CHAPTER
TWO
Marty stepped off the plane onto cracked asphalt. A man wearing a dirt-stained shalwar kameez waved at him and shouted in heavily accented English, “Dr. Cohen, Dr. Cohen!”
“I’m Marty Cohen.”
“God be praised.” The stranger approached Marty with a big smile, his crooked white teeth a sharp contrast to the mahogany of his skin. “Mueller told me you look like Chinese more than Jew. I’m Abdullah.” They shook hands, and Abdullah grabbed the carry-on from Marty’s hand and motioned to his left. “Also, it is fine if you are Jew, we are all creatures of God. Please, please. Mueller waiting on the plane. Come . . . come . . .”
Marty hustled after the man and asked in Arabic, “What do you mean, Mueller is waiting on the plane? I just got off the plane.”
He knew his spoken Egyptian Arabic was a little rusty, but Abdullah looked surprised and pleased. “Oh, you speak so well. Yes, I’m taking you to Monsieur Garnier’s plane. It will get us much closer to the site.”
As Marty stepped out of the main terminal with Abdullah, the man lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. A driver standing next to a parked car about fifty feet away responded with a wave and hopped into his vehicle. It was a BMW 7 Series with an orange flashing light on its roof: one of the airport’s premier Ahlan welcome services, a VIP service that Marty had seen before but never used.
As Marty pondered the expense associated with hiring such a service, he pulled out his phone and launched his banking app. He was relieved to see that the deposit had been wired while he was traveling, and with a few quick swipes, he arranged for this week’s payroll to be deposited directly into his employees’ accounts.
The car pulled up beside them, and the driver, in a dark suit and cap plus mirrored sunglasses, hopped out to open the rear passenger door. Abdullah handed Marty’s bag to the driver, who slammed it into the trunk, and Marty joined Abdullah in the back. Within seconds, they were off.
“Where are we going?” Marty asked in Arabic.
Abdullah shook his head and put his finger to his lips. “Can talk on the plane,” he said in English.
Ramaswamy had mentioned “Indiana Jones,” but this archaeology dig was starting to take on the attributes of a James Bond film. Marty covered the growing smile on his face as he imagined what this Frenchman might look like . . . Dr. Evil?
Five minutes later, the car rolled into a fenced-off section of the airport that catered to private aircraft. They stopped beside a beautiful midsize jet with no commercial markings, and the plane’s cabin door opened, dropping a set of stairs with a handrail.
Marty got out of the car. Despite his growing curiosity about what he’d gotten himself involved in, he felt that ever-present fatigue weighing him down.
While Abdullah paid the driver and retrieved Marty’s bag, Marty heard a voice shout from the plane’s door.
“Marty!”
He looked up and saw Gunther at the top of the stairs, his wispy hair, still mostly blond, whipping about in the breeze. Marty smiled and waved. If more of the senior academics he had known had been like Gunther, Marty might still be in academia.
“I packed a toothbrush!” Marty yelled over the growling of jet engines. “When do I get to see the good stuff?”
Gunther waved for him to approach. “Get in the plane and we’ll talk!”
Marty climbed the stairs and was greeted by an automated voice saying, “Welcome to the Gulfstream IV business jet. As you get acquainted with the features of this aircraft—”
“My friend!” Gunther pulled Marty into a bear hug. His smile couldn’t have been bigger. “It’s so good to see you.” He motioned toward a set of plush leather chairs facing each other. “Grab a seat.”
Marty sat, resting his elbow on the polished wood-grain table that extended between them.
“François said he already sent the money,” Gunther said.
“He did.” Marty nodded. “We’re squared away.”
Abdullah climbed into the plane, Marty’s bag in his hand. He held it up. “I bring to back of the plane.”
“Thank you!”
The pilot—a thin, pale gentleman with brown hair and a high forehead—emerged from the cockpit, scanned the cabin, and pressed a button next to the entryway. With the whooshing sound of hydraulics, the stairway folded inward, and the front cabin door closed. The pilot pulled out his pocket flashlight and quickly inspected the door’s seal, gave Gunther and Marty a thumbs-up, and disappeared back into the cockpit.
Almost immediately, the jet began moving.
“We have received clearance for takeoff,” the pilot said over the speakers. His accent was middle European, maybe Czech or Hungarian. “Please ready yourself and fasten your seatbelts.”
Marty and Gunther buckled in, and Abdullah settled in the back of the plane with a dog-eared book.
“We are first in line and will be taking off on runway two-three-right. Our top altitude will be twenty-seven thousand feet, and we should fly over Luxor before landing at Aswan International Airport. Total distance is approximately eight hundred ninety kilometers, and total flying time should be approximately one hour and twenty minutes.”
