The Silver Scroll

by Jeff Spence

  Marina felt the barrel of the pistol shift from her neck a moment. She slammed her head into his face, feeling the crush of the man's nose. As his body arched backward from the blow, she stomped hard on the top of his shoe, the low heel of her boot snapping the bones of his foot and eliciting a scream of rage and pain. She then dropped her upper body, fiercely gripped his forearms, and thrust her hips up and backward against his weight, bringing the man forward over her back to slam on the ground in front of her.

  From the gunmen spread across the top of the plateau, a sudden burst of return fire erupted and sent tiny shards of splintered stone exploding from surfaces all over the near walls of the ruins.

  Marina ignored the flying bullets and kicked the pistol from the downed man’s hand, grabbing the assault weapon from the strap at his back. She dropped backward, pulling it free from him, and settled into a low crouch. The weapon was an IWI Tavor. Israeli. She had never fired one before, but it was standard enough, she found her way around it in a moment and opened fire, first at the men across from her, and then at those to either side, sharing her aggression between both Bass’s and Kantor’s men.

  Ben's captor had kicked the professor's knee forward and the professor was collapsed at his feet. The gunman fired his pistol half a dozen times before a noise like the clap of hands sounded near his chest and he sank to his knees, his weapon still firing up into the air as he fell backward to lie still next to Ben on the ground.

  The professor heaved himself up and over the fallen form and, suppressing any revulsion the hiding place might evoke, tucked himself as tight under the edge of the fallen man as he could. He reached over to where the gun had fallen and picked it up. He pointed it over the fallen form and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  He brought it back down and pulled the magazine out. Empty. He grabbed at the man’s pockets and found a reload. With a little fumbling, he managed to eject the empty magazine and fit the new one into the weapon. Then he pulled the top of the gun away from the end of the muzzle, the way he had seen it done on television and in the movies. It was harder than he thought it would be, but the slider went back and returned to its original position with a snap. The hammer remained cocked. He aimed the gun up over the body again and pulled the trigger three times. Three loud pops added to the noise that had slowed by then to a few controlled bursts from one side or the other, as he sent three bullets into the general direction of the shooters. He ducked back down, his heart thudding and sweat beading on his brow. He felt no desire to try it again.

  Marina put a cluster of rounds into the man she had taken the weapon from, and then began sending short, scattered bursts into the shadows of the ruins, aiming for any muzzle fire she saw erupting in the darkness.

  She glanced over to check on Ben a could of times, saw him fire a few rounds from cover at one point, then duck down again. Her own position was too open, and it was a wonder to her that she hadn’t already been shot. She laid down some suppressing fire and scrambled over to the edge of the plateau, finally dropping down behind a man-sized block of stone just as rounds peppered the ground around her. She leaned against the stone to catch her breath and check the extra magazine that was taped to the stock of the weapon. Full. Good. She turned and took more careful aim, silencing two of the patches of muzzle fire before a rain of rounds forced her back down into hiding.

  After a few more moments of fervent fire, a time that seemed unfathomably long to Ben, the echoes died in the surrounding cliffs and all that could be heard was the heavy panting of those left alive, hiding behind fallen forms or just over the lip of the cliffs. The air smelled sharp, the cordite thick and acrid on the gentle breeze.

  "Just give us the scroll and we leave you to the treasure." The voice came from the shadows of the ruin. He spoke English, but with a thick, Jordanian accent.

  "Not going to happen, asshole!" Bass. "You still there, Kantor?"

  "Yes, Mr. Bass."

  "How do you feel about an alliance?"

  "I feel it would be a useless gesture, in our current situation. We are outnumbered, and we have no viable cover. You are familiar, no doubt, with your Alamo? This place is not so different, as you know.”

  "I'd rather go down fighting than cowering!"

  "I'd rather live to fight another day."

  "Are you two finished now?" The Jordanian. "Give me the scroll!"

  "Were you under the impression," Kantor asked, "That we have it in our pockets?"

