Nina joined him, tugging down the brim of her baseball cap until it almost touched her sunglasses in order to shade her pale face. “I can see why.”
It was three days since their decision to make the long trip across the Pacific to Australia; three days of intensive preparation and expensive travel arrangements. But now they were finally there, having driven north from Perth, then turned west off the main highway onto a rough track … and into a spectacular desert landscape. The rolling sands were a vivid yellow, almost like a child’s crayon drawing, and protruding from the dunes were dozens of angular limestone pillars, ranging from knee-high to some that towered over Chase. “They look like film props,” he said, touching one to check that it wasn’t made of styrofoam and plaster.
Nina consulted her guidebook. “We’re fairly close to the Pinnacles Desert. It says it’s full of these formations—some of them are thirteen feet tall. Must be a hell of a sight.”
“We could take a detour and have a look,” Chase suggested.
She regarded the strange rocks for a moment before shaking her head. “Let’s find the place we’re looking for first. Besides, it’s a national park—they might not want us carving it up in a jeep.”
“Oh, so when you want to look at bits of old rock it’s a national emergency, but when I do …” He grinned at her as they climbed back into the Land Rover. “Okay, so how much farther to this place?”
“The map says about … seven kilometers. Just over four miles.”
Chase looked at the track, which though winding and bumpy had so far been relatively easy for their 4×4 to negotiate. “Shouldn’t take us too long. What was the name of the place again?”
“Trouble Cove,” she said, with another look at the map. “Australia has such great place-names! Hangover Bay, Useless Loop, Billabong Roadhouse …” A cheeky glance at Chase. “Bald Head …”
“Oi,” he warned, swatting at her with one hand as he started driving. She giggled. “So what do you want to do when we get there?”
“We should have plenty of time before sunset to look around before putting up the tent.” Nina examined her notes, serious again. “We can concentrate on the area near the edge of the bay; that’s the most likely site.”
They continued along the track, desert sand gradually giving way to patches of vegetation as they drew closer to the coast, heathland speckled with bright flowers and low, wind-sculpted trees. Wildlife also appeared: a small group of kangaroos paused in their leaping travels to watch the passing vehicle, and an emu popped its head up suspiciously from behind a bush before scurrying away. Though hot, it was certainly one of the most picturesque wildernesses they had traveled through.
Finally, they crested a rise and saw the shimmering turquoise ocean. “Wow, look at that,” said Nina, taking off her sunglasses for a better look. “That’s really—aah!” She jolted forward in her seat as Chase stamped on the brake, bringing the Defender to a sudden crunching halt. “Eddie! What the hell?”
He hurriedly reversed over the rise and pulled to a sharp stop. “Remember how I said the Covenant would be trying to find this place too?”
“Yeah?”
“I think they already have.” He jumped out and hurried to the rear door, opening it to take a pair of powerful binoculars from their gear. “Come on. But keep low.”
Nina nervously followed him back up the track. Near the top, he dropped to his stomach and crawled under a scrubby bush. She did the same. With one hand shading the lenses to prevent the sun from reflecting off them, Chase took a closer look at Trouble Cove.
“What is it?” Nina asked. “What do you see?”
“That I won’t need to do any digging.” He handed her the binoculars.
Nina scanned the area ahead. To her shock, it was bustling with activity. Grubby yellow excavators were digging out large trenches, men moving in behind them to clear away more sand and dirt with shovels. Parked nearby were several 4×4s and heavier flatbed trucks, presumably used to transport the earthmovers across the desert, as well as a rather incongruous Winnebago recreational vehicle. She also spotted several large tents on one edge of the dig. “Jesus.”
“That’s a pretty serious operation,” said Chase.
“You’re not kidding.”
“We need to get closer.”
“We need to do what now?”
“I want to get a better look at them,” he clarified. “See if that guy Vogler’s there, if they really are these Covenant people.”
