Treasure dp-9, Page 3

  With great individual effort and prodigious energy, she then successfully fought Islamic discrimination and worked up to Director of Antiquities and later head of the Department of information-She caught the eye of then President Mubarak, who asked her to serve on the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. Five years later, Hala was named Vice Chairman when Javier P6rez de Cudllar stepped down in the middle of his second tour during an upheaval when five Moslem-run nations withdrew from the charter during a controversy over demands for religious reform. Because the men in line ahead of her refused the job, she was appointed to serve as SecretaryGeneral in a tenuous hope she might mend the widening cracks in the organization's foundation.

  Now, with her own government teetering on the brink of disintegration, there was a good chance she might become the first chief representative of the United Nations without a good try.

  An aide came up and whispered in her ear. She nodded and held up one hand.

  "I'm told the plane is ready to take off," she said. "I'll take one more question."

  Hands flew up and a dozen queries filled the air at once. Hala pointed to a man standing at the doorway holding a tape recorder.

  "Leigh Hunt of BBC, Madame Kamil. if Akhmad Yazid replaces President Hasan's democratic government with an Islamic republic, will you return to Egypt?"

  "I am a Moslem and an Egyptian. if my country's leaders, regardless of the government in power, wish me to come home, I will comply."

  "Even though Akhmad Yazid has called you a heretic and a traitor?"

  "Yes," Hala replied evenly.

  "If he's half as fanatical as the Ayatollah Khomeini, you might be running into an execution. Would you care to comment?" Hala shook her head, smiled gracefully and said, "I must leave now. Thank you."

  A circle of security guards escorted her from the throng of reporters and onto the boarding ramp. Her aides and a large delegation from UNESCO were already seated. Four members of the World Bank were sharing a bottle of champagne and conversing in low tones in the pantry. The main cabin smelled of jet fuel and Beef Wellington.

  Wearily Hala fastened the catch of her seat belt and glanced out the window. There was a light mist and the blue lights along the taxi strips blurred into a dull glow before disappearing completely. She removed her shoes, closed her eyes and gratefully dozed off before the stewardess could offer her a cocktail.

  After waiting its Turn behind the warm exhaust of a TWA 747, United Nations charter Flight 106 finally moved onto the end of the runway.

  When takeoff clearance came down from the control tower, Lemk eased the thrust levers forward and the Boeing 720-B rolled over the damp concrete and rose into the soggy air.

  As soon as he reached his cruising altitude of 10,500 meters and engaged the autopilot, Lemk unbuckled his belt and rose from his seat.

  "A call of nature," he said, heading for the cabin door. His second officer and engineer, a freckle-faced man with sandy hair, smiled without turning from the instrument panel. "I'll wait right here."

  Lemk forced a short laugh and stepped into the passenger cabin. The flight attendants were preparing the meal service. The aroma of Beef Wellington came stronger than ever. He made a gesture and drew the chief steward aside.

  "Can I get you anything, Captain?"

  "Just a cup of coffee," replied Lemk. "But don't bother, I can manage."

  "No bother." The steward stepped into the pantry and poured a cup.

  "There is one other thing.

  "sir?"

  "The company has asked us to take part in a government sponsored meteorology study. When we're twenty-eight hundred kilometers out from London, I'm going to drop down to fifteen-hundred meters for about ten minutes while we record wind and temperature readings. Then return to our normal altitude."

  "Hard to believe the company went along. I wish my bank account totaled what it will cost in lost fuel."

  "You can bet those cheap bastards in top management will send a bill to Washington."

  "I'll inform the passengers when the time comes so they won't be alarmed."

  "You might also announce that if anyone spots any lights through the windows, they'll be coming from a fishing fleet."

  "I'll see to it."

  Lemk's eyes swept the main cabin, pausing for an instant on the sleeping form of Hala Kamil before moving on. "Did it strike you that security was unusually heavy?" Lemk asked conversationally.

  "Of those reporting told me Scotland Yard caught wind of a plot to assassinate the SecretaryGeneral."

