distance, a chaotic sprawl of metal and glass stark against the hazy blue strip of the Mediterranean. Safiya turned in the cockpit and pointed to headphones dangling from clips against the fuselage wall along with several parachutes, and Ethan and Rachel promptly donned the sets.
“It’ll be about twenty minutes before we run south for Be’er Sheva. Then we’ll head east for Bar Yehuda airfield,” Safiya said, jabbing over her shoulder with one thumb. “The IDF control the airspace very tightly here, and will intercept any aircraft that strays from its flight path. Bar Yehuda is an old airstrip two miles from Masada, and also the lowest airfield in the world.”
Ethan listened as Aaron spoke to air traffic control in the warbling dialect of Hebrew. After a few exchanges with the controller, Ethan felt the Beaver bank left, turning to avoid the built-up urban areas and heading out over the broad and rolling hills of Israel.
“You okay?” Ethan asked Rachel as the aircraft banked over.
“Daughter’s been abducted, we’re flying into God knows what, and you’ve assaulted our escort—I couldn’t be better,” Rachel uttered. “Where is Gaza?” she asked Safiya.
Safiya pointed out of her window ahead, toward the starboard wing.
“Out there, to the right and in front of us.”
Ethan unclipped his seat buckle, joining Rachel in looking out over the Gaza Strip as it appeared through the haze ahead.
Although there was no singular marker at the edge of the Strip, it was still clearly defined by a band of undeveloped no-man’s-land that separated Israel from its entrapped neighbor. Whereas the greenery of Israel was speckled with modern buildings and farmlands, the Strip was a morass of densely packed sandstone, narrow roads, alleys, and derelict buildings baking beneath the sun, like a medieval city stranded in the twenty-first century.
“That small town almost below us is Sderot, a place often hit by makeshift Qassam missiles and rockets fired from within Gaza,” Safiya said, gesturing to the little town far below. “If we flew overhead, we’d be intercepted by Israel’s fighter jets and shot down within minutes.”
“The Gaza Strip looks so small,” Rachel commented.
“It feels it too, when you’re in there,” Ethan replied, moving back to his own seat and tapping Luckov on the shoulder. “Who is the Bedouin we’re going to meet?”
“Ayeem Khan,” Luckov said, keeping one eye on the skies ahead. “He’s a Bedouin elder. Safiya and I have known him for some time.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“Absolutely. The guide who went to search for Lucy was Ahmed Khan, Ayeem’s eldest son.”
The jumbled sprawl of the Gaza Strip and the elegant greenery of Israel fell far behind them into a thickening haze that obscured the horizon. Beneath, the green symmetry of occupied land gave way to the random swirls of desert plains, wadis, gulleys, and canyons that split the epic landscape in winding eddies of erosion. The major roads six thousand feet beneath them vanished, turning instead into lonely threads of dark tarmac winding their way across the vast wilderness of timeless sand and stone. Occasional dusty tracks veered off from the highways into open desert peppered with lonely thorn scrub and isolated trees.
Under Luckov’s skilled control the Beaver cruised over the vast desert wastes for almost twenty minutes, Safiya pointing out various towns like Be’er Sheva, an oasis of glittering buildings encrusted like jewels into the ancient desert. Ahead, Ethan could see the broad blue line of the Dead Sea appearing through the haze as Aaron Luckov responded to the chattering air traffic commands and began to descend. Leaning out of his seat, Ethan could see below them a vast canyon system carved by long-extinct rivers, opening out onto a parched floodplain that had probably once fed into the Dead Sea itself. A barely discernable airstrip scarred the terrain ahead of the aircraft, close to the sparkling expanses of the Dead Sea.
“So, Karowitz thinks that Lucy was right about finding alien remains,” Ethan said to Rachel. “When do you think that these beings started helping mankind?”
“The Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia is the earliest known civilization,” she said. “They began building their cities and mining copper around the same time as Amerindians in what is now Michigan and Wisconsin, around six thousand years ago.”
“They were definitely the first?” Ethan asked.
“Sumer was our Eden,” Rachel said, “the cradle of civilization. They used agriculture, invented the wheel, centralized government, set up social stratification, kept slaves, and organized warfare. They were experts in astronomy and mathematics and their cuneiform script existed almost six thousand years ago.”
“The same