‘Jesus, shut up!’ snapped Chase. ‘Fucking non-stop snideyness, it’s like still being married to you!’
Sophia frowned, but fell silent. Nobody spoke for several seconds.
‘She’s got a point, though,’ Chase said quietly.
Nina’s response was louder. ‘What?’
‘I know you get obsessive about archaeology, but Christ, this is taking it to a new level! You’ve never voluntarily worked with people who want to kill you,’ a glance at Sophia, ‘to find something before. And I know Matt’s a soft touch, but you still walked all over him to get to Antarctica. He was lucky to get out of there alive - and Bandra and that other guy, David, didn’t.’
‘You’re blaming me for their deaths?’ asked Nina angrily.
‘No, the Covenant killed them.’
‘But you think it was my fault, right?’
‘I think this is a side of you I hadn’t seen before, is what I think,’ snapped Chase. ‘Remember on the Pianosa, when I asked you how far you were willing to go for this stuff ?’ He looked at her. ‘Looks like now I know.’ Nina couldn’t meet his eyes.
She hadn’t made a deal with the Covenant, she told herself. She had just done what she had to in order to stay alive.
Hadn’t she?
There was no conversation for the rest of the drive. The bluffs drew closer. Still no sign of pursuit. The Hilux bumped over the last dunes surrounding the mesas to find traction on harder, stonier ground, the landscape already shimmering as the sun heated it.
Nina looked up. The steep sides of the first mesa rose a couple of hundred feet above the surrounding desert, the others slightly higher. But the plain between them was devoid of anything but rocks.
‘So is this it?’ Chase asked, turning the Toyota towards the plain’s centre. ‘Not much of a garden spot.’
‘Not now, but it would have been, over a hundred thousand years ago,’ said Nina. ‘Even the Sahara was green once.’ But the area was so desolate it was hard to imagine anything growing here, never mind a garden worthy of God himself.
She looked at the photograph again. The text for ‘Eden’ was, she noticed, closest to the northernmost of the huge rocky outcroppings. ‘Head for that one,’ she said, pointing.
They drove across the plain, the sun beating down. The whole place seemed utterly lifeless . . . until Nina noticed a lone bird above the mesa ahead. It glided in a lazy circle, then dropped out of sight behind the flat summit. She waited for it to reappear, but it didn’t.
The technical jolted. ‘Sorry,’ said Chase, slowing as the Toyota descended a slope. ‘I think we found one of your riverbeds, though.’
‘It’s only narrow,’ said Sophia, speaking for the first time since Chase had snapped at her. ‘We must be near its source.’
‘Yeah, but where is it?’ Nina wondered. The shallow channel led to the rising cliff walls of the bluff . . . and stopped abruptly at its base.
‘Must have been a spring here once,’ said Chase, bringing the technical to a stop near the cliff and climbing out. Nina and Sophia followed, gazing up at the wall of grey and orange stone.
‘Maybe the Garden of Eden was on top of the mesa,’ Sophia suggested. ‘It would have been a good defensive position, especially if they were worried about animal attacks.’
‘Maybe,’ Nina replied, but the idea didn’t feel right. Shading her eyes, she slowly turned to take in the plain, the other mesas, the surrounding desert . . .
Something in the sky, a pale dot. ‘Is that a plane?’
Chase whirled. ‘Where?’
‘There.’ She pointed.
Chase ran back to the pickup and took out the rifle. ‘What is it?’ Sophia asked as he stared through the telescopic sights.
His reply, when it came, was a horrified whisper. ‘Buggeration . . .’
Nina grimaced. ‘If the next words I hear are “and fuckery”, I’m going to be very unhappy.’
‘And fuckery,’ Chase finished. ‘It’s a fucking Reaper!’
‘That . . . doesn’t sound good.’
‘It’s not. You know on the news, when the White House or the Pentagon show those videos of missiles zooming right at some terrorist and flying down his throat before they explode?’
‘Yes?’
He stabbed a finger at the approaching grey spot. ‘That’s what fires the missiles!’
Nina gawped at him. ‘It’s an American plane? Where did it come from?’
