by Robert Ryan
“A well, maybe,” Hassan said. “Or some kind of catchment for water.”
“Could be. Let’s follow it as far as we can. Don’t worry about depth; let’s just get the top of it exposed, see how big of a structure we’re dealing with.”
Exposing the top of the ridge was relatively easy work, little more than running their hands along either side. They finished just as Mordecai’s wrist computer began to beep, telling them it was time to head up. Stopping their ascent just below the surface to look at what they’d uncovered, through the murky water they saw a jagged circle of rock, at least thirty, maybe forty yards in diameter, completely filled with mud.
“It’s big,” Zeke said.
“Yes,” Mordecai said. “We’re going to need a dredge.”
CHAPTER 56
Mordecai contacted the same industrial dredging company they’d used to clear the salt crust from the sea bottom. Motivated by a $10,000 bonus, a team of technicians completed the job in less than a week. A downward-sloping shaft, eighty yards long and nearly forty in diameter, hewn out of the subterranean rock for an unknown purpose, had been cleared. Only the sea water that flowed into it remained inside.
The dredge operator had told them that the shaft continued past the section he’d cleared. When he’d reached the end of the downward slope and thought he was done, he’d had to remove at least a ton more material because of backfill sliding down from the next section, which inexplicably changed course and sloped upward. With the help of specially trained divers, themselves helped by gravity, they’d cleared that section, at least as far as they could see. Whatever was past that point was beyond the scope of the dredging operation. Only diving could reveal what lay beyond.
While the dredging had gone on, Mordecai had given Zeke and Hassan an intensive course on cave diving. Throughout, his main emphasis had been on safety. They’d be facing many new dangers in the claustrophobic environment of a tunnel. With no light from above to show which way was up, it would be easy to get disoriented. If anything went wrong—and, sooner or later, especially with cave diving, something always did—panic could kill them. They’d have to run a penetration line to show them the way out.
At the shallow depth they’d been working, decompression stops on the way to the surface hadn’t been necessary. But at the bottom of the tunnel, they’d be somewhere around three hundred feet deeper, which would mean several deco stops to avoid the bends. The descent might only take fifteen minutes, but the ascent could take forty-five. Or more.
They’d still be equipped for voice communication, but from that range and with that much solid material between the transmitter and receiver, contact with the surface would almost certainly be impossible. Adding in factors like water density, salinity, temperature and “who knows what,” diver-to-diver might also be lost. They’d spent hours going over hand signals, and Mordecai had emphasized the importance of not getting separated. In that event the penetration line became a lifeline.
On and on it went. Even though Mordecai tried not to overload them with information, the training sessions each ran eight hours.
The 72’ catamaran would be used to manage the dive. Since only Hell Squad members could be used for this part of the dig, that left Leah and Unger to handle the surface duties. While Mordecai trained his underwater team, ex-Israeli Navy commando Joe Dayagi trained Leah and Unger on everything they needed to know.
Now, as dawn broke over the Holy Land, Leah slowly brought the large boat to a perfect stop at the marker buoy they’d left above the entrance to the tunnel. Standing beside her in his monk’s habit, Anthony Unger gave her a thumbs up. Ten feet below, leading to an unknown destination, the mouth of the tunnel waited.
Leah cut the engine. When its rumble finally died out, the unearthly early morning silence of the Dead Sea was jarring. They left the wheelhouse to join the dive team in the control room. Mordecai, Zeke, and Hassan exuded a quiet confidence.
“We’ve been over everything a million times,” Mordecai said, “but if anyone has any questions, we can go over them a million more.”
No one said anything.
“We’ve only got one chance at this,” he said. “No room for mistakes. What’s that thing you always used to say in the Army, Zeke?”
Zeke smiled. “Okay. Let’s do this right. Huddle up.” He held out his hand, palm down. The group picked up their cue, each stacking a hand on top of another. “All right,” Zeke said. “We’re in, we’re out, and nobody gets hurt.” They broke the huddle with a shout.
