The Blood Gospel

Suddenly his own job didn’t seem so hard.

“Is that your camp?” She pointed in front of him to a makeshift canvas lean-to pitched at the edge of the fissure.

Camp was a generous description. “Be it ever so humble.”

He spared the fissure another glance. It cut through the ground like a giant scar, five yards wide, perhaps a hundred long. Even though a simple earthquake created it, it felt unnatural.

“Is that a mass spectrometer?” the archaeologist asked as they reached the site.

He couldn’t help but grin at the surprise on her face. “Didn’t think they’d let us grunts work with such ivory-tower toys?”

“No … it’s just … well …”

He liked watching her stutter. Everybody assumed that if you wore a uniform you had checked your brain at the recruiter’s office. “We just bang on it with rocks, Doc, but it seems to work.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. And please call me Erin. ‘Doc’ makes me feel like a pediatrician.”

“Good enough.” He aimed for the tent. “Almost there, Erin.”

Two of his men huddled under the meager shelter.

One stood near the computer, sucking hard on a canteen. The other sat in front of the monitor, fiddling with joysticks that guided the team’s remote-operated vehicle. The little robot had been lowered by its tether into the crevasse an hour ago.

As he led her into camp, both men turned. Each gave him a brief nod but took a far longer look at the attractive blond doctor.

Jordan introduced her, emphasizing her title.

The freckled young man returned his attention to his joysticks.

Jordan gestured at him. “Dr. Granger, that’s our computer jockey, Corporal Sanderson, and the man over there drinking all our water is Specialist Cooper.”

The husky black man snapped on a pair of latex gloves. A dozen bloodstained pairs filled the nearby garbage can.

“I’d stay and chat, but I gotta get back to cleanup duty.” Cooper looked to Jordan. “Where you hiding the extra batteries? McKay’s camera is almost dead, and we have to get everyone photographed before we bag ’em.”

Erin winced. She went pale again. Being in-country for so long, Jordan realized how easy it was to forget the sheer horror of what surrounded him every day.

Not much he could do for her right now. Or the bodies outside. “Blue pack, right pocket.”

Cooper dug a lithium ion battery from the zipper compartment.

“Damn it!” Sanderson swore, drawing their attention.

“What’s wrong?” Jordan asked.

“The rover is stuck again.”

Cooper rolled his eyes and left the tent.

The corporal frowned at the image on the color monitor like it was a video game he was about to lose.

Erin leaned over his shoulder and stared at the four monitors, each displaying footage from one of the ROV’s cameras. “Is that from inside the crevasse?”

“Yeah, but the robot’s jammed up tight.”

The screen displayed the reason for Sanderson’s frustration. The rover had wedged into a crack. Fallen grit and pebbles obscured two cameras. Sanderson pressed the sticks and the tank treads spun ineffectively, kicking up more debris. “Army piece of crap!”

The equipment wasn’t the problem. The ROV was state-of-the-art, packed with enough sensing and radar instruments to detect a mouse farting in a warehouse. The problem was that Sanderson hadn’t yet mastered the art of manipulating the dual joysticks. Jordan couldn’t run them either.

Erin glanced at him, eyes curious. “Is that an ST-20? I’ve logged hundreds of hours on one. Could I give it a shot?”

Might as well give her something to do. Sanderson didn’t look like he’d get the robot out. Plus Jordan respected anyone who was willing to jump in and help. “Sure.”

Sanderson lifted his hands in obvious disgust and rolled his chair out of the way. “Be my guest. The only thing I haven’t tried doing is crawling down that hole and kicking it.”

Erin stood where Sanderson’s chair had just been and took both joysticks like she knew what she was doing. She alternated between the front and rear controls, inching the ROV forward and backward much like she was trying to parallel-park.

“I tried that,” Sanderson said. “It’s not going to—”

The ROV abruptly pulled out of the crack. Jordan saw Erin smother a quick smile of victory, and respected her all the more for trying to spare Sanderson’s feelings.

Sanderson stood and put his hands on his hips. “Dude! You’re making me look bad in front of my CO.”

Then he smiled and pushed his chair behind her like it was a throne. Once she got settled, she looked up at Jordan. “What are we looking for?”

“Our team’s been commissioned to find the source of the gas.”

“Let me guess,” she said with a true smile. “I’m here to assure the Israeli government that you don’t destroy any millennia-old artifacts in the process?”

Jordan matched her smile. “Something along those lines.”

He didn’t take it any further than that, but her presence here was at the request of Israeli intelligence, not the antiquities department. He wasn’t sure why yet. And he hated unsolved mysteries.

All eyes were on the monitors as she steered the ROV over a pile of rocks.