‘There’s a US Air Force base across the border in Uganda, at Entebbe. Either that, or a carrier in the Red Sea.’ He shouldered the rifle and picked up the rucksack, tossing it to Nina. ‘Doesn’t matter - it’s here, and in about five seconds some nerd in Las Vegas is going to try to blow us up!’
‘What do you mean, Las—’ Nina began, but was cut off as Chase hustled her away from the technical, Sophia hurrying after them. A dot detached itself from the Reaper and fell away - then lanced towards them at the head of a line of smoke.
An AGM-114 Hellfire missile, homing in at almost a thousand miles an hour.
‘Run!’ Chase yelled, but Nina and Sophia were already racing away from the pickup as the Hellfire streaked across the plain and arced down to its target—
The missile struck, nine kilograms of high explosive detonating on impact to gouge a crater twenty feet across out of the rock and sand. The front half of the Hilux disintegrated in a storm of torn metal, the remains of the pickup cartwheeling through the air to smash against the cliff wall. A shockwave of dust and stones tore past the trio as they dived to the ground.
Nina raised her head. What was left of the Toyota slid to the foot of the slope on its one remaining wheel, the machine gun nodding on its bent pole. ‘Son of a bitch!’
‘Get up,’ Chase said, already on his feet. ‘It’ll fire another one in a minute.’
‘How many missiles does it carry?’ Sophia asked.
‘Fourteen.’
‘Fourteen? ’ Nina gasped, looking nervously at the Reaper. It was still heading for them, less than two miles away.
‘Yeah - and now it’s taken out the truck, it’ll probably switch to an anti-personnel warhead to take out us.’ No cover on the plain, and against the steep face of the mesa the Reaper’s targeting laser would pin them like butterflies on a board . . .
‘Split up,’ he ordered. ‘Nina, go that way; Soph, go the other way.’
‘What about you?’ Nina asked.
He pointed at the mangled remains of the technical. ‘That way. Go on, run!’
Nina was about to object, but Sophia was already sprinting away. Chase shot Nina a ‘Move it!’ look, then ran for the wreck. Out of options, Nina took off.
Chase rushed through the field of blackened debris, glancing at the closing Reaper. The aircraft was a remote-controlled drone, its operator on the other side of the world in Nevada, watching on a screen. Warfare as videogame.
But unlike in a game, the targets could shoot back.
He reached the smouldering back end of the technical and swung the Kalashnikov round. The Reaper’s operator would already have seen him reach the gun, making him an immediate threat. Another Hellfire would be launched any moment—
Chase took aim - and pulled the trigger.
The PK still worked, a testament to its rugged design. Bullets roared from the barrel, the green lines of tracers shrinking to burning dots as they arced into the sky. He adjusted his aim, trying to ‘walk’ the tracers on to the Reaper—
Hellfire!
It dropped from beneath one of the long, slender wings, rocket motor flaring.
The tracers closed on the aircraft. Chase kept firing, knowing he had only seconds before the missile hit. Almost out of ammo, the last section of the belt clattering through the feed—
Smoke puffed from the Reaper’s fuselage.
A hit!
Chase didn’t know how much damage he had caused, and wasn’t going to stand and watch. Instead he jumped out and raced along the foot of the cliff, seeing a boul
der part buried in the scree.
He flung himself over it.
The missile hit the remains of the technical, striking with such force that it punched straight through the wreck and into the cliff face before exploding. A huge eruption of sand and rock burst outwards, shattered stone smashing down in the dry stream bed.
The boulder had shielded Chase from the worst of the blast, but the shockwave had still felt like being hit by a bus. He groaned, squinting up at the sky. The missile’s smoke trail led back to its starting point, the Reaper . . .
It was no longer there.
‘Yes!’ he gasped triumphantly, seeing the crippled robot aircraft spiralling towards the distant dunes. The orange flash of a fuel explosion, a rising pillar of oily black smoke . . . and, after a few seconds, a thump as the sound of the detonation finally reached him.
Sophia and Nina came back to him, Nina limping. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘Just about,’ he grunted, finding several new sources of pain across his battered body. ‘But the Blue Oyster Cult were right.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Sophia tiredly. ‘Don’t fear the Reaper.’
