2013: Beyond Armageddon Read online

  He looked back out the window. The gigantic mouth hung open at the end of the wing. Weeks of smoldering anger at madmen and phantoms he couldn’t confront exploded into full-blown rage. Oblivious to the headphones still on his head, Zeke thrust his face an inch from the window.

  “Here I am, you son of a bitch. If you want me come and get me.”

  In his ear he heard a sinister purr. “Oh, I will.”

  The thing tried to intimidate him with its demonic stare.

  Zeke glared back, vaguely aware of Leah pulling on his arm and saying something. Torn, he peered further into the roiling funnel, looking for the source of the light within. Beyond the bottom of the spout, miles away, he thought he saw flames.

  Leah’s words began to penetrate. Passengers were spilling into the aisle in alarm. The force outside drew him toward it until he felt sure he would be sucked into the snapping mouth.

  He shot a look at Leah. “Do you see that?”

  She looked out, then back at him, obviously confused. Zeke leaned close to the window.

  The cloud-thing was gone.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Leah turned to two flight attendants who were keeping the passengers at bay. “Bad dream,” she said. “We’re fine.” She spoke reassuringly until the attendants began herding passengers back to their seats, Leah hovering near them solicitously.

  Still staring in disbelief out the window, Zeke was startled by sound in his headphones. He’d forgotten that he still had them on. He turned to yank them from the armrest.

  They’d already come unplugged. The end of the cord mocked him.

  In his ear a guttural, gloating chuckle, somewhere between a growl and a purr, sent an icy ripple fluttering down his back.

  “How do you like my little parlor trick? By the way, don’t you worry about your lovely sister, errand boy. I am taking good care of her. She is waiting for you. We are all waiting for you. You and I have gotten to be such good friends, I will be disappointed if you do not find me. I don’t think you will, but if you do, my door is always open.” There was a pause and the sound of rustling. “Wait. Valerie wants to say hello.”

  The soul-withering cackle again came through the headphones. On and on it went, until it seemed it would go on forever unless Zeke did something. His hands balled into tight fists as he shot a whispered hiss of impotent rage through the window at the reddening sky:

  “Stop it. Stop it God damn you! I’LL MAKE YOU STOP!!!”

  Abruptly the laughing stopped. A second of nothingness followed. Then he felt something.

  A moist probing in his ear.

  The moaning and mewling sounds of someone becoming sexually aroused.

  No. It couldn’t be.

  “No. Oh God no. NO!”

  He ripped the headphones off and threw them onto the seat, staring in horror. Leah appeared in the aisle and followed his gaze.

  A tongue about the length and thickness of a little finger slid from one of the foam rubber ear pads. Not the black forked tongue of a demon, but the pink, moist, healthy tongue of a desirable female. For several seconds it made the licking motions of fellatio, then withdrew. A molten trail of foam rubber and saliva oozed onto the seat, burning a hole where it touched.

  Zeke looked at Leah. “Did you see that?” He heard madness quivering in his voice.

  “I saw it.”

  The beginnings of a growl or a scream rumbled in his throat, his body taut against the possibility that he might start raving, or that the horror might suddenly reappear.

  CHAPTER 33

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Mordecai Rosen picked Zeke and Leah up at Ben Gurion airport in a van he’d leased for the dig. They waited until he’d made his way through the airport traffic and onto the main road before telling him of the incident on the plane. Mordecai said nothing, only nodding occasionally while keeping his eyes on the constant jockeying along Highway 1. Zeke, still shaken, finally finished the story.

  Mordecai remained silent until he had maneuvered his way onto 90—the Dead Sea highway. When he had settled into a comfortable cruising speed high above the western edge of the sea, Leah leaned forward from her seat behind Zeke. “Isn’t this part of the West Bank?”

  “Yes and no,” Mordecai said. “This is such a vital lifeline for Dead Sea tourists and industry that Israel has managed to keep it out of Palestinian control.”

