by Gregg Loomis
What were they after?
His question was answered moments later when the ground shook with a muffled explosion.
Faful’s first reaction was even more puzzlement. Why would they blow up the Alabaster Tomb? If it was antiquities they were after, destroying the work already done at the dig was going to also destroy what they wanted. Besides, the sound would draw the police.
Unless these men had arranged otherwise.
A few Egyptian pound notes of baksheesh could guarantee the indifference of all three street-level law-enforcement agencies-municipal police, Tourist Police or Central Security Forces-to any event smaller than a nuclear blast.
That still left the question, why?
Less than a hundred yards away and nearly a hundred feet down, Lang played his flashlight on the water gathering around his feet. Only an inch or so a few minutes ago, it was trickling over the top of his ankle-high boots now.
He sensed Rossi was making the same observation. “How long do you think it will take to run out of air or drown if we stay here?”
“Do not think of such things. Our crew will dig us out before there is even such a possibility.”
Lang started to say that if, as he believed, an explosion had sealed them in, the crew above were probably not free to rescue anyone. They were either dead, wounded or being restrained from taking action.
Instead, he said, “On the off chance they can’t do it quickly enough, is there another exit here somewhere?”
The fact oxygen was getting thinner and thinner in the air provided one answer he didn’t want to hear.
“Wealthy Greeks and pre-Christian Romans were entombed in sepulcra, what we would today call mausoleums, rather than simple tombs. They were like small houses, complete with wall paintings, sculpture and housewares. We are in a rather elaborate example. It was customary to leave a small hole at the top so visitors, family and friends of the deceased might share food and wine with the spirit of the dead.”
“So, there would be one here?”
The doubt in Rossi’s tone was not encouraging. “Possibly, but this hole would have never been large enough for an adult to get through.”
“But it would at least let in air.”
“My friend, this tomb has been here for more than two millennia, below ground level for almost as long. Whatever aperture might have existed in the ceiling would have long been sealed by dirt and vegetation.”
“True,” Lang agreed, “but two thousand years of debris and vegetation has got to be easier digging than solid rock.” He shifted his light to the ceiling. “And trying to find it beats waiting to either suffocate or drown.”
“But my crew…,” Rossi protested.
“If they are able to dig us out, swell. I, for one, don’t intend to bet my life on it.”
Muttering among some of the crew who had come down here with them suggested they shared Lang’s feelings.
Lang swept the beam of his flashlight upward. Where the ceiling had fallen, roots of vegetation grasped downward like bony fingers.
“I doubt you will find anything,” Rossi commented.
“Better hope I do. In case you haven’t noticed, the water is already halfway to my waist and rising.”
Although he couldn’t see it in the darkness, Lang would have bet Rossi was in the midst of a very Italian shrug. “Even if you find such a thing, how will you reach it?”
Good question.
Iris Garden, Atlanta
Gurt took Manfred by the hand, keeping her voice level. “We will go home now.”
“Aw, Mom,” the little boy protested, “Wynn Three and Grumps and me were just beginning to have fun.” His eyes flicked to her face, noting she was unpersuaded. “And Wynn Three doesn’t have to…”
Another look at his mother’s face told him the argument, if there had been one, was over.
Paige, startled by the abruptness of Gurt’s decision to leave, asked, “What…?”
But she was speaking to Gurt’s back.
Her hand clasping Manfred’s, the other on the butt of the Glock in her pocket, Grumps grudgingly following, Gurt climbed the gentle hill, feet planted firmly through the crust of ice with each step. When she reached street level, she had a better view of her surroundings. Randy’s SUV was still parked in front of her house, although the tinted glass prevented her from seeing if he was in it. After his insistence on accompanying her, she doubted he would have returned to the vehicle while she was still in the park.
She almost missed it: about a hundred yards away, a streak, a trough in the coating of ice on the hillside on the opposite side of the park, where it looked like something had been dragged. Her eyes followed the trail to a pair of frozen shallow ponds connected by a short stream, that part of the park directly across from the house. The ice on the lower pool had been broken and something was extending out of it, something that could be a fallen branch, explaining the shattered ice or…
Or a human arm.
The distance was too great to be sure, but she wasn’t going to delay reaching the security of the house to find out. She increased her pace, almost dragging Manfred in her haste.
Then she stopped. Ambling toward her was one of Atlanta’s homeless, a man pushing a grocery-store cart filled to overflowing with an assortment of rags, a clear plastic trash bag of tin cans and junk she could not identify.
Agency training had made her permanently aware of her surroundings, alert to anomalies. With ice on the ground and the temperature below freezing, anyone with a modicum of sanity would have sought refuge in any of a number of the city’s shelters or, at least, found a steam vent over which to camp. His clothes, an orange ski jacket and heavy sweat pants, though dirty, were not torn, not the ragged hand-me-downs that were the uniform of most of society’s jetsam. Add to these observations the fact that no stringy hair hung out from beneath the watch cap and he appeared to have shaved recently.
