Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (3 page)

       “And the helicopter?” Paul
tightened his grip on the arm rest as the chopper swirled about, low to the
ground now for its landing.

       “Money talks, my friend.”
Nordhausen smiled at him. “Particularly out here in the middle of  nowhere. I
rented this rig for one thousand dollars. It belongs to an independent oil
drilling concern about fifty klicks east of here in the volcanic flats region.“

       Paul nodded, as he ran a long
fingered hand through his medium brown hair. The professor had enlisted him in
this safari over a month ago, saying that it would be a good excuse for him to
get out of the office and see a bit of the world. Paul had seen quite enough,
but he was only too glad to join his comrade. He secretly loved the desert
climes, and had looked forward to getting decked out in his khaki explorer
clothing, complete with a floppy canvas archeologist hat that sat on his lap
while he struggled to force some order on his hair.

       Nordhausen smiled at him. “Why
do you bother to try and comb that mop?”  he asked with a hint of a tease in
his voice. “You need a haircut.”

       “Easy for you to say,” said
Paul. Nordhausen had lost his battle against a steadily receding hairline long
ago. Paul still rinsed out the emerging gray and tried to keep some sense of
order on the top of his head. In this instance, he gave up, and put his canvas
hat back on in disgust.

       “You say you have people working
out here in this heat?”

       “Three interns,” said
Nordhausen. “It’s a wonderful way to get some experience. Many students would
jump at the opportunity. “

       “But how did you arrange the
passports, travel expenses and visas?”

       “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Paul.
You act as though no one ever does anything but sit at home and watch TV.
Jordan issues at least a thousand reciprocal student visas through the
university. You hire them, tell them where they’re going, buy them a plane
ticket and they do all the rest.  It’s really quite simple.”

       Paul nodded, turning his gaze to
the rocky desert floor beneath them. They were hovering in a gentle downward
glide, and soon the downdraft of the chopper began to kick up dust and debris.

       “There!” Nordhausen leaned
across Paul to point out his window. “See the campsite?”

       “I don’t remember it looking
like this,” said Paul.

       “Of course not. There’s been
plenty of erosion in these landforms over the years. You won’t recognize
anything, but believe me, this is the place.  I got the numbers from Kelly’s
data run on the first breaching point. This was the only hill within walking
distance, so I put my people in here with some nifty ground penetrating radar,
and they found it!” The professor rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

       The helicopter landed with a
gentle thump, its bright silver blades whipping up a cloud of reddish dust. The
pilot, an Arabic man, turned and flashed the two men a toothy smile from under
the headset of his flight helmet.      “Wait for us,” Nordhausen yelled over
the deafening noise. “We won’t be long.”

       The pilot indicated thumbs up
and the professor unlatched his door. “Come on!” He yelled at Paul over the
swirling din.

       The two men leapt out, hunching
low to evade the rotating blades as they gradually slowed. Once they were away
from the helo they saw three shadows emerge from the sheen of dust.  The
interns were out to welcome them, two young men and a woman, all of college age
and decked out in khaki shorts and pith helmets.

       “Greetings, professor!” The
woman was the first to speak, brown ponytails tossing about under her helmet as
she ran up.

       “Good day, Janice. How are
things going?”

       “Everything is fine here, sir. “

       The two men came up and there
were introductions all around. “Paul Dorland,” said the professor as he draped
his arm over Paul’s shoulder
. 
“He was with me when we found the damn
thing. Paul, this is Bill here with the good looks and that’s Bob with all the
muscle.  Now then: we haven’t much time. I’ve only got this bird for another
six hours, and we have a long way to go yet. Is everything ready?”

       “We have it isolated and mounted
on a sturdy pallet,” said Janice.

       “Was the extraction difficult?
Is it well protected?”

       “Came out with no trouble at
all,” said Bill. “We used acetone to strengthen the tendril areas, and got a
good plaster on the main segment. The moorings and cables are all in place. All
we have  to do is hitch everything up.”

       Nordhausen clapped his hands
together. “Fantastic! Let’s get started. I’ll help you two with the cables.
Janice, why don’t you show Paul the dig site. I’m sure he’ll have a few fond
memories.”

       They started away from the helo,
off through the subsiding dust until they came to the low edge of a shelving
ridge. The site was very clean, well marked with stakes and string, and cleared
of all the broken desert stone that had been eroding from the shale and basalt
landforms for centuries. Paul saw the bundled pallet with thick mooring cables
attached to the corners as the other men began dragging the lines toward the
undercarriage of the helo.  He was only vaguely aware of the woman trailing in
his wake. She was saying something about the dig site and the weather, but Paul
wasn’t listening. An inner eye was replaying scenes in his head now as he
scanned the landforms about him, and he had a prickly sensation of
déjà vu.

       It was here, he thought. I was
here…

       The recollection of the swelling
billows of smoke and soot in the sky returned to him. He could almost smell the
sulfur in the air and hear the cold crunch of his footfalls on the iridium
laced ground gravel when they climbed the ridge, sixty-five million years ago. 
They were the first men to travel in time, but an error in the calculation had
sent them careening into the deeps of the later Cretaceous, millions of years
off their target date. In spite of that, the spatial numbers had been dead on
target. They were supposed to land in the desert of old Palestine, now modern
day Jordan, but when they arrived they found themselves marooned on the
volcanic debris of a recently reclaimed seabed—right smack on the KT boundary,
the line that marked the end of the Cretaceous and the doom of the Dinosaurs.

       It was here.

       They had struggled up the hill,
straining to find any clue to identify their location. Nordhausen was stooping
to collect odd fragments of glittering quartz and dead fern fronds. It did not
take them long to realize the error.  The discovery of a near perfect Ammonite
fossil in the side of the hill had been the last deciding clue. They were lost
in time.

