Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28)

by John Schettler

  “Beyond that we get Brown’s seat, a shelf of stone where he believed this entire fissure ended. He said it looked to be impenetrable by any normal means of exploration.”

  “Well that Macaque went this way, we all saw him. Have the men turned anything up?”

  No trace of the beast had been found, which left the party with an unsettled feeling of mystery here. They were certain the monkey did not get past them. In fact, the men heard it making sounds up ahead of them, but could find no trace of the rascal.

  “What’s directly above us?” asked Elena, eyeing the toothy falls of stalactites from the roof of the chamber.

  “Lenora’s Cave,” said Morgan. “Then the Bell Chamber.”

  “Lenora’s cave…” that rang a bell in Elena’s mind. “Wasn’t that the cave that was said to lead to the hidden tunnel under the Straits of Gibraltar?”

  “Just an old tale,” said Morgan.

  “You know they once thought this place was bottomless,” she said. “Let’s do a radar scan of the entire area near Brown’s seat—that shelf of rock over there. Look high and low.”

  MacRae was looking at his compass, and now he held it out to the others. “Damn thing has gone bonkers,” he said. It was spinning this way and that, unable to find true north.

  “This Lieutenant Brown mentions that as well,” said Morgan, reading again… “The fact of the magnetic needle being slightly deflected in some places, shows evidently strong traces of iron in the cave.”

  “Well this is more than slightly deflected,” said MacRae. “It’s spinning about like a top now.”

  “A magnetic anomaly, and well beneath Lenora’s Cave,” said Elena. “A missing Barbary Ape that had to have found some way forward from this point. Gentlemen, get busy.”

  The ten man squad fanned out, their helmet lamps searching all the ground ahead. They nosed around the twisted pillars of limestone extending up from the floor, and probed with files and other tooling at the walls. Three men had the hand held ground penetrating radar sets, and it wasn’t long before they scanned some very interesting returns.

  “I was expecting a solid mass,” said Morgan. “You know, one of those well machined doors like we found at Delphi, but this is reading quite the opposite. That monkey is on to something here. That big rock there reads solid, but these readings show a void beyond that stone.”

  They were, in fact, standing before the very same stone where Sergeant Hobson had been prompted to get after the Barbary Ape the previous year, though none of them knew that at the moment. The Argonauts searched the sides of the rock, but it appeared to be emerging directly from the scored limestone wall behind it. Then they got perhaps the same break that had led Sergeant Hobson on. There came a skittering sound, and then something fell right onto the bill of the helmet worn by MacRae. He reached up, thinking to brush away some small lose stone fragment, but instead he was amazed to see a peanut shell fall to the cave floor, right between the toes of his boots. He stooped, confirming his find, and handing it to Elena, and now all eyes looked up, the beams of the ten helmets suddenly catching the amber glow of two eyes, cat like, in the shadow of the upper rock where it approached the wall. Then they vanished.

  “There’s the little beastie,” said MacRae. “Come on lads, get that folded ladder up.”

  It took all of five minutes, but Sergeant Keller led the way up, noting scratches on the rock as he went. At the very top, it first seemed that there was no way to proceed, but as he eased himself to the place where they had seen the Macaque, he called down.

  “A break on the rock up here,” he said. “But I don’t think I can get through.” It was too small for the broad chested Sergeant, but they had a smaller man in the team, and he climbed up to the place, and was barely able to squeeze through.

  “A very narrow passage,” he said. “I’ll have to slide through on my back.” For a time, Corporal James was only able to move by squirming on his back and using his shoulder blades to keep him going, but gradually, the passage opened up a bit. They heard him calling, seeming very distant now, his voice becoming a slight echo of itself.

  “Switch to your helmet radio,” said the Sergeant.

  Morgan looked at Elena. “Well I think we’re on to something here. Is it another chamber, Sergeant?”

  “No sir, my man James says it’s more of a long passage, very winding, and the walls are scored with well faulted rock. He says it resembles Hell’s Throat.”