“I don’t think they’re there to build vacation condos,” Nina muttered. It was hard to tell from this angle, but there seemed to be something in the trenches.
“Come on.” Chase took back the binoculars and crawled down the other face of the slope, Nina behind him. They carefully made their way closer, staying low behind the patches of vegetation. The ground became rockier, the track entering a winding gulch marking the path of a long-dry river. Nina expected Chase to enter it to take advantage of the cover, but instead he crawled between the boulders along the top, following a ragged line of small bushes.
He stopped suddenly and flattened himself on the ground, gesturing for Nina to do the same. She heard the raucous sound of an engine.
“Quad bike,” said Chase, warily raising his head. Nina peered through the bushes. About a hundred yards ahead, she saw a man in desert camouflage bounding through the dunes on a fat-tired little Kawasaki 4×4 ATV. A rifle was slung over his back. “He’s running a patrol—there’re more tracks on the ground. That must be their perimeter.”
Nina looked past the man to the dig site. They were now about half a mile from its center, close enough to hear the rattle and roar of the machines. “Eddie, give me the binoculars.”
She focused first on the trenches, seeing the remains of buildings at the bottom. Even through the encrustation of sand and soil, the similarity to the underwater ruin in the Java Sea was clear: the same curved walls, the same large, carefully placed bricks.
But her thrill of recognition was immediately blown away by her horror at what was being done to the ruins. The excavators weren’t merely clearing the dirt around them—they were ripping them apart. Even as she watched, another toothed steel bucket smashed one of the walls. As the machine pulled back, men came in to continue the destruction by hand.
“Jesus,” she hissed. “They’re just wrecking everything. They must be looking for something specific … and they don’t care what they destroy to find it.” Panning across the site, she suddenly stopped when she saw an unmistakable figure standing at the edge of a trench. “Son of a bitch!”
“What?” Chase asked.
“It’s Ribbsley!” Dressed in a white suit and a Panama hat, the Cambridge professor was sipping from a plastic water bottle as he gazed at the devastation below. “The guy in white—that bastard’s overseeing the whole thing! And I led him right to it by telling him about the Atlantean numbers on the tablet.” She let out a frustrated growl.
“It’s not your fault,” Chase assured her. “You didn’t know he was working for these arseholes.”
“But I shouldn’t have trusted anyone, not after what happened. Shit!” She returned the binoculars to him. “That’s archaeology by bulldozer, not anything I’ve ever done.”
“Ay up,” said Chase, finding the figure in white, then examining the men standing with him. “Vogler’s there too. Take a gander.” Nina peered through the lenses once more. “The blond guy, right of your mate the Man from Del Monte. That’s him.”
She saw a man in desert camouflage wearing sunglasses. He seemed to be about Chase’s age, mid-thirties. Two other men, similarly dressed, also stood nearby. They were both older than Vogler, one olive-skinned with cropped black wavy hair and a cigar in his mouth, the other apparently Middle Eastern, wearing a black military beret. “Who are the other guys?”
“Dunno, but I’m guessing they’re in charge. They’re not getting their hands dirty.”
“What are we going to do?” Nina asked. “They
beat us to the site. And the way they’re working, there won’t be anything left by the time they leave.”
“Then we’ll have to get in there before they finish.”
“Y’know, I think the guys with guns might have something to say about that.”
“If they catch us. I think I can get us in there without being seen.”
“And then what?”
He grinned. “What do you think? We’re going to find whatever it is they’re after. Before they do.”
Nina had expected the digging to stop at sunset. Instead, glaring floodlights on poles cast a stark light over the excavators as they continued tearing open the ground. From the amount of earth that had been cleared since she and Chase arrived, she estimated that the dig had been going for at least a couple of days. Ribbsley and the Covenant had assembled their operation even more quickly than they had—and put vastly more resources behind it.
Lurking in the bushes, Nina and Chase observed the Covenant’s pattern of activities. There were always two men on quad bikes circling the perimeter, coming close to their position at one extreme and going right up to the edge of the cliffs at the other. It took slightly under two minutes for each man to complete half an orbit; this gave them two minutes to find a way into the site without being seen.
