Carter suppressed a laugh. “Those guys are planning to lug two of them off the mountain.”
“Coast looks clear up there,” Jayden said, eyeing the top of the slope. “Let’s do this.”
They parted the foliage and then bolted across the open space to the salvaged timber, careful not to turn an ankle among the uneven cobblestones and snow pockets. The timber was situated such that it lay only a few feet from the water’s edge, roughly parallel to shore. They walked around it and hunkered down so that its bulk mostly shielded them from view if anyone from up top were to glance down at it.
Jayden took out his Swiss Army Knife and went to work on removing a sample from the timber. He found the log to be remarkably solid for a piece of wood that had been waterlogged for who knows how long, probably about five thousand years, if it was in fact from the days of Noah’s Ark. It wasn’t waterlogged at all. It would take some doing for Jayden to whittle it apart, not a quick process with such a small tool, so while he worked on the timber sample, Carter turned to his pack, now the only stash of gear that the two of them had in this vast wilderness area while being confronted by a hostile group. Except for the broken strap, which meant that he would have to sling it over one shoulder like a college student for the rest of their trek, it appeared to be intact. It was soaking wet on the outside from the snow, but the material was heavy denier and he thought the inside would be mostly dry. The map was what he worried about the most, but it was in a plastic bag. Still, what if the bag had ruptured during all the jostling?
He glanced up at the slope while Jayden whittled away at the log, and then after finding it clear, he unzipped the pack and took out the map. Still in its sealed plastic bag and none the worse for wear. He put it back in the bag and then stowed it away in his pack. He briefly checked his other gear and found it all to have survived the ordeal and be still serviceable.
Feeling satisfied with his inventory management, Carter glanced back up to the rope and pulley system at the top of the slope and saw a man standing there.
“We got what we came for. Let’s get that other timber and prepare to move out,” Daedalus called out to his expedition team as he walked toward his pack. He was pleased with the dive, and his mind was still flooded with what he had seen at depth in the lake. Noah’s Ark. There can be no doubt! His team had collected two solid timbers that had been loose in a pile on the bottom inside the large wooden boat shape. He’d taken a lot of high definition video and now wanted to secure the invaluable footage by placing the memory card safely inside its case in his pack.
While the other two divers broke down their SCUBA equipment, the lookout man went to retrieve the SCUBA rig that had been on standby in case it was needed, but ended up going unused.
“You got it,” he called out to his boss, feeling satisfied that things were going well. He hoped to be promoted within the organization following this most important expedition. But when he reached the rope and pulley rig, he looked around but didn’t see the extra tank. He leaned over the edge of the slope and eyeballed the steep terrain on the way down to the lake to see if it had somehow fallen over the side, but didn’t see it. Again he searched the camp area briefly without success. The tank must have been knocked over the side when the first timber was hauled up on the pulley rig, he thought. Deciding they would probably find it when they went back down to haul up the second timber, he began to focus on that instead. Besides, he reasoned, it would be a bitch as it is transporting those two timbers all the way down the mountain. If they couldn’t find the SCUBA rig, it was just one less thing to carry. As long as it wasn’t found anytime soon by Turkish authorities — that was the only reason Daedalus would care about it. They didn’t want to give away the location of Noah’s Ark, after all, or be hounded after more than they already were for looting historical artifacts.
The lookout man turned to the pulley system and began readying it for the next timber haul. He re-rigged the harness for the timber and activated the pulley to send it back down to the lake shore. As he looked down the rope line to make sure it was operating smoothly, his vision registered an anomaly down on the lake shore — something that hadn’t been there before. Was that the missing SCUBA rig? He reached for a pair of binoculars in his jacket in order to investigate.
Meanwhile, Daedalus reached his backpack and opened it to put the camera memory card inside it. He noticed right away that something was off: the zipper pulls were in different positions than how he normally left them. He’d had the same pack for a while now and was very familiar with it. He always left the different zipper pulls for each compartment in the same position, which he found made it easier to keep track of which compartment they opened. So to see them set differently made him wonder if someone other than him had gotten into his pack. He quickly turned around to see if any of his team was observing him, but the other three men were going about their business of breaking down the dive gear and readying the harness for the remaining timber.
Opening his pack, he went immediately to where he’d stashed the map, in a semi-hidden zippered compartment inside the main compartment, so as to be both well-hidden and protected deep inside the pack. He felt the breath leave his body.
The map! Gone!
He had to get down on his knees or risk falling over. He told himself to make certain he hadn’t somehow misplaced it inside the pack — it had a lot of compartments, after all, and at first he had occasionally “lost” things inside it after not being able to remember which section of the pack he’d put them in. But no, this was different. He was absolutely positive he’d put that map right there. Nothing else inside the pack seemed to be out of place. Only the—wait a minute. His hands went to the concealed carry firearm compartment and immediately found it to be feel distressingly flat.
My pistol! Gone. Daedalus seethed, for this brazen theft meant one of two things. Either he had a very serious traitor in his own expedition, or the Omega Team was proving itself more effective than he would have given them credit for. He stood up from his ransacked pack and was about to approach the nearest of his expedition mates when the lookout man called his name, over by the rope and pulley rig on the edge of the slope.
“Almost got it.” Jayden was cutting away on the timber with his Swiss army knife. No sooner did he complete his sentence than a gunshot echoed into the lake basin and a bullet thudded into the log, sending a shower of splinters up into his face. He and Carter immediately lay prone behind the log, waiting to see if more gunfire was coming. Another shot rang out and a bullet thudded into the ground near Jayden’s feet.
“Do you have the sample?” Carter asked. “And not a piece with lead in it.”
“Almost.”
“I guess I don’t need to tell you to hurry up.” As if to underscore his point, another round embedded itself into the old timber, splintering more of it off.
Jayden reached his hand up holding the knife and stuck it into the section of wood he’d been working on. He pried at the lumber for a few seconds while they heard shouts from the men above.
“They’re mobilizing to come down here,” Carter said, an edge to his voice. “We’ve got to go.”
“Got it!” Jayden pulled his hand back down with a foot-long sliver of wood just as bullet smacked into the log where his hand had been. Carter had been mulling over their options while Jayden was cutting the sample free. Climbing back up through the snow was not an option — the tank air would probably run dry even if they could climb their way up, which he seriously doubted. Not only that, but now that they were getting shot at, going to the camp would be like entering the dragon’s lair. Obviously, they had learned that map and gun were missing.