The plane turned, rolled onto the runway, and stopped. The engines grew louder and louder. Then the plane burst forward, and Marty, who was facing the rear, was yanked hard into his seatbelt. He had never been on a private jet before, and he realized this was not his favorite direction to face during takeoff.
Soon they lifted off the asphalt and the jet was cutting smoothly through the air at a steep angle.
Marty looked across the table at Gunther. “Aswan, eh? How far from Aswan is the site?”
“It’s very close. Only a twenty-minute drive from the airport.”
Marty frowned. “Only twenty minutes and the dig is a secret?”
Gunther grabbed a bottle of water from a compartment in the wall. “Thirsty?”
Marty waved the bottle away.
Gunther took a long swig. “We were working just outside of Nabta Playa.”
“The ancient stone circle? I would have guessed that’s been picked through so many times you wouldn’t find anything of note there.”
Gunther nodded. “And you’d mostly be right. It’s gotten the reputation of being Egypt’s answer to Stonehenge. Very trendy nowadays with the tourist dollars flowing. But we had access to some new ground-penetrating radar technology. To make a long story short, we found a small box buried three feet underground just outside the circle. The box held a clay tablet with writing on it. And that’s where you come in.”
“A clay tablet with writing. Sounds like Babylon, not Egypt.”
Gunther traced a line through the condensation forming on his bottle of water. “It’s old. As old as Narmer.”
Narmer was one of the names given to the pharaoh believed to have unified Egypt into one country. The name was a reading of two hieroglyphs, transliterated n’r, meaning “catfish,” and mr, meaning “chisel,” or maybe “angry.” The hieroglyphs appeared on a very old stone palette that showed a picture of an Egyptian king—understood to be named Narmer—driving his enemies before him with a mace.
“I can’t wait to see it,” Marty murmured.
Gunther chuckled. “Oh, none of us can wait for you to see it. But that’s just the beginning. While we were trying to read that tablet, François continued the survey with the ground-penetrating radar. We spent almost a month dragging three radar units behind vehicles, looking for God knows what. A university-funded dig would have run out of cash, but François got up every morning and yelled, ‘Let’s go spend more money!’ Which was the signal to start up the trucks.”
“That sounds fairly eccentric. Most rich people I know are only that way because they don’t want to spend their money.”
“Exactly, but just wait. And then the radar picked up the first signs of an underground passage. We followed it in one direction and the radar lost the trail. But in the other direction, we found an opening. For security purposes, we dug only in the dead of night. Good God, Marty, I took my turn standing guard with a rifle, can you imagine it? And when we finally managed to uncover the entrance . . .” Gunther leaned forward, eyes wide. “Untouched. Sealed. Immaculate. No sign of tomb robbers, no decay. They might have closed up the passage the day before we arrived, for all we could tell. It was a long tunnel. The writings on the wall were painted with brilliant colors, nothing faded . . . in the same style and syntax as the tablet. And it’s a long text. For all we know, it’s an epic tale of some sort.”
Marty’s heart was racing. It didn’t really matter what the writing said, it could have been a collection of cooking recipes for all he cared. It was lucky enough to find an intact site, but to find one that old, and full of writing . . . it was unheard of. If Gunther was right, and Marty could translate the texts, they might push the horizon on written Egyptian back several hundred years.
Marty’s ears popped as the plane began descending.
“We are now at seven thousand feet and will be landing at Aswan International Airport in ten minutes.”
Marty peered out the window at the vast expanse of yellow rock and sand. From this altitude, he could only barely make out the Nile, a bluish-green thread weaving its way from the south to the north. This dry land, and this river, had given birth to one of the world’s great civilizations, and that birth was still shrouded in a veil of mystery.
The idea that he might be about to get a privileged first look behind that veil put a smile on his face.
After disembarking, the three men got into a waiting SUV. Marty sank into the plush leather seats, trying not to laugh out loud at the contrast with his prior experiences at dig sites, when he rode around in the back seats of twenty-year-old jeeps.
There was absolutely nothing posh about archaeology. No first-class tickets, no private jets, and no G-class Mercedes SUVs, much less one waiting for him on the tarmac. And last but certainly not least, he had never had a twenty-thousand-euro signing bonus wired to his account before he even set foot on the dig site.
Abdullah drove and Gunther rode shotgun. As they raced through trackless desert scrub northwest of the airport, Marty leaned forward between them.
“If this is only twenty minutes into the desert, how is the dig site kept hidden from prying eyes?” he asked. In his experience, foreigners breaking ground on a dig was an invitation for every unemployed man within twenty miles to come offer his services as a digger or guide.
Gunther smiled and grabbed a device from the center console. “We use this.”
The device looked like a garage door opener—a plastic box with a single button and a clip to hang it from the car’s visor.
