HUNTING THE KING

      March 17, 2003 Badghis Province, Afghanistan

      Technically, Molly O’Dwyer should never have crossed the border into Afghanistan. Her passport permitted her to work on an archaeological dig in neighboring Turkmenistan. But, technically, she didn’t give a rat’s ass.

      What’s a few kilometers? she figured. Who’s going to know? Until it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

      She lowered her binoculars, allowing the cold mountain breeze to blow her red hair across her eyes.  Badghis Province wasn’t called the Home of the Winds for nothing. She had to tuck her floppy canvas hat into the belt of her jeans to keep it from flying away. The valley below echoed with the spit of small arms fire and the occasional boom of heavier artillery.

      Molly puffed out her cheeks in exhaustion. That’s who’s going to know, she thought. The goddamned Afghani military. Brushing her hand over her grimy cheeks, she knew this was no time to back down or stop digging for the find they were preparing to steal across the border.

      “Molly! Come quick!”

      Giving one last glance through her binoculars down the forested slope, north toward the Turkmenistan border, she prayed the fighting between government forces and local Muslim insurgents would stay at a distance until she got what she had come so far and waited so long to obtain.

      Five years before near the Valley of the Kings along the west bank of the Nile, burial site of pharaohs, she and the Iraqi archaeologist Mohamoud Jama had made the discovery of a lifetime. A community of ascetics had established residence outside the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. What made these 1^st century Jewish monastics so special, what had drawn both Jama and Molly to this site in the first place, was that their religious community was post-Crucifixion. It had thrived in the time of the Roman occupation of Judea, built along similar lines as the one at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been found. But unlike the site at Qumran, this one had not been abandoned in the wake of the Roman destruction of Judea. Rather, it was an indication that the newly established faith of the followers of Jesus had taken up root elsewhere beyond the reach of Rome at the very time that Rome was brutally putting down a Jewish insurrection and burning Jerusalem.

      Jama had been beside himself with excitement, truly driven by something he would not, or could not, divulge to Molly no matter how much she interrogated him. She maintained a distance then, dispassionate, wondering why he would invite her on the expedition and then keep her at bay. Until she had awoken one night, stumbled out of her tent, still half asleep, and wandered into the desert away from camp. As if directed by the foot of God, she had tripped over a shrub, rolled down a dune into a shallow depression and landed against a large flat rock that had been exposed by the desert wind. The rock had markings on it in Hebrew. The scrolls that lay beneath changed Molly’s life forever.

      “Molly! ‘urry!”

      “Coming, Anicet! Coming!”

       Her breath coming out as mist in the thin air of the Firozkhoi highlands, Molly raced across the path that had taken her expedition from the plain below into the Afghani foothills ten kilometers from Turkmenistan where they should have been.

      She trotted past the tents they had pitched into the hillside, past the horse-drawn carts and tethered horses who had drawn them, pushed through the dozen local tribesmen a generous grant had afforded her to hire. What lay beneath that rock in Egypt had ultimately led her here, to war-torn Afghanistan.

      “Wait’ll you see, Molly!”

      ‘What the hell could it be?’

      Anicet Kashimura had followed Molly from their Boston college campus into this remote region of South Central Asia. Risks be damned, they were friends as well as colleagues, and Molly knew nobody could map and lay out a site better than Anicet.

      Molly had never intended to dig in Turkmenistan. The scrolls from Thebes had led her here. And after three weeks of intense search, she and her team of Afridi and Pashtun laborers had encountered the remains of limestone stairs that seemed to lead directly into the face of the hill. A fire in the woods had exposed the soil to flash flooding and mud slides, which had, in turn, exposed the stairs to the light of modern day.  With time running out on their visas, Molly and Anicet had set up camp and begun to dig in earnest, setting their workers to forming three trenches in a box pattern enclosing the stairs. Now four feet into the rocky earth, Anicet peered up at Molly, her long Jamaican dreadlocks beaded with dirt.

      “What do you have, Ani?”

      “A door, Molly!” her friend exclaimed. “You were right! A freaking door!”

      Molly leaped into the trench behind her friend, nearly knocking her into the stone slab that they had unearthed after five days of digging.

      “There’s writing on it!” Molly hunkered closer, brushing away centuries of earth with a small paintbrush that had been attached to her belt.

      “’ebrew?” Anicet asked.

      “You betcha!” Molly could hardly believe what she was reading. She had been right! By God, she had been right!

“Behold you, all who enter here,” she quoted, her voice shaking. “Eternal life is given to those who believe. To those who don’t, death.”