Contract With God (31 page)

‘Whoever it was probably doesn’t know what we’re doing here. It could be Bedouins, angry at us for invading their turf. They won’t do anything more with all those machine guns up on the cliffs. ’

‘Not that the machine guns did Stowe much good.’

‘I still say Dr Harel knows something about his death,’ Kyra insisted.

She had told everyone that, despite pretending otherwise, the doctor hadn’t been in her bed when Kyra woke up that night, but no one paid her much attention.

‘Be quiet, all of you. The best thing you can do for Erling, and for yourselves, is to work out how we’re going to dig that tunnel. I want you to think about that even when you’re asleep,’ said Forrester, who, at Dekker’s insistence, had left his private tent on the opposite side of the camp and joined the others.

Kyra was frightened, but she was inspired by the professor’s fierce indignation.

Nobody is going to chase us away from here. We have a mission to accomplish, and we will complete it, whatever the cost. After that everything will be better
, she thought, without realising that she had zipped her sleeping bag up to the top in a ridiculous attempt to protect herself.

 

Forty-eight exhausting hours later, the group of archaeologists had outlined the route they would follow, digging down at an angle in order to reach the object. Kyra wouldn’t permit herself to call it anything other than ‘the object’ until they were sure it was what they had expected and not . . . not just something else.

By the crack of dawn on Tuesday, breakfast was already a memory. All the members of the expedition had helped to build a steel platform that would allow the mini-excavator to find a point of attack on the side of the mountain. Otherwise, the uneven ground and the steep angle of the slope would have meant there was a risk of the small but powerful machine tipping over as it began the work. David Pappas had designed the structure so that they could begin digging the tunnel some twenty feet above the canyon floor. Fifty feet tunnelling in, then a diagonal in the opposite direction towards the object.

That was the plan. Kyra’s death would be one of the unforeseen consequences.

 

Eighteen minutes before the accident, Kyra Larsen’s skin was so sticky she felt as though she was wearing a smelly rubber suit. The others had used part of their ration of water to clean themselves up as best they could. Not Kyra. She’d been incredibly thirsty - she had always sweated a lot, especially after her pregnancy - and was even stealing little sips from other people’s bottles when they weren’t looking.

She closed her eyes for a moment and in her mind she could see Bente’s room: on top of the chest of drawers there was a box of baby wipes that would have felt heavenly on her skin just then. She fantasised about rubbing them over her body, removing the dirt and dust that had accumulated in her hair, the insides of her elbows, and along the edges of her bra. And afterwards she would hug her baby girl, play with her on the bed as she did each morning, and explain to her that Mummy had found buried treasure.

Kyra was carrying several planks of wood that Gordon Durwin and Ezra Levine were using to shore up the walls of the tunnel to prevent a cave-in. It was to be ten feet wide and eight feet high. The professor and David Pappas had argued for several hours about the dimensions.

‘It’ll take us twice as long! Do you think this is archaeology, Pappas? It’s a damned rescue operation, and we have a limited amount of time, in case you haven’t noticed!’

‘If we don’t make it wide enough we won’t be able to get the earth out of the tunnel easily, the excavator will bang against the walls and the whole thing will cave in on us. That’s assuming we don’t hit the rock base of the cliff, in which case the net result of all this effort will be to lose two more days.’

‘To hell with you, Pappas, and your Master’s from Harvard.’

In the end David had won and the tunnel measured ten feet by eight.

 

Kyra absentmindedly brushed a beetle from her hair as she made her way to the far end of the tunnel, where Robert Frick was struggling with the wall of earth in front of him. Meanwhile, Tommy Eichberg was loading the conveyor belt that ran along the floor of the tunnel and ended a foot and a half from the platform, throwing a steady cloud of dust over the canyon floor. The mountain of earth that had been excavated from the side of the hill was now nearly as high as the tunnel opening.

‘Hello, Kyra,’ Eichberg greeted her. He sounded tired. ‘Have you seen Hanley? He was supposed to take over from me.’

