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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.
6
“It’s bat-shit crazy,” Tommy said. “But no worse than most of the wild-goose chases we get sent on.”
“If the Kurds don’t kill us,” Trish said. “Or the right-wing fundamentalists.”
They had gathered in Annja’s room in the Sheraton Tower, just around the curving corridor from the suite where they held their meetings—or “briefings,” as Bostitch preferred to call them. Annja wasn’t sure whether he was following Baron’s ex-military lead or his own inclinations. For all that Bostitch presented himself as an aw-shucks folksy businessman, the graduates of his leadership academy sure seemed to see themselves as holy warriors.
Though smaller than the suite, Annja’s room was hardly less luxurious. She sat cross-legged on the wide bed. Tommy perched on the desk. Trish sat in one of the comfy chairs while Jason alternately paced like a caged leopard and stood gazing moodily out at the lights of the city.
“Might that mean it’s a good idea to try our best to get along with the others, then?” Annja asked.
“Hey, we weren’t that bad,” Tommy said. “Don’t bust our balls.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or call you a pig,” Trish said, laughing.
“Whatev. You know what I mean.”
“Actually, you did fine,” Annja said. “I just want to encourage us all to keep that up. You guys have been in the field. You know how once you start getting tired and thirsty and sick of being either too hot or too cold all the time, tensions tend to rise. So either we need to just bail on this or do our best to keep things from getting too tense.”
“You’d do that, Annja?” Trish asked. “You seem to have, like, the most at stake here.” She seemed honestly surprised.
In a heartbeat, Annja almost said. She decided it would be unwise. And anyway it wasn’t really true. Although what Trish probably thought she had at stake in this expedition—the prospect of her own show on the network—barely registered in Annja’s determination to see this through if possible.
“If I thought it was the right thing to do, yes,” Annja said and that was true. Annja always did what she thought was right, whatever it cost her. And there had been times when it cost her greatly.
“What I don’t see,” Tommy said, “is how they can take all this Creation shit seriously.”
“No kidding,” Jason said. “Was it a pair of each kind of animal that went onto the Ark? Or seven of some and two of others? Doesn’t Genesis do it both ways?”
“Yes,” Annja said.
“Isn’t the Bible, like, full of contradictions?” Trish said.
“It is. And I have to hand the literalists credit for their ingenuity in dreaming up explanations for a lot of them. Or maybe intellectual double-jointedness.”
“I thought a lot of the fundamentalists just got by with announcing every word of the Old Testament is true, without actually reading much of it,” Tommy grumbled.
“That’s true, too. I don’t know how well that applies to our employer and his associates, though. They seem to be a studious bunch.”
“Huh,” Tommy said. “Maybe they should study the evidence a little closer. I mean, look at the pictures they got.”
He pulled his phone from its hip holster. “I was looking at some of the pictures online on my own. Take this oblique shot here from 1949. Tell me it doesn’t totally look like somebody used Photoshop to add a toy tugboat in among some rocks. Badly.”
“Dude,” Jason said. “I could be wrong, here, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have Photoshop in ’49.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean. Cut-and-paste job with scissors and glue then. And what about this overhead from a satellite, with the so-called ‘Anomaly’ conveniently outlined in red pen? Give me a break. This just looks like someone took a picture of a random ridge and drew a boat shape around it. It looks like a fucking whale. Using that technique you could demonstrate that anything longer than it is wide is Noah’s Ark.”
“All right, you’re right,” Annja said. “All this is true. We do still have some fairly good artifacts that somebody close to Charlie brought back. And Levi—Rabbi Leibowitz—thinks there’s something up there, if not a stranded ship.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “But what about this rabbi guy, anyway? What’s his story?”
“I think that’s more a marriage of convenience. But Levi’s based in Brooklyn. I think he’s basically apolitical. He’s into this because he thinks there is a mystery up here that could be really, really important to history. And I do, too.”
“Whoa,” Tommy breathed, mock-reverent. “Annja Creed, Chasing History’s Monsters’ resident buzz-kill specialist with all her skepticism, thinks there’s really something there?”
