The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations was a beautiful museum converted from an old covered marketplace
situated close to the Ankara Citadel. It contained samples from Asia Minor's long cultural history, specializing in artifacts from the Paleolithic through
Classical periods. Annja was admiring an ancient Hittite statue of a highly
stylized deer of some sort, whose rack of antlers totally dwarfed its actual
body, when her cell phone rang.
She flipped it open. "Yes?"
It was her team from
Chasing History's Monsters
, who had just arrived at
Ankara's airport. Imagining what sparks might fly when a trio of doubtless
liberal young New Yorkers came in contact with Charlie Bostitch's born-again
culture warriors, she hastily offered to meet them at the hotel to help get
them settled in.
Three hours later they were all sitting on the big mossy stone foundation
blocks of the ruins of the stage area of Roman Theater. It also stood near the
castle on its lava outcrop atop one of Ankara's many hills. Excavation of the
theater's seating area was still ongoing; Annja hoped she'd have time before
they took off for the wild, wild east to pay a visit and see if she could
schmooze her way into the dig as a visiting archaeologist. She might even be
able to make use of it for
Chasing History's Monsters
. The team told her
they were looking for local-color shots to establish setting at stages of their
journey to the forbidden mountain.
"I always thought Ankara was kind of a pit," Trish Baxter, the
soundwoman, said. She was a pretty, medium-size blonde with a snub nose and
ponytail. She dangled legs left bare by her cargo shorts over the edge of a
block. A green slope stretched down toward the city center below them.
"But it's really kind of pretty."
"There's a lot of green here," Annja said. "I was surprised the
first time I visited Istanbul by how much greenery there was. I expected
something more of a blend between desert desolation and cement-canyon
modernism."
"Ankara doesn't seem to be much of a tourist Mecca," Tommy Wynock
said. He was a stocky blond guy of medium height with a Mets cap turned around
backward. He was the chief techie and secondary cameraman.
"So to speak," said lead cameraman Jason Pennigrew. A wiry black kid
an inch or so taller than Annja, he had a brash but engaging manner and an
olive-drab do-rag tied around his head. He sat with his back to a pillar and
his long legs drawn up before him. "I wonder how much of that might be
because of problems the government's having with Muslim fundamentalists."
"Actually, the government kind of
is
the Muslim
fundamentalists," Annja said. "The democratically elected civilian
government, anyway. They're in a state of more or less perpetual confrontation
with the army, which turns out to be the guardian of Turkey's officially
secular status. The religious-minded members of the government insist they
don't want to turn Turkey into a full-on Islamic state. But it seems like a lot
of people in the street do."
"I thought Turks were supposed to be, you know, kind of lax in their
observance," Trish said. She'd impressed Annja as the most bookish and
widely knowledgeable of the bunch. Television production types didn't always
have the deepest understandings of foreign affairs or foreign cultures, even
when they spent a lot of time traveling overseas, Annja had found.
"That's true, traditionally," Annja said. "And there's still a
solid sentiment with the public for Turkey to maintain its secular status, even
with a lot of very religiously fundamentalist Turks. Or that's the impression I
have. Listen to me, sounding like Ms. Turkey Expert. The truth is I only know
what the other members of the expedition tell me, and what I read on the
Internet."
She nodded at Trish's bare legs. "You might want to change out of those
shorts, just to be on the safe side. Ankara's a lot less cosmopolitan than Istanbul. And even if the real crazies are still a marked minority—well, it only takes a
run-in with one to spoil your day, if you know what I mean."
"Oh," Trish said, "yeah. I wasn't thinking. It was so hot and
stuffy on the plane, and then when it turned out to be hot here, too, I just
wanted to kind of, well, air out."
"You're not going to have much opportunity to do that anyway," Jason
said. "Ankara seems to be the only place in the Northern Hemisphere that's
getting unseasonable warmth. Everywhere else it's even colder than last
year."
"Great," Tommy said, shaking his head. "That's all we need. We
already have too many people questioning global warming."
Jason unfolded himself from the stone pavement. "Okay, Annja. We've
stretched our legs, which I gotta tell you was welcome after all those hours
sitting around in airports and on airplanes. We should probably get back to the
hotel. I could use a shower anyway."
"I think Annja wanted to prep us to meet the rest of the crew first,"
Trish said.
Annja made a humorless noise in the back of her throat. "And prep myself.
This is liable to be a pretty hazardous undertaking. I hope that was all fully
explained to you in advance?"
The new arrivals looked at each other and laughed. "Are you kidding?"
Jason said. "Dougie? He assured us this was all going to be a piece of
cake."