‘He’s below trying to rig up some electric lights. Soon we won’t be able to see anything in here.’

They had dug almost twenty-five feet into the side of the mountain, and by two o’clock in the afternoon the daylight no longer reached the back of the tunnel, making it nearly impossible to work. Eichberg cursed out loud.

‘Am I going to have to keep shovelling like this for another hour? Bullshit,’ he said, throwing his spade down.

‘Don’t go, Tommy. If you leave, Frick can’t continue either.’

‘Well, you take over, Kyra. I have to take a piss.’

Without another word, he left.

Kyra looked at the ground. Shovelling earth on to the conveyor was a horrible job. You were constantly bending down, you had to do everything quickly, and keep an eye on the arm of the excavator to make sure it didn’t hit you. But she didn’t want to imagine what the professor would say if they took a break for an hour. He’d blame her, as usual. Kyra was secretly convinced that Forester hated her.

Maybe he resented my involvement with Stowe Erling. Maybe he would like to have been in Stowe’s place. Dirty old man. I wish you were in his place right now
, she thought as she bent down to pick up the shovel.

‘Look out back there!’

Frick had reversed the excavator a little and the cabin almost slammed into Kyra’s head.

‘Be careful!’

‘I warned you, beautiful. I’m sorry.’

Kyra made a face at the machine because it was impossible to get angry with Frick. The big-boned operator was vile-tempered, cursed constantly, and farted while he worked. He was a human being in every sense of the word, a real person. Kyra appreciated that most of all, especially when she compared him to the pale imitations of life that were Forrester’s assistants.

She began to shovel debris onto the conveyor belt. In a little while they’d have to add another section to the belt as the tunnel went deeper into the mountain.

‘Hey, Gordon, Ezra! Quit shoring up and bring another section for the conveyor, please.’

Gordon Durwin and Ezra Levine mechanically obeyed her command. Like everyone else, they felt they had already reached the limits of their endurance.

Durwin and Levine were carrying another section for the conveyor. The machinery was made up of a dozen flat sausages about a foot and a half long, connected by an electrical cable. They were no more than rollers with a strong plastic band around them, but they displaced a large quantity of material per hour.

Kyra dug her shovel in one more time, just so the two men would have to hold the heavy conveyor section a little longer. The shovel made a loud, metallic, clanking sound.

For a second, an image of a freshly opened tomb flashed through Kyra’s brain.

After that the ground tilted. Kyra lost her balance and Durwin and Levine tripped, losing their hold on the section, which fell against Kyra’s head. The young woman screamed, but it was not a scream of terror. It was a scream of surprise and fear.

The ground moved again. The two men disappeared from Kyra’s side like two children sledding down a hill. Perhaps they shouted, but she didn’t hear them, nor did she hear the huge chunks of earth splitting off from the walls and hitting the ground with a dull thud. Nor did she feel the sharp rock that fell from the ceiling and left her temple a bloody mess; nor hear the crumpling metal of the mini-excavator, which went crashing down from the platform and hit rocks thirty feet below.

Kyra wasn’t aware of anything because her five senses were focused on her fingertips, or, more precisely, on the four and a half inches of cable that she was using to help her cling on to the conveyor module, which had fallen almost parallel to the edge of the precipice.

She tried to kick her legs to find a hold but it was useless. Her arms were on the edge of the chasm and the ground was beginning to cede under her weight. The sweat on her hands meant Kyra couldn’t hold on and the four and a half inches of cable became three and a half. Another slip, another pull of gravity, and now there were barely two inches of cable left.

In one of those weird tricks of the human mind, Kyra cursed having made Durwin and Levine wait a little longer than necessary. If they had left the section lying against the tunnel wall the cable wouldn’t have got caught up under the conveyor’s steel rollers.

Finally, the cable disappeared and Kyra fell into the darkness.

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN

 

 

‘Several people are dead.’

