hand to halt them.
The six Bedouin stopped and looked at the bearded soldier before turning to look at each other. A swift exchange in Arabic flitted like desert birdsong between them before the tallest man looked Brad in the eye.
“Yes, it is. It is our home, and you are trespassing.”
Brad glanced across his shoulder at the two troopers behind him.
“Oh me, oh my, so sorry,” he uttered before sneering at the Bedouin with undisguised contempt. “Take a walk back the way you came, Araboosh.”
The Bedouins’ faces hardened at the insult and their apparent leader shook his head slowly.
“It is not polite to speak to us in this way,” he replied.
Brad grinned coldly, revealing an unsightly gold canine that glinted in the hot sun. “My apologies, let me rephrase it. Piss off, Araboosh.”
The young Bedouin hesitated a moment longer and then as one they lunged forward, hands gripping long, slim blades that appeared as if by magic from beneath their robes. Instantly, the two soldiers flanking Brad raised their rifles and the Bedouin came to an abrupt halt.
Ethan moved across to the second tent and peered into the shadowy interior as Rachel led him inside.
The tent contained a number of boxes and crates, along with a satellite receiver dish and a small laptop computer. Ethan moved between the crates, glancing at plastic containers filled with brushes and small metallic trowels, a vacuum pump and plastic specimen jars, several of which contained what looked like bones. Ethan peered at one of the tags inside a jar alongside a small bone.
Right metacarpal.
Ethan slipped the small jar into his pocket.
“These are the tools of a paleontologist,” Rachel said. “This is Lucy’s equipment.”
Ethan nodded, taking a picture of the specimen jars and the array of equipment. He wondered why it had not been returned to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Beyond the smaller crates was another crate some nine feet long and three feet deep sitting on a pallet. Ethan moved across to it, reaching for the lid. He shared a glance with Rachel and then hefted it aside, and as he did so he felt a shock wave of surprise hit him.
A huge block of sandstone had been hewn from the living rock, probably using power tools, and placed in the crate. Ethan knew that scientists like Lucy did not use power tools to excavate ancient remains, preferring instead to diligently remove bones one by one and catalogue their type and position as they went along.
Entombed in the rock lay the skeletal remains of an enormous humanoid, nearly eight feet tall and powerfully built. Ethan stared in awe at the figure. At first glance the remains looked perfectly human to Ethan’s untrained eye, but he could remember Karowitz’s fossils. A gust of hot desert wind moaned through the tent as he stared down at the remains, encased beneath the earth for more than seven thousand years. Now, he saw the strangely oval eye sockets in a skull that was far too elongated to be human, the massive chest plate of fused bone splitting into ribs near the spine, the immense arm bones built for carrying muscle far greater than that of a human being.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“You still think Lucy was mistaken?” Rachel asked.
Ethan shook his head, taking photographs as Rachel gestured to the remains.
“Look at the skull cap,” she said. “It’s elongated, twice as tall as a human’s.”
“A bigger brain or something?” Ethan asked, snapping a shot of the skull. “Karowitz mentioned infrasound communication, like some dinosaurs.”
“That might explain it,” Rachel replied, “and there is a human practice going back thousands of years where the skulls of newborn infants are tightly bound, distorting them as they grow into exactly this kind of shape.”
Ethan frowned.
“Maybe some kind of religious practice?”
“Not likely,” Rachel said. “Such skulls have been found all across the ancient world: Incas in Peru, eastern Germanic tribes, Tahiti and Samoa in the South Pacific, the Atacamero culture, and others. Even the Egyptians practiced it: Tutankhamun, Nefertiti, and Akhenaten all show signs of skull deformation. Hippocrates mentions an entire population, the Macrocephales, who deformed their skulls in worship of ancient sky gods.”
“You think they did it to emulate these things?” he asked, gesturing to the remains.
“It’s possible,” Rachel said. “Why else go to such lengths for something as painful and dangerous?”
Ethan gently replaced the lid, and was about to leave when his eye caught upon several smaller boxes stacked near the rear of the tent. He moved across to them, squatting down and