  Oblivious to his surroundings, Zeke sat grappling with what had happened on the plane. Those things were impossible, but they had happened, and he couldn’t ignore them. Evil existed. And it was waiting.

  No. Not waiting. Stalking them.

  He ran his hands up over his face and scalp to clear away the fog of troubling thoughts, then looked at Mordecai. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What do you think of our sky demon?”

  “It’s not easy for someone who spends his life looking for concrete proof to believe in demons.” He gave them both a quick sidelong glance. “But you are rational people, and all three of us have seen things science cannot explain.”

  “What have you seen?” Leah asked.

  He told of his encounter with the Judas tree in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  “Something is out there,” she said.

  Mordecai passed a truck that said Dead Sea Works, then said, “Baal.”

  “What?” Zeke said.

  “Your sky demon. The cloud. Baal.”

  “As in Baal, the ancient pagan god?”

  “Yes. A false idol to some, a demon to others. Among other things, Baal was believed to control the weather.”

  “Interesting,” Zeke said.

  “Isn’t it,” Mordecai agreed. “Baal was worshipped in many ancient cultures, probably including Sodomites. Certainly including Ammonites, Lot’s descendants.”

  They were passing Qumran at a very brisk pace. Mordecai motioned to the gnarled brown hills off to the right. “Where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.”

  Zeke said, “That discovery is really what started the chain of events that led us to here.”

  “Fate,” Leah said.

  “Or Providence,” Zeke said.

  Mordecai glanced at them both. “Or something.”

  Zeke’s ears popped again, reminding him of Mordecai’s observation that in going from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, they would descend four thousand feet. Far below the steep cliffs that fell away to their left, he glimpsed a splotch of color that stood out like a blue eye on an albino. Made even more striking by the barren brown mountains surrounding it, the Dead Sea appeared calm and smooth in the late afternoon sun.

  Along the far shore, some ten miles away—although they seemed much closer—the deeply furrowed Mountains of Moab rose up from Jordan, forming a spectacular backdrop for the sea. Zeke was reminded of Lake Mead near Las Vegas, its turquoise in sharp contrast to the stark brown Nevada landscape. And the deeply etched and desolate terrain of Death Valley, the way mountains descended to a depression in the earth had that seemed impossibly far below. But this was much more dramatic.

  “Whoa,” Leah said. “What’s wrong with this picture?” Trees and waterfalls had suddenly appeared in the desert landscape.

  “Ein Gedi,” Mordecai explained. “An oasis that’s become a major tourist attraction. There are places to eat if you’re hungry.”

  Zeke knew they were both famished after the long, grueling flight, but he was in no mood to stop. “How much longer before we get where we’re going?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Zeke shook his head. “Let’s come back when we can enjoy it. Right now I’d rather just get there. Do we need to stop for groceries?”

  Mordecai looked at Leah in the mirror. She widened her eyes to convey how hungry she was. “No,” he said. “We have a fully stocked kitchen. I think you’ll be pleased.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The Dead Sea. Dig Headquarters.

  “It’s not the best-looking building,” Mordecai explained as
he helped carry their bags into the lobby, “but compared to the usual accommodations on a dig, it’s the Taj Mahal.”

  He had leased the failed hotel. It was easy to see why it had failed. Drab and unattractive, made of painted cinderblock and shaped like a cereal box, it looked like a lonely, forgotten outpost. That didn’t matter. Its location at the midpoint of the western edge of the shallow southern basin of the Dead Sea made it perfect.

  They followed Mordecai through the lobby and up the stairs. “There is an elevator, but, unfortunately, it needs a part. The elevator man ordered it, but he didn’t give me a good feeling about its chances of actually getting here any time soon. For now we’ll have to schlep everything up the stairs.”

  “No problem,” Zeke said. “We’ll need all the exercise we can get.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Mordecai said as they kept walking past the first-floor landing, “because I put you on the second floor. More privacy, I thought. No one above you for the foreseeable future. Further away from any late-night activity going on downstairs.”

