The Jewel of Babylon (The Unusual Operations Division Book 1)

by Jacob Hammes

  With pleading eyes and a curious attitude, Bishop looked back to Marcus. He knew what the man wanted and reluctantly gave it to him; the last little chemical light the two had. It was still light enough in the room with the lights on the ground so that if the flashlights stopped working they could find their ways back, but the fact that the place was creeping Marcus out made it hard to let the little tube go.

  “Here goes nothing,” Bishop said as he cracked the last chemical light and shook it vigorously. Marcus could not complain as he would have done the same thing. The two curious men were shoulder to shoulder as Bishop raised his hand up over the ledge of the hole. Now that they knew a bottom to the hole existed, they felt a little braver and moved the last few inches to the opening.

  Light from the chemical tube spilled across the sleek sides of the cave as it fell. The twisting tube seemed to take forever, falling gracefully end over end through the dark hole before finally meeting whatever the bottom was composed of. It bounced off something, and then something else before finally coming to a stop in a place that Bishop could not have picked better himself.

  It took a moment to figure out what exactly the two were looking at. There were too many shapes to discern one from the other at first. The bottom looked like tree limbs had been cut and piled there for the last century as cylindrical shapes and tubular objects were jetting this way and that. It was a good thirty seconds before either one could finally tell what was actually littered across the bottom of the pit.

  Marcus was the first to say anything.

  “Dear Jesus,” he whispered.

  “It’s a book,” Cynthia said from inside the cave. “The thing looks ancient and it’s got the Nazi symbol on it with the swastika burned off. I can’t really tell in this light and I can’t read German but it may be a log of all the stuff in here.”

  “Why not?” joked Brenda loudly.

  “Because Mandarin and Spanish took up all my time,” Cynthia retorted.

  “Who can’t speak Spanish?” Brenda replied.

  “I can read German,” the pilot at the end of the cave said. “Bring it down here, I’ll tell you what it says.”

  Cynthia turned to leave, her flashlight showing a little speck of what the massive cave was hiding. She did not get far. Instead, there came a strange noise from inside the cave. A sort of guttural cry escaped her mouth and then as quick as that, the door slammed shut. The last thing Brenda saw was the light flash past her eyes as Cynthia pulled the M4 up on its sling, pointing it at something the others could not see.

  “Cynthia,” Stephen yelled, shouldering his own rifle and running to meet the door. His shoulder met the wood with enough force to send it flying from its hinges, but the door did not budge. Like it had been glued in place, the door was as solid as the day it was made; the bolt somehow stuck back into its original place.

  It did not stop the big black man, however. He simply started kicking the door with all his might, trying with every ounce in his massive body to splinter the thing to smithereens. Were this any other door, he was sure it would have blasted open by now, but something strange was going on here and he could feel it. The pain in his foot was starting to grow with every pumping kick.

  Light started flickering from the bulbs above. Like an ancient haunted house, the bulbs flickered lamely at first with electric noises like static discharges before growing brighter and brighter. In no time at all, the ancient bulbs were flooding the cave with light. All the small shadows disappeared and for the first time the team could see the full extent of the cavern.

  All along each wall were small, almost invisible carvings, so shallow that Stephen wondered if he would feel them if he brushed his hand along them. He didn’t stop to wonder why he had not seen them though. Each carving was nearly caked over with dirt and mud.

  Stephen dropped his weapon so he could place more weight against the door. He could hardly stand the noise coming from the other side. It was like she was being tortured to death. Her screams could not have been louder; they were echoing through the hefty planks of oak that made the door like they were sheets of paper. It made his skin crawl, thinking that something crazy was going on just inches away and he was powerless to stop it.

  “David, get down there!” Brenda screamed. David was standing, still as a statue just like before. She wondered if the man had even blinked since then and knew that he would start drooling soon with that open mouth. He was either completely astounded by what was happening or nearly catatonic. Brenda guessed the second one was right.

  “David!” she tried again, kicking the man in the shin with her good foot. He was rigid, still, and did not register the painful blow. There had to be something she could do, but Brenda could hardly stand the pain in her ankle as it was. What could she do against a solid oak door?

  The M4 rifle was too far away from her to do any good if she needed it. She put the laptop aside, which she had inadvertently stood up with, and noticed something. Its screen was black. She had not run out of battery nor had she shut the computer down, yet the screen was showing nothing as if the power supply had been taken out.

  If there were one chance for Brenda to snap David from his stupor, it would have to be the pistol strapped across her chest. The M9 Beretta pistol held 12 rounds in a magazine and one in its chamber so she did not have to load the weapon. A 9mm round had enough of a crack to shatter the ears of every man in the cave or at least leave them ringing for a week or two. She pulled the gun from its holster, aimed it at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger.

  Marcus finally discerned what he was looking at against the horrible glow of the green chemical light. Somehow, after a bounce or two the stick came to rest directly in the eye socket of a man’s skull. Its light was spilling out across a floor of bones.

  “My God,” Marcus said. “It’s a mass grave.”