As they began heading for the stern, Leah grabbed Zeke’s hand and pulled him back. “You better take your advice, buddy. Don’t you dare get hurt down there. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear, girlfriend. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” He patted the St. Peter’s crucifix he’d secured to his belt in a watertight bag.
“You better be.”
She kissed his cheek and they went to join the others. Minutes later she watched their headlamps disappear into the blackness of the Devil’s Sea.
The divers stabilized a few feet above the bottom and Mordecai led the way. He tied the beginning of a reel of cord that would be their penetration line to the anchor line of the boat, letting it unspool as he swam. The extreme buoyancy of the water made the reel virtually weightless. If they needed more than the hundred yards on his reel, Zeke was close behind with another hundred-yard reel that could be linked to the first. Hassan brought up the rear. Both men had a gloved hand sliding along the line to keep it taut and to avoid getting separated from the group.
Mordecai tested the voice comm. “Can you hear me?”
Both men responded in the affirmative, and they followed him into the tunnel.
They swam in silence, their bobbing headlamps casting flickering shadows on the stone that encircled them. Like fireflies coursing through the artery of some impossibly huge sleeping behemoth, they swam inexorably ahead.
The darkness deepened as they went, as if it were a palpable force trying to repel their beams of light. Soon the light no longer reached the surrounding tunnel. Without that boundary to keep them oriented, the sensation became one of floating through an inky void in deep space.
Mordecai glanced over his shoulder. Zeke was only a few feet behind, but his light barely reached Mordecai’s fins. Hassan may as well not have existed at all.
Mordecai finned slowly through the dense black liquid, concentrating intensely on the sliver of light ahead to avoid feelings of disorientation. It was far darker in here than any cave he’d ever been in. If he was starting to feel uneasy, he knew the others must be, too.
Even though everything was going well so far, Hassan felt apprehensive. The extremely poor visibility was bad enough, but there was something else. He sensed an alien presence, a watcher somewhere in the oppressive gloom.
You were talking pretty tough on land, my friend. Now you are afraid of the dark?
No. Of course not. Well, maybe. A little.
As much as he tried not to, he kept looking over his shoulder, fighting the feeling that something might be coming up behind him. Which was ridiculous, since this was a sea in which nothing lived. And even if something was coming up on him, he couldn’t see it anyway. He could barely see his flippers. This place was like a black hole, with a gravitational pull so strong it sucked in all the surrounding light.
In the last few minutes he’d developed a nervous habit. Keeping one hand on the penetration line, he kept swimming over to touch the stone wall of the shaft, just to reassure himself he hadn’t drifted off into complete nothingness. Several times his panic level got dangerously high before his hand felt the hard craggy surface, and he would curse himself for being a superstitious fool.
Just now he was nervous again. His hand had been out for at least a minute and not felt anything. He was going through his usual bag of tricks to quell his rising fear, chiding himself, questioning his manhood, trying to laugh it off.
He concentrated on the feeble beam of his
headlight. Zeke should be just in front of him, but he hadn’t seen him for quite a while. He spoke into the voice-activated microphone inside his full-face mask.
“Zeke? Mordecai? Are you up there?”
Nothing. He tried again. Silence.
The voice comm must be gone. Mordecai had said it probably would be.
He extended his right arm until his fingers began to slide across the welcome hardness. Reluctant to lose contact with the one thing that was keeping him from slipping over some dark precipice within himself, he kept his hand sliding over the craggy surface.
Suddenly the feel of the rock changed. The archaeologist in him snapped to attention. This was a find. He stopped to inspect it, knowing he was falling behind but confident he could catch up quickly by following the penetration line. He shone his headlamp in the direction of the find, but even at only an arm’s length the beam didn’t reach.