  "They act as though there's a terrorist plot under every rock. I had to show my identification while they searched my flight bag."

  The steward shrugged. "What the hell, it's for our protection as well as the passengers'."

  Lemk motioned down the aisle. "At least none of them looks like a hijacker."

  "Not unless they've taken to wearing three-piece suits."

  "Just to be on the safe side, I'll keep the cockpit door locked. Call me on the intercom only if it's important."

  "Will do."

  Lemk took a sip of his coffee, set it aside and returned to the cockpit.

  The first officer, his copilot, was gazing out the side window at the lights of Wales to the north, while behind him the engineer was occupied with computing fuel consumption.

  Lemk turned his back to the others and slipped a small case from the breast pocket of his coat. He opened it and readied a syringe containing a highly lethal nerve agent called sarin. Then he faced his crew again and made a fumbling step as if losing his balance and grabbed the arm of the second officer for support.

  "Sorry, Frank, I tripped on the carpet."

  Frank Hartley wore a bushy mustache, had thin gray hair and a long, handsome face. He never felt the needle enter his shoulder. He looked up from the gauges and lights of his engineer's panel and laughed easily. "You're going to have to lay off the sauce, Dale."

  "I can fly straight," Lemk replied good-naturedly. "It's walking that gives me a hard time."

  Hartley opened his mouth as if to say something, but suddenly a blank expression crossed his face. He shook his head as if to clear his vision. Then his eyes rolled upward, and he went limp.

  Leaning his body against Hartley so the engineer would not fall to one side, Lemk withdrew the syringe and quickly replaced it with another.

  "I think something is wrong with Frank."

  Jerry Oswald swung around in the copilot's seat. A big man with the pinched features of a desert prospector, he stared questioningly. "What ails him?"

  "Better come take a look."

  Oswald twisted his bulk past the seat and bent over Hartley. Lemk jabbed the needle and pushed the plunger, but Oswald felt the prick.

  "What the hell was that?" he blurted, whirling around and gazing dumbly at the hypodermic needle in Lemk's hand. He was far heavier and more muscular than Hartley, and the toxin did not take effect immediately.

  His eyes widened in sudden comprehension, and then he lurched forward, gripping Lemk by the neck.

  "You're not Dale Lemk," he snarled. "Why are you made up to look like him?"

  The man who called himself Lemk could not have answered if he wanted.

  The great hands were choking the breath out of him. Crammed against a bulkhead by the immense weight of Oswald, he tried to gasp out the words of a lie, but no words could come. He rammed his knee into the engineer's groin. The only reaction was a short grunt. Blackness began to creep into the corners of his vision.

  Then, slowly, the pressure was released and Oswald reeled backward. His eyes became terror-stricken as he realized he was dying. He looked at Lemk in confused hatred. With the few final beats left in his heart he swung his fist, landing a solid blow into Lemk's stomach.

  Lemk drifted to his knees, dazed, the breath punched out of him. He watched as if looking through fog as Oswald fell against the pilot's seat and crashed to the cockpit floor. Lemk slid to a sitting position and rested for a minute, g
asping for air, massaging the pain in his gut.

  He rose awkwardly to his feet and listened for any curious voices coming from the other side of the door. The main cabin seemed quiet. None of the passengers or flight crew had heard anything unusual above the monotonous whine of the engines.

  He was drenched in sweat by the time he manhandled Oswald into the copilot's seat and strapped him in. Hartley's safety belt was already fastened so Lemk ignored him. At last he settled behind the control column on the pilot's side of the cockpit and plotted the aircraft's position.

  Forty-five minutes later, Lemk banked the plane from its scheduled flight path to New York onto a new heading, toward the frozen Arctic.

  It is one of the most barren spots on the earth and one never seen or experienced by tourists. In the last hundred years, only a handful of explorers and scientists have trod its forbidding landscape. The sea along the rugged shore is frozen for all but a few weeks each year, and in the early fall temperatures hover around - 73 degrees the cold sides for the long winter months, and even in summer, dazzling sunshine can be replaced by an impenetrable gale in less than an hour.

