Covenant (2 page)
Authors: Dean Crawford
HAR BEN YA’IR
NEGEV DESERT, ISRAEL
AUGUST 22
S
he’s out here somewhere.”
Ahmed Khan had to shout above the hot wind tugging at his thick black hair as he wrestled an open-topped jeep across a desiccated landscape of thorn scrub and dusty riverbeds. Desert sand whipped past the windshield, stinging his eyes as it had those of his Bedouin forefathers for a thousand generations. To the west, the sun descended into a sea of molten metal.
“Can you find her before dark?”
Dr. Damon Sheviz sat in the passenger seat, a diminutive man with a feeble ponytail of white hair that twitched in the wind behind the collar of his tweed jacket. An associate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the elderly academic was clearly unhappy in the merciless firmament of the Negev. Ahmed saw him glance nervously over his shoulder at a rifle in the rear of the jeep, there to guard against foxes, rogue ibex, and anything else unfriendly they might encounter.
Ahmed did not reply, yanking the wheel of the jeep to one side as they climbed a steep escarpment peppered with thorn scrub. The engine growled as the wheels clawed ever upward through drifting sands until the jeep breached the top. Ahmed eased the vehicle to a stop and switched off the engine. A silence as deep as eternity descended around them as the Bedouin vaulted from his seat and walked to the other side of the ridge.
The Jordan Rift Valley sliced across the wilderness ahead, an ancient seismic scar slashed by the tributaries of long-extinct rivers that snaked their way into the endless deserts. Ahmed sighed and squatted down. He lifted a fistful of dust from the earth and let it fall in the hot breeze as he looked at a pair of parallel tire tracks descending into the valley below.
“Well?” Sheviz demanded, moving to stand alongside him.
“I can, but time is not on our side and she has a head start.” He glanced at the sun as it bled into the trembling horizon. “This is a restricted area. We should not be here at all.”
“I have no desire to travel the desert at night, Mr. Khan.”
Ahmed slowly rose to his full height. “Then go, and peace be upon you.
Ma’assalama.
” He strode back to the jeep and leaped into the driver’s seat. Crunching the Rover into gear, he suppressed a smile as Sheviz skittered with the speed of a frightened hare and clambered in alongside him.
The drive down into the shadows of the valley took another half an hour, Ahmed cautiously guiding the jeep into the shadow of a deep wadi before killing the engine once more. In the distance the shore of the Red Sea glistened, overlooked in silent vigil by the fortress of Masada. Ahead, Ahmed could see a white vehicle loosely concealed by a thicket of thorn scrub.
“That’s one of our jeeps,” Sheviz whispered.
Ahmed grabbed his rifle as he climbed out of his seat, cocking the weapon and creeping forward in the fading light, the land around him already laced with long blue shadows and the sky above darkening swiftly. Behind him followed Sheviz, treading only where he trod and moving only when he moved.
The Bedouin edged forward and caught sight of a small fire flickering in a clearing ahead. Beads of sweat trickled into his eyes. He brought his weapon to bear, one finger hovering on the trigger as his ears strained, but he heard no voices or footfalls as he lowered himself onto one knee at the edge of the thicket.
The clearing was thirty feet across, ending in the ragged face of a shallow ridge of sedimentary rock that stretched away to his left. Scattered across the clearing were various devices including a portable satellite dish, vacuum hoses, and a laptop computer.
Sheviz pointed ahead. “She’s here, that’s the university’s equipment she—”
The Bedouin clamped his hand across the academic’s mouth and glared at him. Sheviz obediently shuffled back out of sight.
Ahmed crept into the camp and saw a discarded mug near the computer. He dipped a finger inside it, and a trace of residual dampness told him what he wanted to know. He moved down the rocky edifice toward where a soft glow illuminated the sedimentary rock.
An unattended phosphorous lamp sat beside a large sheet of plastic concealing something in the sediment. Ahmed reached down and whipped the plastic sheet aside. He stared at that which lay before him, and then felt a superstitious awe creep like insects across his skin.
Sheviz appeared next to him. “Oh my God.”
Within the rocks was carved a tomb of immense antiquity, partially exposed by tools wielded in someone’s patient grasp, and in the tomb were bones. There was no question as to the age of the sediment in which they lay, the levels of strata as ancient as the hills where time had forged them.