‘Who?’

‘Larsen, Durwin, Levine and Frick.’

‘Shit no, not Levine. They pulled him out alive.’

‘The doctor’s up there.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m fucking telling you.’

‘What happened? Another bomb?’

‘It was a cave-in. Nothing mysterious.’

‘It was sabotage, I swear. Sabotage.’

 

A circle of pained faces gathered around the platform. There was anxious whispering as Pappas came out of the entrance to the tunnel, followed by Professor Forrester. Behind them were the Gottlieb brothers who, due to their skill at abseiling, had been appointed by Dekker to rescue any possible survivors.

The German twins were carrying out the first body on a stretcher covered by a blanket.

‘It’s Durwin; I recognise his boots.’

The professor approached the group.

‘There’s been a collapse due to a natural cavity in the earth that we hadn’t reckoned with. The speed at which we dug the tunnel didn’t allow us to . . .’ He stopped, unable to continue.

I guess that’s the closest he’ll come to admitting a mistake
, thought Andrea as she stood in the middle of the group. She had her camera in her hand, ready to take photos, but when she found out what had happened she put the lens cap back on.

The twins carefully laid the body on the ground, then slid the stretcher from under it and went back to the tunnel.

An hour later, the bodies of the three archaeologists and the operator were lying near the edge of the platform. The last one out was Levine. It had taken twenty minutes longer to get him out of the tunnel. Although he was the only one who had survived the initial fall, Dr Harel could do nothing for him.

‘He suffered too much internal damage,’ she whispered to Andrea once she’d emerged. The doctor’s face and arms were covered with dirt. ‘I would have preferred . . .’

‘Don’t say any more,’ Andrea said, squeezing her hand furtively. She let go of it to cover her head with her cap, as did the rest of the group. The only ones who didn’t follow the Jewish custom were the soldiers, perhaps out of ignorance.

The silence was absolute. A warm breeze drifted over from the cliffs. Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice that sounded deeply perturbed. Andrea turned her head and couldn’t believe her eyes.

The voice belonged to Russell. He was walking behind Raymond Kayn, and they were no more than a hundred feet from the platform.

The billionaire was advancing towards them barefoot, his shoulders stooped and his arms crossed. His assistant followed, his face like thunder. He quietened down when he realised that the others could hear him. It was obvious that seeing Kayn there, outside his tent, made Russell extremely nervous.

Slowly everybody turned to watch the two figures approaching. Aside from Andrea and Dekker, Forrester was the only other spectator to have seen Raymond Kayn in person. And that had happened only once, during a long tense meeting at Kayn Tower, when Forrester had agreed to the strange demands of his new boss without thinking twice. Of course, the reward for accepting had been huge.

As was the cost. It was lying there on the ground, covered by blankets.

Kayn stopped a dozen feet from them, a shaking, hesitant old man, his head bearing a yarmulke as white as the rest of his clothing. Out in the open his thinness and slight stature made him look even frailer, but, despite this, Andrea found herself fighting the urge to kneel. She perceived how the attitude of the people around him changed, as though they were affected by some invisible magnetic field. Brian Hanley, who was less than three feet from her, began to shift his weight from one foot to the other. David Pappas bowed his head, and even Fowler’s eyes seemed oddly bright. The priest stood off to one side of the group, slightly apart from the others.

‘My dear friends, I haven’t had the chance to introduce myself. My name is Raymond Kayn,’ the old man said, his clear voice belying his fragile appearance.

Some of those present nodded, but the old man didn’t notice and continued speaking.

‘I regret that we had to meet for the first time under such terrible circumstances, and I’d like to ask that we join in prayer.’ He lowered his eyes, bowed his head, and recited, ‘
El maley rachamim shochen bam’romim hamtzey menuchah nechonah al kanfey haschechinah bema’alot kedoshim ute’horim kezohar harakia me’irim umazhirim lenishmat.
⁷
Amen.’