Pierce pointed his hand forward, his body language enough to shut the kid up and return him to his driving duties.

“Just get me there alive,” he winced.

“Guys back there say you’re a Doctor or somethin’. You going’ up there at look at those men?” He tossed his head towards Pierce with every other word.

“I’m not a doctor’s I’m a-”

“They said you’re a doctor. A kinda doctor or something’.”

“I’m a…well, yeah, I’m a kinda doctor.”

“Well, what kinda doctor are you?”

“Well? I hear that a lot, kid. What kind of a doctor am I?”

“Huh?”

By age 36, Doctor Eugene Pierce was Harvard’s leading Professor of Mesopotamian history and Assyriology. In 1938, when leading an expedition within the royal cemetery of Ur, he discovered the untouched tomb of Queen Pu-Abi. The tombs’ entrance and access ramps riddled with corpses. Their bodies turned inwards, their hands clutching against one another. Pried apart, the corpses were said to appear as if they had been in the process of mangling one another. Some were said to have been found with the innards of others stuffed inside their eternally screaming mouths. A few weeks later, Pierce disappeared. He was found three year later in an opium den by British agents of the SOE, the newly formed Special Operations Executive. Near death, drug-addled and fraught with madness. A month after that, he was entered into service with the ranking of Captain and the duty of Liaison Officer with Rear HQ in Cairo.

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