Read The Temple Mount Code Online

Authors: Charles Brokaw

The Temple Mount Code

BOOK: The Temple Mount Code
12.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

PENGUIN BOOKS

The Temple Mount Code

Charles Brokaw has been a university professor, a teacher, a little league coach and a rodeo cowboy. He’s a frequent speaker, who has given lectures at such widely divergent places as the CIA, West Point and science-fiction conventions. He’s travelled widely, and has more interests than he can possibly keep up with, even if he lives to be a hundred. Among his other many passions, he’s an expert on aviation, international politics, advanced weaponry and pulp fiction. He collects both scholarly military non-fiction and comic books. He lives in the Midwest with his family.

The Temple Mount Code

CHARLES BROKAW

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2011

Copyright © Trident Media Group, LLC and Tekno Books, 2011

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-95721-0

For my wife, with love.

You make it all possible.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my excellent agent, Robert Gottlieb, at Trident Media Group, and to Libby Kellogg, who ably assists him there. Thanks also to my family and students, who are the light of my life.

Thanks are also due to the wonderful people at Penguin Books, including Alex Clarke, Nick Lowndes and Catriona Hillerton. I can’t thank you enough for your professionalism and enthusiasm.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

1

Jiahu Dig

Henan Province

People’s Republic of China

July 21, 2011

‘You’ve had quite a night, haven’t you, Professor Lourds?’

Buckled into the passenger seat of the Bell helicopter, Thomas Lourds smiled. He was pleasantly tipsy and looking forward to his tent and the cot within it even more. ‘Personally, I thought the evening ended rather abruptly.’

‘It has a tendency to do that when you get thrown out of the bar.’ Robert Anders sat in the pilot’s seat, deftly handling the aircraft’s controls. His voice was a pleasant baritone over the radio system. He was a burly Australian with an unkempt air. Tattoos of mermaids and dolphins danced along his forearms as he maneuvered the helicopter over the craggy landscape below.

Lourds stared through the window at the ground. He knew they should be coming up on the Jiahu dig before long. After a moment, he saw the area, dotted with various lights, some coming from battery-powered lanterns and other areas lit by generator-powered strings of lights. Those camps were set up using private funding by corporations looking for tax shelters. Lowly universities, like Peking University, which Lourds was currently visiting, didn’t have money to throw around. Instead, the crews – professors and grad students – worked from sunup to sundown.

Anders shook his shaggy head. ‘I warned you not to hit on that woman.’

Lourds sighed. ‘If the lady had worn a wedding ring or waited to come with her husband, I wouldn’t have flirted with her so diligently. Rings were made for several reasons, you know, and one of those reasons was to keep a man from making a fool of himself.’

Working the stick, Anders dropped altitude and swooped down over the dig. Before they’d left the Peking University campsite, the Australian pilot had marked the makeshift landing pad with a fluorescent-painted sign. Lourds searched for it in the darkness.

‘I don’t think the fight started because you were flirting with the missus, mate.’ Anders grinned. ‘I think it was because you were on the verge of taking her home with you.’

Lourds smiled with genuine regret, which turned into a brief wince as his jaw twinged with pain. ‘She was quite lovely, wasn’t she?’

‘Pretty as a pip, that one.’

‘It wasn’t just about the beauty, though. Marie had a wonderful way of listening.’

‘That’s ’cause you’re a natural-born storyteller. I never seen the like.’

‘You’re too generous.’

‘Just calling it the way I see it, Professor.’

‘You can just call me Lourds.’

Anders nodded and looked out over the landscape again. ‘How’s Sleeping Beauty?’

Glancing over his shoulder, Lourds watched Professor Gao Kelu snoozing in the helicopter’s backseat. The young man hadn’t been able to go the distance with his older comrades. When they’d gotten kicked out of the club, after Anders and Lourds had gotten physical with the jealous husband and his brother, they’d had to carry Gao out with them.

‘Still sound asleep.’

