The Jericho Deception: A Novel (37 page)

“But then what’s the point of even talking about, much less believing in and worshipping, such a God? Why not just worship nature or the universe?”

“Maybe we can experience God—not intellectually, but emotionally. We will never understand God, but maybe we can taste the presence of God. A two-dimensional creature can never truly understand what a three-dimensional world looks like. Its perception of reality is physically limited by its existence. Such a creature could only glimpse part of reality. Art, nature, beauty, love, peace, and the mystical states associated with religion may be our glimpses at this divine reality.”

He’d always been respectfully dismissive of Elijah’s views. His mentor, for all the brilliance of his research, had held on to quaint views from his upbringing. Now, for the first time, Ethan began to feel that his intellectual arrogance had been misplaced. His world had fallen apart around him—Elijah’s murder, Rachel’s kidnapping, his suspension from Yale, the perversion of his research, Chris’s death. He was no longer sure of anything. Then he thought of the vision from his youth and the time he’d spent with Rachel.

He pushed himself up to a seated position.
All this introspection isn’t going to get me out of the desert, nor will it help Rachel and Mousa.
He scanned the horizon, searching for any sign of dawn.

Then he saw it.

At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. The light in the distance was closer than the horizon—it couldn’t be the rising sun.

A CIA search party?
The hairs on his arms stood on end.

He squinted, focusing on the light. It wasn’t moving, nor was it the steady light of a car headlight or flashlight. This light was flickering.

A fire.

He was probably seeing the edge of one of the villages. He figured he must be close to the lake and freedom from the desert. He stood, noted the exact location of the fire in relation to the dunes around it, and took off running.

E
than approached a campsite of three tents. His initial hope that the camp marked the edge of a village was dispelled when he got closer. The fire that had led him there blazed in the middle of the same endless desert he’d been lost in for hours. But at least he’d found people. As he moved closer, he noticed that the long tents were hand-sewn from a quilt of various fabrics: hairy animal skins, colorful cloths, and recycled clothes.

A snorting sound to his right caused him to jump. He turned toward the noise and could just discern the outline of camels bedded down in the sand. He rounded the corner of a tent, wondering exactly what he was going to say to the people camped here.

A tented camp in the desert,
he thought.
Must be Bedouins.
Nomadic tribes who wandered the desert, Bedouins lived by trading camels and goats the men raised and rugs the women wove in exchange for the supplies they needed. He remembered learning from a Discovery Channel documentary that they were known for showing hospitality to strangers. He hoped that to be true.

When he stepped into the clearing in front of the fire, he saw two men dressed in loose white robes with red scarves wrapped around their heads seated in plastic folding chairs. After a brief delay in which they stared at him as if trying to understand how a man could just appear out of the desert in the middle of the night, they jumped to their feet. His stomach lurched when each grabbed an antique rifle from beside their chair and pointed it at his chest. They yelled at him in Arabic.

“Help.” He raised his hands in the air. “I need help. Do you speak English?”

The men waved their guns at him. He felt a trickle of sweat form on his brow in the cool air. His main concern was not further exciting the men with their fingers on the triggers of the guns pointed at him. Thoughts of how he might communicate his harmlessness to them raced through his head. Then he had an idea.

With his hands still up in the air, he pointed to himself and said, “Doctor. I’m a doctor.”

The word had an immediate effect. They stopped yelling and began to speak between themselves. Ethan forced himself to release the breath he was holding. The more relaxed he was, the less tension the men with the guns would feel. At least he hoped that was the case.

One of the men said something in Arabic and then disappeared into the nearest tent. The other kept his gun trained on Ethan. After what felt like ten minutes, but was probably more like two, the man emerged from the tent. A third Bedouin followed him. Taller than the other two, he matched Ethan’s height. Wisps of gray mixed with the long black hair that fell over his shoulders. Unlike the other two, who wore white robes, this man wore red; instead of the turbans the others covered their heads with, he had a blue scarf wrapped around his neck. The elder man rubbed his eyes as if he’d just been awoken.

He spoke in a gravelly voice. “Doctor?”

“You speak English?”

