2013: Beyond Armageddon (26 page)

Zeke shook each man’s hand and wished him well, then watched the series of small splashes that heralded the underwater phase of their quest. He watched until they all disappeared into the Devil’s Sea.

“Now there’s a leap of faith,” he said quietly, and the slightest hint of a smile brightened his somber mood. When the last ripples faded, he went into the control room to begin his monitoring duties.

The limited visibility at the bottom was improved somewhat by the diver handling the airlift, who floated around sucking away the sediment stirred up by digging. Another diver was recording the dig with a video camera wirelessly connected to a receiver in the control room. A visibility enhancement unit was plugged into the receiver, which in turn was connected to the computer. The end result was that objects barely visible through the camera’s viewfinder were reasonably clear and distinct on the large screen monitor in the control room.

Zeke sat watching the live footage. He estimated visibility below at about ten feet. Plenty to get the job done. The divers began executing their duties with well-rehearsed precision.

Swimming to the rectangular anomaly, the six-man team started at the marker buoy they’d left earlier at the nearest corner. They quickly settled into a smooth routine as they focused on their various tasks. Four diggers fanned away silt with gloved hands. The diver with the airlift sucked the stirred-up sediment through the six-inch opening, ready to instantly modify his approach when they reached the anomaly. The videographer floated around documenting the dig.

With the salt crust removed, the loose bottom yielded easily and they quickly came to the anomaly. Finding no artifacts to slow their digging, in three hours they had cleared a section ten feet long and ten deep—more than enough to determine what it was. Several courses of large stones carefully laid in a precise pattern made the conclusion unmistakable. Mordecai had held off on making any pronouncements about what they were uncovering, not wanting to jinx anything. Now he stated the obvious into his microphone.

“It’s a wall,” he said with an almost exaggerated calm. “Stone. Very well quarried from somewhere. Expertly laid by masons, obviously. This has to be a man-made building.”

“Copy,” Zeke said.

Looking at the dedicated hands working to uncover a wall that other long-dead hands had built, perhaps thousands of years ago to honor their god or king, he finally understood why people became archaeologists.

About a hundred yards northeast of the wall, the four-man team headed by Jack Shelby was excavating the first of the other three smaller anomalies. Shelby had worked for many seasons at the buried city of Caesarea in the Mediterranean. An expert on the Middle Bronze Era of Sodom and Gomorrah, his specialty was epigraphy—inscriptions.

His team had run a cord around the perimeter of the anomaly, marking off a square about 30 feet on each side. One person manned the camcorder and another the airlift, leaving Shelby and an Israeli grad student named Lev to do the digging. Working their way in tandem back and forth—“mowing the lawn”—in two hours they’d excavated the square to a depth of about two feet. So far they had not found anything.

Shelby looked at the dive computer on his wrist. “We can go for at least another hour,” he said into the voice-activated microphone positioned near his mouth. “Everybody okay?” He got a quick affirmative, and the digging continued. A few minutes later he said, “Hold it. I’ve got something.”

It was a fragment, apparently of pottery. One of the commonest finds, it could mean anything. The location was logged, the potsherd bagged, and the work continued.

“What’s this?”

Lev was pointing at something clumped over with mud. An encrusted protuberance jutted out from a buried circular mass about two feet in diameter. The videographer was keeping a record of the
in situ
locations of the finds, so before the anomaly was moved he punched its location into the larger dive computer affixed to his waist. When that was done, Shelby gently coaxed the shape from the muck. Mud that may have encased it for millennia washed away easily, revealing a heavily corroded metal object with a handle—almost certainly a pot or other implement used for cooking.

“We may be uncovering somebody’s kitchen,” he said.

Something a little farther away glinted in the light from the camcorder. He handed the pot to Lev. “Hold this for a second.” A few gentle kicks of his fins took him down to the spot.

There were several shiny objects. He called the videographer down to log the location, then plucked one of the finds from the ooze. The videographer came in for a close-up as Shelby very delicately brushed the mud away with a fingertip.