  “That’s fine, Mordecai,” Zeke said. “Good decision.”

  They went though the door from the stairs and stopped at the first room on the left. “Here you are,” Mordecai said. “Room 201. The side with a view of the water, of course. Hassan and I are in 202, across from you. Our commute to the control room downstairs is a minute. Maybe two.”

  “Gotta love that,” Zeke said.

  They went in and set the luggage down. Leah swung one of the bags up onto the bed. “I’ll start unpacking while you guys bring in the rest of our stuff.”

  “After that I can give you the rest of the tour,” Mordecai said.

  “I hope the tour ends in the kitchen,” Leah said. “Those airline peanuts wore off hours ago.”

  “The tour shall be brief and end in the kitchen,” Mordecai said. “After we eat, let’s call it a day. I know you’re tired after that long flight, and our team will be, too. They’ve been working long days on the boats, getting everything ready. Better for everyone to meet in the morning, when we’re fresh. We can go over the plan for the dig then.”

  They finished bringing in the luggage and headed downstairs, Mordecai explaining the layout as they went. “A renovating crew was in here working double, sometimes triple, shifts to make the place livable. It took them a week to get the entrance road and grounds cleared of debris and trimmed.”

  There were fifty rooms, ten on each of the five floors above the lobby. Floors one and two would be handling the immediate lodging needs of the dig. The others could be made ready on short notice as necessary. All twenty rooms on the first two floors had been cleaned and furnished with new twin beds, allowing two people to share a room. Zeke and Leah thanked him for getting them a king-sized bed.

  “It was a no-brainer,” Mordecai said. “Other than the bed, the rooms are all essentially the same. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

  In the lobby Mordecai merely waved at the modest front counter and utilitarian commercial furnishings left over from the building’s days as a motel. “This place was obviously built as a low-cost alternative to the expensive hotels up the road.”

  They went through a door and down a long corridor behind the lobby. Like the corridors above, it ran the length of the hotel and ended at the two staircases at either end. Mordecai showed them the five rooms on one side of the corridor. The first two were being used to store equipment and supplies; the next two would initially be used as classrooms for teaching the specialized skills needed for underwater archaeology at the Dead Sea. The last was an exercise room. There were two sets of free weights and two exercise machines.

  “I got as much as I could of the stuff on the list you gave me,” Mordecai said.

  Zeke nodded appreciatively. “You done good, Mordecai. If nothing else we’ll be in great shape.”

  “You both look like you’re already in great shape.”

  “I own a fitness gym in D.C., and we both work out a lot, but…with everything that’s been going on, exercise has kind of fallen by the wayside.”

  “All this shiny new equipment has me psyched to get back into it,” Leah said.

  The space on the opposite side of the corridor had not been subdivided into smaller rooms, leaving one very large room instead.

  “The hotel probably used it for staff meetings,” Mordecai explained. “And probably an employee lounge. For us, this will be our field lab, our headquarters. This is where we’ll analyze finds, have our meetings, coordinate everything. We’ve been calling it the War Room.”

  “Very apt,” Zeke said, “considering our ultimate mission.”

  Computers and printers were set up on several small tables around the room. Three plain gray office desks were arranged in a cluster so administrative personnel could work closely together while having their individual space. Along the right wall, several rectangular folding tables had been pushed together to create one long one. Small implements and tools were neatly arranged along its surface. A similar table ran down the center of the room. Several workstations had been set up around it for various types of analysis, judging from the magnifying glasses and other utensils. A large safe for securing valuable finds sat in the far corner.

  “I know we’re hungry,” Mordecai said, “so you can get a closer look at everything in the morning. This way to the kitchen.”

