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He pulled the towel from his neck and dabbed sweat from his face. He sipped from his canteen. He examined the stone slab beneath his weapon. A crude daemonic face etched in stone. He looked around. The rampart walls were inscribed with strange glyphs. Each stone block etched with runes and symbols. The floor of the platform was a giant cosmological chart. Deep grooves plotted astral orbits. The sun. The moon. Five planets. Earth at the centre.

He suppressed a shiver as he contemplated the awful antiquity of the building. Robed priests and acolytes must have stood on this platform and chanted in veneration of their tyrannical god.

‘Was this some kind of fucking death cult?’

Jabril’s voice:

‘Hilprecht attributes the temple to the worship of Marduk. But Marduk was a benevolent creator god. Whatever devotional rites took place here seem dedicated to an older, darker deity. Hieroglyphs throughout the complex show scenes from an imminent apocalypse, and demonstrate a preoccupation with the movement of the planets, specifically Jupiter.’

Lucy’s voice:

‘You got to remember, they didn’t have TV.’

Lucy and Huang explored the ruined necropolis. A succession of courtyards filled with tumbled blocks of rubble. Broken arches. Toppled colonnades.

‘Place is a fucking maze,’ murmured Huang.

Empty storerooms. Lucy switched on the barrel lamp of her rifle and scanned darkened interiors. Sand-choked doorways. Stone debris. Empty wall niches.

She checked dusty flagstones for signs of recent disturbance. She examined each entrance, looking for the needle-fine gossamer thread of a monofilament tripwire.

Kandahar. A whitewashed farmhouse. Home to a known bomb maker. Paid informants suggested the man kept a stockpile of old tank shells buried under his chicken coop. He gave local kids 1.5v batteries and improvised firing circuits. Twenty dollars a pop to lay IEDs along the nearby airport highway. Three of Lucy’s Special Recon platoon were killed when a pressure-plate mine reduced their Snatch to whirling shrapnel in a millisecond pulse of white light.

‘Got to watch ourselves, all right?’ said Lucy’s commanding officer. ‘This guy’s a fanatic. He knows, sooner or later, he is going to get taken down. He’ll lay on a surprise, take a bunch of us with him, if he can.’

They kicked in the door. The guy was eating dinner. He was sitting at his table, spoon in hand. Lucy shot him in the face and he nodded head-first into his stew.

She pulled back a curtain door. A side room. She saw rugs and cushions.

A wad of papers in the middle of the floor. Possible intel. Lucy moved to enter room but the CO shouted ‘Stop.’

She moved aside. The CO took a can of party shop Silly String from a mag pouch. He shook it. He sprayed. The can spat webs of yellow foam string at head height. The string drifted to the floor. A single tendril hung suspended at knee level. They crouched. Fine fishing line stretched taut across the doorway.

‘Shit,’ said Lucy.

‘Everyone out,’ shouted the CO.

They retreated two hundred yards into a poppy field and fired a couple of shoulder-launched LASM rockets into the farmhouse. Walls collapsed and a series of secondary explosions reduced the place to dust.

Lucy and Huang picked their way across a rubble-strewn chamber. Sunlight shafted through a hole in the domed roof.

‘Any idea what these buildings used to be?’

Jabril’s voice:

‘Part of the temple economy. Storerooms, perhaps. Built to contain grain, dried fruits, spices. There are no settlements or farms nearby. This was not a self-sustaining community. Someone with god-like authority picked this site, ordered the construction of a temple out here in the hinterland and kept it supplied with food and water. Despite the arid location, there are ceremonial pools, baths and fountains within the complex. A demonstration of unimaginable wealth and power.