The Covenant of Genesis

Nina nervously followed him back up the track. Near the top, he dropped to his stomach and crawled under a scrubby bush. She did the same. One hand shading the lenses to prevent the sun from reflecting off them, Chase took a closer look at Trouble Cove.

‘What is it?’ Nina asked. ‘What do you see?’

‘That I won’t need to do any digging.’ He handed her the binoculars.

Nina scanned the area ahead. To her shock, it was bustling with activity. Grubby yellow excavators were digging out large trenches, men moving in behind them to clear away more sand and dirt with shovels. Parked nearby were several 4x4s and heavier flatbed trucks, presumably used to transport the earthmovers across the desert, as well as a rather incongruous Winnebago recreational vehicle. She also spotted several large tents on one edge of the dig. ‘Jesus.’

‘That’s a pretty serious operation,’ said Chase.

‘You’re not kidding.’

‘We need to get closer.’

‘We need to do what now?’

‘I want to get a better look at them,’ he clarified. ‘See if that guy Vogler’s there, if they really are these Covenant people.’

‘I don’t think they’re there to build vacation condos,’ Nina muttered. It was hard to tell from this angle, but there seemed to be something in the trenches.

‘Come on.’ Chase took back the binoculars and crawled down the other face of the slope, Nina behind him. They carefully made their way closer, staying low behind the patches of vegetation. The ground became rockier, the track entering a winding gulch marking the path of a long-dry river. Nina expected Chase to enter it to take advantage of the cover, but instead he crawled between the boulders along the top, following a ragged line of small bushes.

He stopped suddenly and flattened himself on the ground, gesturing for Nina to do the same. She heard the raucous sound of an engine.

‘Quad bike,’ said Chase, warily raising his head. Nina peered through the bushes. About a hundred yards ahead, she saw a man in desert camouflage bounding through the dunes on a fat-tyred little Kawasaki 4x4. A rifle was slung over his back. ‘He’s running a patrol - there’re more tracks on the ground. That must be their perimeter.’

Nina looked past him to the dig site. They were now about half a mile from its centre, close enough to make out the rattle and roar of the machines. ‘Eddie, give me the binoculars.’

She focused first on the trenches, seeing the remains of buildings at the bottom. Even through the encrustation of sand and soil, the similarity to the underwater ruin in the Java Sea was clear: the same curved walls, the same large, carefully placed bricks.

But her thrill of recognition was immediately blown away by her horror at what was being done to the ruins. The excavators weren’t merely clearing the dirt around them - they were ripping them apart. Even as she watched, another toothed steel bucket smashed one of the walls. As the machine pulled back, men came in to continue the destruction by hand.

‘Jesus,’ she hissed. ‘They’re just wrecking everything. They must be looking for something specific . . . and they don’t care what they destroy to find it.’ Panning across the site, she suddenly stopped when she saw an unmistakable figure standing at the edge of a trench. ‘Son of a bitch!’

‘What?’ Chase asked.

‘It’s Ribbsley!’ Dressed in a white suit and a Panama hat, the Cambridge professor was sipping from a plastic water bottle as he gazed at the devastation below. ‘The guy in white - that bastard’s overseeing the whole thing! And I led him right to it by telling him about the Atlantean numbers on the tablet.’ She let out a frustrated growl.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Chase assured her. ‘You didn’t know he was working for these arseholes.’

‘But I shouldn’t have trusted anyone, not after what happened. Shit!’ She returned the binoculars to him. ‘That’s archaeology by bulldozer, not anything I’ve ever done.’

‘Ay up,’ said Chase, finding the figure in white, then examining the men standing with him. ‘Vogler’s there too. Take a gander.’ Nina peered through the lenses once more. ‘The blond guy, right of your mate the Man from Del Monte. That’s him.’

She saw a man in desert camouflage, wearing sunglasses. He seemed to be about Chase’s age, mid-thirties. Two other men, similarly dressed, also stood nearby. They were both older than Vogler, one olive-skinned with cropped black wavy hair and a cigar in his mouth, the other goateed and apparently Middle Eastern, wearing a black military beret. ‘Who are the other guys?’

‘Dunno, but I’m guessing they’re in charge. They’re not getting their hands dirty.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Nina asked. ‘They beat us to the site. And the way they’re working, there won’t be anything left by the time they leave.’

‘Then we’ll have to get in there before they finish.’

‘Y’know, I think the guys with guns might have something to say about that.’

‘If they catch us. I think I can get us in there without being seen.’

‘And then what?’

He grinned. ‘What do you think? We’re going to find whatever it is they’re after. Before they do.’

Nina had expected the digging to stop at sunset. But it continued, glaring floodlights on poles casting a stark light over the excavators as they continued tearing open the ground. From the amount of earth that had been cleared since she and Chase arrived, she estimated that the dig had been going for at least a couple of days. Ribbsley and the Covenant had assembled their operation even more quickly than they had - and put vastly more resources behind it.

Lurking in the bushes, Nina and Chase observed the Covenant’s pattern of activities. There were always two men on quad bikes circling the perimeter, coming close to their position at one extreme and going right up to the edge of the cliffs at the other. It took slightly under two minutes for each man to complete half an orbit; two minutes to find a way into the site without being seen.

The sound of digging suddenly stopped. Nina saw some of the excavators pulling back. She took the binoculars. Another structure had been partly exposed at the end of the trench; one of the scoops had knocked a hole in the curved wall. A man shone a torch into it, then clambered through. ‘They’ve found something,’ she said.

‘Must be important,’ said Chase, seeing the other machinery stop. ‘Everyone’s downed tools.’

Nina kept watching. After a minute, the man emerged and climbed a ladder out of the trench, hurrying across the site to be met by Vogler and the two other leaders of the group. Some animated discussion followed, and then the trio went to the Winnebago. She had seen Ribbsley retreat to it earlier; he emerged again . . . but not alone. ‘Looks like Ribbsley’s got a girlfriend.’

A woman with short, spiky blond hair had also emerged from the RV, standing beside the professor with her back to Nina. A moment later, someone else entered her field of vision - a hard-faced, white-haired man. Unlike the other members of the Covenant, who all wore desert camouflage, he was dressed in nondescript civilian khakis. ‘And there’s someone else, some guy with white hair.’ There was something vaguely familiar about him, but she couldn’t place what.

‘Let me see.’ Chase took a closer look through the binoculars. ‘She’s got a nice arse, whoever she is.’

‘Eddie!’

‘What? She does. Huh, Whitey doesn’t think so, though. He’s pretty pissed off, telling her to get back inside.’

Nina looked at Chase, surprised. ‘You can lip-read?’

‘A little bit. It’s handy when someone’s trying to tell you something while you’re being shot at.’ He tried to make out Ribbsley’s reply, but the brim of the Panama hat covered most of his face. ‘Looks like Ribbsley’s arguing with him.’ He looked briefly over at Vogler and his two companions. ‘Vogler’s saying . . . something about not wasting time, they need to . . . I think he said “translate the find”.’

Nina’s heart jumped. ‘They’ve found another artefact.’ She glared at the white-suited figure. ‘That son of a bitch lied to me. He knew what the language on the tablet was - he was probably already