“And that is . . . ?” he asked.
“You’ll see.”
Abdullah set down the device and turned on the car’s LCD screen. Instead of a map, it showed a series of numbers, white on a black background, constantly changing as they drove.
“Are those GPS coordinates?”
“Praise be to God,” Abdullah replied in Arabic as he slowed the vehicle. “Monsieur Garnier wants this site to not be found, and we are very careful. We are . . .” He glanced at the display and pressed his lips together. “We are half a kilometer away.”
Marty studied the terrain ahead of them and saw nothing other than sand, rocks, and the occasional clump of desert grasses.
The white numbers turned yellow, and Abdullah slowed the vehicle to a crawl. When the numbers turned red, Gunther picked up the garage door opener and pressed the button.
A ten-foot-wide crack appeared in the ground ahead of them, running left to right. As it opened wider, it revealed a ramp down into the earth. Seconds later, Abdullah was easing the SUV down the ramp into an underground chamber.
“How . . . ?” Marty began.
Abdullah turned off the engine and smiled. “This place was here before us.”
“He means the chamber,” Gunther said. “The ramp and door were installed by a Dutch engineering firm. We brought them out here blindfolded and with no cell phones, all the way from Cairo.” He pressed the button on the garage door opener again and the ramp rose on hydraulic pistons.
They got out of the car, and Marty scanned the underground lair, which was a good hundred feet from side to side. “Was there a cave-in?” he asked, pointing at a mound of rubble heaped against one of the walls.
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Gunther said. “Abdullah and Kareem have managed to move a lot of rock in the space of the last month or so. This chamber has made it really easy to excavate without anyone noticing anything from up above.”
Marty continued to feel uneasy. “Still,” he said, “if you believe the news reports, there are earthquakes happening all over the world nowadays. Isn’t the epicenter in Israel or something?” He pointed to the hydraulic ramp. “I mean, what if that thing breaks?”
“In that case we’re stuck and someone six thousand years from now will find us and have a good laugh at our expense,” Gunther said seriously, then laughed. “Don’t worry, we have other exits—shafts, ladders, well-hidden ventilation holes. We can get out if necessary. But ignore the news. This area hasn’t felt an earthquake in recorded history.”
A beefy man appeared at the far end of the chamber, fast-walking in their direction. “Dr. Cohen!” he shouted, revealing a French accent. He shook hands with Marty, who thought he looked like a blond Gérard Depardieu, only more squared off.
“Monsieur Garnier?” Marty said.
Garnier waved dismissively. “Please. François. First names are good enough for me.”
Eccentric or not, Marty liked him for that. “Then call me Marty.”
“Marty? Not . . . Kung Fu Cohen?”
Marty shook his head. “I see Gunther has completely robbed me of all dignity.”
“No, he has sung your praises. Trust me, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Besides, who doesn’t admire the discipline of a martial artist?” The Frenchman draped his arm over Marty’s shoulder—enveloping him in a cloud of cologne, body musk, and strong cheese—and steered him back the way he’d come. “I am, as you Americans would so charmingly say, the money guy. A banker by profession, at least at one time. Let me introduce you to the crew, and then we can get started. I’m sure you want to see the alien markings.”
“Alien markings?” Marty glanced back at Gunther.
Gunther grinned and shrugged.
Aliens? Marty sighed. But Gunther had said the Frenchman was both eccentric and paranoid. Was this about to be a giant waste of Marty’s time?
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He’d made payroll this week, he reminded himself. If nothing else, that was a positive. A big one.
“I keep telling François,” Gunther said, “that there’s no evidence that these markings are anything but writing from a prehistoric Egyptian civilization.”
“Prehistoric they may be,” François groused, “but they’re no cave paintings from Stone Age man. I’ve seen the paintings in the Chauvet cave; it’s only ten kilometers from where I was born. They’re gorgeous, and show a time of human development that most certainly preceded what we know of as human civilization. But they don’t communicate much in the way of a message. These markings are quite different. I can’t interpret it—that’s why you’re here, Marty—but I can appreciate what it is not. It’s not someone enumerating the nearby wildlife. It’s not the wild myth of a shaman. It’s precise. It has geometric symbology. It’s language. And I’m convinced that it’s beyond the capability of man at that time. I’ve done my homework. The Egyptians weren’t writing in predynastic times.”
“They didn’t write much,” Marty said. “That we have yet found.” He hated to throw water on the fire of the man’s enthusiasm, but it was better to set that expectation now. There were no aliens in predynastic Egypt.
“Do we know exactly how old these writings are?” he asked Gunther.
“Not the ones in the tunnels, but luckily the tablet had organic fibers in it. We sent some scrapings to two labs, and got the results back just yesterday. They both agree: the tablet is about six thousand years old.”
