Kimbaba smiled to himself.
It was so simple.
He had watched with amusement as a fresh-faced CIA man on television had explained in neutral tones that waterboarding was not torture, or even dangerous. It was merely psychological, the agent said—a simulation of drowning.
Kimbaba knew different. Waterboarding did not simulate anything. It was real drowning—controlled, agonizing, and terrifying.
The monk’s writhing and choking became more frantic. Kimbaba looked at the old man’s scraggy hand, waiting for him to drop the cross in submission. But he was gripping it more firmly than ever, his fingers clenched white around it.
The large militiaman paused for a moment, allowing the monk a moment to retch up the putrid water.
Wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, Kimbaba bent low over the guardian’s blindfolded face. “We can end this,” he growled. “Where is it?”
With a firmness that surprised the militiaman, the monk shook his head.
Without waiting, Kimbaba seized hold of the sodden yellow rag lying over the guardian’s face and rolled it into a wet ball, stuffing it deep into the monk’s mouth, blocking his ability to breathe.
With no further warning, the militiaman started pouring the warm water onto the monk’s face again, still in short bursts, but faster this time.
After a few seconds, the guardian began thrashing. Kimbaba noted with satisfaction that this time there was a real panic, a frenzy that had not been there before.
The monk tried with all his force to wrench himself free—the sound of the rack slapping against the floor now reverberating around the stone room. As his struggling grew more wild, Kimbaba finally saw the wizened old hand open a split second before the monk used all his remaining strength to hurl the heavy silver cross down onto the floor’s dark red tiles beside him. The noise cannoned around the room, as the monk started smacking his hand on the metal rack in desperation.
Nodding, Kimbaba stopped pouring and put the jerrycan down. He pulled the sodden yellow rag clear of the monk’s mouth, before ripping off the blindfold to reveal his bulging eyes, darting wildly, filled with terror.
The old man turned his head and vomited more water, before looking up at his torturer, gasping and choking for air.
Kimbaba put a paw-like hand on the monk’s trembling shoulder. “You’re ready.” It was a statement not a question.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the guardian nodded.
Stepping backwards, Kimbaba and Masolo unhooked the bottom end of the rack from the altar and laid the monk flat on the floor again. Kimbaba put a heavy boot on the old man’s sweat-sodden stomach, pinning him to the tiles. He glared down at him expectantly.
The guardian coughed in an effort to clear his lungs. Rolling his head to one side, he spat out a mix of phlegm and water. Kimbaba thought he heard the words, “Forgive me,” but too late registered that the monk’s bony hand was no longer tied to the rack. It had slipped free from the wet ropes, and in a movement quicker than Kimbaba thought possible, the guardian had grabbed the heavy silver cross from the floor beside him.
The metal glinted as the cross arced through the air.
Grunting with surprise, Kimbaba tried to kick it out of his hand. But the old man was too fast. Kimbaba’s foot failed to connect, and before he could aim another kick, the monk had punched himself hard in his dripping emaciated chest.
The bony body arched and went rigid as the cross’s sharpened metal point slammed through the weak thoracic muscles and embedded itself deep into his heart. Before Kimbaba could react, the old man had slumped back onto the floor, his eyes still and lifeless, a pool of crimson blood flowing over his punctured chest and down onto the warm tiles.
Kimbaba cursed loudly, kicking the rack with the dead monk still lashed to it, sending it skidding across the wet floor.
Aged six, he had seen his first murdered body in the nameless slum where he grew up. Aged eight, he had gunned down his first man in the foetid backstreets of Kinshasa. Since then, he had killed so many and so often he did not even dream about their faces any more.
He cared nothing for the monk’s early death—but the old man’s inability to talk any more was a complication he had not planned on.
“Find it!” he bellowed with rage at the sweat-sheened men standing around staring at the grimacing corpse.
They spread out immediately, and began expertly ransacking the room.
Masolo stripped the altar. Another turned over the monk’s mattress and blankets, scattering his few simple effects.
It was soon clear there was nothing there.
The room was largely empty.
“Rip it down,” Kimbaba shouted, indicating the heavily embroidered curtains and gilded hangings adorning the walls, his frustration boiling over. “It’s here.”
As the men began tearing the heavy dusty materials off the walls, Masolo grabbed a silk hanging behind the altar. The fabric’s once-glistening colours had faded long ago, leaving it dulled with dust and grime, but it was still an impressive cloth, depicting rows of stylized figures in lavish Ethiopian Church clothing.
As the heavy silk crumpled to the floor, it revealed a large niche in the wall behind it. Eyeing the recess carefully, Masolo spotted a small latch in the shadows. Reaching forward and pressing it, an almost invisible narrow door clicked open.
