2040 Revelations (6 page)

A couple of hours later Mark rolled in. He’d been out drinking with his friends by the look of it and he wasn’t pleased to see her.

‘So you’re home, are you? About time,’ he said, and then he noticed her cases by the door. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed at them. ‘Are you leaving me?!’ His voice had gone up an octave. He came over to her, pushing his face into hers. She pulled back as his breath stank of lager, but he grabbed her arm.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ she said, subdued and without emotion. ‘I’m going on a dig in Turkey. I leave tonight.’

‘What? What you talking about, you’re going to Turkey, for how long?’

‘A few weeks, six at the most. Look, Mark, I’ve—’

‘Six weeks!’ His eyes bulged at the thought. ‘I don’t think so! I’ve got a work do next week and the week after that it’s my sister’s wedding, and you’re not going to let me down on that. I’ll show my sister I’m better than her. She said I’d never get married, but I’ll show her!’ He pushed Sarah away and stumbled over to an oak cabinet against the wall to get another drink.

Sarah saw this wasn’t going to go well so she began collecting up her gloves, keys and phone. As she pulled on her coat, Mark swung her round and red hot pain exploded on the side of her face and she was flung to the floor. As her eyesight came back she saw him standing over her, swaying from side to side.

‘I told you,’ he said, a hint of madness in his eyes, ‘you’re not going anywhere.’ He emphasised the last word with his hands.

Sarah managed to get to her feet with Mark looking on, an exultant look on his face. Calm settled upon her. She had been working on a numb sort of autopilot as she’d prepared to leave, but the blow had brought her to her senses and her mind felt strong, somehow, and needle sharp.

‘Mark,’ Sarah said softly as she laid a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off, but she took his hand with a tender touch and pulled him closer. He was about to say something when she rammed her knee with full force into his groin. He hit the floor hard, writhing in agony. Sarah bent down to him; her anger raised, and grabbed his cheeks between the fingers of her right hand making him look at her despite his pain. ‘I’ll go where I damn well please,’ she said to him through gritted teeth.

Pushing him back to the floor, she picked up her bags, and as she walked out the door she turned back to see him staring up at her with undisguised hatred.

‘By the way, Mark,’ she said, ‘I am leaving you now.’ Slamming the door behind her, she walked off down the hall, looking at her watch; she had a flight to catch.

Chapter Four

Dust clouds swirled and streamed across the distant plains as fierce winds battered the tents at the base camp of Mount Ararat on Turkey’s eastern border. Fabric panels rippled as the air drove against them, end flaps snapping as they whipped endlessly back and forth. Like an invisible assailant the storm whistled and screamed around a man who stood just outside one of the temporary shelters. Pulling his coat tighter about him he ducked back inside to rejoin his two team mates.

‘It’s colder than a frigid rat’s arse out there,’ he said, taking off his gloves and blowing into his hands.

‘Is a frigid rat’s arse colder than a sexually active one, then?’ a man on the far side said.

A woman laughed. ‘Perhaps he knows by experience. Have you been putting little Jimmy in places he shouldn’t go, again, Jas?’

‘You should know, Trish,’ Jason said, grabbing himself and thrusting at her.

Trish wrinkled up her nose in disgust. ‘Ew – you’re gross!’

‘Ha ha, bollocks, you’d love a bit of ol’ Jas.’

Just then another gust of air ripped into the tent as someone else came in, wrapped in a thick red puffer coat.

‘Don’t you agree, Sazza?’

Sarah closed the tent flap behind her. ‘Agree with what?’ she asked, as Jason looked at her, waiting for a response.

‘He reckons women find him irresistible,’ Trish said.

Sarah looked at her friend with a serious expression on her face. ‘Irresistible? Course, I know plenty of women who find Jason the dog’s doodahs.’

Jason clapped his hands together in jubilation. ‘See? I told you so!’ he said, while Trish looked at Sarah in disbelief.

‘Although these women have been mummified for five thousand years,’ Sarah continued, ‘and would find a rotten turnip an attractive proposition.’