  Yet, shadowed by scarred mountains and swept by a constant wind, the magnificent desolation in the upper reaches of Ardencaple Fjord on the northeast coast of Greenland was inhabited nearly two thousand years ago by a band of hunters. Radiocarbon dating on excavated relics indicated the site was occupied from A.D. 200 to A.D. 400, a Short time span for the archaeological clock. But they left behind twenty dwellings which had been preserved by the frigid ice.

  A prefabricated aluminum structure had been airlifted by helicopter and assembled over the ancient village by scientists from the University of Colorado. A balky heating arrangement and foam-glass insulation fought a lopsided battle against the cold, but at least denied entry to the never-ending wind moaning eerily around the outside walls. The shelter also enabled an archaeological team to work the site into the beginning stages of winter.

  Lily Sharp, a professor of anthropology at Colorado, was oblivious to the cold that seeped into the covered village. She rested on her knees on the floor of a single-family dwelling, carefully scraping away the frozen earth with a small hand trowel. She was alone and lost in deep concentration as she probed the distant past belonging to the prehistoric people.

  They were sea-mammal hunters who spent the harsh Arctic winters in dwellings dug partially into the ground, with low walls of rock and turf roofs often supported by whale bones. They entertained themselves with oil lamps, passing the long dark months carving miniature sculptures out of driftwood, ivory and antlers.

  They had settled this part of Greenland during the first centuries after Christ. Then, inexplicably, at the height of their culture, they pulled up stakes and vanished, leaving behind a revealing cache of relics.

  Lily's perseverance paid off. While the three men on the archaeology team relaxed after dinner in the hut that was their living quarters, she had returned to the protected settlement and continued to excavate, unearthing a length of caribou antler with twenty bearlike figures sculpted on its surface, a delicately carved woman's comb and a stone cooking pot.

  Suddenly Lily's trowel clinked on something. She repeated the movement and listened carefully. Fascinated, she tapped again. It was not the familiar sound from the edge of the trowel striking a rock. Though a bit flat, it had a definite metallic ring to it.

  She straightened and stretched her back. Strands of her dark red hair, long and thick, shining under the glare from the Coleman lantern, fell from under her heavy woolen cap. Her blue-green eyes mirrored skeptical curiosity as she gazed at the tiny speck protruding from the charcoal-black earth.

  A prehistoric people lived here, she pondered. They never knew iron or bronze.

  Lily tried to stay calm, but a feeling of astonishment crept over her.

  Then excitement, followed by urgency. She missed the archaeologist's fussbudget passion for prudence. She scraped and dug furiously at the hard-crusted soil. Every few minutes she stopped and painstakingly brushed away the loose dirt with a small painter's brush.

  At last the artifact lay fully exposed. She leaned over for a closer look, staring in awe as it glimmered yellow under the bright white from the Coleman lantern.

  Lily had excavated a gold coin.

  A very old one, by the look of the worn edges. There was a tiny hole and a piece of rotted leather thong on one side, suggesting that it had once been worn as a pendant or personal amulet She sat back and took a deep breath, almost wanting to reach down and touch it.

  Five minutes later, Lily was still crouched there on her knees, her mind trying to create a solution, when abruptly the shelter's door opened and a large-bellied man with a blackwhiskered, kindly-looking face stepped in from the cold, accompanied by a swirl of snow. He exhaled clouds of steam as he breathed. His eyebrows and beard were matted with ice, which made him look like some frozen monster from a science-fiction movie until he broke into a great toothy smile.

  it was Dr. Hiram Gronquist, the chief archaeologist of the four-person dig.

  "Sorry to interrupt, Lily," he said in his soft, deep voice, "but you've been pushing too hard. Take a break. Come back to the hut, warm up and let me pour you a good stiff brandy."

  "Hiram," said Lily, doing her best to stifle the excitement in her voice, "I want you to see something."

  Gronquist moved closer and knelt down beside her. "What have you found?"

