Raising Abel: An International Thriller Read online

  RAISING ABEL

  W MICHAEL GEAR

  KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR

  Raising Abel

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2022 (As Revised) W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O’Neal Gear

  Wolfpack Publishing

  5130 S. Fort Apache Rd. 215-380

  Las Vegas, NV 89148

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  eBook ISBN 978-1-63977-296-4

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-63977-297-1

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  If you liked this, you may enjoy: Dissolution

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  About The Authors

  TO

  JENNIFER AND KEN ROYCE—

  SOUL MATES

  AND

  SPECIAL FRIENDS.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to thank Dale and Linda Lovin for their help and input. After years in the Bureau, they were invaluable when it came to providing information on the emotional and technical implications of an FBI field investigation.

  We have relied on the numerous works of our colleagues in the field of physical anthropology. In particular, the works of Olga Soffer, Chris Stringer, Milford Wolpoff, Erik Trinkaus, Yoel Rak, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Fred H. Smith, Rebecca Caan, Mark Stoneking, and many others. To these professionals, we say thank you for your hard work in the struggle to unravel the legacy of our prehistory.

  We would like to acknowledge Katherine Cook for her hard work on the manuscript. At Warner Books, Betsy Mitchell and Frances Jalet-Miller provided thoughtful and cogent suggestions to improve the book. We really appreciate the job Deanna M. Hoak did on the copyedit. It is a pleasure to work with such talent. We sincerely appreciate the support our publisher, Jamie Raab, has given to our anthropological novels. And of course, we are eternally grateful to Anne Zafian, Norman Krause, and the field force. Without the salespeople and the hard working reps, these books would never make it to the retailers' shelves. Thank you all.

  Finally, Dr. Diane L. France of France Casting, Fort Collins, Colorado; and facial reconstruction expert, Betty Pat Gatliff, of Skullpture, Norman, Oklahoma, must be commended for their help and enthusiasm in truly Raising Abel and for their creative expertise in crafting Umber in Dark Inheritance.

  RAISING ABEL

  PROLOGUE

  Yevgeny Tubor had no interest in altering the course of human history on that cold and cloudless mountain morning. Had he been asked, he would most assuredly have told the inquisitor that he had no wish to challenge either Allah's will or authority. A devout Muslim, he prayed five times a day, read the Qur'an, and followed the Prophet's teachings as a modest and unassuming man should. He always sought to obey his elders and fulfill his duty to his tribe, clan, and lineage. He did his best to provide for his family, worked hard, and loved his wife and children.

  It was in pursuit of those goals that he did what he did that fateful morning. He had little concern that the Christians considered the year—1999—to be the turning of a millennium. To him, it wasn't the masculine finale of an exhausted age, but yet another day illuminated by a shining sun under a crystalline blue sky. Yevgeny didn't believe in the Christian calendar. His years were those of the Prophet.

  Yevgeny wore rugged felt-lined boots, a warm goatskin coat, and a thick felt hat. Even in midsummer, here at the broken margins of the glacier, the temperature barely hovered above freezing, especially this close to the ice. The footing was treacherous. He had to pick his way over tumbled and cracked gray stone, grit-filled brown ice, and slick surfaces where meltwater refroze into a glazed sheet. A man could break a leg, be pinned by shifting rock, or worse, slip into one of the black fissures that led down to Shaitan knew where. Fall into one of those, and a man wouldn't be found for years, if ever.

  The reason that Yevgeny and others from his village climbed up to the toe of the mighty glacier was as mercenary as any: money. Four years previously, a team of scientists from Europe and America had come to this remote place high in Tajikistan. From where he stood, Yevgeny could look eastward to the mountain divide that marked the spot where the boundaries of his country joined those of Kyrgyzstan and China.

  The scientists had hired Akhbar, Yevgeny's maternal uncle, and his sons to guide them to this place. They had used their wiry little mountain ponies to pack the scientists' equipment up the steep, rocky trails. Before that, no one had ever come to this jumbled mess of piled rock, gravel, and ice. Why would they? Nothing grew here for the goats to eat. The scientists, however, had scrambled around, taking measurements, samples, and photographs of the glacier. They had climbed out onto the treacherous snow-packed surface and drilled holes, taking round cores of ice from deep inside.