A coin.

Coins were invaluable not only because they could help date a period, but their depictions and inscriptions could provide information about the society in which they were used. The one he held had what looked like a man’s likeness on one side, with words underneath. He couldn’t decipher them at this point, but most likely they identified the man whose face was on the coin.

On the obverse side was a scene too worn to identify. Squinting, he guessed it might depict an animal with some human features, although he was not at all sure.

His archaeologist’s imagination started to soar, but the tether of reason yanked it rudely back to earth.

This could be the piece of evidence that killed the dig. Although the find was still valuable, and they still seemed to be uncovering an ancient civilization, the coin made it very unlikely that this could be Sodom and Gomorrah.

The earliest known use of coins was around 600 B.C. Sodom and Gomorrah would have existed at least a thousand years before that. Even allowing for the dates being off by plus or minus a couple hundred years, he couldn’t make the stretch to a thousand. Unless…

New discoveries were made every day that pushed back the timeline of the old ones. Could he be holding something that changed—not just changed, shattered—everything known about the use of money? Stranger things had happened.

Thorough analysis back at the War Room should give the answer. Quelling his irritation at having to wait that long, he continued turning the coin over but could glean nothing further. “Everyone come here for a minute,” he said.

Seconds later they were gathered around. Shelby waited as they took turns inspecting the coin, savoring one of the relative handful of moments of discovery in an archaeologist’s life. The coin came back to him and he placed it into a small waist pouch. “I saw some other spots glinting in the light. Let’s use the rest of our time to do some sieving in this area, see if there are more of these.”

He and Lev swam to the equipment bag they’d anchored to the bottom and took out two items that looked like pie tins with screen bottoms. Returning to the location of the first coin, they went to work. Like miners panning for gold, they used the sieves to scoop the mud, then shake it out until only solid objects remained.

Immediately Shelby found another coin. Then another. Then another. Lev began finding them as well. By the time the alarm on Shelby’s dive computer went off, they had found twelve.

As the team finned gently toward the surface, Jack Shelby wondered if the dozen coins at his waist might begin to unlock the secrets of a cursed people.

Dig Headquarters

Electricity crackled through the dinnertime conversations in the lounge that evening. No one had ever been on—or even heard of—a dig whose first day was so successful. They had made great progress in uncovering The Wall, as they had dubbed it, and found potsherds and a pot from the Bronze Era.

The strongest buzz, however, was about the coins. Everyone hoped analysis would somehow confirm that they were digging in the right place, despite the fact that coin usage was unknown in the time of Sodom and Gomorrah.

As dinner wound down, Mordecai banged a spoon on his glass to get everyone’s attention.

“Thanks to today’s success, we have the best problem an archaeologist can have: a lot more digging to do. We’ll have to begin starting earlier, to make full use of the daylight. We’ll need to be at the boats by six, so we can be in the water by seven. Does this pose a problem for anyone?” No one said anything. “Good. Then I will see you all here early tomorrow morning. Leave yourself enough time to get to the boats by six.”

After dinner Zeke went to the War Room. About a dozen people were studying charts, staring at computer monitors, having animated discussions. Mordecai had a phone glued to his ear, enlisting more people for the dig. At the long table in the center of the room, Leah and Jack Shelby sat beside one another, studying the coins through magnifying glasses.

Zeke went over and stood beside Leah. A large reference book was open in front of her. Beside that was a Bible. “Figured anything out yet?”

“Yes!” she said, holding up the coin she’d been scrutinizing. “Jack just deciphered the inscription that identifies the face on this coin as Bera.”

“Bera? Doesn’t ring a bell. Should it?”

She nodded toward the open Bible. “According to Genesis, Bera was the king of Sodom.”

Zeke remained silent for a long moment. “Excuse me,” he finally said. “This takes a minute to sink in.”