"My uncle back in Waco always used to say, 'Don't piss down my leg and
tell me it's raining,'" Trish said, allowing a touch of Texas Panhandle
she'd obviously been carefully suppressing before to slip into her voice.
"It's like he knew Doug."
"Doug did admit this whole trip might be just a tiny bit
illegal
,
once we got to Ararat," Tommy said. "But he tried to make it seem
like it was really all just kind of a joke the locals like to play on tourists.
You know how he is."
"I sure do," Annja said grimly. "There's a real-life war going
on in eastern Turkey between the Turks and the Kurds. At the moment it's sort
of…contained. But it could blow up at any minute into a serious conflagration
involving Northern Iraq. And if that happens who knows where it'll go?"
"To hell in a hurry, sounds like," Jason said. He didn't appear
overly concerned.
"So it's way important that everybody gets along. Let me stress that—
everybody
.
I suspect that's not going to be easy on either side. So I wanted to get
together with you guys off by ourselves, get to know each other, before we all
walked into the lion's den."
"Are they that nuts?" Trish asked. "I mean, I thought the big
guy, Bostitch, was pretty easygoing. I read up on him a little bit on the way
out. Seems like he was the original good-time Charlie—never met a shot of booze
or line of coke he didn't like."
"Or a babe," Jason said.
"He really isn't that bad. But he is deadly serious about his
beliefs," Annja said.
She paused to inhale and marshal her thoughts. In general the crew made a good
impression on her. But as she'd suspected, they were of a bent to see
right-wing Christians the very same way the right-wing Christians saw them—the
embodiment of dangerous evil.
"Listen. Everybody's polite as hell. Especially the rank-and-file
expedition members, who it turns out all came out of this Rehoboam Christian Leadership Academy Charlie runs. And I'd like to keep things polite as much as
possible," Annja said.
"How about this Baron guy?" Tommy said. "Even I've heard of him.
He's supposed to be implicated in all kinds of war crimes."
Annja shrugged. "He's a bit tightly wrapped, I have to warn you.
Seriously, seriously, do not tease the animals. But…please don't take this the
wrong way. I don't condone war crimes—and I also don't know enough of the facts
to have any idea of what he's guilty of, or whether he's guilty of anything at
all except pretty vigorously waging an unpopular war. But the places we're
going, he might turn out to be just the kind of guy we need to keep us alive,
war crimes or no."
"The places we'll go," Jason paraphrased. "You make it sound
like we're headed into an evil Dr. Seuss book."
"Hold that thought," Annja said.
* * *
"NOW FROM THE SMALL AMOUNT
of research I was able to do before we set out," Jason Pennigrew said,
"I understand that there are at least a couple of alternate sites for the
Ark that've been proposed recently."
Annja was impressed by the crew chief's professionalism. The loosey-goosey
black kid from Memphis and the University of Tennessee was gone. Jason hadn't
quite gone so far as to put on a coat and tie, but he did wear a dark blue
shirt and dark pants. His two companions went for a more informal, blue-jeans
look. Annja wore her usual cargo khaki trousers, practical rather than
fashionable, and a light blouse in abstract streaks of cream and yellow and
rust and orange.
With the sun sinking behind the wooded western hills the view from the
expedition's tower suite was spectacular. Orange light filled the room. Maps
had been spread out on the large table. Charlie and most of his posse were
there along with Annja and the recently arrived
Chasing History's Monsters
crew.
"That's right," Leif Baron said, sitting on the couch. He wore tan
trousers, a white polo shirt and tan boots with pale crepe soles. Annja
suspected the shirt was deliberately tight to emphasize his ripped physique. It
was
ripped, no denying—so much so that Annja suspected it wasn't
entirely natural development. "A guy named Ron Wyatt was a big proponent
for the so-called Durupinar site, eighteen miles south of Greater Ararat, where
our Anomaly lies."
"Wyatt's great discovery is a big boat-shaped object, sure enough. Zeb,
can you find us a photograph?"
Two of Charlie's Young Wolves—as Annja couldn't help thinking of them—stood
side by side with their backs to one of the big picture windows. They looked as
if reality had stuttered and produced the same image twice. Both were an inch
shorter than Annja, athletic, their eyes blue in wide fresh faces with
freckle-dotted snub noses. Like Baron they currently affected a casual style,
salmon-colored shirts and khaki trousers. Everything about them lined up
identically, from their blond crew cuts to the creases on their pants. Annja
had a horrible sensation that if she examined them under an optical comparator
they'd be identical to the microscopic level, as if made by machine instead of
nature.
Since like their packmates the twins responded slavishly to Bostitch and
Baron's every word, the one who came forward to the table was pretty much by
definition not Jeb. She suspected uncomfortably that if Baron had said,
"Jeb, do you think you can throw yourself into that molten lava?"
he'd have complied with the same strutting alacrity.