  Akhbar had been there when the first bones were found in the piled rubble below the glacier. Yevgeny had seen them after they had been packed down the steep slopes to the village. Big, brown, larger than anything he'd seen in his life. The scientists had identified them as coming from mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, and something called a woolly rhinoceros. The explanation, according to the scientists, was that animals had been chased off of the high meadows and onto the glacier, where they had fallen into the crevasses. Hearing that, and curious, men like Yevgeny had come to the glacier in search, and in the process had created a new source of income for villagers. Fossil bones could be sold. Some were smuggled across the border into China to be sold as dragon bones in the apothecary shops. Bigger, intact bones were sold to antiquities dealers who braved the chronic, if sporadic, civil war to transport them out to Europe, America, and Japan for resale. The unique specimens, however, were sold to the scientists, especially to Professor Pietor Ostienko at the University of Moscow.

  Ostienko had special requirements. He wanted bones straight from the ice, as fresh as p
ossible, and he paid very well for them. In American dollars. He had even provided specific and detailed instructions on how to care for the specimens and a toll-free number straight to his office in Moscow.

  And so Yevgeny had come here, searching, hoping to find one of the bones to supplement his meager income. He placed each foot with care, his breath frosting in the rarefied air. Cold came welling out of the ice to his left. It seemed to eat straight through his coat, into his flesh, into his very bones. A deep cold, ancient and primordial. A cold left over from the days of giant animals and myths. The breath of Shaitan might have blown down from hell to create such a cold.

  Yevgeny shivered and glanced nervously up at the dirt-smeared ice that towered over his head. The snowcapped heights contrasted with the incredible vault of sky, as blue as lapis. In the glacier's shadow, even the light seemed weakened by the cold.

  "I must be half-witted," he murmured uneasily. Propping himself on a canted slab of stone, he cocked his head and heard the faint grinding of tons upon tons of dirty ice. The glacier constantly groaned and whispered. The old stories, recounted late at night around crackling fires, told of devils who inhabited the stygian cracks in the ice. Flitting back and forth like phantasmal bats, they would leap out and possess the unwary soul who ventured too close. Yevgeny could well believe it. That sense of being watched, of foreboding, deepened and crawled around between his heart and liver.

  He turned, ready to start back, sure that coming here to the edge of the ice had been a mistake. Far better to look in the stony piles of moraine below the ice for fragments of dry bone.

  His foot slipped out from under him, and in the mad scramble to save himself, he clawed at the rock, barely keeping his grip on the rounded stone. For an eternal instant, he stared at the shining flecks in the granite millimeters from his eyes. His feet kicked futilely, seeking to find a purchase.

  Breathing deeply, he shuddered as a strange fear coursed along his tingling nerves. Praise be to Allah, that had been a close one. He craned his neck, peering down into the black fissure below. The ice had fractured, actually been twisted around an outcrop of granite. How far down it might go was anyone's guess. Clear to Sheol for all Yevgeny knew.

  He pulled himself up by brute force until he could clamber onto the slanted stone and swallowed hard. Yes, a close one indeed. Quite by accident, he glanced sideways at the ice—and froze. For a moment, an unearthly silence filled the world.

  There, half entombed in the eternal cold, the remains of a human face stared back at him. Bits of flesh had been torn from the bone. Strands of pale hair had woven into the ice as if borne by water. The jaw was missing, but the exposed upper teeth seemed to leer. At that moment, the heavy ice groaned; it seemed to come from behind the yellowed incisors that had bitten through the ice. Yevgeny stifled a scream as he looked into the sunken and distorted eyes.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The bus lurched over a pothole, and Avi Raad clung to the overhead strap with one hand as he scanned the June 6 Ha 'aretz for the latest update on the curfew. Several of his Arab laboratory technicians hadn't come in for work that day. Every time a dispute boiled up between the Palestinians and Israelis, it compromised his laboratory. Couldn't the two nations get it through their blocky heads that culture, history, and passions aside, scientific experiments did not proceed on a political timetable?

  Most of the paper was filled with stories about the big religious conference being held in Tel Aviv. Christians of every sect and denomination were arguing with Jews and Muslims of every faction and description over the preservation of holy sites. A plague on them all, especially that American maniac, Billy Barnes Brown, who called for a new "philosophical Crusade". Whatever that was.

  Over the whining of the bus, he could hear the babble of voices, most of them in accented Hebrew. The odors of diesel exhaust, falafel, hummus, and freshly baked bread assailed his nose. He knew most of his fellow passengers by sight. The majority of them, like himself, worked at the university. Each morning and night he traveled this route to and from his office and laboratory at Tel Aviv University. The bus wound through the same packed streets with the closely parked automobiles, the whitewashed houses, and the colorfully dressed people. Each night he smelled their suppers, clutched close on their laps or dangling from their hands in paper sacks. His stomach tightened in response to piqued hunger.

