The Apocalypse Script (3 page)

“
Where were the tablets found?” he
asked, placing a pair of spectacles on his nose before scanning the
next image.

Lilian shrugged. “You’d need to
ask Ridley.”

“
Uh-huh,” said the researcher
distractedly. After taking a few minutes to review the rest of the
photos, he said, “To be frank, Lilian, I have some concerns,
foremost among them being the physical properties of the
inscriptions. My impression is that they are too intricate to be
ancient. Also, the engravings might be decorative or ceremonial
glyphs. There are no distinguishable graphemes so I’m not sure why
your friend Ridley believes the inscriptions constitute a writing
system. I’ll need to study these photos and do some research before
agreeing to take the job.”

Lilian shook her head. “You won’t
find anything like them in your reference books, Ben.”

He removed the spectacles and
squinted. “Why do you say that?”

“
All tablets of this variety are
in the possession of Ridley. There are no others, I can assure you,
and only his closest friends are aware of their existence - at
least, until now. Don’t you think a man in your field would have
seen similar tablets already if they were in the public
domain?”

“
Not necessarily. I deal in
languages and writing systems. It’s possible that there are
artifacts with similar markings that I haven’t seen simply because
the engravings were classified as decorative or ritualistic and
have never been brought to the attention of someone in my
field.”

“
I see,” the woman said, looking
mildly disappointed.

“
Don’t get me
wrong,” he added, “I
am
interested in the job. I just need to do my due
diligence. I’ve got appointments in New York and Istanbul this
week, but as soon as I return I’d be happy to meet with your friend
to examine the tablets in person.”

Lilian frowned. “Oh, no, Ben. I’m
sorry, but that won’t do. Ridley would be furious with me. He wants
you to examine the tablets
tomorrow
.”

“
Tomorrow? I’m afraid that’s not
possible. As I said-”

“
You will be well-compensated, I
promise.”

“
It’s not that, Lilian. I have
commitments to long-standing clients.”

A long silence followed as the
prim woman studied her manicured nails. At length, she said, “What
if you didn’t?”

Ben didn’t understand the purpose
of the question. “Well, obviously, I’d then be happy to examine the
tablets, but that’s not the situation I’m in.”

Lilian took another sip of her
tea, looking at him over the lip of the delicate, translucent cup.
Lowering it, she asked, “Have you checked your messages
recently?”

Ben eyed her skeptically before
warily pulling out his phone. He saw that six texts had arrived in
that last twenty minutes. Each was from a client he was supposed to
perform work for that week, including a prestigious New York
museum, and each client said that due to events beyond their
control they would be unable to keep their appointments with
him.

“
This doesn’t make any sense,” he
said, staring at the screen.

“
You have an opening,
then?”

He looked at her accusingly.
“You’re behind this?”

“
I am.”

The man struggled to reconcile his
anger and disbelief. “I’d like to know how you gained access to my
schedule and what you said to my clients to persuade them to
cancel. You may have significantly damaged my reputation,
Lilian.”

The woman sighed. “Ben, your principles and
indignation aside, how much would I have to offer you to get you to
meet with Ridley tomorrow?”

His anger winning out, he said
loudly, “I don’t put my principles
aside
, Lilian.”

“
Ten million dollars.”

The anger vanished like a whiff of
smoke in a hurricane. “What?”

“
Ten million dollars for one day
of work. If you determine the tablets are authentic and agree to
decipher them, that figure will be far higher.”

The researcher said nothing for a
long moment. Then, “You can’t be serious.”

“
I’m quite serious. In fact, I’ve
already taken the liberty of having the funds deposited into your
account.” She nodded at the phone he still held. “I don’t mind
waiting while you verify that.”

Back at his office, Ben Mitchell withdrew a beer
from the mini-fridge and plopped down in front of his computer,
still in a state of shock. He had been paid ten million dollars in
advance for a day’s work, with the promise that the tablets he
would be inspecting contained the oldest writing system ever
discovered. Swallowing his pride, he had agreed to meet Lilian at
her mansion at eight in the morning the following day.

A millionaire. He was a
millionaire.

He held his beer in the air and
tipped the neck of the bottle in the direction of a photograph on
the wall. It was a photograph of him in his Marine dress blues,
taken many years ago. A grin on his face, he said, “You’ve come a
long way, Corporal Mitchell!”

He had been born just over three
decades earlier in Boduska, Colorado, the only child of a tractor
parts salesman and a substitute teacher. His father had died of a
heart attack when Ben was fourteen years old and his mother had
killed herself his senior year by driving drunk off a bridge into
river a few miles north of town. There was talk of putting him into
the custody of the State since he had no known surviving family,
but he turned eighteen before a decision could be made and so he
finished school living alone in his deceased parents’ dilapidated
two-bedroom home.

A week before he graduated he
learned that his mother had been seven months behind in making the
house payments and that the bank was going to foreclose. With no
particular hopes or aspirations and no money, he did what many poor
young men in the area did - he joined the military. It was early in
the first decade of the twenty-first century. The wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan were running full throttle and the military was begging
for volunteers. He had ended up in the Marines for the simple
reason that when he had visited the Armed Forced Recruiting offices
in Boduska’s only strip mall, it was lunchtime, and the only
recruiter who had remained at his post was the Marine
recruiter.

Prior to going to boot camp he
took the ASVAB and was told he had an aptitude for languages that
was off the charts. In fact, the results were so unbelievable that
the Department of Defense assumed the results were incorrectly
tabulated. The Marines tasked him take the DLAB, or Defense
Language Aptitude Battery examination, and when he did the results
were even more incredible. He’d aced it, which was technically
impossible.