The sound of digging suddenly stopped. Nina saw some of the excavators pulling back. She took the binoculars. Another structure had been partly exposed at the end of the trench; one of the scoops had knocked a hole in the curved wall. A man shone a torch into it, then clambered through. “They’ve found something,” she said.
“Must be important,” said Chase, seeing the other machinery stop. “Everyone’s downed tools.”
Nina kept watching. After a minute, the man emerged and climbed a ladder out of the trench, hurrying across the site to be met by Vogler and the two other leaders of the group. Some animated discussion followed, and then the trio went to the Winnebago. She had seen Ribbsley retreat to it earlier; he emerged again … but not alone. “Looks like Ribbsley’s got a girlfriend.”
A woman with short, spiky blond hair had also emerged from the RV, standing beside the professor with her back to Nina. A moment later, someone else entered her field of vision—a hard-faced, white-haired man. Unlike the other members of the Covenant, who all wore desert camouflage, he was dressed in nondescript civilian khakis. “And there’s someone else, some guy with white hair,” Nina added. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but she couldn’t place what.
“Let me see.” Chase took a closer look through the binoculars. “She’s got a nice arse, whoever she is.”
“Eddie!”
“What? She does. Huh, Whitey doesn’t think so, though. He’s pretty pissed off, telling her to get back inside.”
Nina looked at Chase, surprised. “You can lip-read?”
“A little bit. It’s handy when someone’s trying to tell you something while you’re being shot at.” He tried to make out Ribbsley’s reply, but the brim of the Panama hat obscured most of his face. “Looks like Ribbsley’s arguing with him.” He looked briefly over at Vogler and his two companions. “Vogler’s saying … something about not wasting time, they need to … I think he said ‘translate the find.’”
Nina’s heart jumped. “They’ve found another artifact.” She glared at the white-suited figure. “That son of a bitch lied to me. He knew what the language on the tablet was—he was probably already translating it when I spoke to him. All he needed to find this place was the numerical system.”
Chase watched as the white-haired man took out a pair of handcuffs. The woman raised her hands in protest. His expression darkened—then he lunged forward and punched her hard in the stomach. She dropped to her knees. Before she could recover, the man roughly yanked up her arms to cuff them behind her back.
Chase’s hands tightened on the binoculars. “The bastard just hit her,” he growled as the blonde was dragged upright. Ribbsley was also angry—but not enough to intervene. Chase looked back at the trio. Vogler had an expression of mild distaste, while the cigar-smoking man’s face was carefully neutral. The bearded Arab, on the other hand, didn’t bother to conceal a cruel smirk. “And none of the others are trying to stop him. Fuckers.” Half dragging the struggling woman back to the Winnebago, the white-haired man slammed her against the side of the vehicle before entering it and pulling her after him.
Ribbsley said something to Vogler, obviously complaining about his companion’s treatment. He received no sympathy, the Swiss man gesturing toward the newly uncovered structure. Trying to salvage some degree of authority, Ribbsley strode past Vogler, waving arrogantly for the others to follow.
Nina saw the white-haired man emerge from the Winnebago and go after the others. The blond woman remained inside. “I’ve got to see what they’ve found. Once Ribbsley’s translated it, I don’t think they’ll leave it intact.”
Chase searched for the quad bike riders, seeing one of them coming into view off to the right. “Soon as this guy goes past, follow me down to that rock. Keep as low as you can,” he said. They waited as the rider continued his circuit. “Okay, go!”
He slithered quickly out from the bush. Nina followed more awkwardly, crawling in his wake as fast as she could. They dropped into a shallow, dusty ditch, where Chase rose to a crouch, scurrying along until he reached another tangle of bushes. He popped his head up to check that the way was clear, then shoved through them, snapping off a large branch to make Nina’s passage easier.