As he moved his head closer the light went out. Cursing his bad luck, in the next instant he thanked Mordecai for insisting that each diver have two backup lights. Hassan’s first backup was on his wrist, and only required the turn of a switch. Before turning it on, he ran his hand over the anomaly, wanting to fix its location in his mind before momentarily losing contact.
Softer than the surrounding rock, it felt smooth and spongy to the touch. When he pressed his fingertips against it, it gave slightly, then sprang back. Probing further, his first two fingers left the softness and plunged into a hole of some sort. He moved his fingers around the edges of the cavity. It wasn’t very large, and seemed to have a thin rocklike ridge.
Removing his hand, he clicked on the light on his wrist, reluctantly letting go of the penetration line to swing the light into place. It took several seconds before he found the anomaly.
An involuntary cry escaped from his throat as he jerked his head back.
A dead face stared at him.
His archaeologist’s curiosity quickly took over, and he leaned closer to inspect the bizarre find.
A disembodied skull was embedded in the stone wall of the tunnel. Judging from the amount of decay, Hassan guessed it had been here for centuries, perhaps millennia. Even so, the degree of preservation was remarkable.
Patches of skin still clung to the rotting bone. Gelatinous gray matter, the preserved remains of the eyeballs, bulged from each socket. Though death had long extinguished their luster, some final spark still gave them the appearance of staring in shock at the monstrous cruelty of being left here to rot.
As if to punctuate the horror, the lipless mouth appeared frozen in an eternal scream. The chill crawling up Hassan’s back broke into an icy sprint when he realized that the cavity surrounded by blackened, jagged teeth was where his fingers had just been.
He steadied his breathing and gathered himself. He needed to get moving. He’d fallen way behind.
He attached a small marker buoy to the penetration line to indicate the location where he’d found the skull, then began moving swiftly through the water. The need to reunite with his team temporarily took precedence over any further archaeology. A few minutes later he came to the point the dredge operator had told them about, where the shaft ended its downward slope and started going upwards. The penetration line kept going. He debated whether he should follow it. He looked at his dive computer.
From a depth of ten feet at the entrance to the tunnel, he had descended to a depth of over two hundred. The computer said he’d need two ten-minute decompression stops on the way up.
He had forty-five minutes of air left. If he spent much time exploring that next section of tunnel…
He could afford five more minutes. Then he’d have to turn the dive. The same would have to be true for Mordecai and Zeke. Where were they? Could they have gotten in trouble?
He tried the voice comm again. Nothing. He couldn’t leave without them.
He kicked his fins and entered the upward section. He hadn’t gone far when a spot of light came looming toward him, like the eye of a Cyclops descending into the deep.
A few seconds later Mordecai stopped just short of bumping into him. Using hand signals and gestures, he communicated that, yes, the voice comm wasn’t working, and that it was time to head back. On a small slate he wrote on a small slate that Zeke had insisted on finishing something and would catch up.
Mordecai began to lead them out of the tunnel.
Suddenly Zeke’s world changed.
With startling force his head burst out of the water and into open air. He struggled to get his bearings. From the chest up his body was clear of the sloshing water. He aimed his light to see what was in front of and above him.
The beam glistened off a stretch of damp, craggy rock that continued sloping upward at about a 45-degree angle. At the edge of the beam’s range, about ten yards above, he saw a roughly circular shadow. Encumbered by his equipment, he clipped the reel for the penetration line to a D-ring on his waist, then scrabbled crablike up the slope until he reached the shadow.
It was an opening. He peered inside.
The tunnel went on, flat now, at least as far as he could see. Seventy-five yards at least. He clambered up onto the flat stretch and considered whether to go on. His sudden emergence from the water hadn’t allowed for a decompression stop, but he didn’t feel any symptoms of nitrogen sickness. He needed to get back but desperately wanted to go on. This might be the tunnel to Hell. He couldn’t come this far and turn around without some idea of where it led.
He felt all right. Fatigued, but not sick. Maybe he’d gotten lucky on the bends.