  It seemed colder suddenly, looking down on all those corpses. Some, from what Marcus could tell, were very old. Bones with nothing but old clothes to cover them were buried, mostly out of sight. Others seemed not so old, perhaps months dead at the most. Flesh and even facial features were evident on some.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Bishop said. “We need to repot this whole place and frankly, I’d rather not spend another minute in this cave.”

  Marcus agreed. The place was terrifying, especially now that they knew a hole filled with bodies was their only company.

  Like someone had flipped a switch, the flashlights on each of the men’s weapons flickered out leaving them with only the weak green light from the scattered chemical lights. Marcus stopped dead in his tracks, knowing that two lights going out at the same time was not a coincidence. He could feel it; something was with them.

  He turned back around, toward the gaping hole in the cave for its light and watched, horrified as the corpses seemed to shift. Maybe the skull was moving, grinning up at them with teeth that looked spooky by themselves, let alone the fact that they had been bathed in unnatural green luminescence. Marcus couldn’t tell at first what was happening. Maybe the skull was full of bugs and they were flooding over the light.

  Then it hit them. Somehow, the light was sinking into the skull.

  “We need to get out of here,” Bishop whispered again, grabbing Marcus by the shoulder. “This is not good.”

  He shrugged Bishop’s hand away and shouldered his rifle. Something inside the cave was moving besides whatever had just happened in the hole to make that light disappear. Shadows were creeping along the walls. He could see them slowly moving, like the rocks themselves were rotating inside the cave.

  It took a moment of concentration in the nearly complete darkness to see what was happening. It was not the rocks that were moving, nor was something inside the cave moving around in its shadows. The lights themselves were moving, each one by itself. They had somehow found a way to roll amongst the lava rock.

  One of the green glowing lights disappeared to Marcus’ left. It had been one of the lights they had thrown about
the cavern when they had entered. Another one followed in its footsteps and suddenly the expansive cave was becoming very dark and very haunting.

  Two more of the lights disappeared into some hole in the ground before Marcus knew what he had to do. He took off at a dead sprint, leaving his friend only a few steps behind. He had to make it to one of those chemical lights before they were all gone; it would be their only way out of that horrifying cave.

  Over the rocky surface he flew like a track star on a bed of gravel. One of the little cylinders was only a few feet in front of him, rolling sideways toward a small crack in the ground. He could see it moving on its own accord, like some invisible hand was using it as a play thing. It did not deter him—Marcus leapt face first toward the light.

  His outstretched hand was still inches away as the light made the last little roll into the deep, dark crevice. The rest of the chemical lights had all gone away and Marcus watched in horror as this one, too, cast the last of its light against a dark little crack. Its green glow seemed to linger for just a moment before the cave was completely shrouded in darkness.

  Cynthia could hardly stand the horrible racket of the generator. It was screaming in agony, grinding its gears in what was sure to be its last minutes of life. She doubted the thing had even a drop of oil in it. As to how it started, she would wonder about later, she had never performed such miracles with technology before. All she had done was lift the book.

  Cynthia knew she needed to get out of that place and quick.

  The door had somehow blown so forcefully shut she could see the old rusted bolt had dug itself into the rock face again. She tried a few times in vain to open the door, but had to cover her ears against the deafening scream of the generator or risk permanent hearing damage. When she tried to kick the door, it felt like the door had kicked back.

  It was no matter. David and Stephen were on one side while Marcus and Bishop were somewhere farther in the cave. If worse came to worse, she would just wait for Marcus and Bishop to come along and blow the door from its hinges. As for now, whatever type of mischief this horrible cave was up to was intriguing the dark haired woman.

  One book amongst all these boxes was all she found. It sat side by side with something else that seemed oddly out of place; an ancient looking radio. It was made of bronze or copper. Oddly enough it had started playing with the electricity supplied from the generator. Its music was hardly discernible over the roar of the dying generator, but it sounded like something she had heard on an oldies station.

  The haunting melody rose and fell with the pulsing generator, making a hypnotic dance of machine and music. She was hardly afraid, just concerned that her exit had been cut off and that she would have to wait for someone to help her from her present conundrum.

  A symbol on the first page of the book immediately caught her eye. Beautiful jewels in perfect cuts adorned the outsides of a nearly perfect, golden sphere. Below it was something written in German, something she could not read. The sketch was a perfect match of what they suspected John to have taken to the small shop in China. On the very bottom of the page, both in English and German, the words Jewel of Babylon appeared. Cynthia was starting to understand just how important this orb must have been. It was extremely valuable, more so than any of them could have possibly imagined.

  Cynthia slipped the book inside her backpack and shouldered it once more. She was starting to taste the fumes from the generator and felt as if she would need fresh air soon. It was billowing black exhaust into the air. Lord knew how old that fuel was. The music, too, had grown louder. It was screeching over the generator, vying to see who could be the loudest.

  Even with her hands over her ears, the noise was deafening. It was debilitating, made it hard to move, hard to think. It was just too much. She knew that something was very wrong when, as she moved toward the door to try her luck again, it got louder.