“Okay, keep crawling,” he said as he dropped and headed for the boulder, Nina following. “If I go ‘Hssst!’ then drop flat and don’t move until I say—or someone starts shooting at us.”
Nina didn’t like the sound of that—but she liked the rising noise of the second quad bike even less. The rock loomed ahead, a ragged crescent lit from one side by spillover from the floodlights.
She looked to the right. The ATV’s headlight came into view, jolting over the sandy ground. Getting closer.
Chase was almost at the rock. Nina scrambled after him. Plants scratched her face as she brushed past them. The headlight grew brighter.
He would see them at any moment—
“Hssst!”
Nina dropped flat. The headlight was coming straight at her. It got closer, closer, the engine a strident roar …
The Kawasaki veered away to pass on the other side of the boulder.
“Roll!” Chase ordered.
She did, plants crunching under her. Chase did the same, rolling around the rock after her. The quad bike’s rear lights cast an unreal glow over the ground; Chase stopped inside the boulder’s shadow, waiting until the red light faded before moving.
“Okay, go!” he hissed, pointing across the tracks to a ditch. Stooping, Nina hurried to it. Chase followed more slowly, backing over the wide swathe of tracks and sweeping the branch to cover their footprints. Even though he was trying to match the marks as closely as possible, if the riders slowed to look they would immediately notice the lack of any tread patterns, an erased line pointing at the intruders.
He just had to hope they didn’t slow down.
Another headlight, the other bike coming around the circuit.
“Eddie, come on!” Nina called. He was almost across, only the last few footsteps to remove. Engine noise getting louder—
“Come on!”
Done. He dropped the branch and leapt backward to land beside Nina. The quad bike was almost on them. Its headlight swept across the path of their footprints, the hastily scrubbed patches standing out clearly …
The quad rasped past in a spray of sand, wiping out the evidence of their passage with a new set of tracks from its fat, knobbly tires.
Nina blew dust from her face. “Jesus! Could you possibly have cut it any closer?”
“I dunno. Want me to try again? Just run back across …”
She huffed. “Come on.”
They moved down the shadowed side of the ditch, heading for th
e thrum of a diesel generator ahead. Signaling for Nina to stay still, Chase crept up the stony slope for a look, then slid back down to her. “Looks like they’re taking a break—most of the men are over by the tents. There’s still a few hanging around, though, so we’ll need to be careful.”
“You know which way to go?”
“Yeah. There’s a trench—if we drop into it, we can go almost all the way round.”
They crawled up and took shelter behind the generator, checking that there was nobody nearby before moving along behind a loose line of parked vehicles. One of them was Ribbsley’s Winnebago, a top-of-the-line model the size of a small bus. Chase hesitated as they reached it. “What?” Nina asked.
“We should help that woman. Even if she’s Ribbsley’s girlfriend, the rest of them weren’t big fans.”
“Eddie, I know you always want to be the white knight and help damsels in distress,” said Nina, “but you can’t right now. If we help her escape, what happens when they find out she’s missing? We can’t do anything—not yet, anyway. Maybe after we’ve found what we’re looking for.”
“You’re all heart,” Chase said, unimpressed. Nina gave him a dirty look, then continued on.
They reached the trench. Chase took another look at the surrounding area. A couple of men were working on an excavator’s engine, but their backs were to them. He looked past the machine at the tents. The rest of the men were eating, which would hopefully keep them occupied for a while. He also noticed that they appeared to be divided into three groups, seemingly along ethnic lines, and that each group favored a different type of assault rifle—Belgian FN SCARs, Israeli TAR-21s, and Swiss SIG SG 551s—although all shared the same 5.56mm ammo.
Before he could think about that any further, Nina nudged him. “Is it safe?”
“Yeah, looks like it’s teatime. Think they’d mind if I blagged a sandwich?”
“Let’s not find out.” She climbed into the trench. Chase checked that the mechanics were still occupied, then followed.