Marty’s eyes widened. “And how much writing is in the tunnels?”
François laughed. “Books!” he cried. “Books’ worth!”
They passed into another chamber, thick with shadows. François clapped his hands, and the lights brightened.
This was a smaller chamber, perhaps twenty feet by thirty. At its center stood three long tables, two of which were stacked with books and paper. Several people lay sleeping in cots along the walls.
François clapped his hands again. “Everyone, please meet our newest team member, Dr. Marty Cohen.”
He turned to Marty. “I apologize that everyone is sleeping. We got used to working during the nighttime hours.”
A dark-skinned woman with straight black hair swung her feet off one of the cots. She wore a ragged Rage Against the Machine T-shirt and a necklace of small seashells. “Hello,” she said, without standing. “You’re the language expert?” Her accent was Australian.
François leapt in to make introductions. “This is Lowanna Lancaster, our biological anthropologist. And she makes better tea than the rest of these savages.”
“I can read some languages,” Marty said in response to her question. “Are you an aboriginal Australian, then?”
“Arrernte,” she grunted. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“It isn’t,” Marty agreed. “But I find it interesting.”
“I’ve brought Marty here to give Surjan a little competition for ‘hunkiest man on the dig,’” François said. “It’s for your benefit, my dear. Ah, and here he comes now.”
A man with a thick black beard had hopped up from another cot to join them. He wore a blue turban, a white T-shirt, and khaki cargo pants. He was broad of shoulder and narrow of waist, and his arms and thighs both seemed about to burst free of their confining fabric. Altogether he looked to Marty like a rugby player.
“Marty, this is Surjan, our site security chief,” François said. “He’s been under my employ ever since he retired from Special Group, India’s special forces unit—the one that most people don’t even know exists. So if you’re thinking, ‘Is he as scary as he looks?’ The answer is no, he’s much scarier than that.”
Marty didn’t know much about the military, but he had heard of SG. He’d helped on a dig near the Kashmiri border as an undergraduate, and the Indian government had assigned several of these men to guard the site. Those soldiers had dealt efficiently with predators, robbers, and terrorist attacks alike.
The large man offered Marty his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, mate. I look forward to seeing you in action.” The ex-soldier spoke with a mild London accent, like Ray Winstone playing a member of Parliament.
“Surjan . . . Singh?” Marty guessed.
The big man nodded. “I’m Sikh.”
Marty smiled. “I’m glad to have you on my side. Though to be honest, I hope I don’t have to see you in action.”
“If we do see action, I expect you to pull out some wicked kung fu moves.”
Marty gave Gunther a severe look. Gunther suddenly became interested in a stray thread coming off his sleeve.
Surjan looked Marty up and down as if taking stock of an opponent. “You stand like a fighter, and your knuckles are well-calloused. You’re ready for a fight, I can tell.”
“I was in a lot of fights as a kid,” Marty told him, “but recently, I’ve only fought with a punching bag.”
Surjan leaned in. “Is it true you knocked your dean arse over tits when he didn’t give you tenure?”
Marty sighed. Of course Gunther had to share that story with these people. “I corrected a professor of sociology’s bad attitude. And I did it because he was copping a feel on my grad student at a cocktail party.”
“I’ll remember that!” François said with a laugh. He clapped his arm on Marty’s shoulder. “Now where is Kareem?”
“I’m here, Monsieur Garnier.”
Marty turned to see a short, dark-skinned young man standing in the doorway. He wore a dirt-stained shalwar kameez like Abdullah’s, and held a broken pickaxe over one shoulder.
“Kareem, this is Dr. Marty Cohen,” François said, then to Marty: “Kareem is young, and the young ones are too often full of problems. But he’s Abdullah’s nephew, and so far he seems to be a hard worker and is doing well.” He turned back to the young man. “Did you break yet another axe?” he asked, sounding amused.
The little man frowned. “I couldn’t sleep, so I tried again to work on the barrier. It’s being cursed troublesome, by God.”
He pronounced “cursed” as two syllables.
“Barrier?” Marty asked.
Gunther pointed at the tunnel. “Remember when I said there was a section that the ground-penetrating radar couldn’t get through? We think that’s where the stone barrier is, at the end of the tunnel with all the writing.”
Kareem sighed. “I’ll keep trying. A cursed wall shall not defeat me, by God.”
François patted Marty on the shoulder and motioned to the tunnel. “I suppose this would be as good time as any to show you the tunnel.”
Marty nodded. “I do want to see the tunnel. But maybe I should take a look at the tablet first.”
“Good idea,” said François. “I need to have a word with Gunther, so I will leave you in Lowanna’s capable hands.”