  The gunshot had snapped David out of whatever had been going on with him. Brenda was angrily yelling at the man to get a move on down the entrance of the cave to do what he could to help the trapped woman. He was special, gifted with something the rest of the team did not have. David was known as a mute; something in his being muted the Relics and their resonating effects. It was something that came at a cost to the man, something he would always regret discovering.

  David took his first tentative steps down the smooth surface of the cave’s entrance. Brenda goaded him on with what she thought was reassurance. He could feel them back there, behind that door. They were the strongest he had ever felt. Each of them vibrated inside of his head like bullets bouncing from one side of his skull to the other.

  Another step and he was closer, the vibrations building their intensity with every centimeter of his approach. He could hardly stand it, it was painful. His fingernails dug into his palms and his huge biceps flexed against the pain. “How could they ask me to do such a thing,” he wondered. Why couldn’t they just get out of the cave and get away from this terrible place.

  Three more steps and he had tears streaking down his face. It was as if every step brought him closer to a burning inferno of pain. Stephen waved him in their direction, hoping he could talk some sense into the big guy.

  It was no use. He felt like something was blocking his path. David had stopped dead in his tracks again. Nothing was worth that pain. Nothing was worth it.

  “Marcus,” Bishop whispered into the dark. He had lost sight of his friend when the last of the green glow lights had disappeared down the crack. Bishop had been a few feet away still when the lights had gone out and now he was stepping as lightly as possible, trying not to fall on the uneven ground.

  “I’m here,” Marcus said. “I missed that light by less than a hair.”

  A sound echoed through the cave like dripping water. Marcus wondered if it had been there before or if the darkness had just heightened his sense of hearing. He didn’t know but he did not like it.

  “Do you have any more chem-lights in that bag of yours?” Bishop asked kneeling down in the dark by what he thought was Marcus.

  “Nope,” Marcus answered. “You threw the last one down that hole back there.”

  “Any ideas, then?” he asked his friend.

  “Muzzle flash,” Marcus said, half joking.

  Another sound, unfamiliar this time, echoed through the oppressive darkness. Like rock grinding on rock, a grating sound now filled the black void. The mere thought of something in the cave with them made Marcus’ hair stand on end. He was absolutely certain that the new sound had not been there before. He would have noticed something so unnatural.

  It had to be a snake, Marcus thought.

  “Get on my back,” Marcus said, reaching out through the darkness toward where he thought Bishop had been. Bishop was doing the same thing, only a few feet away, but in a vastly different direction.

  “Come on,” Bishop said. “I’m trying to find you but I can’t see anything in here. Give me a hint.”

  The noise was coming closer, moving faster. Marcus swore he could hear a raspy breath.

  “That’s it,” Marcus said and pointed his weapon in the air. “Plug your ears!”

  Light burst from the barrel as Marcus pulled the trigger, sending a slug bouncing off through the cave from the hard ceiling above. He was just able to see his friend in the quick strobe along with something else. It looked like a man, or the silhouette of one, over near the opening of the pit.

  Marcus grabbed Bishop in the darkness and pulled him around so that their backs were touching.

  “You shoot one magazine and I’ll shoot one magazine until we get to the opening,” Marcus said, trying very hard to control the fear in his voice. The volume at which he spoke told Bishop he did not care about being quiet anymore.

  The dragging sound was getting louder.

  Bishop fired a round into the air, away from the two slowly moving men. It was his turn to gasp in horror. The quick strobe of the muzzle flash showed not only one shadowy figure, but multipl
e. Beyond the shadow, the silhouette the people cast, Bishop could see nothing but teeth—smiling or growling teeth.

  Bishop fired again, this time toward whatever was in the cave with them. They had checked the cave and found it empty. Someone must have fired off some sort of EMP to disable their lights and had kicked the glow sticks into little holes. The muzzle flash created a strobe light effect, lighting the cave with each three round burst. Marcus did not fire his weapon. Instead he had a hand on Bishop’s shoulder, pulling him backwards as he walked forwards.

  Each round that should have impacted something bounced off some long distant wall.

  Strobe lights always gave Marcus a headache, but he was happy for the effect right now. It let him see both where he was stepping and the mouth of the cave which was only twenty feet off. They could not move quickly, though and Bishop was burning through rounds like he was in a firefight.

  “I’m out,” he shouted. “Switch position!”

  Marcus did as he had been told and quickly started squeezing off rounds into the dark. The first flash horrified him. A wall of figures was close and closing quickly. He could not see faces, nor eyes, just groping hands and outstretched arms and teeth.

  Cynthia was curled in a ball between two crates, sick of waiting for the team to break down the door. She could not approach the screaming generator. It was too loud and was letting off too much smoke. All she could do was hope and pray that soon David and Stephen would get the door unhinged so she could get out of there and curse whoever turned the damned thing on.

  The music was not helping. It was squealing away with some high toned woman’s voice, crying about something she did not understand in what she thought sounded like German. She doubted the existence of cassette players in the 1940’s but knew there had to be something inside of that radio playing a track. There was no way she would be getting reception inside the cave, let alone some ancient radio broadcast.