“Field trials have gone well. I’ve designed a complete vehicle transport, launch, and recovery system too. The prototype is on its way to Turkey. I’m going over in a week to help out with an underwater archaeological dig of an old port they found in Istanbul.”
“A week should give us plenty of time.”
“Time for what?” Zavala said, suddenly wary.
Austin handed Zavala a science magazine that was open to an article describing the work of a ship that lassoed and towed icebergs threatening Newfoundland oil and gas rigs.
“How would you like to join me on a cruise to Iceberg Alley?”
Zavala scanned the magazine article.
“I don’t know, Kurt. Sounds mighty cold. Cabo might be more appealing to my warm-blooded Mexican American nature.”
Austin gave Zavala a look of disgust. “C’mon, Joe. What would you be doing in Cabo? Lying on the beach sipping margaritas. Watching the sun set with your arm around a beautiful señorita. Same old same old. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Actually, my friend, I was thinking of watching the sun come up as I sang my señorita love songs.”
“You’d be pressing your luck,” Austin said with a snort. “Don’t forget, I’ve heard you sing.”
Zavala harbored no illusions about his singing voice, which tended to be off-key. “Good point,” he said with a sigh.
Austin picked up the magazine. “I don’t want to push you into this, Joe.”
Zavala knew from past experience that his colleague didn’t push; he leaned. “That will be the day.”
Austin smiled and said, “If you’re interested, I need a quick decision. We’d leave tomorrow. I just got the okay. What do you say?”
Zavala rose from his chair and gathered up his submersible diagrams. “Thanks for the beer.”
“Where are you going?”
Zavala headed for the door.
“Home. So I can pack my flannel jockstrap and a bottle of tequila.”
Chapter 5
NEAR MA’ARIB, YEMEN
“DOWN THERE, MISTER, is tomb of queen.”
The wizened Bedouin jabbed the air, his bony finger pointing to a fissure about a yard wide and two feet high in the side of the pockmarked limestone hill. The rough-edged layers of strata above and below the opening were like lips afflicted with a bad case of trench mouth.
Anthony Saxon got down on his hands and knees and peered into the hole. He pushed aside thoughts of poisonous snakes and spiders, unwound his turban, and pulled off his beige desert robe to reveal long pants and a shirt. He flicked on a flashlight, probed the darkness with its beam, and took a deep breath.
“Down the rabbit hole I go,” he said with a carefree jauntiness.
Saxon dove into the opening, wriggling his lanky six-foot frame like a salamander, and disappeared from sight. The passageway sloped downward like a coal chute. Saxon experienced a claustrophobic moment of panic when the chute narrowed and he pictured himself stuck, but he shimmied his way through the tight squeeze with the use of creative finger-toe coordination.
To his relief, the passageway widened again. After crawling for about twenty feet, he popped out of the chute into the open. Mindful not to bump his head on a low ceiling, he slowly stood erect and explored his surroundings with the flashlight.
The bull’s-eye of light fell on the mortared-stone-block wall of a rectangular space about as big as a two-car garage. There was an opening with a corbeled arch about five feet high on the opposite wall. He ducked through the breach and followed a passageway for around fifty feet until he came to a rectangular room about half the square footage of the first.
The dust that covered every surface started him on a coughing fit. When he recovered, he saw that the room was bare except for a wooden sarcophagus that was tipped on its side. The lid lay a few feet away. A vaguely human form swathed in bandages from head to toe was half tumbled out of the ancient casket. Saxon cursed under his breath. He had arrived centuries too late. Grave robbers had stripped the tomb of any valuables hundreds of years before he was born.
The sarcophagus lid was decorated with a painting of a young girl, probably in her late teens. She had dark, oversized eyes, a full mouth, and black hair tied back from her face. She looked vibrant and full of life. With gentle hands, he rolled the mummy back into the case. The dissected corpse felt like a dried bag of sticks. He righted the sarcophagus and slid the lid back on.
He ran the flashlight beam around the walls of the tomb and read the letters carved into the stone. The words they formed were in epigraphic Arabic of the first century A.D. Off by a thousand years. “Crap,” he muttered.
Saxon patted the sarcophagus cover. “Sleep well, sweetheart. Sorry to disturb you.”
With a last, sad glance around the tomb, he followed the corridor back to the chute opening. He grunted his way through the tight spot and pulled his dust-covered body out of the hole into the hundred-degree heat. His pants were ripped, and his knees and elbows were scraped and bleeding.
The Bedouin had an expectant expression on his dark face.
“Bilqis?” he said.
Anthony Saxon responded with a belly laugh. “Bilked, is more like it.”
The Bedouin’s face fell. “No queen.”
Saxon recalled the portrait on the sarcophagus. “A princess, maybe. But not my queen. Not Sheba.”
A car horn beeped at the bottom of the hill. A man standing next to a beat-up old Land Rover had one hand in the car and the other waving in the air. Saxon waved back, slipped into his desert robe and turban, and led the way down the slope. The man blowing the horn in the sandblasted vehicle was an aristocratic-looking Arab whose upper lip was hidden under a luxuriant mustache.
“What’s up, Mohammed?” Saxon said.
“Time to go,” the Arab said. “Bad people come.”
He brandished the barrel of the Kalashnikov automatic rifle toward a point about a half mile distance. An oncoming vehicle was kicking up a dust cloud.
“How do you know they’re bad people?” Saxon asked.
“They all bad people around here,” the Arab said with a gold-toothed smile. Without another word, he got behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.
Saxon had learned to respect Mohammed’s skill at keeping him alive in the Wild West atmosphere of Yemen’s backcountry. Every chieftain in the area seemed to have his own private army of brig-ands, and larceny and murder in his heart.
He slid onto the passenger seat. The Bedouin piled into the back. Mohammed mashed the accelerator. The Land Rover kicked up dirt and sand. As the driver ground through the gears, he managed somehow to steer and hold on to his weapon as well.
Mohammed kept checking his rearview mirror. After several minutes, he patted the dashboard as if it were the neck of a trusty steed.
“We’re okay,” he said with a wide grin. “You find your queen?”
Saxon told him about the sarcophagus and the mummy of the young girl.
Mohammed jerked his thumb at the Bedouin in the backseat. “I told you. This son of a camel and his village are all crooks.”
Thinking that he was being praised, the Bedouin displayed a toothless grin.
Saxon sighed and shifted his gaze to the barren countryside. The locale changed, but the scene was always the same. A native con man would tell him in excited tones that the queen he was looking for was literally beneath his nose. Saxon would make a hair-raising crawl into the middle of an ancient necropolis that the con man’s forebears had looted hundreds of years before. He couldn’t count the number of mummies he had encountered. He had met a lot of nice people along the way. Too bad they were all dead.
Saxon dug a few riales out of his shorts pocket. He handed the coins to the delighted Bedouin and declined the man’s offer to show him another dead queen.