After darkness had fallen, he ordered his men to move all the animals out of the cave. Ropes were tied from four mules to the vertical mine timbers at the entrance. From a safe distance, the mules pulled the timbers out and the entrance collapsed on itself. A massive boulder tumbled from above the cave, sealing the opening.
They made their way to the natural buttresses at the narrowest part of the canyon. Figures were moving around the fires that blocked the only way out. Thomas ordered the men to cut the animals loose and herd them ahead. A balky mule brayed in protest. There were shouts of alarm; their attack had been detected.
Thomas slapped the mule on its haunches with the broad side of his sword. Braying even louder than before, the mule galloped toward the fires. The other animals followed, crashing through the bandit encampment as their hooves kicked up showers of sparks.
Thomas and his men charged in behind the mules, forming a flying wedge with the giant Percheron at the point of the tight formation. Thomas swung his sword as if it were a scythe, feeling its blade bite into flesh and bone until he realized he was hacking away at empty air.
He brought his horse to a halt and looked behind him.
The camp fires were far behind him. His companions were nowhere to be seen.
He was all alone.
He touched the pouch around his neck to see if it was still there, and then urged his horse on into the looming darkness.
The Persian scout could have been forgiven for assuming that the figure in the dust vortex was a monster.
The metallic head was actually a pot-shaped steel helmet and the scales were a cloak of chain mail. The man’s white tunic looked like lacework. His coif, or mailed hood was draped around his neck, further enhancing the reptilian appearance. A ferocious reddish beard caked with sand and dust hid the lower part of the face. Shredded blisters covered the unprotected part of his sun-blasted face and the threads of dead skin gave the man’s skin a fur-like shagginess. His cloudy blue eyes were set in a vacant stare.
The man stirred and brought his right arm toward his heaving chest. The hand groped under the chain mail coat and came out with a leather pouch that hung from a broken cord. The sergeant had assumed that the man was completely blind. But when the Persian reached for the pouch a hand as big as a lion’s paw whipped out and grabbed his wrist with unexpected strength.
The sergeant’s companions raised their swords to strike.
“Wait!” the sergeant commanded.
The swords were slowly lowered.
With his free hand, the sergeant tilted the water bag into the man’s mouth. A few drops made it past the parched lips and the water seemed to revive the man. His fingers uncurled from the sergeant’s wrist.
“Who are you?” the guard said. He knew fragments of several languages and repeated the question until he got a response using Latin.
The cracked lips twitched, and laboriously formed a word.
“Tho-mas,” the man whispered. “My name is Thomas.”
The hollow voice seemed to issue from the grave.
The mouth produced a string of words that made no sense, as if spoken in a delirium. Then the spittle-covered lips froze in place and the words deteriorated into a mumble. The man’s eyes widened in a wild glassy stare. His massive chest heaved spasmodically a few times and went still.
The sergeant removed the pouch from the dead fingers, opened the bag and pulled out a vellum scroll covered with writing and rolled around a wooden spindle.
The helmet and the mail coat were too worn and damaged to be of value. He might sell the vellum to one of the gullible pilgrims in the caravan. He was sure he could convince someone it was a holy relic. The sergeant tucked the scroll back into the pouch, tied the broken cord and looped it around his neck.
He ordered the men to bury the dead body while he rode back to get the caravan moving again. The grumbling guards used their sword points to scrape out a shallow grave and shoved the body into the hole with their feet. The reluctant grave-diggers returned to their place at the head of the caravan.
The hissing sands of the desert began to complete their unfinished task. Within minutes, a grainy shroud covered the huge body. And long before the jingling of harness bells and the shouts of camel drivers faded into the distance the desert had wrapped the man called Thomas in its timeless embrace.
Georgi Vasilyev was seated on a camp stool in his tent, peering through a magnifying glass at the rock specimens spread out on the table in front of him, when he heard an excited voice calling out his name. Seconds later, his Afghan assistant Raheem threw the flap aside and stuck his head into the tent.
“Dr. Vasilyev. Come quick!”
The middle-aged geologist from the Soviet geological survey mission and his younger counterpart from the Afghan ministry of mining had become close friends, but Vasilyev had specifically requested that he be left undisturbed to catalogue his collection.
Before answering he picked up another specimen and jotted a note into a pad. “What is it?” he growled.
“Sorry, Dr. Vasilyev. I know you wanted no interruptions, but we made a strange find. Come. You won’t be sorry.”
The Russian suppressed a smile at his assistant’s unabashed enthusiasm. He sighed heavily for show, followed Raheem outside and got into the passenger seat of the UAZ-469 parked next to the tent. The rugged all-terrain vehicle was the Russian equivalent of the American Jeep. Raheem drove at subsonic speed and they soon came to a large lake.
Raheem slammed on the brakes and the UAZ fish-tailed to a skidding stop alongside a BTR-152 armored personnel carrier parked a few hundred feet from the cliffs. The vehicle was used to transport the twelve-man squadron assigned to protect the survey party.
The guards stood in a rough circle with their AK-47s slung on their shoulders, alongside a group of Russian and Afghan surveyors, around the perimeter of a pit approximately fifteen feet across and a yard deep. Two Afghan laborers who’d been hired by the survey stood in the shallow crater leaning on the handles of their shovels. The hard sunlight glinted on a flat, diamond-shaped object a couple of feet long.
“What is this?” Vasilyev asked Raheem.
“Not sure. One of the men discovered it a while ago. The wind blew away the sand.”
Vasilyev didn’t have to be reminded of the wind blowing off the lake. The sharp-edged breeze stabbed at his ribs and penetrated the mushroom-shaped woolen hat to his bald scalp. Vasilyev scrambled down into the pit. He was in his 60s, but ten years of field work in the harsh environment of Afghanistan had toughened him. He had shed many pounds tromping around the rugged countryside and hardly ever drank the vodka that many of his countrymen sucked down like water.
He borrowed a shovel from one of the laborers and dug around the object. Then he got down on his knees to examine what appeared to be a large winch. The name etched into the metal revealed that the winch had been manufactured in Colorado. Coiled around the winch drum were the frayed remnants of a cable. Next to the winch were some old gray wooden beams. Eye bolts had been screwed into the wood.
Vasilyev got to his feet and signaled the Afghans to widen the excavation.
There was a hollow tung sound as one Afghan sank his shovel blade into the earth. A minute later, he had uncovered a round metal object. Vasilyev squatted and ran his fingers over the shiny brass surface and around the glass vision ports. He furrowed his brow. A diving helmet was the last thing he expected to find in the desert.
He glanced off at the glittering waters of the lake trying to picture a diver descending into the depths from a boat. Why the heavy-duty winch? He had worked on mine projects and had seen similar pulleys suspended over the earth. On impulse, he stood and began to walk back and forth, moving closer to the lake with each pacing turn.