  "Where is it? You can get it."

  "I am afraid that would be difficult, under the circumstances."

  "And why is that?"

  "It is in my vault, in my office building in Tel Aviv. I am here. Unless you allow me to leave to retrieve it — should be back by morning if I don't delay."

  There was a long pause. Ben dared to peek up over the body that served as his hiding place. The sun was getting lower in the sky, almost ducking below the cliffs to the west of where he lay. The shadowy figures within the ruins were well hidden, but from his low vantage point he could make them out if he looked just to the side of each opening, allowing his peripheral vision to pick up on rough shapes and subtle movement.

  He looked to either side for a possible way out. He saw none. He swept the ground between him and the ruins to see if Marina lay there, hidden or dead. Nothing. He checked to either side and then ducked his eyes back down below his cover and looked behind him. Nothing.

  She was gone.

  He peeked up again, back toward the ruins. It seemed already darker to him, and yet his eyes picked out movement in the shadows. Three, four… were there five of them moving now? Further back in the dark corridors of the old fortress? These seemed to be moving closer, not retreating, coming up behind those who had been firing on the arcade from the shadows. Reinforcements?

  Shit, he swore to himself, How many of them are there now?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The dark corridors lit up like a nightclub as gunfire split the silence and chips of rock burst from walls and floor. Men shouted in Jordanian Arabic and in Hebrew. One of the shadowy figures in a window stood and faced back into the darkness before his head jerked to the side and dark fluid sprayed out onto the sill where he had leaned just a moment before. Another backed through a doorway with blood pumping from a wound in his neck. He turned toward the flat of the plateau and in the twilight Ben saw the fear and pain in his eyes before his feet seemed to tangle and the man fell headlong into the dust.

  That was enough for Ben. He rolled away from the body he had been using as cover, and scrambled on his hands and knees toward the lip of the plateau, the gun still in his hand. There was a low wall there and he hoped to make it there alive, to find some place without hot slugs of copper and lead whistling through the air, dealing death and pain.

  He had to find Marina, to know where she was. To know if she was still alive. With a dozen yards now between him and his cover, he managed to get fully to his feet and stumble toward what he hoped was a safe place of refuge, if only for a moment, to regain his wits. He raised the pistol with the intension of firing a few rounds into the darkness, his own covering fire.

  "Do not move!" the voice came from the western lip of the plateau, straight ahead of him. "Drop the weapon or the woman dies!" As Ben staggered to a standstill, his line of sight fell on Marina's face, stained with tears of fear — or anger. A man stood behind her, a gun jammed into her neck below her jawline. There was no way Ben could fire without hitting her. She dared not move either, for fear that the bullet would fire true… or the gunman simply get in a lucky shot. The man was armed, calm, competent.

  "Please, don't hurt her-"

  Ben's last word was buried beneath a single pop from off to his right, closely followed by two more as the man behind Marina sank down and toppled backward, to slide in fading thuds and scrapes down into the ravine and the darkness below.

  Marina lunged forward and Ben leapt toward her. They slammed into each other's arms and tumb
led to the ground. The gun dropped from Ben's hand and, unknown to him, Marina reached down and picked it up.

  As the soldiers moved in around them, Bass spotted Ben and his face contorted in a scowl. Marina saw the subtle movement as the motion of Bass’s pistol shifted and he brought the weapon up toward Ben. She shouted once and her firearm discharged before she had conscious thought of it. A burst of pink cloud from Bass's right side and the gun fell to the ground, Bass on top of it, squirming in the dust and stones.

  The soldiers began shouting all around them again as Marina let the weapon fall to the ground, her fingers splayed out wide and her hands in clear sight. Bass's remaining man dropped his gun and Kantor's raised their hands high, pointing their weapons straight to the sky above them.

