great work.’
‘So we steal it?’ the same man asked.
The two men who had been at the palace shook their heads simultaneously.
‘That wouldn’t work,’ one of them said. ‘If it goes missing, they will know what’s happened and hunt us down. We must take it without them realizing that it has gone. There is only one way that can be achieved.’
He turned slightly and looked at another man in the group, a tall, thin man with long black hair and an even longer beard.
The crowd fell silent as if in response to some kind of signal, and they all looked at that one still figure.
‘I will do it,’ he said, his voice clouded with barely supressed emotion, ‘because I believe absolutely in the man who died today. When?’
‘For this to work, it must be as soon as possible.’
‘Very well. My family have been prepared for this, and I am resigned to what must happen. I will take just a little time to make my farewells.’
A short while later, the man returned to the group and they all followed the two leaders out of the village and into the undergrowth. They halted in a small clearing, where the tall man with the long hair and beard spent a few short moments with each of his companions before walking to the centre of the clearing and kneeling down. With an air of great solemnity, one of the leaders produced a short but heavy sword and stepped over to the kneeling man. He gave him a reassuring press on the shoulder and took a pace back. Then he inhaled deeply, did his best to compose himself and, with a single heavy blow, decapitated his friend. He shuddered and turned away, unable to look at what he had just done.
‘Let us hope this works,’ he said thickly, as his companion picked up the head and slid it into a heavy linen sack half-full of rags to soak up the blood. ‘If it doesn’t our brother will have given his life – and I will have become a murderer – for nothing.’
An hour later, in the fading light of early evening, the two men once again walked into the palace courtyard. Perhaps surprisingly, there were still twenty or so spectators there, wandering about under the watchful gaze of two guards. Most of them were looking at the body of a man who had been stoned to death, a killer convicted out of his own mouth earlier that day.
The moment they entered the courtyard the two men separated, one joining the largest group of civilians, while the other, the linen bag slung over his shoulder, moved over to the opposite side of the courtyard, and loitered near the doors that led into the hall.
Moments later, a scuffle broke out amongst the group of spectators, a dispute deliberately instigated by the new arrival, and which almost immediately turned violent. Raised voices and the sound of blows filled the courtyard, and within seconds both of the watching guards had stepped forward to intervene, lashing out with the wooden shafts of their spears to separate the fighting civilians.
The moment the guards had begun to move, the second man had pulled open the door to the hall just wide enough to allow him to slip through the gap, and disappeared from sight.
Inside, half a dozen flickering oil lamps provided barely enough illumination to see from one end of the hall to the other. But it was sufficient to clearly show the silver salver placed upon a table by the wall opposite the throne, on which the uneven outline of the decapitated head of the prophet was visible.
The man hurried over to the table and bowed his head in a brief prayer. Then, looking with sadness and reverence at the features that were as familiar to him as his own, he reached out to seize the hair of the decapitated head. But the gaze of the half-closed eyes seemed to accuse him even in death, and he changed his mind. The prophet deserved better from him.
Instead, he gripped the head with both hands, lifted it off the salver and placed it gently on the floor. It was heavier than he had expected and awkward to manoeuvre. He opened the linen sack, removed the second head – the head of another man he’d also been pleased to call a friend – and placed it on the silver dish. He took precious extra moments to arrange the hair and beard on the salver so that the replacement looked as much like the original as possible.
He gently transferred the head of the prophet to the linen sack, took a deep breath to steady himself and then strode back to the partially open door. Outside the guards were still trying to restore order, and the man could see another two guards approaching the mêlée from outside the courtyard. And then behind him, from inside the hall, he heard the sound of running feet. And then an angry voice rose in challenge.
The man didn’t hesitate. The guards would kill him on sight without waiting to question why he was there. He simply took to his heels, pushing open the door and running out into the courtyard, heading for the wide arched entrance. All of the guards, he knew, would be encumbered with weapons and would be unable to catch him, though obviously a well-thrown spear would bring him down.