“Here!” he shouted, pushing the door wide to reveal a small staircase lit by the glow of candles.
Kimbaba elbowed impatiently past him, leaving Masolo and the others to follow down the age-smoothed stone steps.
At the bottom, Kimbaba finally saw what they had come for.
It stood in the centre of the windowless stone crypt.
Around it, the guardian had banked up hundreds of guttering white candles and dozens of varied antique oil lamps. Their flickering lights danced in thousands of reflections on its uneven gold surface, throwing eerie patterns onto the gold-threaded hangings covering every inch of the walls.
As Kimbaba took in the sight, his eyes began to sting. The air was cloudy, thick with the bitter-sweet fumes of burning frankincense and oud from four ornate braziers, one on each side of the object.
Kimbaba turned and nodded to his men.
They knew what to do.
Working clumsily, they quickly set about clearing a path to it. With no method, they haphazardly shunted the candles and lamps out of the way, spilling hot wax and warm oil onto the patchwork of threadbare carpets. Almost immediately, the air became thicker and more pungent as the acrid wisps of smoke from the greasy snuffed candles mixed with the heady incense.
Once the object was exposed, Kimbaba could see it had carrying poles at the base on both sides.
He gestured for the four men to take a pole each and follow him.
Striding for the stairs, he had no idea who may have been alerted by the C-4 explosions. Now he had what he came for, he wanted to get out as quickly as possible.
The strain showed on the men’s faces as they lifted the object. It was made of thick wood, with hammered gold covering every inch of its surface. Two gold statues on the lid only added to the dead weight.
With a supreme effort, they carried it up the stairs and out into the breaking daylight, their bodies gleaming with fresh sweat.
Kimbaba bolted the building’s heavy wooden doors shut, as the men carefully loaded their prize into the lead Land Cruiser, covering it with a grimy tarpaulin to shield it from view.
Kimbaba slammed the tailgate shut, and the men climbed quickly into the two vehicles. Their mission completed, they sped out of town to the rendezvous at the airfield.
Inside the crypt, a knocked-over candle connected with a gathering slick of oil from an upturned lamp. The flames rapidly took hold, dancing their way across the floor, licking up a cocktail of oil and dry carpet.
——————— ◆ ———————
US Central Command
(USCENTCOM)
Camp as-Sayliyah
The State of Qatar
The Arabian Gulf
“Do you know what my biggest problem is, Dr Curzon?” General Hunter turned to Ava solemnly. He spoke slowly but authoritatively, a marked Alabama drawl complementing his oversized frame.
Ava really had no idea. The adrenaline coursing through her system was not helping her concentrate either.
She shook her head. She did not even know why she was there.
She was still heavily disorientated.
She had started the day in the quiet hush of Baghdad’s National Museum, where her overfilled office was one of the few areas of constant activity among the closed and dust-sheeted galleries.
She had been looking out of her large window at the museum’s massive entranceway—a replica of ancient Babylon’s famed Ishtar Gate—when two uniformed and armed soldiers of the U.S. Marine Corps had appeared unannounced in her doorway.
Without giving her a choice, they had taken her down to their armoured Humvee, and driven her through the perimeter concrete blast-walls and razor-wire of the international Green Zone, then on to what had been Forward Operating Base Prosperity—the ultra-high-security U.S. military camp at its heart.
Everyone in Baghdad knew Prosperity by reputation. It had been one of Saddam Hussein’s gilded marble palaces before the U.S. military commandeered it as their Baghdad command and control centre. When the army pulled out, the site had become home to the U.S. State Department, and remained a formidable outpost.
Ava had never been through its staggered checkpoints and multiple security screens before—still less under armed escort and without an explanation.
Arriving at the barriers into the ultra-secure zone, her escorts had produced a pass emblazoned with a white letter A on a blue background rimmed by a red circle and the word ‘ARCENT’. Despite the long queue of vehicles waiting to enter, the soldiers on guard took one look and waved them straight through.
Once inside the heavily fortified base, the escort took her directly to its busy helipad, and ushered her onto a desert-camouflaged US-101 headed south.
In response to her repeated questions, they said little other than her presence was required immediately by U.S. Central Command in Qatar, seven hundred miles to the south in the turquoise Arabian Gulf.
After an uncomfortable four-and-a-half-hour flight, the pilot had eventually dropped low over Qatar, skimming Doha’s skyline of concrete mosques and minarets before landing to the south-west of the city at the desert moonscape of Camp as-Sayliyah, the U.S. Forward Command Centre in the Arabian Gulf.