  The Israeli soldiers moved in and grabbed the weapons, taking the gunmen down to the ground as they did so until all of them were lying prone in the dust, their hands pressed against the back of their heads. An uzi- bearing gunmen stood over them, alert and scanning the area. A lone couple of tourists popped out from a hiding place and ran over the eastern wall, hissing at each other in something Scandinavian as they fled the scene. The gunmen let them go.

  One of the soldiers lifted Bass to a sitting position and secured the weapon that lay beside them. A bullet had grazed the soldier’s chest, passing through a bit of flesh, before lodging soundly in his upper arm, which now hung paralyzed at his side, clutched in his other hand. He all but ignored the pain, securing the scene just as if he had not been injured at all.

  Then Dr. Ahud stepped over the rise to the west, panting and drenched in sweat. "Not the professor or the woman… let them up. Where are they?”

  "They're over here, Doctor." The soldier with the limp arm called the IAA official over, an escort of two more armed men moving over with him.

  "Get them up!"

  A quick pat-down for weaponry and the escorting soldiers complied, one even smiling at Ben as he pulled up on his arm to help him stand. Marina refused assistance, glaring at the men with much the same look she had used on Bass and Kantor's thugs.

  "Dr. Ahud?" Ben asked.

  The moustachioed man nodded and took Ben's hand. "You have had a close call here," he said, "I am glad I decided to take your call seriously."

  "Me too." Ben looked around the scene, at the bodies and at the men lying prone with plastic ties around their wrists. The soldiers stood almost casually above them now, smoking firearms in their hands and the odd cigarette already lit and smouldering away in the orange glow of the sunset. Ben wondered how they could be so calm, even if they were professionals. How does anybody get used to that? Had it not been for them, though… He turned back to Ahud, nodded a thanks. "I figured you couldn't dare do otherwise, considering the stakes."

  "And yet you would be surprised how many such claims we get, and how many of them turn out to be hoaxes, poor forgeries, or simple delusion."

  Ben smiled.

  Ahud nodded.

  There was an awkward pause.

  "So which is this, Professor Gela?” Ahud asked. “Obviously these men took it seriously, or they wouldn’t all be here, causing mayhem and scandal. Where is this trove of artefacts that has eluded archeologists on this mound for generations?"

  Ben thought for a moment, running the text over and over in his head. Then he threw his head back and barked out a loud laugh.

  Ahud looked sour. So this one is delusion, he thought to himself, And I hauled myself up that hill for nothing! Should have let them each take care of the other and simply come to pick up the bodies…

  "Ben?" Marina asked, wondering herself if the pressure had become too much for the academic.

  "Sorry, sorry," Ben said, shaking his head, "But it just occurred to me where it is, exactly where it is."

  "Yes?" prompted Dr. Ahud.

  "I can tell you," Ben smiled at the IAA director, shaking his head, "But you're not going to like it."

  THIRTY-SIX

  The sun was rising hot behind them as they looked down at the gathering people and vehicles. Ben and Marina had been given a place in the administration tents, courtesy of Dr. Ahud and the archeologists he had assigned to plan the preliminary dig. Funding had been no problem. Money had flowed in almost faster than they could do the administrative work to receive it. The valley below Masada looked more like a tent city now, than the barren, rocky place it had been for millennia.

  The fortress rose high in the background as Marina pulled out the transcript, now neatly typed and bound in a field booklet, of the whole of the text of the Silver Scroll.

  "It makes so much sense now," she said, "Especially once you know the story."

  Ben nodded, the words passing through his mind again:

  We, the Sons of Light, have witnessed this. I, the scribe of silver, submit to this word and make record of this covenant. We laid it here, beneath the mountain of the last day of the final battle, and here we shall stand fast over it. The enemy has done with great effort what we could not have achieved. The LORD has decreed it, God has made it thus, and there shall it lay until the gold is held aloft.