       Paul stared at the gaping hole
in the ground neatly marked by string and small wooden stakes.  Nordhausen had
been talking about this project for months after their mission. He called it
his consolation prize and urged Paul to come with him to recover the fossil.
How he planned to get it through customs was a matter Paul never had a chance
to discuss with him. When he first raised the question the professor had waved
him off with a typical ‘don’t worry, Paul, it’s all arranged.’

       The strange feeling swept over
him again. Somewhere at the edge of this dig the two of them had sat on the
ridge and built a small fire—the first fire ever made by human hands on earth.
They had used the supplies Maeve had secreted away in their travel garb to brew
a cup of coffee. That thought prompted him to turn to the young woman at his
side.

       “Find anything else in the
area?”

       “Sir?” The girl had been
watching him closely, a bit confused by his initial silence.

       “Anything on the perimeter of
the dig site?” He was thinking that they might have uncovered evidence of the 
charred rocks they left in a small circle.

       “There was one thing,” said the
girl. “Very odd, in fact. We found an old tin cup, just there, at the lower
perimeter of the dig site. It was extremely corroded and barely recognizable.
Probably was left by someone a few centuries ago, because it was obviously not
native to this strata on the rock formation.”

       “Of course,” said Paul with an inward smile. That
sealed it for him. The interns had found the very same tin cup that they had used
to brew their coffee. Somehow it had managed to remain relatively intact in the
dry desert climate, sleeping quietly in the limes and shale of the hill for all
of sixty-five million years. He shuddered again, feeling as though he was
walking on his own grave site, a resurrected ghost returning to the place where
he had chatted idly with Nordhausen about the Alvarez Theory and the demise of
the Dinosaurs.

       “Come on, Paul! We’ve got to get
moving!” The Professor was waving at him from the base of the helicopter. He
could see that the rotors were beginning to turn again, and heard the whine of
the engine.

       “You joining us?” He smiled at
the pleasant girl at his side.

       “Oh, no sir. We’re taking a
rover into Amman next week. The professor wants us to return the dig site to
its original condition.

       “I see,” said Paul. “Covering
his tracks, is he? Well you’ve done a wonderful job here. This will mean a
great deal to Professor Nordhausen.” He offered a brief handshake and then
hurried off, listening to Robert’s animated chatter as the professor waved him
on.

       “Come on, Paul, stop flirting
with the ladies and get in this thing before it raises a maelstrom in all this
dust.”

       They clambered inside the small
craft, sealing out the billowing haze and quickly fastening their seat
harnesses. Nordhausen gave the pilot a reassuring pat on the shoulder and the
engine revved up to maximum for the takeoff.

       “How heavy is it?” Paul strained
to see the cables tightening to taut lines of woven steel as the chopper lifted
off.

       “God only knows,” said
Nordhausen over the noise. “This fellow says he can haul a little over a ton,
and I don’t think we’re pulling that much. Besides, we’ll be at a relatively
low altitude, and the lift capability of the helo will be at its maximum.“ He
leaned forward and handed the pilot something he had written on a scrap of
paper. The man nodded  and began fiddling with controls on his dash panel.

       “What was that?” Paul was
curious.

       “Our heading,” said Nordhausen.
“We’re going to swing out into the open desert for about twenty minutes, and
then turn south by southwest at Wadi Safra. Another few hours should do the
trick.”

       “Do the trick? What do you mean
another few hours? That will take us well beyond Amman.”

       “Precisely.”

       “Well, why waste the fuel? Are
you sight seeing? Our plane leaves from Amman tomorrow. How do you plan to get
this thing through customs?”

       “You’ll see. Just leave
everything to me, Paul. As a matter of fact, we’re going to fly over some of
the most spectacular terrain on the globe in a few hours, so sit back and enjoy
the ride. Wait until we get to Wadi Rumm—The Valley of the Moon! I hear there’s
a series of natural rock formations the locals call ‘The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom.’ How’s that ring to you, eh?” The professor flashed him a smile,
clearly excited about his recovery of the book.

       “What? Wadi Rumm is well south
of Amman. Just east of Akaba.” Paul had never been there before, but he had
spent hours pouring over maps of the region and he also remembered his history
quite well. Lawrence often used the spectacular gorges of Wadi Rumm as a hide
away during his raiding missions in 1917. He wrote about it all in the
Seven
Pillars of Wisdom
, one of Paul’s favorite reads—particularly after his
mission to the Hejaz the previous year.

       “Yes, and we should be there in
a little under two hours.“ Nordhausen smiled but Paul pursed his lips, suddenly
suspicious.

       “What are you up to, Robert?” He
wished he had Maeve at hand, as she said that so much better than he could.

       “Do you realize what we have,
Paul? I was here last month, just before they started the extraction. The
fossil is amazing! It may be one of the very few complete Ammonite fossils
found anywhere—if not the
only
one. Why, you can even see impressions in
the eye socket. It’s wonderful!”

       “Yes, yes, it’s fabulous,”
echoed Paul. “But what about customs? Are you telling me the Jordanians are
just going to let you fly away with this thing, no questions asked?”

       “Exactly,” said Nordhausen. “Why
should they ask? I’m supposed to be working a wadi terrace site at Baidar.
Hell, they’ve got plenty of Ammonite fossils, lots of them at Wala Mujib, not
far from our dig. Why should they care about this one?”

       “Are you kidding? You just said
it was one of a kind. If this thing is in the pristine condition you describe,
then they will damn well care about it. What’s going on here? Are you telling
me you’re going to try and
steal
the damn thing?”