‘Good.’ Anders rubbed his face with a big hand. ‘That bloke couldn’t carry a note in a bucket.’ He pointed through the Plexiglas. ‘That’s the campsite there, isn’t it?’

Lourds leaned forward and stared through the cockpit windshield. His eyes were bleary from alcohol, days spent eating the yellow dust of the central plains of ancient China, and from long hours of studying text. He made out the signal with difficulty. ‘It is.’

The landing strip had been situated on the other side of the dig Professor Hu had arranged for his students to work and for Lourds to visit. Lourds was initially visiting Peking University to deliver papers regarding protowriting to the professor’s undergrad classes. Although Harvard was expecting him back in a few days, Lourds had managed to squeeze out extra time from the dean, which he was putting to good use here.

‘Hang on, and I’ll put us down.’

Lourds leaned back in his seat and felt the helicopter drop even closer to the ground. He’d lost most of the glow from the alcohol, but he knew he’d sleep well once he crawled into his cot. He wouldn’t need any aid from the thriller novel he habitually carried.

Tall and lean, Lourds was in his early forties and kept himself in good shape with dedicated soccer as well as his international trips. His short-cropped goatee was in need of a trim, and his hair had gotten a little shaggy, but he knew it looked good on him. He was dressed in a chambray shirt over a white T-shirt, and brown cargo pants tucked into tall hiking boots to cut down on the amount of dust that crept into his footwear.

As the helicopter started its final descent, movement and a red flash near the one of the dig sites caught Lourds’s attention. He grabbed for the spotlight mounted on his side of the helicopter, switched it on, and trailed the beam across the broken terrain.

‘What is it?’ Anders glanced in the direction of the beam.

‘Thought I saw something.’

‘What?’

The beam fell across the corner of the dig. The Jiahu was mostly undiscovered country for archaeologists. Even though over three hundred bodies had been taken from burial sites in the region, much of the area had yet to be explored. Lourds was a linguist, trained in dozens of languages, and a gifted translator.

Almost everything that was found at the dig was turned over to the Chinese government, but there was a fair market for stolen relics. Purloined antiquities remained a flourishing part of international business. Even though China dealt with black market trade in antiquities harshly, there were some who were desperate enough to risk the punishment versus the payoff.

Lourds trailed the beam across the ground and flicked across a man running with a pack on his back. ‘Did you see that?’

‘I did.’ Anders flicked a hand out for the radio. ‘I’ll sound the alert.’

Lourds moved the spotlight around again and found another man. This one had a pack and a rifle, which he was aiming at the helicopter. ‘Look out!’

Anders jerked the stick, and the helicopter side-slipped through the air. The muzzle flare below stood out bright orange against the black. At almost the same time, a bullet ricocheted off the Plexiglas bubble, and the sound of the shot penetrated the loud din of the rotors.

Startled, Anders swore and twisted the helicopter around. Lourds braced himself as he struggled to keep the spotlight on the grave robbers.

Another man emerged from the shadows and all three men ran for the outer fringe of the excavation, the light trailing after them flying across tents and other dig sites. Lourds doggedly stayed on them as Anders flew the helicopter after the men.

‘Do you know what they might have gotten?’ Anders heeled the helicopter around again, turning perpendicular to the running men.

‘No, we’re still exhuming bodies.’ Lourds thought frantically. So much of what had been found at Jiahu was becoming ordinary, but who knew what extraordinary things were still waiting to be discovered? He knew it was more than possible the grave robbers had stumbled upon something irreplaceable. Lourds himself had done that when he’d located – and lost – Atlantis.

‘There’s a vehicle up ahead.’ Anders shifted the spotlight on his side and pinpointed a pickup truck parked in the shadows of a ridge.

‘Good eyes.’ Lourds was impressed. He hadn’t seen it, all of his attention focused on tracking the men.

BOOK: The Temple Mount Code
12.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

And Four To Go by Stout, Rex
The Wrong Girl by Foster, Zoe
Murder One by William Bernhardt
The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke
Twilight Girl by Della Martin
Merry Humbug Christmas by Sandra D. Bricker