  They went through a swinging door in the wall to their left. The kitchen looked like restaurant kitchens all over the world. Large pots, ladles, spoons, cutting and chopping implements hung from an overhead carousel attached to a long wooden table. There were two large ovens, two deep fryers, a large walk-in freezer and a three-door stainless steel refrigerator. Everything had obviously been disinfected and scoured to a gleaming shine. They made sandwiches and followed Mordecai through another swinging door on the opposite side of the kitchen.

  Zeke had told Mordecai to spare no expense in making the lounge a good place to unwind after the grueling days that undoubtedly lay ahead. He’d emphasized having a high-quality audiovisual system that could double as a home theater, envisioning possible movie nights. About twenty-five yards away, the far end of the lounge looked like the showroom of an electronics store.

  They sat at the largest of about two dozen black vinyl-covered tables set up for dining. “From here the system looks good,” Zeke said.

  “So the salesman says. At those prices, it better be.”

  They unceremoniously dug into their sandwiches. A few minutes later Zeke finished the potato chip he was munching on and said, “You mentioned that the crew has been working on the boats. We have boats? Plural?”

  “Yes. Two. We’re leasing them from two brothers. They’ve been taking people on Dead Sea tours for years, but business was slow, so they were glad to have the steady income. The fee includes having them as captains to handle the sailing. I’m trying to be as careful as I can with the money, Zeke, but with the salaries necessary to get good people, and our other overhead…it could get up to somewhere around a million a year.”

  Zeke waved it away. “No problem. Hopefully it won’t take us anywhere near a year to find something, but whatever it takes, it takes. We can re-evaluate the situation as we go, based on whatever we’re finding. So. You were talking about the boats.”

  “Right. They’ll shuttle us back and forth to the site, about 2.5 miles each way. During the day they’ll be moored at the site, managing the dig.”

  Zeke held up his soda. “You’re awesome, Mordecai. To put all this together in less than a month.”

  “With enough money, the rest is just details. But, yes, I do have my moments.”

  “When we talked on the phone, you said everything was in readiness. Everything?”

  “Yes. We start digging tomorrow.”

  “You said there were several anomalies to investigate. Have we got enough people?”

  “We have a team of twenty. That should be plenty to get us started. I have a dozen more
on standby, ready to go if—when—we find something major. We can go over the specifics in the morning. For now, we have much more pressing business.” He motioned toward the audiovisual equipment. “I’m sure you want to see this digital cocoon.”

  They finished eating and made their way to the entertainment center. A dozen vinyl-covered swivel chairs had been placed in front of the television on what had apparently been a small dance floor. Via satellite the 72” HDTV received the entire 500-channel universe. Mordecai gestured at the five speakers arrayed around the room. “Surround sound. And the television is high-definition. The DVD player plays Blu-ray discs, whatever they are. I guess they let you see every blemish and hear every pin drop. The chairs can easily be moved to turn this into a discotheque, in case some booty needs shaking.”

  Leah almost spit out some of her soda. “Oh my God. Booty-shaking. You are one hip archaeologist.”

  Mordecai smiled. “Some of my classmates at Texas A&M did their best to teach me how to be cool. I think I was moderately hip at one time, but now, alas…I think my booty is all shook out.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Zeke was admiring several components stacked inside a glass cabinet. “Nice stuff, Mordecai. Good job. We may never want to leave the lounge.”

  Mordecai smiled. “I’ve created a monster.”

  “The way this man loves movies,” Leah said, “you have, Herr Frankenstein. I guess that makes me the burgomeister. I’ll be in charge of keeping you boys from getting too cozy with your ale at the inn.”

  “You’re much prettier than the average burgomeister,” Mordecai said.

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a while.”

  “What?” Zeke said, rejoining them. “That you’re better looking than Lionel Atwill?”

  Leah gave him a playful punch on the arm. “Okay, showoff. Besides, don’t you mean Lionel Belmore? He played the burgomeister in Frankenstein.”

  He rubbed his arm as if she had inflicted major damage. “I was thinking of Lionel Atwill in The Vampire Bat. As many horror movies as he was in, he must have played the burgomeister in something.”