Stepping out of the helicopter, she was instantly enveloped by the suffocating furnace-like heat of the desert air. It was much hotter than Baghdad—one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, according to the ground crew. Not that she could see any shade. There was nothing living for miles around.
She was instantly hurried indoors.
Passing through the full-body x-ray at security had been quick. She was clearly being fast-tracked by the soldiers on duty, who gave her appreciative looks as they issued her identity pass. She guessed they did not see many women in anything other than the local flowing black
abaya
, usually with the whole face except the eyes covered by a
niqab
veil.
With her gold-flecked brown eyes and long dark hair, she could have passed for local, but the open-necked soft casual shirt, combats, and loose ponytail immediately gave her away as a westerner.
Now, less than ten minutes after landing, she was sitting at a stripped oak table in the heavily air-conditioned strategic nerve-centre of U.S. combat operations in the Middle East.
She had never been in a U.S. military control room before.
A guard from the front desk had shown her onto the floor of a hanger filled with groups of soldiers in khaki and sand-coloured uniforms clustered about workstations and banks of wall-mounted screens. He had led her directly to a soundproofed glass box ‘briefing zone’ in the centre, from where she was now looking out at the activity on the floor all around her.
It was a far cry from the warm wooden shelving and tables piled with books, catalogues, and artefacts in her quiet lo-tech office back in Baghdad.
Opposite her at the table, flanking General Hunter, were a man and a woman in civilian clothes. All three of them had slim brown files on the desk in front of them, each stamped with the blue flaming torch and atom-ringed globe of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
Ava was feeling at a distinct disadvantage. There had been no time for a coffee or to freshen up after getting off the chopper. And she had been given no opportunity to prepare for whatever they wanted to talk to her about.
General Hunter looked keenly at her, a solemn expression in his pale grey eyes. “You see that, Dr Curzon,” he pointed through the glass wall to a screen in the main room showing a sequence of numbers flashing blue and green as they increased and decreased in value by the second. “That’s the cost on the NYMEX of WTI Light Sweet Crude delivered to Cushing, Oklahoma.” He paused. “To you and me, that’s the price the world pays for gas.”
Ava peered more closely at the screen. The number was flickering around one hundred and five dollars a barrel.
Looking back into the room, she noted that General Hunter’s desert-pattern combat uniform was sun-bleached and worn, as were the two faded stars on each shoulder. She was not surprised—he was clearly no armchair soldier. He had the air of a man who led from the front.
He continued, evidently wanting her to understand. “Before we started Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, it was around twenty a barrel. By mid-2008, it was one hundred and forty-six. Early last year it was one hundred and ten. Now it’s a shade lower. But who knows where it’s headed. It’s got a mind of its own, not connected to anything real any more. With the ongoing instability in the region, the number could break loose any time and punch through the two hundred mark.” He looked at her solemnly. “Every industrialist and motorist in the world is feeling the effect of what we do here.”
Ava was not at all sure where the conversation was going. She was not an expert in petrochemical economics.
“And,” he grimaced, gesturing to a white board visible through the glass in the control room, “that’s the reality no one wants to see. I make sure it’s updated and on display here at all times.”
She read the handwritten script:
Insurgent Forces
Iraqi Sunnis 65,000 50%
Iraqi Islamists 32,500 25%
Iraqi Shi’a 29,900 23%
al-Qa’eda & Jihaadis 2,600 2%
Total 130,000
She was beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable. She knew a huge amount about Iraq. But this was not her area at all—she was not a military analyst.
A soldier entered the glass box quietly without knocking. He had the regulation high-and-tight shaved head and the same desert-pattern combat uniform as Hunter. His sleeve showed the three chevrons and rockers of a master sergeant.
He stooped to whisper something in Hunter’s ear, then left without waiting for a reply.
Hunter pursed his lips before turning to the woman sitting to his right. She was neatly dressed in a light grey suit, with long slightly wavy auburn hair pulled back into an austere bun.
“Seven Revolutionary Guard boghammars have been spotted on the wrong side of the Shatt al-Arab, intention unknown.” He spoke softly but decisively. “When we finish here, I want an incident response unit set up immediately.”
“Washington’s going to want to know,” she replied, typing something rapidly into her Blackberry.
He nodded curtly.
Ava was rapidly getting the feeling she was being involved in something of major strategic importance—she doubted General Hunter had time for purely social meetings. But looking around the room, she had no idea how her skills fitted in.
The general leaned his ox-like frame towards her. She could see why he had risen to the top. He oozed authority. “Dr Curzon, none of these are in themselves my biggest problem. The real headache is that embedded into each of them—oil, insurgents, and border-disputes to name a few—is one unknowable factor.” He paused and looked at her grimly, before answering his own question with five words—“The Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Ava decided it was time to say something before the situation developed further. It was obvious there had been some kind of serious mistake.
