The Dig Read Online Free Page A

from the flies drawn to the dig site, if it weren’t for the snakes. He’d seen two already: a mamba, eight lithe feet of gray-green terror moving along the forest floor faster than he could trot; and—perhaps even scarier—a puff adder, the length and thickness of his leg, lying camouflaged almost to invisibility right where he had been about to sit.
    He glanced to the other side of the pit, where the light tower sat on its four-wheeled carriage. He always hated turning off the generator before bed, knowing that the few hours of light from his laptop screen was all that would remain between him and the primal darkness.
    The satellite phone in the trailer began to ring, and Rheese skidded, nearly sprawling in the mud, in his haste to reach it.
    “Rheese here,” he said into the large handset.
    “Doctor, this is Peter Sharma. How are you today?”
    “Glorious. What do you have to tell me, Mr. Sharma?”
    “We’re trying to get you some new equipment and an expert to certify the results, but it may be another couple of weeks.”
    Rheese’s biceps tensed as he restrained himself from throwing his one communication link to the civilized world through the window and into the mud and rain.
    “Listen to me, Sharma, I’m not staying out in the bloody rain and flies, twiddling my thumbs for two more blasted weeks! At the very least, I’m bringing back the crew to get digging again.”
    “Very well, Professor,” Sharma replied, his voice taking on a soothing diplomatic tone. “As long as you keep the work away from the discovery location. Also, it would be a good idea to get more photographs of that corner, from various angles and distances, in case anything should happen. We only have those few you e-mailed.”
    “Yes, yes,” he replied and hung up. Finally, he could get back to some real work!
    Rheese had given up on any chance of the artifact paying off in the near future. Still, he was well aware that if the thing proved authentic, his name would forever be tied to its discovery. That was something, anyway. But would it get him out of his “nice” Mayfair house and into a Kensington castle? Not likely. And so, unbeknownst to Peter Sharma, Rheese now had authorization to resume his private plans.
    He had no intention of continuing digging in this place. The artifact recovered from the soon-to-be famous northeast corner of dig site 00876-B223KY had actually revealed for him the site’s lack of value.
    Rheese unrolled his satellite maps to the red circle around the current site. He could see why he had identified its potential from the geologic markers in the area, but realized now why it was illogical. He slid his finger to a different circle, also marked in red pencil, several centimeters to the left. After an unsatisfying sip of cold tea, he found a metal ruler and calculated the distance: four kilometers west.
    Garrett Rheese had gone through this process enough times in the past that he had the steps down to a routine. A childlike excitement came over him as he prepared for the coming month.
    First, identify site: done! Second, identify intermittent “finds” to keep the museum interested and the money rolling in. He moved over to the laptop and opened his personal catalog spreadsheet. In his career, Rheese had worked all aspects of an excavation, and he knew that finding missing bones from nearly complete dinosaurs was a heady thrill for legitimate paleontologists. Over the years he had accrued a healthy sum of “missing bones,” for which he kept a well-maintained catalog. The world’s only intact #4 left metacarpal from a Saurophaganax ? Easy—sealed in a box in his basement, on a shelf with hundreds of other rare or unique bones. After a couple of weeks’ digging, call up the lab and let them know you’ve found something they’ll like. Have Jimmy ship the package to the site, repack it with some native minerals it was “found with,” and send it off to the lab. They’re all happy, and better