‘Tchah! You spoiled my joke.’ He turned to Nina. ‘How’s your leg?’
‘Sore. But I can still walk on it.’
‘That’s good,’ Sophia said, gloomily regarding one of the Toyota’s burning tyres, ‘because you’re going to have to.’
‘We’ll nick a new truck from the Covenant,’ said Chase.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Callum must have called for that Reaper to look for us - they probably told the pilot we were high-ranking terrorists or some bullshit to justify crossing into Sudanese airspace. But it found us, which means they’ll have told Callum where we are. The Covenant’ll be on their way.’
Sophia swept a hand through her blonde hair. ‘Marvellous. But at least they won’t have any more luck at finding Eden than we have.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Nina said quietly. Chase and Sophia turned to see what she was looking at.
‘Bloody hell,’ they said in unison.
The missile hadn’t merely blown a crater out of the side of the mesa. It had blown a hole. Through the drifting dust and smoke, a cave entrance was now visible.
‘There was a spring here once,’ Chase realised. The dry stream bed began its journey across the desert directly beneath the opening. ‘It came out of there. But . . .’
‘Somebody blocked it up,’ Nina finished. A simple landslide would have piled debris outwards from the cliff, but the remaining rocks covering the entrance were inside the cave mouth. They had been deliberately placed to seal it.
‘From the outside - or the inside?’ wondered Sophia.
Nina started towards the entrance, the pain in her leg forgotten. ‘Let’s find out.’
‘If there isn’t another way out, we’ll be trapped in there when the Covenant arrive,’ Chase pointed out.
‘You’d rather wait for them out here?’ She climbed over strewn rocks to the opening. It was roughly five feet across and four high, dusty darkness beyond. ‘Is there a flashlight in that pack?’
Sophia produced a torch and tossed it to Nina. She caught it and switched it on, leaning through the opening. The drifting dust made it difficult to see, but beyond the broken rubble the cave went back into the rock for some distance.
Not a cave. The shape was too regular. A tunnel . . .
‘It’s man-made,’ she announced, excited. She bent to duck through the hole. ‘Come on, there’s a way through!’
‘Wait,’ Chase called, but she had already scrambled inside. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
By the time he reached the opening, Nina was already picking her way down the heaped debris on the other side. ‘Check it out,’ she said, shining her light round the tunnel. It was oval in cross-section, taller than it was wide, some twelve feet at its broadest. While the walls had clearly been carved by hand, it had been done to widen an existing channel, the floor grooved by once-flowing water. She directed the beam down the tunnel, which curved away out of sight. ‘It must go right into the mesa.’
Chase traversed the opening, Sophia following, and jogged after Nina as she started down the tunnel. ‘Slow down, will you? You don’t know what’s down there.’
‘And I won’t until I see for myself, will I?’
‘You won’t see anything if a big fucking rock falls on your head,’ he chided. ‘You’re so mad keen to find the Garden of Eden that you’re rushing things.’
She waved her hands in a mixture of enthusiasm and exasperation. ‘That’s because it’s . . . it’s the Garden of frickin’ Eden, Eddie! If it’s real, if it’s down that tunnel, then it changes everything! And I’ll have found it!’
‘We’ll have found it,’ said Sophia, giving Chase a pointed look.
‘All right, we’ll have found it, whatever! But this is our only chance to reach it before the Covenant. Unless you want to block up that hole behind us?’ She read his expression. ‘Yeah, I thought not. So come on!’ She set off again.
Chase blew out a long, frustrated breath. ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Sophia as she strode past. ‘You’re the one who wants to marry her.’
The remaining dust soon cleared, the tunnel curving back and forth as they progressed along it. The daylight from the entrance faded. But the torch beam wasn’t the only light . . .
Nina stopped, Chase and Sophia flanking her. She switched off the flashlight. Another source of illumination became clear - ahead. ‘It’s daylight,’ she whispered. ‘And listen - can you hear something?’
Chase strained to pick anything out over the residual ringing in his ears from the two missile explosions, but Sophia cocked her head curiously. ‘It sounds like running water.’