“Quite understandable,” Shelby said. “We had the same reaction.” He gestured at the small circles of rough-hewn metal carefully laid out on the table. “The significance of these coins is enormous. We have here the first direct proof of the existence of Sodom. Not a second-hand reference, but an artifact directly from the city itself. But they’re significant in other ways as well. For one thing, on our first day we may have pushed back the earliest known use of coins by at least a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred years. In archaeology a quantum leap like that is virtually unheard-of.”

Zeke tried to look impressed, but there was only one find he was genuinely interested in. “Does this confirm that where we’re digging is Sodom?”

“Almost certainly,” Shelby said.

“‘Almost’?”

“There is the possibility—remote, but possible—that Sodom could still be somewhere else, that some traveler from there might have brought their coins to this location.”

Zeke frowned. “What are the odds? I mean, how valuable could the currency of Sodom have been anywhere else but Sodom?”

Even as he asked the question he knew it was impossible to know the answer, but the patience necessary to establish a historical fact beyond any doubt was not his strong suit.

“The possibility is slight,” Shelby said, “but it is possible. We don’t know enough yet. Certainly Sodom was no world power like Rome, whose currency would have been good everywhere, like ours is today. But it is conceivable that a currency exchange could have existed, say, among the so-called five cities of the plain. Of which Sodom and Gomorrah were two.”

“So, at this point, we might still be dealing with any of those five cities?”

“Or even someplace else that we’ve never heard of. But don’t worry. At the rate we’re excavating, with any luck we’re bound to have collaborative proof soon.”

Zeke nodded, slowly allowing common sense to overcome his impatience.

“And I still haven’t mentioned what’s on the other side of this,” Shelby said. “It fits in perfectly with the legend of Sodom.”

Zeke squinted at the worn, crudely-fashioned coin while the epigrapher explained.

“It’s a picture of one of the legendary ancient Semitic gods. The inscription gives us his name.”

“Which is?”

“Baal.”

Zeke and Leah exchanged a quick uneasy glance, remembering Mordecai’s earlier mention of the pagan deity and its supposed ability to control the weather.

“There were countless ancient streams of Baalism,” Shelby said. “Each had different rituals associated with it. In some cases, Baal was worshipped as the embodiment of sensuality and lust.”

Leah indicated the open reference book. “It says here that homage was sometimes paid to Baal by copulation with animals, among other things.”

“Which by no means settles the case,” Shelby said, “but Sodom’s reputation for wickedness might not be just a myth.” Very pointedly he added, “In the Bible, temples erected to worship such false idols incurred God’s wrath.”

“So,” Zeke said. “What’s the bottom line?”

“We are definitely uncovering an ancient city from the time of Sodom and Gomorrah. The only question is, which one?”

Zeke made a small salute. “Great work. I feel really good having you both on my team. Looks like we’re off to a great start.”

“I’ll go out on a limb and say the best ever,” Shelby said. “I don’t want to jinx us, but if things keep going the way they are, we may know something fairly soon.”

“A dig for Sodom and Gomorrah getting jinxed?” Zeke said. “What are the odds?”

With the new earlier start time, the evening broke up not long after dinner. Zeke asked Leah, Mordecai, and Hassan to meet him in the lounge. They got beers and gathered around a table in the seating area of the home theater. As they settled in, Zeke fingered a small crucifix he’d started wearing around his neck. It had been blessed by a Bishop and given to him the day he became an altar boy. When everyone was seated he began.

“I’ve come to think of us as the Hell Squad, since we’re the only ones who know what we’re ultimately searching for. And since what I’m considering is directly related to that part of the dig, I wanted this discussion to be for us only. It would have a major affect on the dig, and I wanted your input before I make a decision.”

He took a quick sip from his beer.

“I’ve been giving a lot of thought to why we’re doing this. Wondering if our reasons are good enough. The four of us are here because of personal tragedies. Because madmen killed our loved ones. Don’t get me wrong. I believe our ultimate goal is a noble one, to cut off evil at its head and make the world a better place. But I also know that, human nature being what it is, we are also driven by a much less noble reason.

“Revenge. We want to make the one ultimately responsible pay. And I’m perfectly fine with that, if our actions only affected us four.