And even as that thought crossed his mind, he felt a glancing blow on his shoulder and a spear slammed into the open wooden door a few feet to his right. He touched his shoulder. No blood. The blow must have been from the shaft of the weapon, not from the point.
He began jinking from side to side, but no other missiles came anywhere near him. Within a couple of minutes he slowed down to a walk, and before long his companion rejoined him. Together, they retraced their steps, heading back to the village with their gruesome but invaluable prize: the severed head of their leader, the teacher and prophet they had followed for the last decade.
Kuwait
When Chris Bronson stepped outside the arrivals building at Kuwait International Airport the humid heat hit him like a hot sodden blanket. It actually stopped him in his tracks, and for a few seconds it almost hurt to breathe. His aviator-style sunglasses instantly fogged up, so the heat had rendered him not only immobile but also unable to see.
‘Dear God,’ he muttered, putting down his two small bags at his feet. He only had a cabin bag containing his weekend stuff, a couple of books, washing kit and clothes, and a small leather computer bag that held his netbook and tablet. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, took off his sunglasses, squinting against the hard glare of the morning sun, and wiped the lenses. At least then he would be able to see what was in front of him, even if he had no idea at that moment where he should be heading.
He looked around hopefully, trying to take shallow breaths as his body began to acclimatize to the radical change in temperature and humidity. The air-conditioned aircraft, air-conditioned walkway and air-conditioned terminal building had left him woefully unprepared for the blistering-hot reality of the world outside.
‘Chris!’
He spun round and saw that a sand-coloured 4x4 vehicle had just come to a halt on the access road in front of him, and through the open window a woman was waving enthusiastically at him.
He grinned broadly and waved back, then picked up his bags and walked the short distance across the pavement to the vehicle, opening his arms for a hug as the woman climbed out of the vehicle.
But she shook her head and simply extended her hand for him to shake.
‘No, not here, Chris,’ she said. ‘They’re very touchy about public displays of affection, even between married couples. And we’re not even that any more.’
Bronson took her hand firmly and pulled her towards him, bumping shoulders as he met her eyes.
‘That, Angela, is the biggest regret of my life,’ he said with a wide smile, ‘and I’d be very happy to walk you down the aisle again. All you have to do is say the word.’
‘I do know that,’ she replied, taking a step backwards and looking up at the face of her former husband. ‘And I do kind of miss being Mrs Angela Bronson. It has a nice ring to it, but we had our reasons, Chris, you know that. Anyway, it’s good to see you again. You look well.’
‘So do you,’ Bronson said, his gaze running up and down her body, which was entirely covered apart from her face. ‘What I can see of you, that is.’
‘It’s practical, my dear,’ she said. ‘It’s cooler to wear white or light-coloured clothes out here, and local sensibilities mean I need to cover up.’
‘And the scarf?’ Bronson pointed at her head. ‘You haven’t fully embraced Islam, have you?’
‘Of course not. I don’t have to wear the hijab, but I prefer to, especially in the city. And being blonde always attracts attention in this region. It’s just easier to cover up to avoid being stared at. It makes me feel more comfortable.’
Bronson looked into the back of the vehicle, saw that it was loaded with boxes and packets, and pulled open the rear door, placed his bags on the floor behind the driver’s seat, then walked round and climbed into the front passenger seat.
His ex-wife and still his best friend got in beside him and then, shielded by the tinted windows of the Toyota, leaned over and kissed him firmly on the lips. Bronson grasped her hand and smiled at her, and for a few moments they remained almost motionless, relishing each other’s presence after too long apart.
‘That’s a better hello,’ Angela said, returning his smile. She put the Toyota into gear and pulled away as Bronson buckled his seat belt.
‘Tell me this jeep has got air-conditioning,’ he said with a groan, feeling the sweat already starting to dampen his shirt. ‘It’s like a bloody oven out there.’
‘Actually,’ Angela said brightly, ‘it hasn’t. But what it has got is climate control, which is much better, so if you just sit there and stop complaining about the heat, you’ll cool down in a few seconds.’