‘In the middle of a desert?’ said Chase dubiously. But now he could hear it too.
Nina relit the torch. ‘It’s not far away.’ She set off again, quickly stepping up to a jog in her eagerness to see what lay ahead. Chase had little choice but to keep pace.
They rounded another curve in the tunnel . . . and emerged into a vastly larger space, stopping in sheer amazement at the sight that greeted them.
‘My God,’ Nina whispered. ‘We found it.’
34
The Garden of Eden
‘Jesus,’ said Chase. ‘This can’t be real. Can it?’
‘It’s real,’ Nina replied, awed. ‘It’s really real.’
The cavern was huge, a massive space within the mesa, the walls sloping inwards to form almost a dome of rock overhead. But it was not complete; there were holes in the stone ceiling through which sunlight poured, great beams slanting down to illuminate the ground below.
To give life to the ground below. The tunnel emerged by a slight rise in the southwestern corner, giving them a view across the colossal chamber - and the lush green jungle filling it. Steam rose from the trees where sunlight touched the leaves, swirling as it rose . . . to condense on the rocky ceiling and drip back down on to the vegetation below. The source of all the water was easy to see, a large lake occupying most of the cavern’s southeastern corner, streams leading from it. The sound of running water came from a small waterfall dropping into a giant chasm that split the entire chamber seemingly in two, just east of their vantage point.
Sophia arrived behind them, for a moment also overcome by the incredible sight. ‘That’s . . . that’s incredible.’
‘You’re not kidding,’ said Chase. He walked to the edge of the chasm, looking down into it. And down. And down. The bottom was out of sight, lost in darkness. Only the distant rumble of churning water told him that there was any end to the fall. His gaze tracked along the opposite edge of the jagged canyon, a great tear in the ground that had even ripped a hole in the chamber’s southern wall. It narrowed as it cut through the jungle to the north, but the tree cover meant he couldn’t see if it extended all the way to the far wall.
Nina’s attention had been seized by something rising above
the trees at the cavern’s eastern side, however. ‘Oh, my God . . . Eddie, give me the gun.’
‘What, you going to shoot something?’
‘I want to see it.’ She took the Lee-Enfield and looked through the sights at the shape in the far-off shadows.
A face stared back at her.
She stiffened in momentary surprise before the object in the cross hairs resolved itself. It was another statue, a representation of the Veteres’ god, like the one they had seen in Antarctica. Although it was unmistakably the same figure, the design of the giant sculpture was different, in some odd way simultaneously more primitive yet more refined. More naturalistic. Yet for all that, the shape of the skull and the facial features were just as elongated and stylised as on the statues in the frozen city.
Beyond the statue was a plateau, the top of a domed structure just visible on it. She moved the sights down, seeing that the statue had one hand held out, palm up as if scattering seeds, just like its counterpart at the South Pole. This one, however, was not within a temple - instead a circular wall, reaching almost to the lake’s shore, surrounded its feet.
‘It’s another statue of their god,’ she told Chase and Sophia, passing him the rifle so he could see for himself. ‘Looks even bigger than the one in Antarctica.’
‘The original?’ Sophia suggested.
‘Could be. And if it’s anything like the other one, there might be another library there - another Tree of Knowledge.’
‘Of Good and Evil,’ Sophia added. ‘We’re in the right place, after all. Watch out for snakes.’
Nina gazed across the jungle at the towering statue. ‘We need to get over there.’
Chase lowered the gun, pointing it into the chasm. ‘Bit of a jump.’
‘Maybe it’s narrow enough to cross further along. Come on.’ She walked down the small rise into the dry stream bed, which was abruptly truncated by the ravine, almost directly across from the waterfall. ‘Must have been a pretty big earthquake to cause a rift that deep.’
Ahead, several large boulders lay on the rocky ground, moss clinging to their sunward sides. Chase looked up. Directly overhead was a hole in the ceiling. ‘Probably made that too.’ The other holes above ranged from car-sized to easily large enough to fit a helicopter, some sections of the roof Swiss-cheesed with openings. ‘One more big shake and the entire ceiling’ll come down.’