The shaft was barely eighteen inches square, and Ethan could see a ladder strapped or bolted into the side which descended into the depths of the hill. There was no way to tell how far down it went, but the ladder looked far less than twenty thousand years old.
‘They came prepared too,’ Ethan said as he pulled out his cell phone and activated a small but bright LED light. ‘Whatever we need to do it had better be quick, I don’t want the Russians following us down here.’
‘This is a popular tourist site,’ Hellerman warned, ‘before long there will be people up here and I can’t keep them away from this shaft.’
‘Lower the capstone after us and replace the soil,’ Lopez said to him. ‘Then head back down to the village and buy or borrow a shovel and a decent length of rope. We might be able to call you when we’re ready, but if not we’ll wait until sundown and you can help us out of here under cover of darkness, got it?’
‘Got it,’ Hellerman promised. ‘And if the Russians show up?’
‘Hide,’ Ethan ordered him as he climbed onto the ladder and began descending into the shaft. ‘If they identify you, they’ll find us. Get out of here if it gets too difficult to stay hidden. We’ll figure out a way to escape once we’ve got what we came here for.’
‘Which is what, exactly?’ Hellerman asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Lopez replied as she too vanished into the shaft. ‘I’m just doin’ whatever he does.’
Moments later, they vanished into the darkness as Hellerman lowered the capstone back into place. The light from the bright blue sky was gradually pinched off until suddenly Ethan and Lopez were plunged into blackness as the capstone thumped back into place amid a torrent of loosened soil.
***
XXII
‘Damn, it’s cold in here,’ Lopez said.
Ethan could also feel the creeping cold as they descended deeper into the shaft, the light from their cell phones the only illumination. The weak lights flashed this way and that as Ethan carefully descended one step at a time, always searching for the bottom of the shaft and wondering how the hell they were going to get out of here when they were done.
The light from his cell reflected off the glistening abdomen of a spider as large as his hand that scuttled up the wall of the shaft as it tried to escape the light. He heard Lopez utter a muffled obscenity as it made its way past her.
The base of the shaft became visible beneath Ethan, a floor of soil and rubble that he stepped carefully onto before crouching to one side to give Lopez room as she joined him in the cramped confines at the bottom of the ladder.
‘Well, this is cozy,’ she quipped. ‘I saw a millipede on the way down that was as long as my damned arm. At least you haven’t forgotten how to show a lady a good time.’
Ethan shone the light from his cell phone down a tunnel that descended away from them into the depths of the hillside.
‘I’ve seen things like this before.’
‘What, two–foot long millipedes? Seriously, that thing was all kinds of gross.’
‘Tunnels like this one,’ Ethan replied. ‘The pyramids in Egypt have internal tunnels like this that descend at an angle.’
‘You think the same people who built the pyramids came over here and did the same thing?’
‘Maybe not the same people, but people who perhaps remembered the same things. We just descended about sixty feet into this hillside, and Hellerman said that material dug out of here at ninety feet was twenty thousand years old.’
‘Which means we’re already at a geological age of ten thousand years or so,’ Lopez replied as she looked at the walls of the tunnel, built from perfectly shaped and fitting blocks of stone. ‘Those walls look like the ones we once saw at Machu Picchu in Peru.’
‘Same construction method,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Dry stone blocks, no mortar, irregularly shaped. This place is like a mix and match of half the world’s most famous archaeological sites.’
Ethan crouched slightly as he moved off down the tunnel, his six–foot frame several inches taller than the people the tunnel had presumably been designed for. He recalled that the stature of human beings in the past had been considerably less than today due to the daily struggle of survival, the number of calories available to a Neolithic human a mere fraction of those available to people in the western world today.
The tunnel descended deeper into the hillside and the temperature began to rise a little once again, the deeper tracts insulated against temperature changes above ground. Ethan peered ahead using the feeble light of his cell phone and saw the walls of the tunnel end as they reached a more open space ahead of them.
‘There’s an opening up ahead,’ he said.
Lopez followed close behind and together they walked out into a chamber that was perhaps thirty feet wide and forty feet long. The walls were of polished stone and Ethan could see sunken revetements in the walls, while every inch of the temple was laced with ancient climbers, roots and vines that had forced their way inside over countless centuries. Above the scent of foliage and soil he could smell the faint odor of burnt wood.
‘She was here,’ Lopez said as she turned this way and that, sensing where the odors were coming from and then slowly walked across to where an old torch of dense fabric and wood was propped up inside one of the revetements. She lifted it down and sniffed at it.
‘Gasoline,’ she reported. ‘This was used just days ago.’
Ethan pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket, a gift from years before and a sort of good–luck talisman that he always carried with him. Lopez held the torch out and Ethan lit it. The flames coiled weakly at first but then took hold as the gasoline still inside the old wood burned.
Ethan switched off his cell phone light as the torch illuminated the interior of the chamber, flickering flame light shimmering off shaped stones and shadows dancing like demons across the walls.
‘Very Indiana Jones,’ Lopez remarked as she looked around them. ‘Now what?’
