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“Then we follow orders and go. But when that’s done, we return to USS Dahlgren and wait for her SOS.”
Chapter Thirteen
A week passed before a new camp was set up near the site Diana had identified. Again, they were supplied with Bedouin-style goat-hair tents, which helped cut the heat of the day with their cool, dark interiors. Diana wondered how they were acquired and hoped the women who’d made the hair curtains had been compensated for their labor.
They were deep in another twisted, dry ravine system. Only this time, Diana knew exactly where she was, having been the one to reveal the site location to Harun, who’d thankfully left the way station and hadn’t been seen again.
She, Jamal, and Bassam began digging on their second day back in the desert. Diana choosing where to start, knowing that the site had to produce artifacts relatively quickly or they would suspect deceit.
It was with both relief and horror that they excavated the first broken vessel made by Nabataean hands two thousand years ago.
She reminded herself this was for a greater good. She would make sure she was the one to deliver these goods to Rafiq’s center of operations. They would need to be properly cleaned and packaged, an indispensable role she would insist only she could fulfill. Then she’d trigger the tracker, and he would again be targeted for capture or kill.
The man was personally responsible for so many deaths. Children in Syria. Entire villages in Afghanistan. There were rumors he was aiming for the United States next. A civilian target like a sporting event or the power grid across the Eastern Seaboard.
Her money was on the power grid, but she based that on nothing other than the man was clearly more wily than previous leaders. He’d successfully staged his own presumed death in a military raid after his men shot down a transport plane carrying a platoon of SEALs.
Rafiq had been high on the most wanted list for nearly a decade, and the general consensus was that he’d been taken out of the game. But Diana had seen him with her own eyes. He was alive and his network was well organized. So much so, they’d managed to keep his survival a secret for nearly two years.
Bassam and Jamal were at the lowest level of the organization. They probably knew nothing about the big boss, but in being her main guards, they hoped to get attention from higher-ups.
She would use that to her advantage. Feed them information. She was their golden ticket. In time, they might even come to trust her.
Ten days passed before the camp was expanded to the point where they had five crew members who could dig with enough precision to extract artifacts without destroying them.
At that point, Diana ceased digging herself. She was the task master, patrolling the site and jumping in the pits at the first sign of something that wasn’t a rock or other natural feature. If this were a real dig, she’d be the principal investigator, but she shunned that title, feeling the shame she deserved. There was no investigation going on. This wasn’t a data recovery protocol. Sure, she took notes, but she was only given one piece of paper per day, so her notes had to be precise and minimal.
In doling out paper like a miser, Bassam prevented her from spending too much time on paperwork, recording every detail of the site she could as all context was destroyed.
Instead, she was constantly on the move, making sure the workers were careful in their digging. It was the only kind of protection she could give the pieces of history that were being unearthed.
Artifacts were removed along with the dirt that encased them. Here in camp, Diana would gently process what she could, but she left much of the cleaning to be finished later, preferably in Rafiq’s center of operations. There, she’d have the proper tools. Running water. Electricity.
This made for shoddy fieldwork—chunking out the artifacts with minimal processing. Plus there were no soil samples taken, nor would radiocarbon or other dating methods be employed. No pollen or other organic chemical analysis to identify the contents of the vessels in antiquity. There was no science happening here at all. The dig was a disgrace of technique and an irreversible loss, but it did produce items to sell.
Each day, Diana woke up with the knowledge she’d betrayed Fahd. She was a traitor to her country and her profession. Fahd would spit on her in the afterlife. Except she’d never cross paths with him in hell because he’d betrayed none of his beliefs in his death.
She was all alone with that sin.
She didn’t actually believe in hell, except the one she was living in now had proven the concept was all too real and not reserved for the deceased.
At the end of the long, nightmarish days, she collapsed on her sleeping pallet in exhaustion and tried not to hate herself so much that she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
On the evening of her twenty-first day of captivity, Bassam settled beside her as she ate her evening meal.
“Excavation in the north area will be completed tomorrow, or the next day at the latest. Where will you direct the men after that?”
She shrugged. She’d been trying not to think about it. In her mind’s eye, she could see the ground-penetrating radar images Fahd had shown her. She’d been doing her best to avoid the areas likely to have the deepest deposits.
The oldest parts of the site.
This site was a small crossroads, but it had been an important one. A watering hole for traders used by Nabataeans and others for hundreds of years.
It had been a small village. An oasis in the desert.
She cleared her throat. She knew where the men would not dig. Someday, real archaeologists might come back. Something could be salvaged from this atrocity. “I was thinking we should drop some exploratory holes to the southeast. See if we can find that border of the village.”
“I think we should dig to the west,” Jamal said, dropping down on her other side. “It would make sense if there were dwellings there, closer to the spring.”