  "See for yourself."

  Gronquist fumbled for his reading glasses inside his parka and slid them over his red nose. He bent over the coin until his face was only inches away and studied it from every angle. After several moments, he looked up at Lily, an amused twinkle in his eyes.

  "You putting me on, lady?"

  Lily looked at him sternly, then relaxed and laughed. "Oh, my God, you think I salted it?"

  "You've got to admit, it's like finding a virgin in a bor dello."

  "Cute."

  He gave her a friendly pat on one knee. "Congratulations, this is a rare discovery."

  "How do you suppose it got here?"

  "There isn't a workable gold deposit within a thousand miles, and it certainly wasn't minted by the early inhabitants. Their level of development was only a notch above Stone Age. The coin obviously came from another source at a later date. "

  "How do you explain the fact it was buried with artifacts we've dated within a century either side Of A.D. 300?"

  Gronquist shrugged. "I can't."

  "What's your best guess?" asked Lily.

  "Off the top of my head, I'd say the coin was probably traded or lost by a Viking."

  "There is no record of Vikings sailing this far north along the East Coast," said Lily.

  "Okay, maybe Eskimos from a more recent time frame traded goods with the Norse settlements to the south and used this site to camp during hunting expeditions."

  "You know better, Hiram. We've found no evidence of habitation after A.D. four hundred."

  Gronquist gave Lily a scolding look. "You never give in, do you? We don't even have a date on the coin."

  "Mike Graham is an expert on ancient coins. One of his specialties is dating sites around the Mediterranean. He might identify it."

  "Won't cost us a nickel for an appraisal," said Gronquist agreeably.

  "Come along. Mike can examine it while we have that brandy."

  Lily donned her heavy fur-lined gloves, adjusted the hood of her parka and turned down the Coleman. Gronquist switched on a flashlight and held the door open for her. She stepped into the agony of the numbing cold and wind that groaned like a ghost in a churchyard. The freezing air struck her exposed cheeks and made her shudder, a reaction that always seemed to sneak up on her even though she should have been quite used to it by now.

  She grasped the rope that led to the living quarters and groped along behind the protecting bulk of Gronquist. She stole a glance upward. The sky was unclouded and the stars seemed to melt into one vast carpet of
shimmering diamonds illustrating the barren mountains to the west and the sheet of ice that ran down the fjord to sea in the east. The strange beauty of the Arctic was a compelling mistress, Lily decided.

  She could understand why men lost their souls to its spell.

  After a thirty-yard hike through the dark, they entered the storm corridor of their hut, walked another ten feet and opened a second door to the living quarters inside. To Lily, after the abominable cold outside, it was like stepping inside a furnace. The aroma of coffee caressed her nostrils like perfume and she immediately pulled off her parka and gloves and poured herself a cup.

  Sam Hoskins, neck-length blond hair matching an enormous blond handlebar mustache, was hunched over a drafting board. A New York architect with a love for archaeology, Hoskins allowed two months a year out of his busy schedule to rough it on digs around the world. He provided invaluable assistance by rendering detailed drawings of how the prehistoric village might have looked seventeen hundred years ago.

  The other team member, a light-skinned man with thinning sandy hair, reclined on a cot, reading a dog-eared paperback novel. Lily couldn't remember seeing Mike Graham without an adventure book in one hand or stuffed in a coat pocket. One of the leading field archaeologists in the country, Graham was as laid back as a mortician.

  "Hey, Mike!" Gronquist boomed. "Take a look at what Lily dug up."

  He flipped the coin across the room. Lily gasped in shock, but Graham expertly snatched it out of the air and peered at the face.

  After a moment he looked up, his eyes narrowed doubtfully. "You're putting me on."

  Gronquist laughed heartily. "My exact words when I laid eyes on it. No gag. She excavated it at site eight."

  Graham pulled a briefcase from under his cot and retrieved a magnifying glass. He held the coin under the lens, examining it from every angle.

  "Well, what's the verdict?" Lily asked impatiently.