Carpathian Read Online Free PDF Page A

guard and stolen the one object that could bring down the trust of the chosen people and the love they had of him as a successor to the Deliverer.
    “Joshua, what is it?” Lilith, wife of fifty-two years, asked as he collapsed to the sand. Then her eyes widened when she realized what was missing from the tent that held the Hebrews’ greatest religious objects. “What do we tell the people?” Lilith asked as she turned away from the empty space where the gilded box had lain. “The covenant is still here. Why, my husband, would the Jeddah take not the Ark of the Covenant, but take the—”
    “The people must never know what was taken. Never.”
    “What will you do, my husband?”
    In the distance the sound came. It was loud enough that it filled the early morning sky and even drowned out the sound of butchery across the river in Jericho. The sound echoed off distant hills and was not absorbed by the fog as sounds often are. The roar of the beast was a challenge to the world—the Golia were now free and they would never follow the death words of men again.
    “I pray that Kale builds my temple and lays to rest for all time the heritage of the people; to be locked away behind stone and earth. If he does this he will never have fear from me or mine. Let him travel to the stone mountains, let Kale and the Jeddah be. Let the Golia be.”
    The roar of the giant wolf was followed by the sound of howling that coursed through the valley of Moab as every remaining animal left of the family of Golia mourned the loss of the two irreplaceable males.
    The Jeddah, along with God’s last magic found on earth—the Golia—moved into the distant, barren, and foreboding lands far to the north.
    The Lost Tribe of Jeddah would forever dwell in the land of darkness beyond the lands of the Hittites—in the lost world of the stone mountains of the great north.
    HONG KONG HARBOR, APRIL 1, 1949
    The gleaming white yacht sat anchored in the bay of Hong Kong glistening in the illumination cast from a full moon and the festive multicolored lights that had been strung from bow to stern. The largest yacht inside the harbor was hard to miss as it sat motionless at a minimum of two miles from any fishing or harbor patrol boat, creating an island unto itself in the great expanse of the harbor. The only vessels allowed near the gleaming white hull of the Golden Child were the rented whaleboats that had been cleaned and lined with satin pillows for the invited guests as they traversed the busy waterway on their way to the largest auction of Palestinian and ancient Canaanite antiquities the world had ever seen.
    Golden Child was owned by a man known as Charles Sentinel, a Canadian commodities broker of some ill repute. It boasted accommodation for forty overnight guests and had an interior salon that measured 182 feet in length and could handle a party of hundreds. Tonight however, the salon would only accommodate thirty. The remaining space would be taken up by the items everyone on the Golden Child had come to see. The evening belonged to Lord Hartford Harrington, who had agreed to the astronomical lease price for the ship of $2 million for the weekend. There could be no other more secure location for the greatest antiquities sell-off in a hundred years.
    As the third to the last whaleboat wound its way around the tied-up water taxis made famous in Hong Kong, the woman saw the Golden Child in the distance for the first time. As her green eyes roamed over the shape and silhouette of the ship her mind raced. This was the first time she had assigned herself a field operation, and also the first time she had disobeyed an order from the director. If he knew she was four thousand miles from home with no field security team in place she may as well find somewhere to live inside China because she could never go home again. “Garrison would kill me,” she mumbled to herself as the whaleboat slowly made its way to the large staircaselike gangway that had