Callsign: King II- Underworld

Pierce wasn’t so sure about that, but took the monocular from the soldier and held it to his eye as he crawled forward to the edge of the chamber where the creatures were engaging in their own peculiar funerary rites.

There were at least two dozen of the creatures moving about in the cavern, and about half that many lined up against a nearby wall unmoving, presumably dead. Pierce noted the care that had been taken in arranging their bodies; they were all oriented in the same direction, limbs straightened against the onset of rigor mortis, and arms crossed on their chest. Their totem necklaces had been removed but Pierce caught a glint of something metallic in the mouth of each fallen creature—an obol, he realized.

The human remains had not received such elaborate treatment. The bodies of the fallen soldiers, too many for Pierce to count, had been piled up in the center of the chamber where the creatures were meticulously searching each one in turn. Pierce saw watches and rings torn from hands, and coins shaken from wallets. The loot was laid out carefully in a pile, and when a body yielded nothing more, it was dragged to another mound on the wall opposite from where the fallen creatures lay. Amid the uniforms of dead soldiers, Pierce saw other human remains—some in an advanced state of decay, some withered away to mummified husks but still clad in tattered jeans and hiking boots.

They’ve been doing this for a while, he realized. He had read up on the history of the Superstition Mountains during the long plane ride; every year, going back at least a century, a few hikers, many of them dreamers searching for the Lost Dutchman gold mine or some other bit of treasure from folklore, vanished in the desert wilderness. Here, it seemed, was the answer to that mystery.

It didn’t, however, explain the tetradrachm.

The creatures spent only a few more minutes searching the dead. When they had finished their grisly task, the collected items were gathered into what looked like a leather sack, carried by one of the creatures who already possessed a prodigious totem necklace. He barked stridently to the rest of the group, and then as if answering to a collective consciousness, they all fell in behind him and moved single file into another tunnel on the far side of the cavern.

Pierce knew that his only priority should have been finding a way out, but scientific discovery had always been his single motivating purpose. Teaching, lecturing and writing. Those were the things he had to do as a professional, but working in the field, uncovering mysteries so ancient that no one even knew they had been forgotten, was what drove him. He had wanted to be an archaeologist from the moment he had first watched Indiana Jones trekking through the jungles of Peru in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Given a choice between escaping danger or making a spectacular discovery, Pierce had only one guiding principle: What would Indy do?

As the last of the creatures vanished into the passage, George Pierce moved forward into the burial chamber.





20.


After driving cautiously along an unpaved Forest Service road for about five miles, headlights off to avoid drawing attention to their presence, King spied a distant blaze of light in the objective of his PVS-7. He stopped the Humvee in the middle of the road and got out for a better look.

The source of the illumination was, even at a distance, easily recognizable as another military compound. The camp was at least twice as large as the forward operating base where they had been taken after being captured, and was situated only a few hundred yards from the long asphalt ribbon that had to be US Highway 60. The size and close proximity to the highway suggested that this was probably the central command for the military exclusion zone. It was only when he peered through a pair of binoculars he’d found in the Humvee that King realized that this camp had also been attacked.

This base had faired better than the FOB from which he and Nina had escaped. Teams of soldiers were busy working to repair the damage, most of which had occurred along the northern edge. Closer to the center of the camp, a row of Humvees was lining up in readiness to venture outside the wire. King knew the patrol was probably going to find out why the other base hadn’t reported in. It was time to get off the road.

Before he could return to the Humvee, he spied another vehicle approaching the camp from the east along a track that cut across the desert. With its blazing headlights, it was impossible to see the vehicle using night-vision, but King’s suspicion that it was not a military truck was confirmed when it pulled up to the base. In the glare of the portable generator-powered sodium vapor lamps, and aided by the binoculars, King saw a white SUV with an indistinct logo painted on the door.