Christopher, Paul - Templar 01

by The Sword of the Templars

  “Doc, you’re getting spooky again,” Peggy warned.

  “Sorry.”

  “The passage is splitting,” called out Wanounou in the lead.

  Ahead of them the passage split in two, the left fork narrower, the roof a lowered flat slab at about room height. The right fork was wider than the one they stood in, an extension of the same soaring crack in the earth. Holliday and Peggy joined the professor.

  “Which way?” Holliday asked.

  “It’s a toss-up,” answered Wanounou. “It’s not as though they put up a sign.”

  “Just like the highways,” laughed Holliday.

  “I say we go right,” said Peggy firmly. “Actually I’d like to just get the hell out of here, but that would mean going back up that stupid staircase and I don’t think I could deal with that right now, so I say we go right. Maybe they’ll have a Starbucks at the other end.”

  Wanounou looked at Holliday. “Well?”

  Holliday shrugged. “Suits me.”

  They went to the right, where the passage was wide enough to let them walk three abreast. They walked on for another hundred yards, and then the passage suddenly opened up again, the roof soaring above their heads. The sound of falling water thundered.

  “Incredible,” breathed Peggy as the light from both men’s flashlights played over the way ahead. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  21

  In front of them lay an immense underground lake. At its far end a waterfall gushed down fifty feet before striking the main pool. Except where the waterfall struck, the water was as black as pitch.

  This time it was the Israeli archaeology professor who spoke the words.

  “ ‘In the black waters of the Pilgrim’s Fortress a treasured silver scroll is found,’ ” he whispered. “This has to be it.”

  “Where?” Peggy said. “All I see is a big reservoir of water. You think an arm is going to come up out of the water like the Lady of the Lake or something?”

  “Maybe,” murmured Holliday, excitement slowly coming into his voice. He pointed the beam of his flashlight into the center of the pool. A small island had formed over a million years or so, limestone in solution dripping from the roof of the cavern to fall into the water, eventually, drop by drop, eon after eon, building up and creating a small solid hillock rising into the open air.

  Now the island and the long, wax-like dripping from the ceiling seemed to be reaching out to each other. In another hundred thousand years perhaps they’d even join together to form a solid column of stone.

  “What?” Peggy said. “All I see is one of those stalacthingumajiggies. What’s so special about that?”

  “Stalag-thingumajiggy,” corrected Wanounou. “Stalac tites come down, stalagmites go up.”

  “Whatever,” said Peggy, exasperated. “It’s cold, it’s creepy, and there’s no scroll, silver, or otherwise. Can we go home now?”

  “Look at the base of the stalagmite,” instructed Holliday, holding the beam of the flashlight steady.

  “That’s no natural formation,” said Wanounou. A right angle of stone seemed to be jutting out from the frozen ooze of dripstone, surrounding it like the corner of a cube.

  “The base of a column?”

  “An altar?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think there might be something underneath it?” Peggy asked, suddenly understanding.

  “Could be,” said Wanounou, staring out across the water.

  “Well, let’s go and find out,” she urged.

  “How do you propose doing that?” asked the professor.

  Peggy shrugged. “Swim out with Doc’s rock hammer and whack the thing until it breaks. Like opening a pińata.”

  “Hardly rates as good archaeological field technique,” responded Wanounou.

  “To hell with that,” said Peggy. “Let’s do it.”

  “I told you, I’m not much of a swimmer,” the professor said.

  “It’s two hundred feet,” said Peggy. “A hamster could swim that far.”

  “I can’t swim at all actually,” admitted Wanounou, coloring with embarrassment. “I never learned.”

  “Doc?”

  “It was your idea,” said Holliday. “I’m willing to come back later with a rubber raft and the right tools and do it properly.”

  “And go down that stairway again?” Peggy scoffed. “No way,” she said. She toed off her sneakers and undid her jeans.

  “What are you doing?” Wanounou said, startled.

  “Going for a swim,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the pool. She wriggled out of the jeans, pulled the T-shirt over her head, and put out her hand. “The hammer,” she said to Holliday. He handed it to her, grinning, and she jammed it into the waistband of her panties. Wanounou looked at her as though she was insane.

  “What?” Peggy frowned. “Do I need a bikini wax or something?”

  The professor blushed furiously.

  Peggy turned around and dipped the toes of one foot into the water. She winced.

  “Cold.” She shivered.

  “Come on, kiddo, if you can do the creek behind Uncle Henry’s in May you can do a cave in Israel during August.”

  She gave him a nasty look, wrapped her arms around herself, and stepped tentatively out into the pool.

  “Anything nasty likely to be in here with me?” Peggy called out, looking back at Wanounou and Holliday, her voice echoing loudly around the cathedral-sized cavern. “The bottom feels slimy.”