Bronson shook his head and adjusted the dashboard vents so that the stream of ice-cold air was directed towards his face and chest.
‘Sorry,’ he replied, as the cool air started to have an effect. ‘The heat was a bit of a shock. I was expecting it, obviously, but it still kind of took me by surprise. How on earth do you manage to work in it?’
Angela shrugged her shoulders. ‘You get used to it, at least to some extent, and we do what we can to keep the sun off our backs at the excavation site. Ideally we’d live somewhere here in the city, but we don’t really have any option,’ she continued. ‘The site is too far away for us to commute there on a daily basis from anywhere half-civilized, and being on site all the time means that we can get a lot of work done first thing in the morning before the sun gets too high in the sky, and carry on late into the evening until the light finally goes. We each spend at least two nights in a hotel in Kuwait every fortnight, just to wash off the dust and dirt. Showering in the desert isn’t the easiest thing to do.’
‘Isn’t it a hassle going back and forth across the border between Kuwait and Iraq so often?’
‘We do have to cross the border, obviously, but there’s absolutely no indication apart from the GPS’ – she pointed at a unit attached to the windscreen with a suction cup – ‘and possibly a couple of border guards patrolling the area in a 4x4 to tell you where you are and when you’ve crossed into Iraq. I can promise you that the desert in Kuwait is absolutely identical to the desert in Iraq. The dig is in a kind of empty quarter, so that’s why we need a professional standard GPS to navigate by lat and long. There are only a handful of roads out there.’
‘Makes sense,’ Bronson said. ‘So we’re heading straight out there, are we? I saw you’ve already got all the gear in the back of the truck.’
‘We are, yes, but we’ve got to stop and pick up somebody before we leave Kuwait City. Stephen Taverner – another archaeologist from the British Museum. I gave him a lift here a couple of days ago for an appointment and it’s easier for us to all go back together.’
‘So you didn’t just drive down to meet me?’
Angela nodded.
‘Well, sort of. The main reason I drove down was to collect you, obviously, but one of our vehicles does a supply run at least once a week, and we also had to deliver some of the relics we’ve uncovered to the museum in Kuwait. The staff there are collating what we’ve found, and they’ll then arrange to transport everything up to Baghdad.
‘Normally, of course, we’d expect to take the stuff straight to the museum that authorized or sponsored the dig, but Baghdad is just too far away to make that feasible in this case. Where we’re digging is about three hundred miles from Baghdad as the crow flies, and probably over four hundred by road – not that there are many of them, or not proper roads anyway. But Kuwait City is only about sixty miles away in a straight line, and a bit over one hundred on the route we drive. And don’t forget that this is a joint expedition. We have both Iraqi and Kuwaiti archaeologists involved in the dig, plus the three of us from the British Museum and a couple of French experts from a Paris museum, so it really does make sense to use Kuwait City as our base.’
Bronson switched his gaze from Angela’s profile to the view through the windscreen. It was the first time he’d been to Kuwait, though he had on occasion visited Dubai and Muscat, albeit briefly, and he could immediately see the similarities. The skyline in front of them was dominated by skyscrapers and there were signs of recent construction everywhere; the roads were wide and in good condition, most of the vehicles looked quite new, and the driving was universally awful, vehicles swapping lanes at random and without the use of indicators or mirrors, and all driving far too close to one another, and far too fast.
‘The driving doesn’t bother you?’ he asked, looking at a car moving alongside them.
‘It terrified me at first, but after a week or so I got used to it.’ She broke off and hit the horn hard as a white Nissan saloon dived across two lanes of traffic and pulled in front of them with only inches to spare, before swinging off on to an exit slip road.
Bronson lifted his foot from the imaginary brake that he had applied as the car appeared, and shook his head.
‘I thought Cairo was bad,’ he muttered, ‘but this is probably worse, and everything’s moving a hell of a lot faster.’
‘We won’t be in it for very long,’ Angela said, slowing down slightly as the vehicles ahead began bunching up, brake lights flaring into life. ‘Once we’ve collected Stephen we’ll be heading out of town, and the roads should be fairly empty.’