In subsequent interviews with
befuddled Marine officers Ben explained that he had always had a
knack for languages. He had learned to speak a variety of
languages, albeit at the elementary level, by simply watching
foreign movies with subtitles. This included German, Hindi,
Spanish, French, Chinese, and Italian. The Marines verified this by
interviewing him with native speakers from their own ranks.
Checking his records they saw that the boy had no formal training
on any of the languages he spoke.

The new Marine was promptly
assigned the MOS of 2671, or Cryptologic Linguist, Middle East, and
was instructed to report the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California to attend a forty-seven week long
Pashto-Afghan language class. After that he spent a year in various
cryptology courses around the United States, learning to identify,
use, and break codes used by foreign governments and militaries in
Southwest Asia.

After almost two years of training
- his enlistment was for six years - he finally touched down at
Kandahar Airfield, usually referred to by its one-syllable
nickname, ‘kaf,’ where he spent five months rotating between combat
duties in Pashtun tribal areas, diplomatic translator assignments
for the State Department, and intelligence analysis missions for
the Department of Defense.

But a bad thing had happened about
nine months into his tour. He and an Army soldier he had befriended
were tasked to serve as translators for some intelligence officials
that had flown in from the United States to attend a high level
meeting with various tribal leaders in Kabul. The soldier was Eddie
Forbes, a Dari linguist from Brooklyn. The plan was for them to fly
fixed wings to Bagram Airfield from Kandahar and then continue on
to Camp Phoenix, in Kabul, by rotary, but bad weather grounded
flights out of Bagram. It was apparently impossible to reschedule
the meeting for diplomatic reasons, so the U.S. officials had
elected to chance a ground movement.

The convoy to Kabul consisted of
five up-armored GMC Suburbans operated by a private security
company, with the two officials in the second vehicle, Eddie in the
third, and Ben in the fourth. The use of private security firms for
non-combat related ground movements was standard protocol, freeing
military vehicles and personnel for combat missions. Most of the
private security personnel were highly competent former military
types who had spent a good portion of their careers “outside the
wire.”

Unfortunately, soon after the
convoy left KAF, two semi-trailers carrying munitions collided on
the main rain road to Kabul, closing it. That was the road they had
planned to take since the Afghan National Army and Coalition
regularly patrolled it and swept it for roadside bombs. Against the
team leader’s objections, the suit in charge directed that an
alternate route through a nearby village be used.

That’s where the vehicle-borne
improvised explosive device, or VBIED, had ended the young Marine’s
military career. The convoy had entered the village along narrow
gravel road and was forced to stop when it encountered a dead end
not shown on any maps or the GPS display. The Suburban’s drivers
were struggling to turn their vehicles around on a road that was
hardly wide enough to accommodate them while villagers, donkeys and
goats swarmed around them.

As the drivers cursed, Ben saw a
junky white Toyota, riding low to the ground, zipping toward the
convoy from a side street. He had barked a warning, but it was too
late. They were sitting ducks. The VBIED detonated between the
second and third vehicles, turning them into modern art. The driver
of Ben’s vehicle instinctively slammed on the brakes and turned his
steering wheel violently, sending his Suburban careening into a
concrete ditch.

Everything after that was a blur.
The truck lay diagonally on one side in the ditch. Ben had a vague
recollection of knifing through his seatbelt and kicking the door
above him open, his ears ringing and blood dripping into his eyes
from his forehead. Some angry villagers had appeared and commenced
pulling him from truck but he had yelled at them in Pashto and
lashed out with his knife, slicing two men. They had dropped him
only to start brutally kicking him. His rifle was still in the
Suburban and he didn’t carry a pistol, so his only defense was his
knife, which he began to swing and thrust angrily.

As the surviving security team
members started firing warning shots at the mob, one of Ben’s
attackers managed to get behind him and slammed a piece of pipe
into the base of his neck. The Marine blacked out. When he regained
consciousness minutes later, he saw a severed hand, minus a pinky,
lying a few inches from his face in a pool of oil. It bore a
stainless steel wedding ring with an engraved golden tribal band.
It was Eddie Forbes’ ring.

A mangy brown and black dog
appeared from out of nowhere and scooped the remains up in his
mouth. The dog glared at Ben menacingly, Eddie’s hand in its mouth,
and the Marine had screamed, and continued screaming, in pain and
grief, until a member of the security detail from the trailing
vehicle appeared and shot the dog and then pummeled the animal’s
corpse until it was a lump of meat.

That had made Ben laugh, and the problem was he
hadn’t stopped laughing for a long time, or crying, and everyone
agreed he was pretty messed up and should be given a one-way ticket
back to the States.

Four months later, the medical and
psychological evaluations and the paperwork completed, Ben,
honorably discharged, sat in a Denver motel watching a commercial
about feminine hygiene products with a strawberry milkshake in one
hand and a remote in the other.

A painful year of readjustment
followed. He suffered long bouts of depression, was easily startled
and more easily angered, and often woke from nightmares soaked in
sweat. Worse, he found that the mental wall he had built in
Afghanistan to insulate himself from the world remained pretty much
intact back in the United States. The entire world seemed ‘out
there,’ even when he was in it.

He began to attend Veterans
Administration counseling for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or
PTSD. The counseling was no magic bullet but the sessions did, at
least, help him to readjust to life in the United States, and they
reminded him of what normal people were like. While he was never
able to completely restore the humanity he had lost overseas, he
did learn how to pretend to be like everyone else. He found that if
he did a good enough job of fooling others, he could lead a
relatively normal life.