Ten more minutes wouldn’t kill him. He set his timer, then took off his tank and fins, leaving his booties on. Their hard rubber soles weren’t designed for this rough terrain, but they were better than nothing. He began walking ahead, focusing his light on the ground. For all he knew, his next step could bring him to the edge of a sheer underground cliff.
The ground was much drier here. Thirty to forty yards in diameter, the shaft appeared to be mostly rock, with damp earth here and there in the nooks and crannies. He’d gone about a hundred yards when it abruptly changed course.
It was going down again. His light only revealed the first ten yards or so. It was clear of water, so he decided to venture a little farther.
In the otherwordly silence, he jumped when his wrist alarm went off. He decided he could spare just a few more minutes to get a feel for this new stretch of tunnel.
He’d only gone ten or fifteen steps into it when he began to feel uneasy. The distance from the boat, everything he had to negotiate to get back to it, the fact that he had no help if anything went wrong—all were factors in the sense of dread slowly coiling itself around his psyche. But there was something more.
A palpable sense of foreboding hung in the air down here, almost seeming to ooze from the walls, closing in around him. Still he pressed ahead.
Finally he stopped and probed the darkness all around, looking for any distinctive feature to mark his place before he left.
A gasp escaped his throat.
A skull was embedded in the stone wall.
Zeke moved warily toward it until the lifeless face hovered only a few feet from his own. Shadows danced in the empty eye sockets. Caused by his shifting light, they gave the disturbing impression that the thing had come to life. Something about the skull’s features hinted to Zeke of a sneer.
His imagination was running away with him. That could be a sign of nitrogen narcosis. He needed to get out of here and come back fresh. He turned to go, but was unable to resist shining his light on the opposite wall before he went.
Another skull hung there, its hollow eyes seeing nothing—yet seeing everything. He shone the light first at one, then the other, back and forth, back and forth.
They looked like two sentinels, two diabolic guardians, decorating either side of an entranceway.
CHAPTER 57
An hour later they were all safely aboard the catamaran. After quick showers, the divers grabbed bottled
waters and met in the control room, where Leah and Unger waited anxiously to hear what had happened.
“It’s a tunnel of some sort,” Mordecai said. “Where it goes, and for what purpose, we can’t know until we do a full investigation. It goes down, then up. We were five, ten minutes into the into the uphill section when I realized Hassan was no longer behind us. I went to check on him while Zeke kept going as far as he could. I’ll let Zeke tell what he found.”
“From the point where you turned around, the upward slope goes another twenty, thirty yards, then—all of a sudden—it breaks free of the water. It’s still underground, but somehow it’s above the level of the water and you’re on dry land. From there the slope goes up another ten yards or so, then levels off, like a plateau. That section runs for about another hundred yards, then it starts going down again. The downward section was free of water too, at least what I could see. I only went a little ways into it, because I knew I had to get back. How far it goes and where to, there’s only one way to find out.”
Mordecai nodded. “We can figure out that plan in the War Room.”
“I didn’t tell you the most bizarre part,” Zeke said. “In that last downward section, there were two skulls embedded in the walls. One on each side, like decorative sentinels, guarding an entranceway.”
“I saw one too,” Hassan said. He described the skull. “The worst was the eyes. There seemed to be a spark of life left in them. Shock. Like they couldn’t believe this was happening. I never looked to see if there was one on the other wall.”
“Did you have the feeling something else was in the tunnel?” Zeke asked. “A presence?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Those skulls would make anyone feel uneasy,” Zeke said, “but it was more than that.”
“Uneasy,” Hassan said. “A good word to describe it. Mordecai, I can think of no reason for these skulls to be there. Can you?”
He shrugged. “Mining went on in this general area thousands of years ago, when it was dry land. Slaves were used to work in the mineshafts, digging out the copper that gave rise to the Bronze Age. Sodom and Gomorrah would have existed during that period. Who knows? Maybe if a worker got too slow, they lopped off his head and stuck it up there, as an example to keep the other workers in line.”