  “That’s the bottomless pit you were talking about,” said Morgan. “When the Moors had the place, they said it was often used to hide treasure when outside forces were threatening to take the Rock from them. Many have tried to find it, and there are a few ‘Grandfather’s tales’ about Hell’s Throat. I read up on one the other night when we were prepping for this mission.”

  “Let’s hear it,” said Elena.

  “Well, Mum, it concerns a British soldier, Grimsby by name, who had a friend named Peter Provost who was led to Hell’s Throat by a couple of Moors. They threw in a torch, and it fell away to a mere spark before it vanished. Then they threw in stones, which clattered down and down until they could hear no further sound. Hence the rumors about that drop being bottomless. Well, this Provost fellow decided to rig out some ropes and climb down for a look. About ninety feet down, he came to a shelf of stone big enough for him to stand and walk along its edge. It led him to an aperture in the walls of the throat, and that opened onto a passage—or so he claimed. The man got marooned there when the two Moors that led him to the spot heard British soldiers coming and fled, dropping the rope that was tied fast to this Provost fellow. The rope fell over the brink into the abyss, and the man was stranded over 90 feet down.”

  “Poor fellow,” said Elena. “How did he get out?”

  “That’s the odd part,” said Morgan. “There was an attack on the British contingent by men from the Spanish Camp at nearby Son Roque. The two sides were always at each other’s throats. Well, this man Grimsby was taken prisoner, and transported out to a Spanish P.O.W. ship anchored in the bay. The Spaniards were trying to blockade the Rock with a little fleet out there, but here’s the strange twist in all of this. Days later, a boat arrived from Morocco, delivering yet another prisoner to that ship, and lo and behold, it was this Peter Provost, recognized immediately by Grimsby, in spite of the fact that he seemed dazed and haggard. The Moors said he had been found wandering the hills behind a village—on Ape’s Hill, in Morocco!”

  “This is sounding all too familiar,” said Elena. “Was there anything else to the story?”

  “Grimsby said that Provost was babbling on and on about pillars of fire, utter nonsense, but he did manage to extract something of what may have happened to him. In desperation, the man apparently followed a deep subterranean passage, which continued to descend for some time before it eventually turned up again. He was down to his last torch, which eventually guttered out, but in that eerie darkness, probing along with a walking stick, he claimed that a strange greenish glow was seen all about him, just enough for him to make way. All the while, he claimed he could hear the sound of water, high overhead. It wasn’t a dribble like the seepage that formed these stalactites, but the deep swell of some great body of water. So you know where this is going, aye?”

  “The hidden passage under the Straits of Gibraltar,” said Elena.

  “Aye, and it was said that Provost came upon a mummy of a Moor, a dagger still embedded in its bony chest, and saw two jars, both empty, but with a scatter of gold coins on the stony floor of the passage. By the time he was found, Provost was not in his right mind, but he continued to babble on about this hidden passage to the Spaniards, thinking they might be interested in it as a way into the Rock. They paid him no mind, and it seems he was never quite right in his own head again after that—assuming any of this can be believed.”

  “Interesting,” said Elena. “Your map shows this cave is very near that place—Hell’s Throat. I think we’d best tell our Corporal to scout
that passage out. Anyone else care to try and get through that gap up there? Let’s get some tooling up and see if we can widen it.”

  Sergeant Keller told the Corporal to survey the way ahead and see how big the fissure was. The report came back that it was now beginning to descend, steeply in places, and as yet there was still no sign of the Macaque. It was then that Keller gave Mac Morgan a quick look.

  “Corporal James,” he said, using his visor microphone. “Your TALOS signal just went yellow. Hold your position.”

  The Sergeant had his visor down, and he could read the Corporal’s signal as a green dot, one of ten that corresponded to all the men in his squad. It had just turned yellow. Now he heard the Corporal’s voice in his earpiece, but it seemed fragmented, the signal losing integrity.

  “You’re breaking up, Corporal. Reverse your steps and fall back until we get a clear signal. I repeat—fall back. Do you copy, James?”