The shoes were the clincher, sneakers that looked like one of the more expensive Nike models. The footwear was always the giveaway. Although a torn and laceless pair would have been more in keeping with the persona someone was trying to create, no professional was going to risk wearing anything not securely bound to the foot. A fight in which a shoe might come off with a kick, a chase in which pursuer or pursued lost the race because of the loss of a shoe… No, shoes were the one part of a disguise no one who knew what he or she was doing would compromise.
Stifling her impulse to just pick Manfred up and flee, Gurt bent over, pretending to adjust his jacket and giving her an opportunity to look behind without obviously doing so. She was not surprised to see a second man, his lower face covered by a muffler shoved into the turned-up collar of his overcoat.
Miles?
He had promised to have a man or two keep watch, like the one who had come out of nowhere the night of the attempted firebombing. But this was no surveillance, not two men in this weather, converging at once on a sidewalk glazed with ice. She recognized the classic maneuver intended to surround an enemy before he was aware of what was happening.
For an instant, she considered brandishing the Glock. Perhaps seeing that she was armed would make whoever these men were back off. Unlikely. More probable they were armed, too. A sudden display of a weapon could precipitate gunplay with the chance of a stray shot hitting Manfred.
No, surprise was her only logical weapon, to continue as though she suspected nothing, turning on the false tramp at the last moment. Nonchalantly, she shifted Manfred to her other side, the one away from the approaching stranger.
Usually, in dangerous situations, her mind seemed to slow down as it worked out points of attack, favorable angles and the like. As she closed with the homeless look-alike, she thought about a quick shot through her coat, another at the man behind before he could react. No, foolish. What if, as improbable as it sounded, they were exactly what they appeared to be: a hobo and a guy just coincidentally walking down a quiet residential street?
Mostly,
though, she was considering Manfred’s safety.
And where the hell were Miles’s people?
Cemetery of Terra Santa
If there had been any doubt as to their peril, it was dispelled by the sound of rushing water. The flooding of the corridor outside had apparently defeated the braces against the water pressure on its walls. Water was up to Lang’s waist and he was taking two or three deep breaths at a time just to keep a minimum of air in his lungs. He was experiencing a mild dizziness, the first signs of oxygen starvation. He could hear the crew panting in the dark like a pack of exhausted dogs as the lights on their miner’s helmets moved, fruitlessly seeking an escape route.
“I don’t think we can wait for your people,” he gulped to Rossi.
“You have a plan?” Rossi croaked back.
“Maybe.”
Lang played his light around the chamber until it centered on the place the stone slab had become invisible underwater. Moving slowly to conserve breath, he sloshed through the water until his foot touched something solid. With the next step, he climbed on top.
“That will help little,” Rossi gasped. “The water will continue to rise. You will drown on that piece of rock.”
Lang shook his head. “Not if I’m not on it.”
“But, how…?”
Rossi’s gaze followed Lang’s flashlight to the roots hanging from the ceiling. “You cannot reach them. Even if you could-”
“I appreciate your eternal optimism,” Lang snapped a little harsher than he had intended. “How about a little help instead?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m guessing if there was a hole in the ceiling of this sepulcrum, it would be right over where the sarcophagus was.”
“So? It is nearly ten meters high. You cannot reach it.”
Rather than expend breath uselessly, Lang swung his light among the now-silent crew. Picking the smallest man he could see, he beckoned. “You, come here.”
“Dante,” Rossi said. “His name is Dante, like the poet.”
Rossi translated and the man cautiously joined Lang on the stone slab. Lang handed him a hand pick one of the crew had dropped and said haltingly, waiting for Rossi to translate each phrase while pointing to the roots overhead, “Dante, here is what we’re going to do: you climb onto my shoulders and see if you can snare one of those roots with the pick. Do you think you can climb it?”
Dante, short, squat and muscular, listened to Rossi and nodded enthusiastically, beginning to see hope where there had been none before.
Lang continued, using his hands to illustrate. “When you get close enough, I want you to use that pick to dig just above us, capisce? ”
He waited for Rossi’s translation, just to make sure.
Dante nodded understanding again, this time smiling.
On the first attempt, the poet’s namesake leaped from Lang’s shoulders, pick extended, missed a large cluster of roots and splashed into the rapidly accumulating water. Though the effort would have produced howls of laughter under normal circumstances, no one even chuckled.
Dante climbed onto Lang’s shoulders again, this time directing the light on his miner’s helmet from one clump of roots to another before making a decision. Lang let go of the man’s ankles as Dante leaped again. This time he succeeded in grasping a tangle of roots, climbing upward with the agility of a monkey. Had the task not been far from complete, Lang would have congratulated himself on his choice of men.
There was still a long way to go, and the humid air was getting thinner as the water rose.
Almost without thought, Lang transferred his BlackBerry and wallet from his pants pocket to the one in his shirt.
His one arm and his legs wrapped around the root cluster to hold him in place, Dante took a one-handed swing at the roof of dirt, roots and remnants of stone ceiling. He was rewarded by being pelted with a curtain of loose dirt. Undeterred, he took another swing with the same result. Below, the crew, the lamps on their helmets trained upward, watched in silence. The only sounds were the bite of Dante’s pick accompanied by the splash of detritus freed from the earthy roof, and the collective gasps for breath.