“I’m my tribe’s sheikh.” He raised his eyebrows, no doubt questioning why an American doctor had appeared in their camp in the middle of the night with no supplies.

“I’m lost.” Ethan shrugged. “I have to get to Luxor quickly.” Evaluating the skeptical expression on the tribal elder’s face, he added, “And I can pay you for your troubles.”

He hoped the last fact would motivate the Bedouin leader to help him without requesting details. As the elder continued to stare at him, he stuck out a hand. He didn’t know the proper protocols for introduction here. “Dr. Ethan Lightman.” He emphasized the word
doctor
again.

A smile spread across the sheikh’s face. He grasped Ethan’s hand in both of his. “You may call me Josef. Your money is not needed here. If a traveler in the desert is in need of a place to rest, he may always rely on our
diyafa
—our hospitality. You may stay with us for three days.” His smile grew wider. “And we could use a doctor.”

He turned and spoke in Arabic to the men behind him. They lowered their rifles. One went to the fire and placed a tarnished silver pot that had been sitting on a nearby blanket in the coals. The other disappeared into the far tent.

“Follow me to our
beit al-sha’ar
.” The sheikh started toward the far tent.

Ethan wiped his palms on his pants and followed after him. “To your what?”

Josef parted what appeared to be goat hide, revealing the opening into the tent. “Our house of hair.” He chuckled.

The tent was roomier and cozier than Ethan would have imagined. Lanterns on posts in three corners illuminated the interior with a soft, flickering glow. The floor was covered in colorful, hand-woven rugs, and groups of large red pillows defined seating areas. To his right a low table contained a hookah whose tentacle-like hoses snaked around a glass vase. Curtains at the rear separated the tent into other areas he couldn’t see.

Two figures in the center of the room grabbed his attention. A woman dressed in a long black dress sat on the floor with a child of about ten resting his head in her lap. The guard who had preceded them into the tent stood behind them with a pained expression on his face. The woman’s hair was hidden with a red veil but her face was uncovered. She gazed at Ethan, tears streaming from wide, dark eyes.

Josef exchanged words in Arabic with the woman and motioned to Ethan. She studied him a moment and then nodded.

“The boy, Muhammad, was showing off for the girls this afternoon. He tried to ride a camel while standing up.” The sheikh crouched next to the boy and pulled down the goat-hide blanket covering his torso. The boy whimpered but kept his eyes closed. “He landed on his arm.”

Ethan knelt beside the woman and tried to give her a reassuring smile, although he knew that bedside manner wasn’t one of his strengths. The
boy was curled in her lap on his left side. He cradled his right arm on his stomach.

“Okay, Muhammad,” he said in a soothing tone. “Let’s see what we have here.”

The boy winced as Ethan pulled the sleeve of his robe up to his bicep. The cause of the boy’s pain became immediately apparent. His right ulna—one of the two bones that, along with the radius, comprised the forearm—had sustained a fracture. A purple bruise covered an inch-high lump about halfway between the wrist and the elbow. He gently ran his fingers along the arm. When he palpated around the lump, the boy cried out.

“I know that hurts. I’m almost done.”

At least the fracture’s closed
, he thought. The bone had clearly broken, but it hadn’t sliced through the skin. Still, the arm had to be stabilized; a wrong movement could cause it to sever the nerves and blood vessels around it.

He turned to the sheikh. “He needs to go to a hospital. They’ll x-ray and then set his arm in a cast.”

“We were going to take him in the morning.”

“How long is the drive?”

“Drive?” Josef laughed. “Two hours by camel, four by foot.”

The boy stared at Ethan with curious eyes. Judging from his pallor, he was in a mild state of shock. Bouncing around on a camel would not work in the arm’s current state, and he wouldn’t be able to walk on his own either. The boy had only one option.

The thought of what he had to do made Ethan nervous. A simple procedure really, but one he’d done only as a resident in med school, years ago. He would have to set and then stabilize the arm.

He explained to Josef what he planned to do and then listed what he needed. The sheikh translated for the parents, who looked even more frightened but didn’t protest. The boy’s father left the tent, returning minutes later with two sticks two inches in diameter, probably from their supply of kindling for the fire. Ethan flexed each one. Both were strong enough. He broke off several knobs to smooth them out. Then he eyeballed the length of the boy’s forearm and broke the branches so that they were about the same length. The
splint would be rough, but it only needed to stabilize the arm until they could reach Aswan. Next he sorted through the strips of fabric the father had brought.