  Nothing came back but a fine wash of static. Then, to the Sergeant’s great surprise, he had only nine green dots on his visor. Nothing was reading for the Corporal at all, and where his amber dot had once been, a steady winking red dot was now displayed, indicating a malfunction. He looked at the others, a puzzled look on his face.

  “We’ve lost him,” he said. “He went red.”

  “Perhaps he stumbled and fell.”

  “No sir, that red light indicates no signal from his TALOS suit at all now. Even if he was unconscious, I should still be able to read his suit, but it’s as if… he just vanished!”

  MacRae was all business. “You men there—where’s that bloody tool satchel? On the double!”

  Chapter 27

  The ladder up was rigged in a matter of minutes, and a man was looking over the opening, well hidden in the shadows of the upper rock. It was seen that on one side of the rock, several scratches and scuff marks indicated someone else had tried to climb to the spot, perhaps with success, if Elena’s story bore credence.

  “About that Grandfather’s tale,” said Elena to Mac. “It doesn’t seem like there was any movement in time.”

  “Aye,” said Mac. “The fellow turns up days later when he’s delivered to that prison ship.”

  “There was one odd thing, assuming the whole story isn’t bunk. What do you make of what he said about the pillars of fire?”

  “Miss Fairchild… I think we can safely say that story was a load of rubbish, probably just concocted to bolster the legends concerning this place.”

  “Oh? Then where’s our Corporal James?”

  “My bet is that he met with an accident. Maybe his suit failed, and he lost his helmet lamp. We’ve no idea what’s beyond that stone. There may be a fairly treacherous passage back there.”

  It was soon determined that the very narrow entrance that required the Corporal to slide in on his back could be opened with the setting of a small low-yield explosive charge. The Artisan Engineers had blasted numerous openings and tunnels into the limestone over the years, and it remained very stable, so there was little risk of a collapse. Yet for safety’s sake, they rigged out a remote detonator, and retired beyond the prison feature, about a hundred meters from the detonation. It went off without a hitch, and the Argonauts were quick to the scene, looming like automatons in the dust until it finally settled, their helmet headlamps casting long amber cones of light as they worked to clear out the broken stone and rubble.

  “We’ve got that passage opened up enough for any of us to get through,” said MacRae. “But I’d recommend we send in a two man recon team first, and they should be tethered to us here with a sturdy rope. The men have rock climbing gear, and both Barret and Cooke have a good deal of experience. I don’t think the rest should proceed until they give the all clear. Perhaps they’ll find our man James quick enough. He wasn’t very far in.”

  But they didn’t find the Corporal, which created yet another mystery to be solved. The way beyond the rock was a narrow throat and gradually opened to a passage allowing a man to stand with little difficulty. Yet it was bounded on every side by solid rock. The stony floor was unbroken or perforated by any pits of crevasses, and the walls, though wrinkled and irregular, offered no apertures or side tunnels of any kind. Above there was just the hint of new Stalactites beginning to form, and in places, the walls seemed wet with thin trails of water that glimmered in the helmet lamps.

  As the two men pushed on, the party beyond the rock played out the sturdy nylon rope, keeping just enough tension to have a bit of a tactile connection to the recon team, letting them pull the rope on as they advanced. All the while, Sergeant Keller was keeping a close watch on the condition of both men with his helmet visor, relieved that they remained solid green.

  Then one man went yellow and he immediately ordered the team to halt. “Scout team. Stand where you are,” he said quickly. “Reverse five paces.”

  He watched, seeing the yellow light, Private Barret, shift from yellow to green. He told the men to look as far ahead as they could for any sign of the Corporal, but nothing was reported. “Very well, hold position there and await further orders.” The Sergeant turned to Morgan. “Sir, this is about the spot where I lost contact with Corporal James. I just saw one of the scouts losing signal integrity, and so I’ve halted the team.”

  “How far in have they gone?”

