Not that he trusted his superiors. It was simply a case of better-the-devil-you-know.
“Mr. Walker!” the pilot called. “Time to move!”
Walker turned to see the snow-covered mountain beside him, the dark mouth of the cave just below. The left side of the cave measured about forty feet in height, but it slashed down across the snowy face at a jagged, seventy-five-degree angle, down to a height of only ten or twelve feet on the right side. The copilot unstrapped himself and slipped back to join them, bent over slightly. He began unraveling a length of thick cord that Walker quickly realized was a harness.
Kim Seong had radiated a pleasant serenity until now, but she took hold of Walker’s arm and gripped tightly. “I am not going first.”
He steeled himself. “I wouldn’t ask it. My team, my risk.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly safe,” Kim quickly added.
Walker removed his safety belt and let the copilot help him into the harness.
The copilot slid open the door on the chopper’s left side and beckoned to him. The other man would control the winch that lowered Walker toward the mountainside, but nobody could step out that door for him.
He tugged on the harness, let a bit of the cord play out, then turned his back on empty space before pushing off into freefall. He used his right foot, not trusting the left just then. The helicopter danced above him in a sudden terrible gusting updraft and he swung side to side in a dizzying arc before the harness cable began to play out and he found himself descending toward the mountainside.
The cave mouth beckoned below, off to his right, and he tracked it with his eyes as he began to spin on the end of the cord.
The wind gusted again, a blast so cold that spikes of pain shot through his skull and so hard that for several seconds he swung out like a pendulum frozen at one end of its arc. The chopper tilted along with him and then dropped twenty feet in the space between heartbeats. Walker cursed even as the wind died down and he began to descend normally once more. The cold sank into his bones, cutting through his clothes.
He closed his eyes tightly, teeth bared, and then it seemed a different sort of wind swept over and through him. A sickly sensation made him shudder from something other than cold. He felt as if he’d been dipped in filth that soaked deeper into his skin by the moment. His flesh crawled with revulsion and he opened his eyes, staring about him in desperation as he spun in the harness. Below, people had come out of the cave and were waving to the helicopter pilot to swing him closer. Two figures had crept down to a spot twenty feet below the cave opening, where a kind of platform had been set up, posts sunk into the face of the mountain.
Fear swam up inside him, worming its way into his belly, roiling there like acid and bile. He felt himself go slack. For so long he had believed himself next to fearless, but this fear bit as deeply into him as the mountain chill.
For long seconds, he went blank. What the hell is going on?
Then a hand grasped his ankle and he snapped his head around, on the verge of a scream until he saw the face of the man who’d grabbed him. A face he’d seen in documentaries and on the back covers of books he’d skimmed on the plane from Washington, D.C., to Istanbul.
“Holzer,” Walker said.
The adventurer hauled him in, unbuckling the harness as soon as Walker’s feet hit the snow-covered mountain.
“Just ‘Adam’ is fine,” the man said, giving the harness a tug. Immediately it began to sail upward, the winch retracting the cord so that the next member of the team could descend. “You must be Dr. Walker.”
“Just ‘Walker’ is fine.” The echo was meant to be funny, but he felt dizzy and some of that sickly feeling, the malignance that had swept over him, remained, and he worried that his introduction had come off as sneering. “It’s good to meet you.”
Holzer—Adam—thrust out a hand. “Welcome to Mount Ararat.”
“Don’t you mean Noah’s ark?”
Adam’s features clouded. “Why don’t we let you decide that for yourself?”
“Listen, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot,” Walker said. “I know you didn’t want me here.”
“The U.S. government wanted you here and the company financing the project was willing to oblige,” Adam replied. “Which means you’re welcome as long as you’re useful or at least not in the way.”
“Message received,” Walker said.
Adam took him by the arm and guided him to another man, whose thick beard and weathered attire suggested plenty of experience with the mountain.
“Hakan is our project foreman,” Adam said, raising his voice a bit louder to be sure he would be heard over the thump of the chopper’s rotors. “He’ll help you to the cave.”
Walker glanced up to see Kim already standing at the open door on the side of the helicopter, the copilot barely visible as he coached her—apparently reminding her of the brief training they’d received on this procedure the day before.
“Don’t worry,” Adam said. “I’ll make sure they get down safely.” His smile faded again. “Trust me when I say this is not the scariest thing you’ll encounter today.”
Walker started to ask what he meant, but by then Hakan had already taken charge of him and he had to start climbing. Ropes had been secured above, somewhere inside the cave, and Hakan put Walker in front of him, showed him how to use the ropes as guidelines. Without the crampons on his boots, and the rope to steady himself on the unstable ground, Walker felt sure he would have fallen. On one particularly troublesome assignment, he’d incurred serious injuries to his back and leg, and with the cold and the climb, the old wounds were singing.
He glanced up at the helicopter, saw Kim Seong being lowered down. Once the chopper returned to its base, there would be no way off the mountain except to climb down. To his surprise, this thought left him deeply unsettled. With every step upward he felt an urge to retreat so powerful that he was barely paying attention when he reached the cave. He found himself kneeling on the cliff edge in front of several members of the dig team.
Walker recognized Meryam Karga from her books and documentaries, just as he had with her fiancé. The tension around her eyes and the hunch of her shoulders gave her an almost predatory aura, as if her default position was one of coiled, serpentine readiness. The others he saw seemed tense as well, and Walker wondered if the Ark Project had hit a snag.
“Come along, Dr. Walker,” Meryam said, hugging herself against the wind. “We’ll get you a cup of coffee while we await your people, and then you can have a look at what you want to see.”
He glanced around, peering at the work lights and the ancient timbers and the people working all through the cave.
“Noah’s ark,” Walker said as he climbed to his feet.
“We think so,” Meryam replied. “But you didn’t come to see the ark.”
A strange calm settled into him. The pain in his leg receded.
No, he thought. True enough. He didn’t give a shit whether or not the timbers he was looking at had really once made up the structure of a boat—Noah’s or otherwise.