Now comes the unpleasant part
, he thought.

“Josef, I could use your help.”

The sheikh knelt beside him as the parents stared with furrowed brows. The boy’s eyes went wide with fear.

“First, we need him on his back.”

The sheikh translated for the mother. Together they shifted the boy so he lay flat on the rug; his head rested in his mother’s lap. Tears fell from his eyes despite an obvious attempt to be brave. He bit his lip.

“Good.” Ethan cradled the arm. “Now hold his shoulders firmly so he cannot move.”

Josef placed his thick hands on the boy.

Ethan looked into Muhammad’s eyes. “This is going to hurt a lot, but just for a second.”

He waited for Josef to translate. The boy nodded, biting his lip. Ethan wrapped his hands around the boy’s forearm, one on each side of the fracture. He then applied traction, pulling his hands apart in order to set the broken bone.

The boy’s scream pierced through the nighttime quiet in the tent.

A
xe climbed into the Black Hawk as the engine began its start-up whine.
How did I fuck up so badly?
The evening’s events still seemed blurry. One minute he was bent over, holding the Muslim in the chapel, and the next he’d been double-crossed by one of Wolfe’s psychologist priests and attacked by the professor. His memory of the firefight was fuzzy. He hadn’t realized he’d killed Chris Sligh until the others told him. His last memory was of firing his H&K from behind the boulders. He’d woken up in Wolfe’s office with an IV in his arm.

After they’d pumped him full of stimulants, Wolfe, who’d just returned from Cairo in the Black Hawk, had chewed his ass out. “Do you understand the implications of this facility being made public!” Wolfe had paced his office floor like a caged jungle cat. “I’m barely holding off the Deputy Director from terminating the program with prejudice.” Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. Axe had never seen the boss sweat before. “And you know fucking well what that means!”

Axe let him rant. Nothing he could say would excuse what had happened. Excuses were for the weak. One either won or lost. Success or failure. Why didn’t matter. He had only one option, and the orders that came from his boss next made that clear.

Wolfe stopped pacing, leaned over to bring himself eye-to-eye with him, and enunciated each word slowly. “Find them. And eliminate them.”

The doctor, the girl, and the Muslim had a few hours’ head start and had eluded detection so far. Unfortunately, the computer equipment that handled
the Monastery’s security had just been blown out the roof. A team was searching Aswan already, but Axe wasn’t convinced they were headed in that direction. Driving toward the nearest town was too obvious a move. He would scour the desert, following the tire tracks, but he knew that as soon as they hit hard dirt, finding the car would require more luck than skill.

He flexed his triceps by locking out his arms and rotating his elbows inward. Most men made the mistaken assumption that to build huge arms they needed to do endless bicep curls, but he knew that the triceps made up three-quarters of the arm’s muscle mass. Not that his biceps weren’t huge also. He settled into the vinyl seat and buckled his shoulder strap. Next, he checked his M4 rifle and the thermal scope that would illuminate any living creature up to several hundred yards away by its heat signature. The helicopter rose vertically while moving forward at the same time.

Nick Dawkins sat across from him, adjusting the night-vision goggles on his head. Although Nick had made the boneheaded move of allowing the doctor, the Muslim, and the girl out the front door, he was a good operative—a new hire straight from his retirement as a member of SEAL Team Two. Although Axe had spent his teenage years dreaming of one day being a SEAL, motivating himself through brutal workouts with the image of the amount of ass he would kick, he’d never made it out of the Navy’s two-week SEAL indoc program that preceded the seven-month-long BUD/S course.

When he’d arrived at Coronado Island, off the coast of San Diego, he was the largest guy in the barracks, and he’d relished the envious looks the other recruits gave him when he removed his shirt. Lieutenant Mills, however—a tanned and wiry New Yorker with a scratchy voice—had laughed at him. “You, Muscleman, will be the first to go,” he’d said in a Jersey accent, jabbing a calloused finger at him.