About fifteen minutes later she pulled the Toyota to a stop directly outside a hotel on a side street and tooted the horn briefly.
Almost immediately, a tall, thin man with sandy hair and what looked to Bronson like three days’ growth of beard walked out of the hotel and over to the Land Cruiser. He’d actually stretched out his hand to the front passenger door handle before he registered the fact that the seat was already occupied. Instead, he opened the rear door and pulled himself into the back seat, a gust of hot damp air accompanying him.
‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there. I’m Stephen Taverner,’ he said, and extended his hand for Bronson to shake.
‘Nice to meet you. I’m Chris. I’m Angela’s former other half, if you can call me that.’
‘Oh, of course, Chris Bronson. She’s told us all about you.’
‘Nothing good, I expect,’ Bronson said.
‘No, not really,’ Stephen replied, deadpan. Then he grinned, but immediately grimaced and put the palm of his hand against the side of his face. ‘This blasted tooth,’ he said. ‘The dentist hacked out the old filling and put in a new one, but it’s still giving me gyp. No, actually, Angela was quite complimentary about you, given the fact that you’ve been divorced for so long. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, maybe?’
‘Not in my case,’ Angela piped up, swinging the Land Cruiser around a corner to head back the way they’d come. She gave Bronson a wry smile. ‘But Chris can be useful, especially in a tight corner.’
‘So if you’re not here for some kind of reconciliation with the fair Angela,’ Stephen asked, ‘why are you out here at all?’
‘I had a couple of weeks’ leave due, and I thought I needed a change of scene from rural Kent, so when Angela suggested I come out to see what she was up to in Iraq, I booked a flight and packed my shorts. I would have packed a bucket and spade, but she told me not to bother.’
Stephen nodded. ‘Quite right too. Archaeologists almost never use anything as crude as a spade. Our tool of choice is usually a brush or, if something is particularly reluctant to come back into the light of day, a small trowel.’ He paused for a moment, then added: ‘So are you looking forward to seeing the temple?’
‘Temple?’ Bronson demanded, his interest piqued. ‘What temple?’
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
The tailgates of the lorries slammed down almost simultaneously, sounding like two ragged gunshots, and from the back of each vehicle a group of about a dozen men jumped down to the ground and began walking steadily towards the encampment. They were clad in a wide variety of clothing, everything from classic but rather grubby Arabian jellabas up to military-style camouflage clothing.
But the new arrivals shared one characteristic: they were all carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. Many of them also wore shoulder or belt holsters containing pistols of various types, and a couple were hefting rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
As the men approached the encampment in two straggly lines, the members of the archaeology team stood and watched, frozen to the spot, the expressions on their faces ranging from merely puzzled to frankly terrified.
Suddenly, one of the younger Iraqi archaeologists turned on his heels and ran towards the small vehicle park at one side of the encampment.
He didn’t get far.
A shouted command came from somewhere in the line of men approaching from the east, and two of the figures dropped to their knees, aimed their Kalashnikovs at the fleeing figure, and opened fire.
Two sudden flares of blood discoloured the man’s clothing, one on his left leg and the other on his back. He took another couple of steps, probably driven by nothing more than momentum, and then collapsed in an untidy tangle of limbs on the desert sand. For the briefest of instants there was silence, and then the fallen man began screaming as he tried to crawl away. One of the approaching men walked unhurriedly over to where he lay, took a pistol from a holster and fired two shots into the fallen man’s legs. He began screaming even more loudly, and the sound only stopped when the terrorist bent over him, took a large knife from his belt and slowly, methodically, sawed through the man’s throat. Blood pumped out of the ragged wound as the major arteries in the neck were severed and for a few seconds the only sound in the camp was the scrape of steel on bone as the knife was worked through the Iraqi’s vertebrae. Once he’d finished, the killer wiped the blood from his blade on the dead man’s clothing, then picked up the severed head by the hair and placed it in the middle of the corpse’s back.