Even if Dante succeeded in opening a hole to the ground above, only one of their problems would be solved, the almost-depleted supply of oxygen. The water would rise to wherever the normal table was and no farther, leaving them still below the surface. Anyone who couldn’t swim, or at least tread water, until help arrived would be in serious danger of drowning.
Help.
Once again, Lang thought of the members of the crew Rossi had left aboveground. He had heard no shots since the explosion that had blocked the exit from this chamber, but the fact no one had come to their assistance was ominous.
Lang temporarily forgot the question of those above-ground as a crack of light appeared above his head. With Dante’s next swing of the pick, chunks of dirt and stone crashed into the water below, scattering several crew members who, like Lang, had been watching the little Italian’s progress.
Almost immediately, there was a grumble of crumbling earth and a shriek. Lang would have rejoiced at the speck of daylight that appeared had it not been for a falling object plummeting from the surface above. Like a bird shot in flight, a white-clad form tumbled through the hole, smashing into the water below. It took Lang a full second to recognize the object as human, someone who seemed to be wrapped in sheets. He joined the group gathered around. A man, either dead or stunned, lay in the still-rising water. He wore what Lang guessed was Bedouin robes but there was nothing Semitic about his facial features: they were decidedly Asian. The gun that had fallen with him was unmistakable. The bullpup configuration, action and trigger in front of the magazine identified it as a QBZ type 95/97, a relatively new Chinese assault weapon that was replacing the Kalashnikov knock-off that had been the primary small arm of the People’s Liberation Army.
Lang snatched it from the water just as a burst of gunfire from above churned the water not five feet away, sending the gathered crew frantically splashing toward the far edges of the chamber.
Lang lunged to his left, grasping the unfamiliar QBZ in one hand. The gun had made its first public appearance when the PLA marched in to reoccupy Hong Kong, long after Lang had left the Agency and its recurring training in contemporary firearms. Happily, he still browsed the gun publications frequently enough to know what he held, if not exactly how it worked. Muzzle velocity, clip capacity and caliber were a number of details Lang would have liked to know, but now was hardly time for a familiarization lecture. The one thing he did know was that this automatic rifle would provide firepower vastly superior to the Browning in its holster at his back.
If only he could figure out what was the safety and what was the fire selector.
Another fusillade ripped the water, this time close enough to shower him.
Shit! He still wore his miner’s helmet, with its light providing a perfect target. One sweep of a hand sent it spinning into dusky shadows and drawing yet more fire.
He ducked, spinning farther into the nightlike shade provided by what was left of the mausoleum’s roof. Now he was standing in darkness, looking up at a patch of sunlit sky. Reaching to his belt, he removed the flashlight he had jammed into it, turned it on and tossed it toward the circle of light playing off the room’s flooded floor.
It had barely splashed before a man’s head and shoulders appeared at the rim of the hole above. A ragged flame of muzzle flash jetted in the direction of the flashlight.
The Chinese rifle was too short to steady comfortably against his shoulder and squeeze the trigger at the same time. One hand on the forward grip, the other on the trigger, Lang pointed and held on tightly as the gun bucked in his hands, its blast deafening in the confines of the burial chamber.
For a second, he could only hear the ringing of his ears. There was no sign of the man at whom he had fired.
How could he have missed with such a clear target?
His question was answered a
split second later as a figure leaned over the edge of the opening as though to shout something to those below. It slowly tumbled through the hole. The bright light from above showed another white robe, this one punctuated with a series of red splotches.
As his hearing slowly returned, Lang became aware of two sounds. Someone, one of Rossi’s crew from above, was shouting something as he tossed a rope ladder into the opening. The other was the vibrating wail of approaching sirens.
Even the Alexandria police had a limit as to how much they could ignore.
Ansley Park
Gurt was slightly more than an arm length away from the street person when he stopped. “Ms. Fuchs? I need to speak with you.”
The use of her name, one she had never changed, was uncommon among her contemporary friends and associates. She had found it easier to respond to Mrs. or Ms. Reilly than explain, the reason she had not corrected Randy as they left the house… what, less than an hour ago?
“Who are you?” she demanded.
He gave a smile that wasn’t a lot warmer than the ice on the ground. “A friend, a friend who’s here to help you.”
Gurt took a step back, conscious of the man behind her. “Why do you think I need help?”
The man’s smile didn’t move. “Because there are some very bad people who want to hurt you and your family. If you’ll just come quietly along with me…” He pointed to a black Chevrolet Suburban that hadn’t been there a second before but was now slowly cruising down the street. “We can take you to a safe place.”
Gurt indicated the house with a jut of her chin. “My house is safe.”
The tramp peered over her shoulder, obviously gauging if his partner, the man in the overcoat, was going to be any help. “Ms. Fuchs, I have orders to move you to safety. Your preference is not, repeat, not, a factor. You have quite a reputation for being able to defend yourself and my superiors feared you could be difficult. That’s why this street-bum getup, so I could at least get close enough to speak with you, try to reason without getting an arm broken.”