Albadi couldn’t even guess at how far it went down but, like a few others at the edge, he had a small pair of field glasses that he used to peer into the depths. Once or twice he thought he saw movement but quickly discounted it as a trick of the near non-existent light against the dark and darker shadows.

A few hundred feet along, someone lit and dropped a red smoking flare into the depths. Some pulled back momentarily, fearful the dot of heat and light would ignite flammable gasses, but eventually curiosity won out, and they crept back to watch it drop lower and lower, until it became a flaring spark that finally landed, creating a small pool of hellish red light on the sunken architecture about a thousand feet below them.

Albadi exhaled and felt slightly dizzy. He perspired profusely, and didn’t feel well at all. Apart from the feeling of empathetic shock at the knowledge that hundreds of people were either dead or trapped down in the depths of the crater, there was something else – a feeling of unease and foreboding that made his gut roil. When he had read about the people going missing, and the holes opening up, he had been dreading this. Could it be true? he wondered.

He and a few other academics had taken it upon themselves to preserve the great literary history, the precious works in the ancient Damascan library, from terrorists and looters. Albadi and the other men and women had worked with a mix of speed and care as they packed up the ancient books, manuscripts and scrolls. However, there had been one discovery that had frozen him. Wrapped in an oilcloth, hidden from sight between two religious texts, it was just a copy of an earlier work, but still, from the first page, it had taken his breath away. Fanciful blasphemy, he had thought from the scraps he had been able to read.

But now? Albadi, still crouching, turned and threw up onto the ground. After a moment, he wiped his mouth with a sleeve and got to his feet, pushing quickly back through the crowd. The more distance he put between himself and the pit, the better he felt. It was strange: he didn’t see the crater as a geological oddity, but instead some evidence of infection, a canker on the face of the Earth from which an evil and pustulant scourge would soon burst forth.

The Book said this would happen. He needed to be home. The Book also said there was worse to come.

Chapter 5

United States Army Forces Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina

General Henry Decker looked at the image on the wall screen, hands on his hips. Beside him, Major Joshua Abrams walked forward, holding up an arm and sweeping it across the picture.

“Two thousand feet wide, give or take. And goes straight down about a thousand. No survivors.” He turned to Decker. “This is in Syria. It’s bone dry, and only suffers sinkholes rarely in its lowland marsh areas.” He shook his head. “No reason for it, sir.”