Brass Monkey: A James Acton Thriller Book #2 by J Robert Kennedy Page B

natural.”
    “Ancient walls, perhaps?”
    “Perhaps. I’m more inclined to believe streets, but there’s one way to find out.”
    Mitchell smiled. “Dig!”
    Laura nodded, pleased to hear her prize grad student had forgotten the oppressive heat outside.
    “Where are we on this?” he asked.
    She pointed at a spot several grid blocks south. Mitchell frowned.
    “What?”
    “Well, there’s an NGO that arrived here yesterday and they set up camp right where we’re going to be digging.”
    “An NGO? On my site? What are they doing here?”
    Mitchell shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I spotted them as they arrived and went over to explain that we had the entire area assigned to us for a dig, and they said they had permission to be there, and that it would only be for a few days.”
    Laura shook her head. “That won’t do. They could be contaminating the site.” She grabbed her satchel containing their government authorization forms and headed from the tent. “Take me to them.”

 
     
     
    Somewhere over Maryland, United States
     
    James Acton stretched his aching muscles. His back, ass, legs, basically everything, were on fire from having crawled, crouched, knelt and laid on the rocky ground of the dig site every day for months.  Then this ridiculous flight home to placate the alumni committee at his university just capped it off. The passengers, not to mention the flight attendants, frowned upon a grown man stretching in the aisles, and his nineteen hours of travel to get to this flight, hadn’t helped his condition. Ten hours by truck from the dig in the mountains of Peru, bouncing over roads in name only, four hours of waiting at an airport which had more chickens running around the terminal than passengers, all to catch a prop from Lima to Mexico City. Three hours sucking in the filth generated by ten million souls living in close proximity with no environmental laws that couldn’t be broken with the right amount of currency, then finally, finally his flight on an American carrier and its promised luxury, promised luxury that had him crammed against the window (even though he had specifically requested the aisle), with an immense woman beside him pouring over the arm rests,  unapologetically sharing his space, who clearly belonged to the “I’m fat and beautiful, so deal with it” camp, her sleeveless shirt revealing six inches of extra skin dangling like gizzards under her arms every time she reached for something from the bottomless snack pit that was her purse, and an odor that left Acton looking back fondly on the air he had just escaped, had left him in a pretty foul mood by the time he boarded his final flight for Maryland.
    Arriving at last, he departed the flight and arrived at the baggage claim area, exhausted, sore, and ready to swear off airplanes for the foreseeable future.
    And he smiled.
    Waiting for him was his best friend, Gregory Milton, waving from off to the side, a huge smile on his face. Milton reached to grab the wheels of his wheelchair but Acton waved him off and hurried over. He leaned over his friend and hugged him around the shoulders. Milton returned the hug, slapping his friend on the back and then pushing him away.
    “Have you smelt yourself?”
    Acton laughed. “That’s not me, that’s the livestock that was flying with me.” He looked his friend up and down, still unable to get used to seeing him in the chair, but after he thought he had lost him in last year’s “incident”, it was the most beautiful sight imaginable. “You look good.”
    Milton patted his stomach, protruding a little farther than when Acton had seen him last. “Still getting used to this damned thing. I thought life behind a desk was making me fat, but life in a chair is definitely doing it.”
    Acton winced. It was his fault his best friend of over twenty years, the man who had taken him under his wing as a freshman in college, who had encouraged him to become an archeologist, and