‘There’s not a single laptop, memory stick, tablet, mobile phone or camera anywhere here, as far as I can see,’ he said. ‘But they seem to be the only things missing. That doesn’t really make sense.’
‘You’re right,’ Bronson agreed. ‘It doesn’t.’
8
When the convoy was about twenty miles from the camp, Khaled pressed the transmit button on his driver’s walkie-talkie and ordered Farooq to stop the lorries. If the woman had been hiding somewhere in the camp, the last thing he wanted to do was make a direct approach, and then end up chasing her over the harsh desert terrain.
And it was also possible, he reasoned, that she hadn’t been at the camp at all, but had been away obtaining supplies, in which case their best plan would be to lie in wait among the tents until she came back. He realized that neither he nor anybody else in the group had bothered counting the number of people in the camp or the vehicles parked there, which was a mistake. If they had, they would have known immediately whether or not anyone was missing.
Wherever the woman had been at the time of the attack, Khaled knew that they would have to proceed cautiously to ensure that they managed to locate her and then kill her. They could not afford to allow her to escape with the knowledge of what was in the temple. And that meant a circuitous approach to the camp.
‘Meet me at the jeep,’ he ordered. ‘And bring your map.’
Two minutes later, Farooq spread out his map on the bonnet of the 4x4, and for a few moments the two men just stared at the largely featureless terrain marked on it, the whole sheet a uniform sandy brown. Then Khaled glanced at the coordinates on his GPS unit, took a pencil from his pocket and drew a rough circle on the map. He changed the image on the navigation unit until it showed the location of the archaeological camp, and marked that spot on the map with a cross.
‘We can’t just drive there with the lorries,’ he said, ‘because if she’s in a vehicle heading to the camp she could easily see us and just turn around and head the other way. And then we might never find her. If she’s already at the camp, there are several 4x4 vehicles there she could use to get away.’
‘The lorries will kick up a lot of dust and sand,’ Farooq pointed out reasonably, ‘even if I tell the drivers to go slowly, so we won’t be able to approach without being seen.’
‘Exactly.’ Khaled pointed at the map. ‘We will not drive to the camp at all. There’s a track here that cuts down to the south between the camp and the border with Kuwait. Send one of the lorries down there and tell them to hold position near the route over the dunes that the archaeologists have been using when they drive to Kuwait City. They are just to watch, and to take no action until I give the order.’
Farooq estimated distances on the map by eye.
‘If they stay on that track,’ he said, ‘then they’ll be about ten miles to the east of the camp, and a lot further from where we are now. The walkie-talkies only have a reliable range of about five miles, so how will we remain in contact? We only have your satellite telephone.’
Khaled shook his head irritably. He hadn’t foreseen that particular practical difficulty.
‘But you told me that there is a satellite phone at the archaeological encampment,’ Farooq added. ‘I suppose that if the woman is there when we arrive, we can kill her immediately. If she runs for the border, we can use that phone to call the crew of the lorry and tell them to stop her before she gets there. That would work.’
‘Yes,’ Khaled replied slowly, ‘it would. That’s a good idea. Give my telephone to the crew and tell them what we want them to do.’
‘What about the other lorry?’
‘The men in the first lorry will cover the area to the east of the encampment, and if she does run, that will be the way I would expect her to go. But just in case she does something unexpected, I want you to send the second lorry along this other track to the west. I doubt if she would head that way, because there’s almost nothing out there but desert, but we should still take precautions.’
‘And where will you be?’
‘I want you to ride with me in the jeep, and we’ll go ahead of the second lorry on the westerly track. If she is in the camp, she will have found the mess we left and I’ve no doubt she’d be spooked by any vehicle approaching directly, but hopefully she would ignore a vehicle passing about a mile away. And that’s how I plan to approach her.’
9
Within about half an hour, Bronson had managed to cover all the bodies, and had weighed the material down with stones to stop it blowing off or being pulled away by the carrion birds.
By the time he’d finished, Angela and Stephen were visibly traumatized, but Angela’s mood was now dominated by fury as much as by terror and sorrow.
‘This is such a senseless waste of human life,’ she said. ‘I worked with all of these people, and I liked every one of them. Why the hell would anybody want to kill a bunch of archaeologists? It makes no sense, whether or not it was a terrorist action.’
Stephen had walked off to clear his head as soon as the last body had been covered, but about ten minutes later he came back, a puzzled expression on his face.
‘I’ve just found something else that’s rather peculiar,’ he said. ‘I went back and had a look at both the trenches, and then I climbed the ladder down into the temple.’ He paused for a moment, his gaze flicking between their faces. ‘I don’t know why it’s happened, but the inscription has gone.’
‘What do you mean it’s gone?’ Angela demanded. ‘It’s carved into the stone of the wall.’
‘I mean it’s not there any more. Somebody has chipped it away with a hammer and chisel, and all that’s left is a clean smooth wall.’
The three of them immediately walked over to the second trench and climbed down the ladder and into the underground chamber, Bronson and Angela carrying torches that they’d picked up on the way.
‘See what I mean?’ Stephen said, shining his own torch at the wall in front of them, now entirely featureless.
Bronson shone his torch down at the floor of the temple, and moved the beam around, as if searching for something.
‘What is it?’ Angela asked.
‘There’s nothing here at all,’ he said, puzzled. ‘That means that after they chipped it off the wall, they collected all the debris and took it away, and the only reason they could have for doing that is to make absolutely sure nobody could reassemble the carved text after they’d destroyed it and all evidence of it was gone. It makes me wonder if this — this obscure inscription — is the reason these killers appeared here in the first place. Apparently whatever that encrypted carving means was clearly worth killing for.’
Although the air was stale and stuffy, and the temperature was if anything even higher than it had been on the surface, Bronson spent a couple of minutes looking around. He examined the carved human face above the altar as well as the altar itself, and also looked at the carved depression in the stone floor that Angela thought might have been something to do with a baptism ritual. Then he walked over to the ladder and climbed out of the temple to rejoin his two companions.
‘This makes no sense,’ Angela said again. ‘Even if it was important, why was it necessary not only to obliterate it but also to kill everybody who had seen it?’
‘Well, at least we know one thing now that we didn’t before,’ Bronson said, gesturing towards the shrouded bodies lying a few yards away. ‘We now know that this wasn’t just a random terrorist attack or a senseless massacre. This was a deliberate act and the crux of this matter was the inscription. That was their primary objective. That was why they obliterated it and took every camera and computer they could find from the camp that might have an image of the inscription on it.’