2013: Beyond Armageddon by Robert Ryan

Author:Robert Ryan [Ryan, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Messiah, King, Devil, evil, Hell, lucifer, End Times, Mayan Prophecy, Koontz, Sandra Ee, Satan, Armageddon, apocalypse, end of days, angelfall, 2013, 2012, cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: Robert Ryan
Published: 2012-10-17T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 37

About a hundred yards northeast of the wall, the four-man team headed by Jack Shelby was excavating the first of the other three smaller anomalies. Shelby had worked for many seasons at the buried city of Caesarea in the Mediterranean. An expert on the Middle Bronze Era of Sodom and Gomorrah, his specialty was epigraphy—inscriptions.

His team had run a cord around the perimeter of the anomaly, marking off a square about 30 feet on each side. One person manned the camcorder and another the airlift, leaving Shelby and an Israeli grad student named Lev to do the digging. Working their way in tandem back and forth—“mowing the lawn”—in two hours they’d excavated the square to a depth of about two feet. So far they had not found anything.

Shelby looked at the dive computer on his wrist. “We can go for at least another hour,” he said into the voice-activated microphone positioned near his mouth. “Everybody okay?” He got a quick affirmative, and the digging continued. A few minutes later he said, “Hold it. I’ve got something.”

It was a fragment, apparently of pottery. One of the commonest finds, it could mean anything. The location was logged, the potsherd bagged, and the work continued.

“What’s this?”

Lev was pointing at something clumped over with mud. An encrusted protuberance jutted out from a buried circular mass about two feet in diameter. The videographer was keeping a record of the in situ locations of the finds, so before the anomaly was moved he punched its location into the larger dive computer affixed to his waist. When that was done, Shelby gently coaxed the shape from the muck. Mud that may have encased it for millennia washed away easily, revealing a heavily corroded metal object with a handle—almost certainly a pot or other implement used for cooking.

“We may be uncovering somebody’s kitchen,” he said.

Something a little farther away glinted in the light from the camcorder. He handed the pot to Lev. “Hold this for a second.” A few gentle kicks of his fins took him down to the spot.

There were several shiny objects. He called the videographer down to log the location, then plucked one of the finds from the ooze. The videographer came in for a close-up as Shelby very delicately brushed the mud away with a fingertip.

A coin.

Coins were invaluable not only because they could help date a period, but their depictions and inscriptions could provide information about the society in which they were used. The one he held had what looked like a man’s likeness on one side, with words underneath. He couldn’t decipher them at this point, but most likely they identified the man whose face was on the coin.

On the obverse side was a scene too worn to identify. Squinting, he guessed it might depict an animal with some human features, although he was not at all sure.

His archaeologist’s imagination started to soar, but the tether of reason yanked it rudely back to earth.

This could be the piece of evidence that killed the dig.

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