  As he finished the words, Ben's eyes travelled from the fortress high above them to the base of the great rampart, so tenaciously built by the Roman soldiers two thousand years before. He wondered what it was they would find beneath the thousands of tons of earth and rubble those ancient soldiers had piled there. He wondered if they would ever find anything, if anything had survived the many tons of stone and sand, and the many years. They would try though, that was certain. The first tunnel would go in on the following morning. After that, if nothing was found, a secondary site would be determined, based on subterranean scans and the best guesses of experts and administrators. If something were hidden beneath that massive structure, it would have lain undisturbed for two thousand years, perhaps waiting for this time to once again see the light of the sun.

  "So now we have some time… tell me."

  "Tell you what?"

  "Why you think your Jewish name is so complicated."

  "Really?"

  "Really. It's a good spot for it, isn't it?"

  He thought for a moment. Yes, he thought, it probably is.

  "Why don't you start with your mom."

  He smiled. "I suppose that's a good place."

  "She was Jewish?"

  "A convert, not long after I was born."

  "And your father?"

  "My biological father, I don't know. He knew about me, supposedly, but didn't stick around."

  "Why 'supposedly' — you think your mom lied?"

  "I just can't imagine it, I guess. Who could not care?"

  "Maybe there was more to it. There usually is."

  "Anyway, the man my mother married, Maurice Gela, was a good man, a Jew from the stock that made it through the Holocaust. Some came out bitter and hard. Not Dad. He was a good man. Sad, often, but he loved to laugh too."

  "He died?"

  "Liver cancer. He was seventy-four."

  "So why is it so complicated then, your Jewishness?"

  "I have no Jewish blood. I'm just an American kid whose ancestors came over from England to strike it rich, and wound up striking it mediocre in a big way."

  "But your mom converted. You were raised as a Jew?"

  "From age ten I was. But this is the thing: could she have converted to Italianism, my mother? No. Could she have converted to being Greek? No. That would be silly. One can't just decide a thing like that."

  "That's not the same thing though."

  "Isn't it? I'm not a religious person, not particularly — so what's left?"

  "You're still Jewish though, right? You can't stop being Jewish."

  "Then how could I have started being Jewish?"

  "Then why not say you're not Jewish?"

  "Because," he looked her in the eye and held his hands out to either side in a shrug of helplessness, "I'm Jewish."

  She smiled and leaner up against him. They watched the men cordon off the ar
ea where the digging would start in a few short hours.

  "It's right there," she said, "Under there. No wonder they've never found it before… it might as well be under a mountain."

  "Yeah," Ben nodded, "They sure didn't shy away from a little work back then, did they?"

  The Christmas tree had filled the house with that sweet-but-bitter pine smell. The candles Mimi insisted on keeping alight from December first until the fifteenth of January added a heavy, cranberry flavour to the air and above it all, drawing out saliva like a magnet, was the warm smell of roasted turkey.

  David sat in his weathered leather armchair, his slippered feet up on the coffee table and a heavy tumbler of Scotch held casually in one hand, a half-smoked cigar in the other. Ben lay sideways on the sofa across from him, his feet up and his eyes on the crackling fire. He, likewise, held a tumbler and a cigar — it was the only time of year that Mimi allowed the smoking of them in the house. It had become another one of those rare treats that the Christmas season brought with it. Along with painful memory.

  "Mimi's fond of her," David spoke into the silence, as if the conversation had been started and he was merely filling in his part.

  "Is she." Not a question.

  "Yup."

  "And you?"

  "She seems a fine girl."

  "Yes, I think so."

  "The two of you went through some things over there."

  Ben nodded.

  "Seems she stood by you pretty well."

  Ben turned to look at him, saying nothing.

  "Yes, Ben, I think so."

  "You think what? I didn't say anything."

  "I think this is the fulfilment of what I promised to do — for now, anyways. Up to you, from here on in.”

  "What you promised…?"

  "Donna. What I promised Donna." He paused. "I think she would approve."

  Ben looked into the fire. He knew without looking that David's eyes were fighting back tears, working hard at not showing emotion that was so easily evident on his face anyway. But Ben, too, struggled when he spoke of his late wife, especially there, in that room. Especially on the Holidays.