Trish hooted. “Could you try to be more insulting, Tommy?”
He huffed and shook his head. Annja found herself just naturally envisioning him with a baseball cap turned backward on his head. “Sorry,” he said.
“Speaking of climbing to the top,” Jason said, “what do you make of the chances of old Charlie making it up alive? He looks like he’d be all out of breath walking across the room.”
“Well, he did say he’d been climbing around Solomon’s Throne in Persia—I mean Iran,” Annja said. “Also illegally, by the way. He’s tougher than he looks. I think he actually goes through his own academy physical-training courses in the summer.”
“He must do a lot of training to keep that shape, then,” Tommy said. “Like, at the buffet tables.”
“And happy hour,” Trish said.
“And what’s with this Wilfork guy?” Jason said. “He looks worse if anything.”
“Tommy says he smokes like a chimney,” Trish said. “He always sees him when he sneaks out for a smoke.”
“Dude,” Tommy said aggrievedly.
“He’s probably tougher than he looks, too,” Annja said. “When he was filling me in on the whole Turkish political situation, he said he’d spent his whole career chasing from one trouble spot to the next.”
“Yeah,” Trish said. “He’s a pretty famous crisis journalist.”
“As long as he doesn’t have a crisis with his heart halfway up the damned mountain and we have to beg the Turkish army for a medevac chopper,” Tommy said.
Jason grunted. “Be lucky if we didn’t get a helicopter gunship,” he said.
“Also, what’s up with that whole mountain-peak thing, anyway?” Tommy said. “Fifteen thousand feet? God’s supposed to have flooded the Earth three miles deep?”
“That’s what our associates believe,” Annja said.
Tommy shook his head in wonder. “Whoa,” he said.
THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED slowly for Annja. It was a relief not to have the hassles of organizing and outfitting an expedition into hostile territory as her responsibility. Ankara’s unseasonable warmth gave way to the equally unseasonable chill that had already descended on the rest of the country. Yet not running the show had one big drawback—it left her without much to do.
Although a vast and highly modern mall, the Karum, stood right across the street from the hotel, Annja had never bothered to venture inside. She didn’t feel enough attraction to brave the crowds. She was not a shopping goddess, nor even particularly interested in shopping beyond what was necessary to keep her clothes from wearing out to the point of falling off her body. She’d rather be sitting on her couch in her apartment poring through her stacks of printouts of papers submitted to obscure journals of archaeological arcana. Like Rabbi Leibowitz, basically, but with a few more social skills.
But she could always wander the archaeological sites and museums. Fortunately, as she’d mentioned to the CHM crew, the city abounded in those.
Even they palled eventually. Two days after the CHM team’s arrival from New York she decided to head south on foot through the section called Kavaklidere, which was a former vineyard. Its most prominent features now were her own enormous hotel, the high-rise Karum and, several hundred yards south, the equally ostentatious tower of the Hilton.
She spent a pleasant, if cool and windy, day in the botanical gardens. The park occupied a hill south of the big hill, Kale, on which the Ankara Citadel stood a few blocks north of the Sheraton. Hill and park alike were dominated by the Atakule Tower, named like so many things for Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish republic. The tower was a spindly white four-hundred-plus-foot spire with a sort of space-needle flying saucer at the top—a similarity acknowledged by the presence of the UFO Café and Bar within, along with two more upscale-looking restaurants.
After the brief warm spell autumn had returned with vindictive force that hinted at a truly brutal winter to follow.
In her puffy down jacket Annja found the breezes blowing down from the Köro lu Mountains to the north, already well-socked-in with snow according to the Internet, bracing rather than uncomfortable. Although no blossoms survived in the park’s beautifully designed and tended gardens, and the merciless winds had stripped the leaves from the deciduous trees, the park was planted thickly with evergreens, tall pines and fir trees. And even the bare limbs beneath which the numerous hill paths twined created interesting, intricate shapes against a lead-clouded sky.
