of the apartment block and now lay at a steep angle against the surface of the last remaining upright wall.
Ethan picked his way between blocks of rubble that littered the earth around him. He stepped up onto the ramp, climbing until he was some ten feet above the ground. He looked at his cell phone and glanced back at Mahmoud, giving him a thumbs-up. Mahmoud made no response, simply standing guard in the darkness.
Ethan sat down on the ramp and dialed a number into his cell phone, waiting for the line to connect. From his elevated viewpoint he could see the low roofs and haphazard streets of Gaza stretching away to the south between the skeletal remains of the building.
“Hello?”
“Doug? It’s Ethan.”
“Ethan!” It sounded as though Doug Jarvis had fallen out of bed. “Where the hell have you been? What happened to the daily call?”
“Things got complicated and we were compromised before I could contact you,” Ethan said quickly. “I don’t have much time, so just listen.”
“Go ahead,” Jarvis replied.
“Lucy’s disappearance isn’t just to do with fossil hunters: it’s got something to do with an American security company called MACE: Munitions for Advanced Combat Environments. They’ve been operating out here for some time and have the ear of the Israeli Defense Ministry. It was their people who stole Lucy’s discovery and they presumably know what happened to her and her team.”
“MACE,” Doug echoed. “Haven’t heard of them.”
“There’s more,” Ethan said quickly. “They’re responsible for atrocities against the indigenous population of Bedouin in the Negev and I have it on film. Unfortunately, they know this and have been trying to recover the incriminating evidence, and they’re not shy of shooting first and asking questions later.”
“Christ, Ethan! Is Rachel okay? Where are you?”
“Rachel’s fine,” Ethan assured him. “We’re in Gaza. We were chased here by MACE operatives and we’re trying to get back into Israel. I need you to contact the IDF and clear us a passage through the Erez crossing by dawn our time.”
“You’re in Gaza?” Ethan could hear the concern in Doug’s voice. “Who are you with?”
“It’s a long story,” Ethan replied. “Let’s just say that we know that insurgents did not abduct Lucy or anyone else in her team.”
There was a pause on the line before Jarvis spoke again. “Look after my daughter, Ethan.”
“I’ll have her out of Gaza by dawn, I promise. I need you to look into MACE, see if you can find out what connections they have to the fossil black market, or anything that might give us some perspective on what the hell they’re really doing out here. Look for any connection that you can find with something called the American Evangelical Alliance, a church in DC that owns the company.”
“Consider it done,” Jarvis said.
Ethan was about to speak when he noticed Mahmoud leap with feline agility onto the edge of the ramp and stare up into the night sky. The Palestinian’s face contorted as though he was straining to hear something, and then with an urgent grimace he waved at Ethan to follow him.
“Doug, I’ve got to go,” Ethan said, standing and running down the ramp.
“Why, what’s happenin—”
Ethan had barely managed to shut the phone off when Mahmoud grabbed him and hurled him toward the tunnel entrance. For a brief moment Ethan heard a strange humming noise.
“What’s happening?”
“Get down!”
In an instant the entire area around Ethan lit up in a blinding flare of unimaginable brightness. His eyes automatically shut, an image of ruined buildings seared onto his retina amid blazing light as a blast of superheated air slammed into him like a freight train.
Ethan felt his body propelled sideways through the air as an enormous explosion radiated out from a nearby building. He slammed into the ground backward, felt the breath blasted from his lungs as he crashed into a slab of shattered brickwork. He rolled away instinctively from the painful assault on his eardrums as the darkness plunged down around him once more.
He lay for several seconds with his arms over his head, curled into a fetal ball in the rubble as the pain in his ears subsided to a torturous ringing echo of the infernal blast. He rolled over, lifting his arms from his head and trying to force his eyes to focus.
The entire adjoining building had been obliterated, a burning wasteland of vaporized rubble and debris cast wide by the explosion. The few shattered walls that remained standing looked like the carcasses of rotting animals burning from within. From the stygian