Ethan turned a full circle and saw at one end of the chamber a raised platform with what looked like a sarcophagus on top of it. He edged his way toward it and saw at once that it was a sundial, buried far beneath the surface where no sun ever shone.
‘I don’t get it,’ Lopez murmured with a frown. ‘What good’s a sundial down here?’
Ethan stood for a moment as he wondered what the hell the ancient builders of such a chamber were thinking when they placed a sundial about a hundred feet inside a mountain. The dial was set atop the sarcophagus–like rock, the surface of which was randomly pitted and lumpy, as though the people who had constructed it had forgotten to sand it smooth.
‘There’s gotta be a reason for it,’ Ethan said as he looked around them. ‘They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble for nothing, and neither would Lucy.’
Lopez stood back from the dais and looked at the surrounding walls, and then she looked up.
‘I got it,’ she said as she pointed upward.
Ethan looked in the direction she had indicated and saw a small, rectangular shaft that was angled to look directly down on the dais. The shaft was perhaps the size of a house brick and was filled with soil and the debris of ages.
Ethan recalled his own mention of shafts in the pyramids of Egypt that looked out at the stars, and he fumbled in his pocket for his compass as he checked the orientation of the shaft to the dais. He grinned as he looked at her.
‘Good spot,’ he said. ‘The shaft points out of the hill due east, and I’d be willing to bet that at the time of the summer solstice the sunrise would shine directly through that shaft and hit the dais and the sundial here.’
Lopez nodded. ‘And that would somehow give us the direction we need.’
Ethan glanced around at the chamber. ‘But not the distance, presumably.’
‘And it’s not the summer solstice,’ Lopez added. ‘Apart from that we’ve got this covered.’
The walls of the chamber were covered in engravings, but this time he could
see no star maps or anything that immediately jumped out at him as suggesting a map or directions of any kind. Still, Lucy had been here recently and she would not have left before finding out what she needed to know.
‘Whatever happens, before we leave here we need the sun to shine down through that shaft.’
*
Hellerman reached the bottom of the hill and the shabby line of corrugated iron shacks that passed for a shopping district in Gunung Padang. The occasional local clattered by on a battered scooter trailing white smoke as they labored up the steep hillside, usually with a stained cigarette clasped between their lips.
Hellerman crossed the dusty street, and then to his amazement he felt his cell phone buzz in the pocket of his shorts. He pulled it out and saw a message from Lopez.
FLASHLIGHT AND RODS TO CLEAN SMALL SHAFT ON EAST SIDE OF HILL BY SUNRISE
Hellerman stared at the message and rolled his eyes as he wondered how on earth he was going to find anything that would be long enough to clear a shaft that would probably be more than a hundred feet long and filled with thousands of years’ worth of accumulated soil and debris and…
The sound of another approaching vehicle got his attention, this one not the clattering whine of a moped but the growl of powerful engines. He looked between the shacks to the south and spotted a convoy of big, black SUVs maybe a mile away on the track climbing toward the site.
‘Oh no.’
Hellerman turned as he surveyed the shacks, but he could see nothing that would clean a hundred–foot shaft and no sign of any flashlights. Desperate, he wondered for a moment how Lucy could have done whatever she had done to get the information she needed out of the subterranean site.
Hellerman saw his reflection in a grubby old mirror propped up in a stall nearby, the sky behind him bright blue–white. He checked the position of the SUVs and he knew that he had no time and little choice.
Hellerman dashed toward the man with the stall and the mirror and hoped that he could finish the task before the Russians arrived. He grabbed the mirror and stuffed a wad of cash into the surprised vendor’s hand, and then he attempted communication with the Indonesian. ‘Do you have any black market materials?’
The old man stared blankly at him and shook his head in confusion.
‘You know?’ Hellerman tried desperately. ‘Things that you shouldn’t really stock?’
The old man’s eyes narrowed and he said nothing.
Hellerman rolled his eyes, and then made out with his hands the form of somebody pressing down on a plunger and then swung his arms up and shouted a single word.
‘Boom!’
The old man’s eyes lit up and he chuckled in delight. ‘You wan’ trinitrotoluene! TNT, no? Why din’ you say? I got no TNT, but I have this.’
The old man proudly produced an M14 landmine that looked as though it had probably been left by American forces in the Vietnam War and somehow made its way here on the black market.
Hellerman blinked and glanced at the convoy of SUVs now closing rapidly on the site.
‘How much do you need?’ the old man asked.
‘One will do,’ Hellerman said.
He grabbed the mine and handed the old man two hundred bucks before he turned and sprinted back up the hill, wondering whether the mine in his grasp was functional, which then led him to belatedly wonder whether it was safe at all. He figured that the Russians would make it to the site within five minutes, which didn’t give him much time to make his escape and there was no way he’d be able to conceal the blast.
He labored up the hillside, and finally clambered up the terraces toward the ranks of rocks standing in silent vigil as the rising sun glowed through the veils of mist drifting among the hilltops.
*
‘There it is,’ the driver pointed as Konstantin Petrov peered up into the misty hilltops and wondered how many more of these remote and godforsaken locations he and his men would be dragged to in pursuit of the Kremlin’s obsession. With Valentin Kurov dead he had no choice but to take direct leadership of the operations – reporting such a loss back to Moscow before they had recovered what they sought was not something he was prepared to do.