Zeb bent over and searched through a number of large photographic prints from a
folder. Straightening, he proffered one to Baron with a smile. Then in response
to a slight inclination of Baron's shaved skull he handed it to Annja instead.
"Ms. Creed, I believe you have some training as a geologist," Baron
said, smiling at her. "Maybe you could tell us what you think?"
Annja accepted it and scrutinized it under the light of the lamp on the table
beside her. After a moment she looked up.
"That's a good shot," she said. "I'd say it's definitely a
natural rock formation that looks a lot like a ship. I'm guessing it's
basalt."
"You're good, Ms. Creed," Charlie said, nodding his head and smiling
his big goofy smile. He sat sprawled comfortably in one of the black leather
chairs, almost as if he'd been spilled there. "The samples Leif and I
brought back from our little visit there last year have been scientifically
confirmed to be basalt. No Ark. Unless it was a mighty heavy one."
"About what you'd expect from a nurse-anesthetist," Baron said.
"Which is what Wyatt was."
Annja passed the print on to Jason, who pulled a long face and nodded,
impressed. "Isn't there a supposed Ark site in Iran?" Trish asked.
"Oh, yes," Larry Taitt said, when Baron and Bostitch said nothing. He
was dressed, as he always seemed to be, in a dark suit and tie. "There are
several purported sites. We've investigated all of them thoroughly."
"We did produce some photographs of the site," Larry said. "Zeb,
if you could please find those for Ms. Creed, thanks."
The blond twin handed her more prints with what seemed to Annja a lack of
grace. The Young Wolves seemed willing enough to accept Bostitch and Baron's
alpha and beta status. But having one of their own jumped over them in pack
precedence didn't seem to be sitting too well.
"The one on top purports to be a view of the Ark itself," Larry said.
"The other is of bits off stone they cut that some think are petrified
wood planks from the Ark."
The first photo showed a ridge or saddleback, with snow drifts to one side and
cloudy sky to the other, and slanting gently down to the snow a slope dotted
with small rocks and dark green bunch grass. Jutting from the middle of the
photo, right below the ridge-crest, was a dark outcrop with a pointy top that
might have been a single big boulder. Annja made a face.
"This could be anything," she said. "Even some kind of hard
volcanic extrusion with softer rock eroded away around it."
She handed it back, shaking her head. "I can't tell you much more about
it. I doubt anybody could, on the basis of that picture alone. But I'd be
extremely surprised if it was anything
but
natural rock."
"And these planks?" Bostitch asked.
"Look, I can't pretend to be a fully qualified geologist or anything. I
took some courses—I have plenty of experience on digs. But I'm no expert. Still,
what these look like to me are just slabs of some kind of fine-grained
sedimentary rocks—shale or sandstone. Because of the way they've been cut out
they look like planks. But see—" she pointed to some detail in the photo
"—I think these patterns that look like grain in wood are probably a
result of layers of deposition in some kind of marine environment. Like
basically, years of silt filtering down out of the water."
"Nailed it again," Bostitch said from his throne. "That's just
what the geologists we hired to look the pictures over said. One said he
reckoned the so-called Ark was just a basalt dike—igneous, just like you
said."
"Maybe we should have contracted with Ms. Creed earlier and saved
ourselves some money on consultants," Baron said with a smile toward
Annja.
"Not a good idea," Annja said hastily. "If you have real experts
in a given field, you should listen to them."
"So what makes you think you've got a better candidate for Noah's
boat?" Tommy asked, sitting perched on a table with his elbows propped on
his knees.
The twins and the other two Young Wolves in the room, who'd been introduced as
Josh and Eli, gave him slit-eyed looks as if not appreciating an outsider
butting in. Annja was about to leap to his defense when Charlie spoke up.
"Well, that's a right good question there, Mr. Wynock. Luckily, we got us
some good answers. And we'd better—otherwise we'd look like a bunch of damn
fools coming over here and spending all this money."
At the pained looks that flitted across his acolytes' faces he blushed and
added, "If you'll pardon my French."
Annja quickly outlined the evidence as they had presented to her. When called
upon, Levi, who had gotten interested and sat leaning forward with his clasped
hands between his wide-splayed knees, agreed that, at the very least, there
might be a very valuable historical site on Ararat.
Jason looked to his companions. Annja caught a bit of an eye-roll from Tommy,
but the others didn't notice. She hoped.
The television crew chief slapped his hands down on his thighs.
"Well," he said, standing, "it does look as if we're in for some
interesting times."
The intonation he gave the last two words suggested to Annja that any
resemblance to a mythical Chinese curse was strictly intentional.