The remains bore testimony to an enormously powerful creature, the internment a cavity over eight feet long. The bones were huge, bearing the depressions of tissue anchoring points that suggested immense musculature. Broad hands were clasped neatly across a vast chest, long legs crossed at the ankle. The body was flat and level, perfectly supported within the sediment in which it had been interred.
“Purposefully buried,” Sheviz said in wonder, kneeling before the excavation.
“How old is it,
sadiqi
?” Ahmed asked the professor.
“Not less than seven thousand years. It’s quite possibly—”
The sound of boots crunched on the parched earth behind Ahmed and he whirled, swinging his rifle up to aim at the figure striding purposefully into the clearing. In the glow of the camp lights a tall blond woman dressed in khaki shorts, T-shirt, and bush hat came to an abrupt halt.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Sheviz stood and pulled his jacket neatly into place as Ahmed lowered the rifle.
“I might ask you the same question, Lucy.”
Dr. Lucy Morgan placed her balled fists on her hips. “Overtime. Who are you?”
“Dr. Damon Sheviz. The university has demanded the return of this equipment,” he announced, “and your return to Jerusalem immediately.”
“This equipment is on loan to my survey team.”
“Indeed it is,” Sheviz said as he took a pace toward her. “And that survey was completed two days ago in Be’er Sheva. I was on the verge of reporting you missing to the authorities and the equipment stolen.”
Lucy shrugged. “They don’t need any of this right now, anyway.”
“And what are you doing with it, Dr. Morgan? You realize that this is theft, do you not? The university does not condone the use of its resources for personal projects.”
“Perhaps they would if they knew anything about this,” Lucy snapped, and then glanced at the remains nearby.
Ahmed watched Sheviz falter, following her gaze. The fastidious little man straightened his tie absentmindedly and cleared his throat.
“How long ago did you find it?”
“Three days ago. I’ve been back whenever I’ve had a chance.”
Sheviz’s voice edged a tense octave higher. “Have you classified it?”
Lucy gestured across the camp to her laptop. Sheviz leaped across to the device with the speed of a man half his age. The computer hummed into life, the blue screen lighting his features.
Ahmed, bemused, moved to stand behind him.
“Good God,” Sheviz uttered, reading from the screen. “Remains located south of Zin, Israel. Previous carbon-fourteen dating suggests specimen died approximately seven thousand years ago, confirmed by obsidian hydrationrim dating of accompanying detritus within strata.”
Lucy joined them as Sheviz went on with increasing excitement.
“Subject cranium fully intact. Postcranial structure present with mild erosive damage concurrent with recent exposure.”
Ahmed looked at the bones, confused now by the unfamiliar terminology and the doctor’s excitement. “What’s so special about it?”
A ghost of a smile touched Lucy’s lips. “It’s not human.”
A
hmed Khan struggled to understand what Lucy Morgan had said.
“The remains are completely unmineralized,” Sheviz gasped before Ahmed could speak. “They are not comparable to any known variant of
Homo sapiens.
Awaiting analysis from Field Museum, Chicago.”
Ahmed shot a questioning glance at Lucy. “How can it not be human?”
“Look at the chest structure, the cranium, the fused sternum.”
Ahmed looked again at the remains and a tingling sensation rippled through his nerves. The skull cap was elongated as though stretched to double the height of a human cranium, the eye sockets were cavernous and shaped like giant teardrops, and the vast plain of the chest was a sheet of fused bone, only the base of the ribs visible, protruding from the spinal column still buried in the rocks.
“Cranial capacity, three thousand cubic centimeters,” Sheviz whispered, shaking his head. “A bigger brain than ours.”
Homo sapiens
—modern man—had been believed for millennia to be the only intelligent species of life in the universe. Now, Lucy’s discovery had extinguished that fallacy as brutally and instantly as man’s first fires had banished the darkness and the beasts of the night. Here were the remains of an unknown species, immensely powerful in stature and yet seven thousand years old. Bigger. Stronger.
Smarter.
“In the name of Allah, what is it then?” Ahmed asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Lucy said. “We need the measurements I’ve made to be examined and I need this specimen out of the ground and back in Jerusalem. Whatever it is, it didn’t evolve on this planet.”