  “Microbial mats,” said Wanounou. “A bit of ooze, that’s all. Nothing that bites.”

  “No blind worm snakes?”

  “No blind worm snakes.”

  She was up to her waist now. She took a breath, held it, then ducked herself completely under the surface. She came up sputtering.

  “Freezing!” she yelped. “And salty.”

  She arched forward gracefully, slipping into the water fully, stroking across the surface of the pool with barely a ripple, doing a perfect, powerful Australian crawl.

  “Astounding,” said Wanounou, clearly in awe. “Beautiful.”

  “She was always the porpoise in the family,” said Holliday proudly, touched by the Israeli’s appreciation of her. “As far as I know this is a first for her.”

  It took Peggy less than a minute to swim to the little stone island. Reaching it, she pulled herself out of the water, slicked the hair off her face in a quick gesture, then pulled the geologist’s hammer from the waistband of her panties. She turned back to the men waiting on the far shore.

  “Anywhere in particular?” she called out, raising her voice over the steady noise from the waterfall.

  “They’re a lot more fragile than they look,” Wanounou called back. “Just about anywhere should do it.”

  Peggy turned back to the stone and raised the hammer.

  “There goes a thousand years of work by Mother Nature,” muttered the professor under his breath.

  Peggy brought the hammer down hard, the sound ringing like a church bell. Nothing seemed to happen. She raised the hammer and brought it down a second time.

  “It’s cracking!” she called out, excited. She began pounding at the rocky extrusion, finally shattering it. “It’s some kind of statue, I think!” She pounded harder. On the shore Wanounou winced with every blow.

  “A statue,” he whispered. “And she’s destroying it.”

  Peggy kept on hammering. Suddenly she stopped.

  “What is it?” Holliday called out.

  Peggy started hammering again, more carefully and with less force.

  “There’s something inside!” Peggy boomed.

  “What is it?” Holliday called again. Peggy turned, put the hammer back into the waistband of her panties. She had something else tucked into the crook of her arm.

  “What is it?” Wanounou asked Holliday.

  “I can’t see. Some sort of jar, I think.”

  Peggy slipped into the water again and began side-stroking b
ack to shore. In another minute she was back again and climbing out of the water. Shivering and covered in goose bumps, she handed the object in her hand to Holliday. It appeared to be a plain alabaster jar about ten inches long, three in diameter, and sealed with some black, tarry substance at the upper end.

  “I think the statue was of the Virgin Mary,” said Peggy, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering as she pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Made of clay. There were praying hands, I’m pretty sure.” She sat down on the stone and began tugging on her jeans again. “That was inside. Is it the scroll, do you think?”

  “Someone went to a great deal of trouble to keep it hidden, that’s for sure,” said Holliday.

  “Then let’s get it open,” said Peggy.

  “Not here,” said Wanounou firmly. “We don’t have the right tools.”

  “Tools?” Peggy said. “Who needs tools? We’ve got a hammer.”

  “Sorry, Peg. Raffi’s right,” said Holliday. “We have no idea what’s in that jar or what condition it’s in. We’ll have to open it in a controlled environment.”

  “Specifically my lab at the university,” said Wanounou.

  “If you say so.” Peggy shrugged. “So now can we get out of here?”

  In the distance, muffled but distinct, they heard the undeniable sound of a human sneeze.

  They froze.

  “Oh, crap,” whispered Peggy.

  “Somebody’s down here with us,” said Holliday.

  “Who?” Wanounou asked nervously.

  “Nobody knows we’re here,” said Peggy.

  “Kellerman’s people; they must have followed us,” grunted Holliday.

  There was the sound of a second sneeze. Closer now. Then a rusty grating sound. Someone hauling away on the big iron door.

  “Benzona,” muttered Wanounou in Hebrew.

  “What do we do now?” Peggy said.

  “Scram,” said Holliday.

  “Which way?” Wanounou asked. “We can’t go back the way we came. We’ll run right into them.”

  “The other tunnel?” Peggy said.

  “What if it’s a dead end?” Holliday said. “We’d be trapped with our backs against a stone wall.”

  “We’re trapped now,” said Peggy. She hefted the rock hammer. “Maybe we should stay and fight.”

  “With a hammer?” Holliday said. “The last time we ran into these people they were carrying machine pistols.” He shook his head. “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

  “Sun Tzu?” Wanounou asked.

  Holliday nodded.

  “Nice philosophy, guys, but what are we supposed to do?”

  Wanounou looked around, then turned to Peggy.

  “You said the water tasted salty?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Look at the edge of the pool—those dark stains on the limestone walls.”

  “High tide,” said Holliday, brightening suddenly. “This is a tidal pool.”