  “Looks to be about 50 meters from the rope we’ve played out, and I’m not sure why we can’t maintain a signal hold. These rocks aren’t all that dense and the TALOS suits should be able to broadcast out 500 meters under these conditions. It’s been well tested.”

  They soon found that even normal voice communications were starting to show interference, prompting the Sergeant to order the men to fall back another five meters until they recovered signal strength.

  “They’ve seen nothing?” asked Elena.

  “Not yet,” said the Sergeant. “But Barret reports the passage makes a bend to the right and seems to descend ahead of their present position. That could be the spot where we lost the Corporal. Shall I have him edge forward? The second man can keep a firm hold on him with the rope.”

  “Very well. Proceed.”

  The Sergeant ordered Barret to narrate every step he took, so he could hear him as long as possible. As he advanced, there was rising static on the voice line, until his voice was lost in the wash.

  “Hold fast to that tether,” the Sergeant cautioned his other man. Cooke was still in signal range, and Keller could hear his breathing over the open connection. His condition dot was safely green, but the yellow dot for Barret had him worried. Then it happened.

  Cooke had his helmet lamp focused ahead on his mate, the rope between the two men kept taut as Barret advanced. He saw the other man reach the bend in the passage ahead, and then disappear around the corner. Seconds later, the rope when completely limp and fell slack to the stony floor of the passage. Quite surprised, he called out to Barret, for the man could not have been more than fifteen meters ahead of him. All he heard was the echo of his own voice. He tried calling on his helmet radio, but there was nothing but static.

  “Damn,” he swore, reporting the incident to the Sergeant, who already suspected the worst. The yellow dot for Barret had gone red… Cooke was ordered to pull on the rope, thinking the other man may have fallen, meeting some unseen stumbling block that may have taken down Corporal James as well. That might account for the rope going suddenly slack like that. Barret could be on the floor of the passage now, but it was not so.

  As Private Cooke pulled slowly on the rope, it offered no resistance at all, yet it had been firmly clipped to the other man’s waist belt on the TALOS suit, and with a very sturdy clasp. As he gathered the rope in, he soon came to its end, seeing there was now no clasp at all. The end of the rope seemed singed and burnt, fused as if cut clean through by a laser, or perhaps an acetylene torch. There was no knife work involved. The charred end was ample evidence that it had been severed by some kind of heat. He activated his radio and reported what had happened.<
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  “We’ve lost Barret,” said the Sergeant. “Cooke says the rope went slack, and it’s been burned clean through.”

  “Burned?”

  “He says the end is seared—still warm in his hand.”

  “Can’t say I like the sound of that,” said MacRae rubbing the stubble on his chin. He eyed Miss Fairchild, seeing the worry in her eyes.

  “Well, what’s happened to them?” she asked. “We should have rigged out a video on the second man.”

  “Wouldn’t have helped,” said Morgan, coming over after huddling with Sergeant Keller. “There’s a blind turn, about fifteen meters ahead of the second man. Private Barret vanished after he made that turn, so the other man would have to be right on his heels to see anything, and we might have lost the two of them in that instance. Cooke has called out for him, and Barret should hear him easily enough, but nothing comes back, and the TALOS suit reads no signal at all, just like the Corporal.”

  “Alright,” said Elena. “I think it’s fair to say we’ve found the source of our magnetic anomaly. If the information we have about the time rifts is accurate, then I think we may have found one right here.”

  “Unsecured?” said MacRae. “I thought these rifts were to be under lock and key. That’s what all this bloody business with the keys is about, right?”

  “So we believed. Who knows, these passages and caves twist off in all directions down here. We may have just uncovered an approach to this rift that the key makers never found.”

  “The key makers? Who are they?” Captain MacRae was getting too many questions and not enough answers.

  “Somebody had to engineer these keys and place them in the artifacts where they’ve been found. Someone had to put that key into the Selene Horse.”

  “Aye,” said MacRae, “and when did he do that? And Why? For this little foray here? If that key was supposed to secure something here, then what’s happened to our men?”

  “That’s what we’ve got to find out now,” said Elena, determined.”