If there had been the slightest doubt before about the intentions of the approaching men, the casual and almost incidental but still ritualized murder of the young archaeologist comprehensively removed it. These people were clearly terrorists, perhaps a splinter of the Islamic State, the ruthlessly murderous group that had risen to prominence as ISIS or ISL a few years earlier and which had terrified members of all the nations in the Middle East, including those that followed Islam.
But that really didn’t make sense. The Islamic State was a political entity, determined to impose Islam on every nation it could, the choice being offered to people simply comprising an option: ‘follow Islam or we will kill you’. The group had left a trail of bodies, thousands of them, across the Middle East, a mute testimony to their implacable resolve and total ruthlessness.
This, however, didn’t seem to have a political motivation. Taking over a village and insisting that the inhabitants converted to Islam was one thing, but surrounding a dozen or so people involved in an archaeological dig tens of miles from anywhere seemed completely pointless. There had to be some other reason, some overriding objective, for these men to have driven so far out into the desert.
The two lines of approaching men stopped, now completely surrounding the group of archaeologists. Two of them had fallen to their knees and were visibly quaking, while most of the others were just staring wide-eyed at the intruders, trying to make sense of what had happened just seconds before.
One of the newcomers, a young man with a thick black beard and wearing a military-style camouflage uniform, stepped forward and looked at the group of unarmed men they had encircled.
‘Who is in charge here?’ he asked softly in English, his voice educated and the tone almost conversational.
Nobody responded, and with a deceptively casual gesture the newcomer pointed at an archaeologist standing to one side of the group, a brush and trowel held forgotten in his hands.
The man standing on the right of the apparent leader of the newcomers raised his Kalashnikov and fired three rounds straight at the archaeologist at virtually pointblank range. The impact of the bullets slammed his body backwards, knocking him off his feet, and he was dead before he even hit the ground. A chorus of ragged screams rang out as the terrified archaeologists stared in fascinated horror at his broken body and the slowly expanding pool of blood around him.
‘I’ll ask you once again,’ the bearded man said, just as quietly as before. ‘Who is in charge here?’
For about a second, nobody spoke, but several people in the group looked straight at the man in their centre. Then one of the archaeologists pointed at him.
‘He is,’ he said, an obvious tremor in his voice. ‘His name is Mohammed. Please don’t shoot me. Please.’
Mohammed nodded, took a half step forward and slowly raised his left hand.
‘Good. Now, that wasn’t too difficult, was it?’ The bearded man smiled slightly. ‘We have been told that you have discovered a hidden temple. An important hidden temple. I would like to see it. Now.’
Mohammed shook his head.
‘It’s just an empty room,’ he said, his voice sounding bewildered. ‘There’s nothing in it. Well, almost nothing. But of course you can see it,’ he added hurriedly, desperate not to antagonize the young man. ‘It’s this way.’
He turned and pointed towards one of the trenches that ran arrow straight across the irregular rocky ground of the desert. It was marked by flags at regular intervals, and its vertical sides also bore markings to indicate both the excavated depth and the areas where particular artefacts had been discovered. At the far end of the trench, one of the sides displayed a large bulge, a kind of semicircular shape, out of which the top of an aluminium ladder protruded.
Mohammed started nervously across the rock towards the ladder and then stopped right beside it.
‘It’s down there,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to go down first?’
The bearded man shook his head.
‘That will not be necessary. I know what I’m looking for. Do you have lights down there?’
Mohammed swallowed and nodded.
‘We do,’ he replied, ‘but only when the generator’s running. I can have it started for you, if you wish.’
‘No. I have a torch.’
The man checked that the base of the ladder was firm, then swiftly climbed down it.
Mohammed peered nervously down into the opening, seeing the flickering light as the torch beam swept around the interior of the abandoned cave they had uncovered just four days earlier.
He glanced around, wondering if there was any possibility of him reaching one of the vehicles and making his escape, but when he looked more closely at the two parked trucks he realized that to do anything of that sort would simply hasten his own death. He had assumed that the two lorries had been abandoned by the armed men, but now he saw that this was not the case. In the back of each vehicle, standing in the loading area but directly behind the cab, he could see a single figure, and beside each person was the unmistakable shape of a mounted heavy machine gun. With those weapons, even if he somehow managed to reach one of the 4x4s, get it started and drive it away, they could still cut him to pieces from half a mile away.