  “Which means it must have an outflow somewhere; the runoff from that waterfall has to empty somehow,” nodded Wanounou.

  “Look,” said Peggy, pointing.

  They turned. Behind them, at the mouth of the passageway leading to the pool, they could see the faint, wandering beams of multiple flashlights playing over the rock walls.

  “Come on,” whispered Holliday urgently.

  They made their way around the narrow shelf between the edge of the water and the wall of the cavern, looking for the pool’s outlet. A third of the way around they found it: a narrow tunnel in the stone only a few feet wide, barely visible in the shadows of the jutting, smooth rock walls. The tide was clearly low, and the flow seemed to be only about knee-high, if the high-water mark on the wall of the cavern was any indication.

  “Quick!” Holliday urged, looking over his shoulder. The flashlight beams behind them were getting brighter as their pursuers approached. They had to get into the relative safety of the outlet tunnel before Kellerman’s men reached the cave.

  “What if it gets deeper?” Wanounou asked nervously. “I told you, I can’t swim.”

  “I’ll protect you.” Peggy grinned. She put her arm around the professor’s waist, and they stepped into the water with Holliday right behind, holding the alabaster jar.

  The swift undertow took all three of them by surprise, sweeping them off their feet and tumbling them into the lake’s narrow outlet. Wanounou yelled, but the sound was swallowed up as he drank in a mouthful of the freezing water and gagged. He began flapping his arms and struggling in the water, but Peggy managed to get his head above the surface, her arm now crooked, elbow under his chin, as they hurtled along the underground river.

  “You’re okay! You’re okay!”

  Peggy turned her head, looking for Doc in the almost absolute darkness, then spotted the sweeping beam of his flashlight a few yards behind, swinging wildly back and forth as the speeding current dragged him along.

  Suddenly Peggy felt something hard slam against her back and realized that it was the stone bottom of the stream. It was getting shallower, not deeper. She began to call out a warning to Holliday, but before she could speak the world dropped out from beneath her, and then she and Wanounou were sliding down a long curving tube, the rock slippery with the same sort of microbial muck she’d felt under her feet when she swam out to the island in the pool.

  She and Wanounou clutched each other desperately as the tube descended, slamming them back and forth with every twist and turn, the rush of water from the pool following the course it had carved through the rock for a million years. Then, abruptly, there was daylight, and just as abruptly they were thrown out into the air as the tube emptied into another cave, this one with an entrance open to the sea.

  They dropped six or seven feet, straight down into the ocean, and once more Wanounou was struggling as he breathed in water, choking and flailing. Again Peggy dragged him to the surface as she oriented herself, then pointed him toward a narrow shelf of beach a few yards away. He slapped the water with both hands, doing a frenzied version of the dog paddle.

  After three steps she felt the bottom beneath her feet. Wanounou reached safety first and slumped down onto the sand. There was a loud splash behind her, and Peggy turned as Doc came flying out of the water’s yawning exit point on the sidewall of the cave and plummeted into the water. A few seconds later he surfaced, the alabaster jar still clutched under one arm. Peggy gave him a hand, and they staggered to the shore and dropped down on the little beach.

  Finally they had a moment to get their bearings.

  “I lost the hammer,” said Peggy, pushing hair out of her eyes and getting to her feet. “Where the hell are we?” Beside her, Wanounou, gasping and retching, was still coughing out the last of the water from his lungs.

  Holliday looked around the chamber. It was a typical sea cave, narrow and relatively shallow, perhaps fifty feet across and a hundred feet deep, the far end sloping up into a sandy beach with darker limestone chert pebbles strewn around. The walls arched steeply up to a rotted stone ceiling, and there was sea salt encrusted here and there, left by the rising and falling tides. At the sea end of the cave the Mediterranean glowed like sapphire in the early-afternoon sun.

  There was evidence of recent occupation everywhere: rusting fifty-gallon drums lined up at the far end of the cave beyond the high-tide line, a coil of rope, several broken crates, and something that looked like a portable air compressor of some kind.

  Tethered to a roughly hewn pier carved out of the ancient rock was what appeared to be a perfectly sea-worthy RIB—a rigid-inflatable boat, military grade, painted in shades of dull gray and brown, with a shield and bat wing emblem on the prow. It was about fourteen feet long with a center-mounted console and some kind of inboard drive.

  “Is that our ride?” Peggy asked.

  “It is if I can get it started,” answered Holliday. He handed Peggy the alabaster vase, then crossed the little strip of beach and climbed up onto
the stone pier. He walked along it to the point where the boat was tethered. The boat was neatly attached to a very old-looking iron ring with a round turn and two half hitches, a sailor’s knot that even a hurricane couldn’t undo.