He’d spent most of his summer making impressions of the markings into his copybook. He’d found out that local legends called the markings the language of the fairies, and he’d been fascinated. They had fueled his interest and driven him to pursue archaeology.
He brought the copybook back to his desk and carefully turned the pages until he found the one symbol he recognized from the photo in the email. He glanced from the screen to the page and back again, multiple times. “This can’t be right.”
The symbols were older than any written form of language the academic world had on record. It wasn’t Middle Irish, and it wasn’t even Primitive Irish. It was pre-Ogham, most likely a proto-form of Gaelic. An alphabet that shouldn’t exist, and it definitely shouldn’t be in that region of the world. Not in stone, and not arranged in the exact same sequence as on the rocks in a mountain range in Ireland. But it did.
He barely breathed as he stared at that scan for nearly an hour. Every now and then, he muttered to himself, cross-referencing the etymological shifts with the impressions he hadn’t touched in years. He kept waking up from the dream. Because it had to be a dream, right? Every archeologist dreamed of making such a discovery. But no matter how many times he pinched himself, the image on the screen didn’t change. It still matched those impressions. “Wow. I can’t believe this. It cannot be possible.”
He picked up his phone and dialed the contact number buried three paragraphs deep in the email signature.
It rang twice before someone answered. “Dr. Sutherland. Thank you for calling back.”
Not many people must ring this line, if he knew it was me before I spoke at all.
“You’ve got about thirty seconds before I hang up and report this to every linguistic society I’ve ever published with. What the hell am I looking at?”
The voice on the other end of the phone hitched. “We don’t know. That’s why we reached out.”
“People don’t send me Proto-Irish symbols from the middle of the damn Indian Ocean unless someone’s panicking.” There had to be an angle here somewhere. The last time he’d heard of something similar happening, it had turned out to be a hoax, and the archaeologist had been discredited once it was discovered.
There was a slight pause and the sound of an exhale before the man at the other side of the phone call continued. “We haven’t gone all the way into the tunnel. There might be a chamber, but we just don’t know for sure. We’ve only cleared the outer edge of the site. What we found was carved into the rock face aroundthe entrance. Identical symbols are scattered along the chamber wall about fifteen meters in, but we stopped going further in once we realized they weren’t incidental.”
If they were already digging, then why did they need him? “So what, now you want me to rubber-stamp this shit?”
“No, Doctor. We want you to explain it before someone tries to steal whatever is in there.”
That gave him pause. This didn’t sound like a press release, university grab, or grant chase waiting to happen. Just that quiet desperation of people who knew they were out of their depth and needed someone who didn’t panic when the rules bent sideways.
Ward scrubbed a hand through his hair. “This isn’t some lost tribal dialect. This is what I’ve been considering as a bloodline language. Most likely ancient Irish. Do you understand what I’m saying? If I go there and I verify that it didn’t drift there—it isn’t a copy, either modern or recent past, and some form of early Irish ancestor created it in situ—do you understand what will happen?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Then history as we know it collapses under its own bullshit.”
“We’re aware it’s a strange find.”
“It’s an impossible find.”
“Yes, Sir. But it’s real.”
The silence stretched between them as Ward glanced again at the scan. The glyphs were familiar and foreign all at once, and the longer he looked at them, the more certain he became that this wasn’t a hoax or a mistake. This was real. Those symbols existed where they shouldn’t.
He worked hard to keep the excitement he could feel building inside him out of his voice. “I’m in. Where’s the dig?”
CHAPTER ONE
The roarof the C-130 Hercules wasn’t enough to drown out the fury grinding through Viper’s spine. He stared at the satellite map pinned to the cargo wall beside him and bit back a curse. He clenched his jaw, crossed his arms, and ignored the vibration in his skull that hadn’t let up since the mission brief started.
Operation Caldera. Fancy name for a kill order.
At least they aren’t pretending this is a capture op.
His commanding officers had to know better than to send him and his team on a capture mission for the asshole they’d been hunting for almost two years. He glanced at the red-ringed target zone on the map, a heat-blasted speck in the middle of the damn ocean that barely qualified as land. The island was officially uncharted and uninhabited, yet somehow it was French-controlled. All the intel they could find pointed to it being nothing more than volcanic ash and tropical decay baked into a jungle hellscape.
Now it was also a hiding place for the piece of shit responsible for the Benghazi-style bombing of the US embassy in Aleppo twoyears ago. They’d lost former SEALs in that blast. Good men. Brothers. One of them had bled out in Viper’s arms while they tried to drag civilians out of the burning shell of a diplomatic compound.
No quarter.
No forgiveness.
There was no chance in hell he was leaving that island without the bastard’s head in a goddamn bag. He jabbed a finger at the infrared overlay. “The French call it Île Saonae. It’s a volcanic island, but its last eruption clocked in around 3,000 years ago. Intel says the caldera is showing signs of being unstable.” There wasn’t much that scared the shit out of him. Volcanoes were one of those things. “It could pop again,” he lifted one shoulder, “or it could sleep another hundred years. Who the fuck knows?”
Reaper muttered, “Perfect place for a scumbag to hole up.”