Mohammed’s mind raced and he started to shake as he accepted the inevitability of what was likely to happen. They couldn’t hide, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight: the fate of everyone in the group rested entirely on the whims of the armed men who had invaded the camp. All they could do was exactly what they were told, and just hope that some of them would still be alive when the terrorists finally left.
He didn’t dare to move and, after about a minute, the ladder began to vibrate as the man started to climb up it again to emerge from the opening.
He glanced at Mohammed as he stepped back on to the ground.
‘Wait here,’ he ordered, and strode away, heading towards the jeep that had accompanied the two lorries and was still parked some distance away. As he approached it, the vehicle began to move towards him, closing the distance between them, and then came to a halt again.
Mohammed hadn’t moved an inch from his position beside the entrance to the temple, and he watched closely as the armed man held a brief conversation with somebody inside the vehicle. Then the back door of the jeep opened and the man climbed inside.
As soon as the door closed, the jeep started to move once again, circling around both the group of terrified archaeologists and the armed men surrounding them, and headed over towards the excavation where Mohammed was standing.
The jeep stopped a few yards away, and the driver – his face virtually invisible because of the tinted wind-screen and side windows – switched off the engine. The two doors on the driver’s side opened simultaneously and two men climbed out, both wearing shoulder holsters over their military-style clothing and each carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle. They looked at Mohammed and then scanned the entire area, presumably checking for any sign of danger. Apparently satisfied, the driver turned back towards the vehicle and nodded. Only then did the other two doors open.
The young bearded man climbed out and walked over to Mohammed. He was followed by a man in late middle age who was wearing a somewhat crumpled white linen suit, and who immediately began mopping the sweat from his forehead with a large red handkerchief.
Mohammed stared at the man in disbelief, forgetting his state of terror for an instant.
‘You,’ he said, his voice quivering with emotion. ‘You’re involved with these people? Why?’
The man in the suit looked at him with a dismissive expression and shook his head.
‘You mean you haven’t worked it out yet? Never mind. It’s too late for you anyway. I don’t think we need your services any further.’
He turned slightly and issued a brief instruction to the driver.
Mohammed didn’t hear what he said, but there was no mistaking the meaning of his order.
As the driver began raising his Kalashnikov, Mohammed started to run. He had always been built for comfort rather than speed, and he’d only covered about ten yards before the driver pulled the trigger.
The man wearing the suit nodded in satisfaction as he watched the senior archaeologist’s body tumble clumsily to the ground and lie still.
‘Tell your men to get rid of the others, Farooq,’ he said. ‘No word of this must be allowed to get out.’
And as he began to climb down the aluminium ladder into the temple, he heard the sound of the Kalashnikovs opening up.
Kuwait
‘So tell me about this temple,’ Bronson said, as Angela steered the Land Cruiser along the highway that headed south-west away from the city and towards the border – not in fact the border with Iraq, but the one between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the first thing you need to understand is that we don’t really know whether or not it is a temple. We’ve been calling it that ever since we found it, but really only because it’s a convenient name. We could be quite wrong about what it was used for.’
‘Agreed,’ Stephen said from the back seat, ‘but the signs are that it was some kind of a place of worship or veneration. Why don’t you tell Chris exactly how we found it?’
Bronson looked at his ex-wife, and she glanced at him and smiled, then returned her attention to the road in front.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘There are more potential sites dotted around the world than there are archaeologists to investigate them. This particular area of southern Iraq was identified as being of interest perhaps twenty years ago because the Marsh Arabs lived there, and not a huge amount was known about their early history. This was also the height of Saddam Hussein’s regime so for several reasons – mainly political – nobody did anything about it. And as he seemed to be determined to wipe out the Marsh Arabs there was no way any expedition could possibly be mounted while he was in power. And then, of course, there was the turmoil after he’d been deposed, when it still wasn’t safe to travel or work there.’