Trish doubled up and Jason’s exuberant grin turned into a hurt scowl. As Sarah walked past she gave him a friendly whack on the back of his head with her gloved hand.

‘Carl, do you know how long this weather is likely to last?’ Sarah said.

The man across from Trish made a face and shook his head. ‘Hopefully it should be only a few hours; it’s a fairly regular occurrence at this time of year.’

Sarah nodded and then lay down on a sleeping bag, zoning out while Trish and Jason argued over whose turn it was to cook. She was glad to be out there, away from all her troubles. Surprisingly Mark had tried ringing her, but she had just blocked his calls. The only thing she regretted about that night was that she hadn’t kneed him harder.

The stolen bone fragments still gnawed away at her, although the theft was a welcome distraction from the terrible guilt over her mother’s death, something that dwelt immovable in the recesses of her mind.

Who’s sabotaging my work?
she asked herself for the umpteenth time. She’d been in touch with her
group
, people who, like her, believed that a large human ancestor lived and flourished in the distant past. They had suggested the Catholic Church as a culprit, as according to some it had been covering up the existence of
giants
for a very long time. Sarah was unsure if such claims had any credibility, but it was put to her that the Church covered it up because it proved that an advanced race populated the world prior to – according to the Bible – the creation of the universe. This was a fact the Church could not allow to become common knowledge as it directly challenged and fundamentally undermined their whole faith.

She had to admit looking at it that way made it seem much more plausible. It was well documented that the Vatican had banned and destroyed many books, along with any other evidence that contradicted their teachings, over the centuries, so why not this, too? The answer, Sarah reasoned, was that such a theory falls down when you think about the scale of the potential cover up. Could they really police the whole world so thoroughly?

Once again there was a counter-argument. What if the population of Homo gigantis hadn’t been that large, or had been condensed into certain areas? Not to mention the fact that fossil records, while appearing comprehensive, are anything but; this misconception was mainly due to the sheer mass of media coverage, films and books warping our sense of perspective. Conventional predictions indicate that a mere two per cent of all species that have ever lived will have been preserved. In many instances, millions of years go unaccounted for in terms of any kind of significant animal finds and evolutionary continuity is ridiculously underpinned. There is little to no proof that anything actually evolved at all, apart from the more recent biological remains and the observation of evolution in modern times.

The fact that evolutionary theory was correct was not in question in this instance. What was in question was the fact that it was not currently proved by the fossil record or by any other means of using ancient records. Extremely old, preserved DNA may begin to make this argument redundant, but for now it is a very real fact; we know very little about Earth’s evolutionary history and have only scratched the surface of what was in our past.

All these assertions, according to Sarah’s circle of like-minded individuals, were why a single powerful organisation such as the Catholic Church had the motivation, means and opportunity to be able to cover up the existence of a whole species.

A flaw still existed, however. Over the last hundred years many scientific discoveries had been made to challenge a whole raft of religious teachings, Catholic or otherwise. So why still cover it up? Something else must be going on, some other reason to hide this from the world. Wild claims suggested by her friends swirled dizzyingly around in her head as she drifted into a deeper sleep.

♦

‘Sarah!’

‘What?’ she murmured, rolling over, away from the sound.

‘Sarah, wake up will you.’

She felt a foot nudging her side; groaning, she opened bleary eyes and saw Trish looming large above her.

‘Sarah, I’ve been calling you for ages. The winds have died down, come on, we’ve got a few hours left till nightfall, let’s get to the dig site.’

‘Sorry, I must have been dozing.’

‘Sound-O is more like it,’ Trish said, amused. ‘Come on, Saz, let’s get going!’

Grunting a little, and accepting a helping hand from her friend, Sarah pushed herself up. ‘You’ve got far too much energy for your own good,’ she grumbled.

Trish laughed. ‘Ha! Pot, kettle, black is all I have to say to that.’