‘Pull up here and prevent anyone else from accessing the site,’ he ordered.
The SUVs pulled up and immediately Konstantin’s men poured from the interiors, their muscular bulks dwarfing the local villagers who scurried away from them and vanished from the street. A young boy on a scooter turned back the way he had come and wound the throttle open as Konstantin stepped out into the humid air and surveyed the site.
A tall and vaguely pyramidal hillside rose up to his left, signposts indicating the presence of a Neolithic site. Warner and Lopez had both been tracked here, and now the men Konstantin had employed to assist him in finding them had a personal reason to do so; they had lost friends off the coast of Dwarka, some of them to the sharks that had cruised the waters of the Arabian Gulf. They had not reached the site quickly enough to save the injured troops, and even Konstantin’s hardened heart had been wrenched by the carnage he had witnessed on those churning blood–red waters.
‘You and you,’ Konstantin pointed to two of the men, ‘you come with me. The rest of you, stay here and don’t let anybody off that mountain.’
The men nodded obediently as Konstantin set off up the track and into the forest. The heat was already unbearable, the sun rising above the mountainous forest to the east and glorious to look at. He ignored it, pressing on up the hill with his two bodyguards right behind him. Konstantin glanced around and, satisfied that they were alone on the hillside, he pulled out a 9mm pistol and pushed harder up the hill as he saw ranks of black stones jutting from the soil and grass on the summit.
***
XXIII
Hellerman knelt down on the hillside as he searched frantically for the opening that he presumed would be somewhere here on the eastern slopes. He could see the rectangle of stones surrounding the shaft entrance over the brow of the hill and he figured that Ethan and Nicola were maybe a hundred feet down in the interior. That Nicola’s text message had reached him was amazing enough, but he figured that the hillside must be perforated with empty chambers and shafts that had allowed the signal to escape the hill and reach the nearest tower.
He judged the rough location of any shaft entrance that would both be visible to the rising sun and also angled to reach a spot one hundred feet inside the hill and then began scrambling about looking for a needle in a haystack.
The Russians would be at the village by now and would probably block any exits to escape routes. Hellerman could not hope to slip by them, so all he could do was find the shaft and blast it clean and hope that the Russians would let him live.
He was on his knees in the mud and the grass when, quite suddenly, he smelled woodsmoke on the morning air. He glanced down the hillside, expecting to see a farmer burning waste or similar, but there was nobody to be seen. Hellerman sniffed the air and shuffled across the hillside and then he saw the faintest tendrils of smoke drifting up amid the long grass some twenty feet from where he knelt. He got up and bolted to the smoke, dropped to his knees and pushed the grass aside.
There, in the hillside, was a narrow opening no larger than a house brick.
‘I’ll be damned.’
He could see that the opening was filled with a loosely packed decaying leaves and crumbs of soil, but if that smoke could get out then the blockages must be loose all the way down. Hellerman grabbed the landmine and pushed it into the opening, then reached in carefully and pulled the safety pin from the top of the mine.
Hellerman gently removed his arm from the shaft, and then reached out for a length of tree branch nearby as with his other hand he pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He tapped a quick message and sent it as with his other hand he eased the stick into the cavity and probed for the mine’s pressure–senstive detonator.
Even as he did so, he heard footfalls on the summit of the hill nearby and a soft whisperin
g in Russian.
*
‘It’s too high,’ Lopez said.
She stepped down from the wall, where she had been trying to set the foliage clogging the shaft alight with the flaming torch to help clear it.
‘Any word from Hellerman?’ Ethan asked as he continued to survey the walls of the chamber.
‘Nothing yet,’ Lopez said as she checked her cell. ‘I only asked him to get a flashlight and something to clear the shaft with.’
Ethan shrugged as he looked up at a series of engravings on the walls of the temple, visible now in the torch light. They looked like nothing that he had ever seen before, the icons of gods and suns and angels both familiar and yet different to those of other religions and temples he had seen.
Each of the images was accompanied by lines of script that seemed to be a mixture of ancient cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
‘You ever seen anything like this?’ Lopez asked as he took photographs of the engravings.
‘Never,’ Ethan said. ‘If Lucy was here she couldn’t have failed to have noticed all of this and yet she never mentioned any of it in her video recording.’
Ethan could see figures that reminded him of the Greek god Neptune rising from the sea, bearded and with his famous trident in one hand. Others seemed to depict Zeus and other famous gods who roamed the Underworld, great storms raging over the oceans and gigantic waves crashing over shorelines. There were ships on the oceans, and Ethan suddenly realized that he was looking at evidence of ancient seafaring thousands of years before mankind was supposed to have been capable of planting crops, let alone setting sail for other continents.
‘They were travelling,’ he said.
And then he saw it, on the western wall of the chamber, a carving of three concentric rings with a cross through the middle. Ethan turned to stare at the engraving, carved from the living rock, when he heard Lopez’s cell phone buzz in the pocket of her shorts.
The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7) Page 15