‘So what’s the site?’ Bronson asked. ‘A Marsh Arab village or something?’
‘It might have been,’ Stephen interjected, ‘but we really aren’t sure what it is. The initial reports had only stated that there were signs of habitation there, and clear physical evidence in the form of pottery fragments on the ground. The assumption was that it was probably the site of a settlement that had been abandoned some considerable time ago. That deduction was based on the type of pottery people had picked up there, none of which appeared to have been made within the last couple of hundred years or so, and the absence of any recent artefacts. No plastic or metal objects, I mean.’
‘Anyway,’ Angela continued, ‘when the situation in Iraq seemed to be a bit more stable, the Baghdad Museum decided it was worth sending a team down to do a test excavation, and because the location is so close to the Kuwaiti border they invited the corresponding museum in Kuwait City to take part, and also asked for a handful of Western specialists to join the group. The British Museum sent Stephen and me, and a chap called George who you’ll meet at the dig.
‘It really didn’t look all that promising when we got there, but that’s the thing about archaeology. Until you get below the surface you genuinely have no idea what you’re likely to find. The site is a fairly level area, but when we set up our tents and stuff I couldn’t see any obvious signs that there had been a village there. No outlines on the ground or anything like that, but there were quite a few bits of pottery lying around, all quite ancient.’
‘Of course, we are talking about a desert here,’ Stephen said, ‘and that particular area is a mixture of sand, rock and earth, so it’s quite conceivable that there could have been a substantial village there, but after only a few months drifting sand could have completely buried it. Or, and this might be more likely, the people who built the settlement there might have decided for whatever reason – better grazing for their animals, their normal water source drying up or something of that sort – to dismantle everything and move somewhere else.’
‘So you pitched your tents and started digging?’
‘Basically, yes. And in fact, what we found was pretty much what we had expected to find. Quite a lot of pottery, the dates consistent with what we had anticipated, a few ritual ornaments and the like, and clear indication of the remains of a building in one trench – rotted sections of cut timber, that kind of thing. But nothing exciting until a few days ago. And then, at the very end of one trench, we found something different: worked stone.
‘It was just a right-angled piece of rock on the left-hand side of the trench, and we thought at first it was the base of an individual object, a stone carving or something of that sort, but when we shifted more of the earth from around it, we realized it was nothing of the sort. It was actually a step carved into the bedrock that ran beside the trench. Even before we’d fully exposed that length of stone, we did the obvious and checked to see if there was another step below it. There was, and there was a third one under that. What we were looking at was the beginning of a rough-hewn staircase that descended below the desert floor.
‘As you can imagine, that changed the mood on the team quite dramatically. What we’d expected to be nothing more than a perfectly routine excavation of a long-abandoned village had suddenly turned into a treasure hunt. We had no idea what might be waiting for us at the bottom of that stone staircase. We did it properly, though, documenting and photographing each phase of this unexpected turn the excavation had taken, but we were all caught up in the excitement of the moment, and I think that most of us believed we might have stumbled upon something of real importance. After all, it was a buried stone staircase that had led Howard Carter to the untouched tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.’
‘But I presume it wasn’t a tomb?’ asked Bronson.
‘Patience,’ Angela said, with a faint smile. ‘We excavated the length of the staircase, which went down to about twelve feet below the desert floor. It finished at a small square stone platform, surrounded on two sides by vertical slabs of bedrock. On the third side, directly in front of the staircase, there were half a dozen lengths of roughly shaped wood that formed a kind of door, or that’s what it looked like initially. It turned out that they were just individual planks of timber, positioned there to cover an opening in the rock.’
‘And?’ Bronson asked impatiently. ‘What did you find?’
