The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [69]
Ahead in the darkness, something was moving.
Writhing.
‘Best to turn around, my friends,’ Stokes muttered, his left eyebrow tipping up.
The audio crisply picked up scratching and clicking.
The procession halted abruptly as the ringleader made the first visual confirmation.
When he spotted the horror that lay ahead, he screamed out in terror and wheeled around so fiercely that he barrelled into the two men behind him. He stumbled and the cell phone fumbled out of his grasp, clattered along the rocky ground.
Then the panic infected the others.
‘Go back! Go back!’ the ringleader was pleading as he regained his footing. He shoved at the others, trying to speed them along. Spinning, he attempted to retrieve the cell phone, but it disappeared beneath the slithering mass that crashed into him like a violent wave. He recoiled, levelled the AK-47, and opened fire. The weapon’s consecutive muzzle bursts flashed brilliant white in the infrared images on Stokes’s monitor; the deafening retort squelched the computer’s speakers.
‘No …’ Stokes grumbled.
Comfortably ahead of the others, Al-Zahrani was now back in the previous camera frame, blindly clawing his way through the darkness. But something scurried beneath his feet and caused him to trip and fall. He screamed out when something took a chunk of flesh out of his hand.
Then Stokes’s eyes bounced back to the other frame where the gunman lost his footing and suddenly tumbled backwards, forcing the assault rifle to swing up over his head, spraying bullets along a wild arc. The lethal barrage strafed the two men trailing behind him about the face and chest, sending the pair crumpling to the ground.
An instant later, a ferocious explosion ripped through the passage and obliterated the camera.
38
‘What in God’s name—’ the combat engineer gasped. ‘What happened to those people?’
On the LCD panel, the bot’s camera swept slowly side to side for the second time, panning over the ghastly bone pile forming an enormous ring ten feet high.
‘Looks like a fucking mausoleum,’ Crawford grumbled.
Jason looked up at Hazo, knowing that for him, the images would slice deep. It was a similar portrait of mass death that drove Hazo to become an ally to the Americans.
The Kurd stared emptily at the screen.
In 2006, US forces had used satellite imagery to scan the Ash Sham Desert for undulating mounds that hinted at the presence of mass graves. Over 200 sites had been identified for potential exhumations. One of the first confirmed graves contained three dozen male skeletons wearing Kurdish attire, all of which had been blindfolded and bound with arms tied behind the back. Every skull bore an executioner’s bullet hole. Though most of the bodies could not be identified, Hazo’s father - formerly an industrious carpet retailer - had been carrying business cards in his vest pocket. The name on the card, Zirek Amedi, enabled forensic investigators to match dental records for the partial denture still affixed to the skeleton’s jawbone. The positive identification brought bittersweet closure for the victim’s surviving family members who’d already suffered tremendous loss at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
‘You should take a break,’ Jason said to Hazo in a low tone. ‘Have something to eat with the guys.’ He pointed to the cave entrance where Meat, Camel and Jam were blissfully spooning rehydrated beef stroganoff from foil packs.
Hazo sighed wearily and nodded. Then he went over to join the others.
‘Looks to me like another hiding place for evidence of Saddam’s genocide,’ Crawford said.
‘No,’ Jason said. The only similarity he saw here was the sheer number of bones. ‘Doesn’t look anything like Saddam’s handiwork.’
‘How so?’ Crawford challenged.
‘First off, not one of the skulls we’ve seen on that screen shows signs of execution. No bullet holes, fractures—’
‘Hey, smart guy, Sarin doesn’t leave its mark on bones,’ Crawford countered