Ancient Echoes

CHAPTER 11



Mongolia

“MICHAEL! MICHAEL! Wake up! Wake up!”

Michael heard Jianjun's voice, felt his assistant's hand shaking his shoulder, felt air so cold it numbed his teeth. He opened his eyes to see a blue sky.

He looked around amazed to be alive, then pushed away the sand that covered his body and sat up. Finally, he held his head, laid back down, and shut his eyes once more. The last thing he remembered, he had been inside the ger drinking, and then felt sleepy. A vague memory…Lady Hsieh calling him, drawing him outside…

He didn’t want to think about that, about her.

Now it seemed an entire caravan had marched over his body while a yak dung fire burned in his mouth. Airag did that to a man. Opening one eye at a time, he tried again. “What am I doing here?” he whispered.

“Good question. You tripped over me leaving the ger. Woke me up.” Jianjun’s hair stood on end, his face pale, and his eyes blood shot. He looked as bad as Michael felt. “You were sleep-walking. I tried to talk to you, stop you, but you kept going so I followed. We both fell, I guess. At least, I'm assuming we fell, and that's how we got down here. Way down here. I must have been knocked out or I was too tired to stay awake, because next thing I woke to the loud sound of my own teeth chattering. They're still chattering. It's freezing and—”

“Stop!” Michael pleaded, holding his aching head. “I get the picture.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet, and saw they were at the bottom of a steep drop. They were lucky they hadn't broken their necks in the fall.

After nearly thirty minutes and any number of tries, they climbed out of it. The sun was high, the sky clear, pale and ghostly, but the land....

Sand and dust lay everywhere, covered everything, and turned a grassy plain to a tan-hued ocean.

Michael made his way toward the camp's sand-covered gers on legs that felt shaky and weak.

No smoke billowed from the chimney, and no one moved around outside. An unnatural, eerie stillness had settled over the area. As much as Michael wanted to convince himself that Batbaatar and Acemgul might yet be sleeping off the liquor, or that they had already gone to the dig site to see how much damage had been done, he couldn't. A foreboding took hold and refused to let go.

He ran toward camp, cautiously at first, then faster.

As he got closer, his steps slowed and faltered. Jianjun, right behind him, did the same.

Two low mounds of sand were on the ground near the gers. Looking at the size and shape of them, his heart sank.

He went to one mound near the truck and with a gentle hand brushed away the sand. He shut his eyes, his worst fear confirmed.

Batbaatar.

Not far from him lay Acemgul's body, also covered with sand.

They'd been shot in the back of the head. Two executions.

Michael fell to his knees as he surveyed the horrifying scene, the startled, anguished death stares on the faces of men he had worked with for so many weeks, men who had become true and honest friends.

“What happened here?” Jianjun placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Why kill these men? These good men?”

Michael didn't reply.

“If you hadn’t left, and I hadn’t followed you,” Jianjun said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, “could we have saved them? Or would we also be dead?”

The question remained unanswered as, angry and sickened by the senseless deaths, Michael gazed in the direction of the dig. No tire tracks or other signs survived the storm, yet a suspicion, one he prayed wasn't true, formed.

He went to the truck, Jianjun silent beside him. Batbaatar had covered the hood with a tied-down tarp before entering the ger the day before to keep sand out of the engine. When Michael removed the tarp and cranked the key, the truck came to life.

Michael drove straight to the dig site. The storm should have completely buried it, but as he neared, what he saw infuriated him.

Someone had been here. Someone had dug into the pit and cleared any sand that had fallen into it. No, not someone—removing that much sand would have taken a small army!

Wordlessly, he jumped from the truck, searching for any sign of who had done this.

He scrambled down the ladder to Lord Hsieh's tomb. Everything connected with Lord Hsieh had been removed, but that meant little to him.

He hurried to the opening down to the lower level, and half-slid, half-fell into Lady Hsieh's chamber.

The coffin was gone.

Raw fury cut through him like a razor. Who did this, and why? With those questions, he made a resolution. He would find her again. He would find her and learn what all this meant. He would do it, no matter what it took.