‘That was the disappointing bit,’ Angela replied. ‘There was a large opening, an archway about seven feet tall and four feet wide that had been carved out of the rock. Beyond it was an open space that was clearly a natural geological feature, a small cave, which had been used in the past by some group of people. It seemed fairly obvious to us that the wood had been positioned to keep the dust and sand out of the cave when the decision had been taken to fill in the staircase. And it had worked well. When we cleared away the lengths of timber, we found only the equivalent of a couple of buckets of debris had penetrated behind it.
‘So that opened up the entrance and Mohammed – he’s the senior Iraqi archaeologist on the team, from the Baghdad Museum – took a look inside first.’
‘Rank has its privileges, in archaeology, just like every other job,’ Stephen mused.
‘Exactly. Anyway, as soon as the lights were working, we went down there in groups of four to have a look.’
‘And it wasn’t quite what we’d expected,’ Stephen said. ‘It was just an empty room, and there were no treasures of any sort down there. I don’t just mean no gold or anything like that, but I was certainly hoping that it might have been a burial vault or something of that sort, and we might at least have recovered a few bones and maybe some grave goods as well. But there was nothing. It looked as if at some point, maybe a few centuries ago, the people who had used the space had changed their mind, taken out everything that was movable, covered the entrance with the lengths of timber and then filled in the stone staircase leading down to it. And in fact that did sort of tie up with our first deduction that the settlement had been deliberately abandoned for some reason.’
‘But you said right at the start that it was a temple,’ Bronson objected, ‘so it can’t just have been a completely empty room, otherwise you would probably have thought it was a storeroom for grain or something.’
‘Quite right,’ Angela agreed. ‘In fact, once we had the lights burning and could examine every inch of the place, we found exactly three artefacts, and one or perhaps two of them did suggest that the cave might originally have been a temple.
‘The most obvious of these was a small stone altar – well, actually it’s little more than an oblong slab of stone positioned on two shorter vertical stone pillars. But we called it an altar because that’s what it looked like more than anything else, though in reality it could have been a stone seat. But the main indicator that the space might have been some kind of a temple was an image carved into the wall directly behind the “altar”. That image is a human face. It’s not very clear, and the carving is fairly basic – I suppose you could call it primitive – but it appears to be the face of a bearded man with long hair.’
‘You mean it’s a kind of graven image?’ Bronson said. ‘I thought a lot of religions forbade images of human beings or animals? Judaism and Islam, for example?’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ Stephen said. ‘The technical term is aniconism, and that’s basically a prohibition against depicting any kind of living creature, and especially not a religious figure, as an image to be worshipped. It’s an important character of the Jewish, Islamic and Byzantine artistic traditions, but it’s also worth saying that there are a few grey areas. Public buildings in Islamic states were often allowed to have such images on them as decoration, and back in 1932 a third-century Jewish synagogue was discovered in Syria with its interior walls almost completely covered in paintings showing priests and religious events like the consecration of the Tabernacle. So although you’re right in principle, the fact that we have a graven image in this particular structure doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a temple, and it also doesn’t mean we can rule out any particular religion, though I suppose we could probably suggest that the cave was unlikely to have been used by either Jewish or Islamic worshippers.’
‘And I suppose the image itself wouldn’t help to date it?’ Bronson asked.
‘No, not really,’ Angela said. ‘Men shaving their faces and having their hair cut is actually a comparatively recent innovation. For quite literally centuries, going back to the very dawn of recorded history, men wore beards and had long hair as a matter of course. You can see this in all the old paintings and images, everyone from Moses and Solomon to Jesus Christ. So the way the face had been carved was no real help in dating the temple. Unfortunately, radiocarbon dating the wood isn’t all that likely to give us a definitive answer either. What we will know when the tests have been completed is the date of the wood. We’ll be able to say with certainty that the entrance to the structure must have been covered after that date, but we have no obvious way of proving when the temple itself was created. The cave might have been opened up and used for some kind of religious services for only a year or two before it was shut up. Equally, it could have been used for a millennium, and then abandoned. At the moment, we simply have no way of telling.’
‘You didn’t find any organic matter inside the cave, then?’
‘No, nothing,’ Angela replied. ‘It was as if the place had been swept clean before they boarded up the entrance.’