  The bus honked at the stubborn traffic around the intersection and slowed. Avi twisted to see through the driver's windshield. A uniformed soldier tweeted a whistle and gestured traffic through the congestion as two other soldiers warily inspected a stalled black compact. Two nervous Palestinians stood to one side, hands held high. Such things had thankfully become less common with the coming of the "peace". Though the tenacious, be they Hamas or the zealots in Mea Shaarim, would cling to their hatred to the bitter end.

  Avi winced at the thought, noticing two of the hard-eyed Hasidim who stood on the sidewalk. They muttered behind their hands as they watched the soldiers search the stalled car. Their hatred might have curled around them like smoke.

  Under his breath, Avi said, "You are the real enemies of mankind. Blinded by your intolerance and 'Truth'." Reflexively, he folded his copy of Ha 'aretz and fingered the scar on the side of his head. They might have marked him long ago and maimed his arm, but not so many years would pass before they learned that he and his colleagues had, in turn, irrevocably changed their futures.

  He sighed as the bus inched through the intersection and onward to his stop. His feet thumped on the rubber-matted metal as he stepped down to the warm sidewalk. With his paper folded under his bad arm, he walked the half block to the entrance of his apartment building. Nodding to the doorman, he passed through the glass doors, retrieved his mail from the drop, and crossed the tiled lobby to the elevator.

  Built in the 1980s, the structure was one of those glass, steel, and white concrete marvels the government had slapped up to ease overcrowding. Although the building was just two decades old, work crews constantly clattered about the twenty-two stories, patching plaster, bolting cracked concrete, and fixing water pipes. One of the peculiarities of the building's construction ensured that when the toilet was flushed, everyone on the surrounding four floors was able to share the experience as the pipes screamed and the sewage gurgled.

  When the elevator lurched to an unsteady stop, Avi stepped out onto the fourteenth floor and walked down his familiar hallway. Two maintenance men were pushing a cart from the other direction. They slowed, nodded, and smiled, allowing him time to fish his key from his pocket and open his door. He ran a fingertip over the mezuzah on the frame and started into his apartment.

  Two strong arms caught him from behind, shoving him forward. Before he could scream, a hand clapped over his mouth, and he was bulldozed across the room and driven face first into the thick couch that buttressed his wall. In panic, he thrashed, trying to break free. Twisting his head to the side, he bellowed in fear, but the thick cushions muffled his shout.

  "Now, now," a male voice told him from just behind his ear. "Don't make this more difficult than it has to be." English! American English!

  "Who are you?" Avi cried against the cushions. "What do you want?"

  "Divine justice," the voice hissed. An instant later, a balled fist slammed into Avi's right kidney. As he arched and gasped, a length of duct tape was slapped over his mouth. Pain made him wince; Avi tried to battle back. The soft cushions hindered his movements. Another blow to the back of his head left him reeling, unable to resist as his hands and feet were bound.

  He flopped to the floor, looking up in terror as one of the men, dressed in a maintenance uniform, pulled back and kicked him viciously in the side. The spear of pain doubled him, leaving him panting through his nostrils, the tape pulling and puffing on his mouth.

  He had experienced such pain before, at another beating, when the zealots broke his arm, scarred his face, and left him moaning in the dirt just below his archaeological excavation.

/>   "That's better, Professor." The man smiled grimly down at him and smacked a gloved fist into a cupped palm. He appeared to be in his late twenties, blond, blue-eyed, and much too athletic. His hair, what could be seen of it under a tightly fitting cap, looked close-cropped, almost military. The man stood about a meter seventy-five. The second intruder, shorter, in his mid-forties and perhaps a meter sixty in height, walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down a photo of Avi. In it, his face was bandaged; the Hebrew caption read, "Professor recovers in hospital from beating received at the hands of Yod party radicals."

  "Should have taken the hint, Professor," the second man said. "Even if they were Pharisees, they were right. You were sinning against God. In the years since they closed down that dig of yours, you've just spiraled deeper and deeper into sin."

  "Whooo muff woooo?" The tape muffled his words.

  "Warriors of God," the blond giant said, smiling grimly. "Come to send you off to your judgment, you dirty Jew. God is waiting, and he has a great deal to talk to you about. But first we're going to have to ask you some questions."