She looked at him apologetically “General, if I can speak directly, I think you may have the wrong person. I don’t—”
He silenced her with a dismissive wave of his massive hand. “Dr Curzon, we know this isn’t your field of expertise. You’re an archaeologist. That’s why you’re here.”
Ava heard the words, but it still felt like there had been a fundamental mistake. “General, I’m not engaged in any field work at present. I just—”
Hunter cut her off. “Okay. So let’s get on. Starting with your experience. We’d be grateful for an overview of your résumé.”
Although still lost as to how she fitted into General Hunter’s hi-tech military world, she breathed a little more easily.
It was not a difficult question.
“I’m a specialist in the ancient Middle East,” she began. “I studied archaeology and ancient Middle-Eastern languages at Oxford, Cairo, and Harvard. In 2005, I joined the British Museum’s Department of the Middle East. In mid-2007, I was seconded to the National Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan. In 2009, given my regional experience in the field, I was invited to head up the Iraqi UNESCO taskforce to trace the tens of thousands of artefacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the war.”
She paused, looking across at Hunter to see if he wanted more detail.
“Baghdad’s a dangerous place for a civilian working outside the Green Zone.”
The unexpected comment came from the athletic man to Hunter’s left. His accent was British. Although not in uniform, he looked windswept and tanned from an active outdoor lifestyle. She guessed he was in his mid-thirties.
She glanced at the identity tag hanging round his neck. It simply read ‘David Ferguson’. There were no other details.
Ferguson’s interruption had been a statement not a question. He was now looking at her closely with none of Hunter’s affability. She met his gaze, wondering what he meant. But his expression told her nothing.
She ignored the comment and turned back to Hunter. “My task is to spearhead reassembling the museum’s decimated collections. It’s going to take decades. We’re finding looted artefacts as far away as Peru.”
Hunter’s expression changed. For a split second she thought she saw a flash of remorse, then it was gone. “We dropped the ball on that one, Dr Curzon. We know that now. The chain of command just didn’t appreciate how important the museum was.”
“Yes, you did,” she replied, anger flaring briefly. “You just had other priorities.” Her eyes flicked to the screen showing the real-time oil price.
She knew that for weeks before the hostilities began, the coalition’s assault armies had been begged by diplomatic channels to protect the museum and its unique holdings. She knew because she had been tasked with coordinating a briefing paper for the military high command. In it, she had painstakingly explained that the collection was priceless, unique, and irreplaceable—as important to cataloguing human history as the holdings of the British Museum, the Vatican, or the Louvre.
But in April 2003, as the street-by-street artillery battle raged furiously in Baghdad’s al-Karkh district around the museum complex and the neighbouring Special Republican Guard base, the pleas for the museum’s security were ignored. Unguarded and vulnerable, tens of thousands of its priceless artefacts disappeared into the dark Iraqi night. Some went into pockets and underneath flapping
dishdashas
, while others were strapped onto borrowed and stolen flatbed trucks.
International newspapers quickly began to talk of the unprecedented rape of the world’s heritage. They reported that over one hundred and seventy thousand of humanity’s earliest records of writing, literature, maths, science, sculpture, and art were all gone—stolen, destroyed, or lost.
Ten years on, it still made her furious. It had been a completely preventable catastrophe. But for whatever reason, the coalition military staff had taken the operational decision to sacrifice the museum.
She had no words to describe how angry it made her.
Ferguson interrupted her thoughts. “You were telling us about your experience?”
She nodded, pulling herself back to the present. “My published work deals mainly with the countries of this region’s fertile crescent. My specialism is the Bronze Age.” She smiled. “To most people that means I do the archaeology of the Old Testament period of the Bible.”
Ferguson looked up from the file, making direct eye contact with her this time. “It says here you had trouble fitting in at school.”
Ava wondered if she had heard correctly.
What sort of a question was that?
She had assumed she was there to help, not to be insulted.
She looked at the files the three of them were leafing through.
Were they personnel files?
On her?
She stared back at him.
Was this some kind of test?
He continued. “And that aged sixteen, you broke out of your boarding school in England. You found an African tourist company on the Earls Court Road in London, and impressed them so much with your knowledge of east African languages that you talked your way into a job as a tour guide on a Blue Nile Sudan cruise from Sannar. Once they’d flown you there and you’d completed the job, you made your own way cross-country into Ethiopia, back to your family home in Addis Ababa, where your father had been on the British embassy’s staff for many years.” He glanced up at her. “That’s very impressive. Are you sure you’re not wasted as an academic?”
Ava could feel her blood rising.