She had a point, Sarah had been like a woman possessed these past few weeks. She’d pushed her small team to the limits to cover as much ground as possible around the area where she had discovered the previous year’s finds, which included the hair, finger bones and the small cast metal pentagonal disc. The disc had a small hoop on one edge, like a pendant, enabling her to hang it in on a chain around her neck. Instinctively she pushed a hand onto her thick puffer jacket and felt the object press reassuringly against her chest. This was one thing she was determined never to let out of her sight again, doubly so in light of recent events. She’d been keeping it at her apartment while she waited for the other artefacts to be dated at the lab. Initial tests had revealed no residual presence of carbon-14 outside or within the disc, rendering it impervious to the dating technique. Luckily this had ensured it was not amongst the other objects when the vault was broken into back in Oxford.

With Trish by her side, Sarah made her way to the current site of excavation. A number of hours soon passed and after much digging and relocating, Sarah found herself off on her own on a particular bit of ground, slowly removing earth and rock with her pick and shovel. She’d found anomalies there with her favourite bit of kit, a hand-held ground-penetrating imager, which made finding fossils and buried objects much easier as the resolution meant you could virtually see through stone. It cut days or even weeks off normal dig times.

The imager had been around for some time, but it used to be extremely expensive and unwieldy; however, with innovative technical advances in its manufacture, it was now lightweight and a lot cheaper – still expensive, but well worth the money. Sarah had also upgraded the scanner’s software and added some lines of code herself to further improve performance, something she felt quite proud of.

Prior to Sarah’s reputation going down the plughole she had also managed to acquire some much sought-after satellite time. Using infra-red satellite technology enabled massive areas to be scanned from space, resulting in spectacular finds. The idea had been pioneered in the early twenty-first century when it had unveiled the lost cityscapes of Egypt, including the phenomenal finds of seventeen pyramids buried for millennia in the desert sands. Since then many lost tombs and treasures had been unearthed, eclipsing even those of the infamous Tutankhamun. It was truly a new golden age of archaeological discovery and Sarah had got in on the act and requisitioned mapping of some areas around Mount Ararat. At the time people bemoaned the waste of such resources on an innocuous piece of land, but Sarah knew that significant finds had been made there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when an Islamic expedition from within the Ottoman Empire had unearthed bones of giant humans.

The scriptures that indicated this had been found in an old Islamic library in the city of Samsun, Turkey. Supposedly Samsun also had many caves which had contained the bones of seven foot tall humans; none had been recovered, however. Sarah herself had been there many times without her searches coming to fruition. Obviously she hadn’t said in the official mapping request form that she was searching for giants based on passages contained within old Islamic texts. Instead she put together a feasible yet flimsy argument for finding Noah’s Ark on the plains around Ararat Lesser, the smaller of the two peaks of the Mount.

She hadn’t expected to get approval, truth be known, and when it came she had nearly fallen off her seat. The resulting scans revealed various anomalies, although none were boat-like or large enough to warrant further study – officially. Sarah kept the scans, however, and in her own time she went out on numerous occasions to the large expanse to unearth the more promising areas. That was how she had found the maps, fragments, hair and her pendant. If she were to find further evidence, it would be here.

Getting down on her hands and knees she heaved over a large stone to reveal – she held her breath – the skeleton of a long dead sheep. Cursing her luck she stood up and took a swig of water. That was the only downside to the imager, you may be able to find various things that looked like finds of the century, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred you’d end up with bugger all.

Jason came over to see how she was faring. ‘Anything?’ he said.

She pointed at the very ordinary bones with her foot.

He put his hand on her shoulder consolingly. ‘Shall we call it a night? The light’s almost gone.’

She looked up at the sky; night approached, its blackness seeing off its antithesis, the colours of the day. ‘Let’s get the generators out; we can get in another five hours minimum.’

‘Seriously? We haven’t got that much fuel left,’ he said, looking dubious. ‘If we run out it’s a long way back to the nearest town that can supply us with more.’

‘If we have to go back, we have to go back. It doesn’t make much difference if it’s in a couple of days or a week. Let’s push on now; we always get more done when we’re in the groove.’

‘You’re the boss, boss.’ He mock-saluted and went off to set up the lighting rigs, Sarah following to get the gennies started.