The Covenant of Genesis

‘Or our spines. So how far have we left to go?’

Chase swapped the Veteres map for a considerably more recent representation of the area. ‘About a hundred miles.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘Over this terrain? No way we’ll get there today. We’ll have to camp for the night.’

‘And we only have one tent,’ Sophia said with a playful smile. ‘Cosy.’

‘One tent and one truck,’ he reminded her. ‘I’m not bloody telling Nina that I slept with my ex-wife.’

‘Your loss. Do you have a preference, or shall we toss for them?’

‘You can have the tent.’

‘Then you can put it up. What?’ she said as Chase shook his head in exasperation. ‘You got to choose where to sleep. It only seems fair.’ She looked into the truck. ‘And what about the guns?’

‘They’ll be sleeping with me,’ he said firmly. As well as the truck and some survival gear, they had been furnished with a pair of weapons: a battered Browning High Power automatic that Chase guessed was a couple of decades older than he was, and an even more ancient Lee-Enfield rifle, its wooden body chipped and scarred, that almost certainly dated back to the Second World War.

‘Yes, I thought they might be.’ She smirked. ‘Sleeping with something cold, hard, inflexible, with awkward knobbly protrusions . . . it’ll be as if you’ve got Nina back.’

‘Har fucking har. Just for that, you can put up your own tent.’ Ignoring her look of displeasure, he gathered up the sheets of paper and got back into the Land Cruiser. ‘Coming?’

‘A long journey through a hot desert over awful terrain in a truck with worn-out suspension to spend the night in a tent? I can’t wait.’ She climbed in and slammed the door.

They picked their way northwest for hours, slowing over the harsh, rocky plains littered with sharp stones that threatened to rip through the Land Cruiser’s tyres, then speeding up to avoid getting bogged down in mile after mile of soft sand. Despite Chase’s best efforts, they still had to stop and dig themselves out a couple of times, further slowing their progress. By the time the sun neared the horizon, the Land Cruiser’s milometer told him that they had barely covered two-thirds of the distance to their destination.

The sunset itself was something to behold, though. The dust and sand in the air turned the western sky a lurid, dripping-blood red, swathes of orange running through it as though the heavens had caught fire. ‘Look at that,’ Chase said. ‘That’s a hell of a sunset. Wish we’d brought the camera.’

‘This isn’t going to become your new “night sky in Algeria” story, is it?’ Sophia yawned. Chase spotted a rock poking from the sand and swerved the Land Cruiser so that the wheels on her side slammed over it, jolting her hard. ‘Ow! Did you do that on purpose?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Chase, suppressing a smile as he looked back at the splendour of the setting sun.

He spotted something else, though: a column of black smoke rising into the sky two or three miles away. ‘Soph, check the map - the proper one. Were there any villages near the route we were going?’

She had seen the smoke too, and consulted the map. ‘Not for a long way. Are you off course?’

‘Don’t see how; I’ve been following the compass.’ He tapped the compass ball attached to the dashboard, which showed them to be heading northwest. Looking at the distant smoke, he saw a second column starting to rise beside it. ‘We’d better take a look.’

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Sophia asked, her tone making it clear she thought it was not.

‘There’s not supposed to be anyone out here. Someone might be in trouble.’

‘Which is hardly our problem. And if it’s the Janjaweed?’

‘Then I want to know where they are before they know where we are.’ He aimed the Land Cruiser towards the smoke.

Fifteen minutes later, Chase stopped the truck. They were close to the base of a rocky rise. The smoke was coming from the other side, more dark stalks having sprouted during the drive. He wound down the window, listened for a moment, then took both guns from the back seat. ‘Come on.’

‘What is it?’ Sophia asked as he got out.

‘I heard shouting. Keep your voice down, and stay low.’ He clambered up the shadowed face of the dune. Sophia followed.

The shouts became clearer as they approached the low summit. Men, the yelling of a mob. And others cutting through it, higher-pitched: the screams of women.

And children.

Chase crawled the last few feet to peer over the top of the dune. ‘Shit,’ he hissed when he saw what lay below.

He’d seen similar scenes in different countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, half a dozen others where the rules of civilisation had been broken down by war. Over the dune was a rocky hollow, a small pool of rancid water at its heart, round which had been built a pathetic collection of shelters. A makeshift village, a camp for refugees fleeing the violence in Darfur to the west. A few dozen people at most, most of them women and children, trying to find safety.

They had failed.

The shelters were on fire, bodies strewn around them. Some had been shot, but most had been hacked down by machetes, or simply bludgeoned to death with clubs and rifle butts. Some of their attackers were on horseback, circling the doomed encampment and forcing back those of the dwindling group of survivors who tried to flee, laughing and shouting abuse as they rode to block and strike at them.

Those who had dismounted were in groups, three or four to each of the refugee women. They too were laughing, egging each other on.

Chase watched, a seething rage rising, as one of the women was thrown to the ground, the men holding her down and ripping away her clothes. She screamed, begging for mercy that would never be given as the Janjaweed leader, a man in a white headscarf and teardrop mirrorshades, tugged at his own clothing, belt flapping from his waist. More laughter, a cheer from the others as the screams rose into hysteria.

Chase brought the rifle to his shoulder, locking the cross hairs on the back of the man’s head—

Sophia shoved the barrel down. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘The world a favour,’ he replied angrily. ‘Let go of the gun.’

‘There must be fifteen of them, and they’ve all got AKs. If they realise we’re here, they’ll kill us.’

‘We’ll see how many I get first.’

‘This isn’t your fight, Eddie. We have to find Eden before the Covenant. And we’ve got no chance of doing that if the Janjaweed know we’re here.’ She looked him in the eyes. ‘You want to save Nina? Then we need a bargaining chip we can use against the Covenant. Being a white knight here will get us killed, and it will get her killed.’

Chase’s face tightened with fury . . . but he lowered the gun. ‘Fuck!’

Below, the screaming woman managed to pull one arm free, flailing it in panic - and knocking off her attacker’s sunglasses. The other men holding her laughed mockingly, but he punched her brutally in the face once, twice, blood spurting from her mouth and nose - then pulled back, drawing a gun and shooting her twice in the chest. He adjusted his clothing, then picked up his sunglasses and spat on the corpse.

Then the group moved on to another woman.

Sophia was already sliding back down the slope. ‘We should go,’ she said. ‘Wait for them to leave - and hope they’re not going the same way as us.’

‘They’d fucking well better not be,’ he growled as he descended after her.

Behind him, the screams stopped, one by one.

The horsemen led the convoy of vehicles through the empty desert. The sun was a fat, shimmering semicircle on the horizon by the time they stopped. Nina saw on the Humvee’s GPS screen that they were still at least thirty miles from the possible location of Eden, but the break in the journey was being called by their escorts.

They had arrived at the Janjaweed’s camp.

Nina watched nervously through the tinted window of armoured glass as the five vehicles pulled into a circle like a wagon train. There were at least fifty men in the camp, mostly young, all with the same predatory eyes as the