“We will help,” Parviz said. Quebat nodded.
“Are you sure?” Tauber said.
“Buble is there all month,” Parviz said.
At the cave site, Parviz operated the digital wire locator they used when they were running cable from the reactor hut to the tower and back. It was a long electronic wand that used sound waves and a magnetic resonance field to show them what was beneath the ground—a high tech divining rod. It was three feet long with a broad plastic body. An arm at the top supported a digital monitor for visuals of what had been detected. There was also audio, a wide range of beeps, buzzes, and hums that alerted the user to the proximity of buried objects and their depth beneath the soil.
The screen read nothing but a jumble of rocks beneath the scree of sand and shell, but it had an outside range of six feet. The three of them worked in the broiling sun using the backhoe. When the going got tight, they used shovels to remove more of the silt and gravel to allow the backhoe arm further access. None of them were archeologists. They were playing this by ear. The Iranians seemed to enjoy themselves. They even smiled a few times. Tauber assumed it was a relief to have a change from being cloistered with a reactor all day watching the clock. Even manual labor in the desert heat was a break for them.
The sun was setting, so they set up bright work lights inside and out of the cave opening and kept scraping away at the silt until they had deepened the floor of the cave by ten feet. Quebat had made sandwiches for them. Lamb for the Iranians and tuna salad with lettuce for Tauber. There were cold beers on ice in a cooler and hard lemonade, a favorite of Quebat’s.
Parviz got a ping on the locator and waved it over an area of the floor against the back wall of the cave. The digital image showed a blurry, speckled picture of what looked like human skeletal remains at a depth of four feet.
On hands and knees, they scraped carefully at the layer of cool sand they’d uncovered. They used their fingers and the blades of trowels. It was past midnight, and there was a chill in the air by the time they found the first bones, a collection of ribs. They dug more gingerly now. It was Quebat who thought of using the melted ice from the cooler to wash the sand away from the bones. He poured the water on the cleared area and the hard packed grit began to melt away to reveal bones dried yellow and brown. There was evidence of three skeletons lying close together. They were surprisingly intact. The joints had long ago decayed and the structure collapsed but they were still in the rough arrangement that approximated how they must have looked in life. No animals had gotten to them. Perhaps they’d been buried in the silt of that long-ago storm surge.
Tauber recalled watching a special on TV about Pompeii and how the eruption of Vesuvius froze the dead in the postures in which they’d died. Perhaps the same had happened here in a sudden wash of silt and shell rather than volcanic ash.
Parviz trained the lights on the remains and Tauber brushed sand from the brittle bones with his fingers. The sand was still discolored here from the flesh and sinew that had sloughed off the trio all those years past. It was a rusty brown color.
The skulls of two of the remains were broad. The teeth that remained in the jaws were unusual. They were pointed as though they’d been filed and burnished purple-black. The skeletons appeared to belong to adolescents except for the exceptionally wide scapula. Well under five feet tall. And the long bones showed signs of bumps and lesions. Tauber knew from his casual reading of archeological magazines that these were indications of a short, brutal life, typical of remains found from Neolithic cultures.
Tauber lay on his belly in the glare of the lamps and spread sand away from the third skull of the skeleton that lay under the other two. This one was taller, the bones finer and unmarked. He whisked the sand from the visage of the skull. Its jaw was unhinged. These teeth were not filed. They were straight and unmarred and stained over time to a uniform color of dried corn.
All but one tooth that was still a translucent white. The second molar that Caroline lost in college when a pizza crust at a sorority party turned out to have a small pebble in it.
Tauber was gasping to breathe, and his vision blurred with tears as he brushed the last of the sand away from the skull to find a single round hole drilled in the left temple.
The next day, two of the men he’d sent down the Tube returned from the past.
8
Mission Creep
The village was ablaze. The satchel charge tossed into the bonfire threw flames over the huts and the rooftops of dry reeds turned the huts to pyres within seconds. The skinnies ran through the crazed shadow shooting and shrieking. Smoke hung thick in the air. It stung the eyes, and made it hard to breathe.
Dwayne led the Rangers through an outer ring of huts toward the wide cave opening. The huts were arranged with no discernible pattern, a random arrangement that didn’t allow for easy navigation.
Spears and rocks came at them from all sides. Skinnies leaped from cover to taunt them with animal barks. The males used every opening to fling spears. The worst were the children who flung rocks, shells, and feces in a constant rain on the Rangers. And there were hundreds of the little bastards laughing and throwing their projectiles with astonishing accuracy.
Renzi fell to his knees when a rock struck him in the back of the head. Chaz dropped
