“Lois, look at me.” He turned toward her, again. “We’ve come a long way…on your father’s money. I’m not about to go back now just because a security guard warns us to stay away.”
“It’s what I told you before,” Hornsby suddenly chimed in. “It’s not safe up here. I knew this would happen. I knew it. I knew it before we ever got started on the trip.”
Seabury ignored Hornsby’s remark. He drove back out of the clearing onto the road. A few minutes later, he trailed behind the security vehicle. A mile later, Seabury spotted another car coming along the road in their direction, spewing thin wisps of smoke under the front tires below in the undercarriage. He spotted the Sicilian at the wheel coming at them from the opposite direction.
He eased off the gas and watched as the ostrich honked the horn and told the Sicilian to pull over. The ostrich got out of the patrol vehicle and walked over to the car. He motioned for the driver to roll down the window, then leaned his head inside to exchange words. Then, the Sicilian turned the car around and headed back down the road. Five minutes later, the security vehicle turned around and headed back in the opposite direction.
The end of the patrol route. Seabury rolled down the window. He gave the ostrich a two-fingered salute as he drove by, heading back toward Long Apari.
Seabury checked his watch as Gretchen said, “I like your style, big man. It’s like living on the edge.” She clapped her hands excitedly. “I need a little adventure. My life’s such a big bore living in Jakarta.” Lois glared, and Gretchen turned on her. “Come on, stuffed shirt,” she said. “Get rid of that tight ass. It’s time to take a wild ride.”
Seabury hid his smile and kept on driving down the road. Five minutes later, he turned around and started back up the road toward the mine. By then, the patrol vehicle was far enough ahead of them. Still, Seabury felt his stomach churn. He had no idea what danger lay ahead of him.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I’m worried,” Lois said from the backseat. Dark lines cut deep into the flesh at the bridge of her nose. Seabury kept quiet. “Did you hear me?” Still nothing.
“Shouting won’t help,” Hornsby said, turning around. He stared back at her. “Can’t you see he’s not turning back?”
“I guess you’ve been out-voted.” Gretchen smiled. The smile irritated Lois. She crossed her arms over her chest. She fussed and fretted.
“You can’t always have your own way,” said Gretchen with a gleeful expression.
“We need to keep going,” Seabury interrupted, gripping the wheel hard. “We can’t turn back, now.” He formed a narrow space between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. “Not when we’re this close. It wouldn’t be fair.”
Up ahead, they reached the fork in the road without being noticed. It was eleven o’clock, one hour before lunch. Four hours before quitting time at five o’clock during a normal work day. Seabury thought about the security patrol. If they patrolled the road during the afternoon, did that mean security would be light at the mine? He didn’t know. One way or another, he would find out. He had no idea what he’d find up at the mine. Still, he had to go, get over and back quickly, before the others missed him. They could look for the entrance to the cave during the afternoon. Hopefully, they’d find it. If not, they’d have to run the risk of returning to Long Apari, or else stay the night hidden out somewhere until morning.
Ahead, he turned left at the fork in the road and drove on. The road continued a short distance and became a dead end. A sign appeared on a rickety, old wrought-iron gate. Private Property. Keep Out. No Temple excursions available. Some of the words were splashed over with red paint.
Seabury used a dead bolt cutter to snap the chain attached to the lock. He opened the gate, got back in the car, and drove through. A moment later, he ran back and secured the chain in place with a piece of wire and returned to the car. From a distance, it appeared the chain was still intact.
Behind the wheel, Seabury heard Gretchen giggle. She pointed a finger and compared him to James Bond and giggled, again. Lois rolled her eyes in the air, then started in on him, again.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Seabury.”
Hornsby sat in silence, staring out the window. Across the field were the scattered remains of large stone pillars buried in a sea of wild grass. A tall stand of trees lay to the left of the pillars, and Seabury pulled into a clearing inside. His spirits soared. Out of sight. A lucky break, he thought. Now, we won’t be spotted from the road.
A hundred yards back from the pillars, a deep gulch knifed down between the broad shoulders of two separate mountains. The timberline below the rugged, snow-clad peaks choked with clusters of white pine. The map pointed to a spot at the foot of the gulch. They headed out beyond the pillars in that direction, dark stick-like figures concealed among the shadows like deer moving along a trail inside the trees.
Seabury stopped a few minutes later and checked his watch. Eleven forty.
“The act’s solo from here on out,” he said. “I’m going over to check out the mine. There’s something fishy going on over there, and I need to find out what it is. I think Barat’s hoarding gold bullion over there.”
“Gold bullion,” Lois said. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m serious all right, so you need to stay here, out of sight.”
“You’re leaving us,” Lois said, unable to believe him.
“He’s made up his mind,” Hornsby said.
“Super-spy on a mission.” Gretchen chortled.
“I’ll be over and back before you know it,” said Seabury. He slipped back quietly into the woods.
* * * *
He couldn’t believe how much he’d misjudged the distance. It was much further than it looked. The mountain flared out like a giant claw and then swung back into a white pine forest, but he kept going. He jogged at a fast pace, back inside the trees. Eventually, he came to the edge of a barbed wire fence, crawled under, and checked his watch again. Twelve forty-five. Fifteen minutes until the lunch break ended.
He kept to the outer edge of the mine yard. A moment later, he stopped behind a high-powered winch and stared across the yard. A Dry where men changed clothes and showered, stood to the right of a stark red office building. At the back of the yard, a massive wall of volcanic rock and limestone shot straight up the rugged face of a steep mountain covered in timber. A tunnel stood below. He glanced over and back quickly, amazed at what he saw.
To his right, the area beyond the yard surprised him. He thought he would find a large, open-pit coal mining operation taking place there. Instead, he found a limited operation. Hmmm. Window-dressing, he thought. It was just enough show to allow the public to think large scale mining was taking place here when actually, it wasn’t.
Beyond the yard, in a narrow, circular space, a few high-powered bulldozers and one steam shovel clawed back the earth. Dark layers of lignite coal, forming black carbon nuggets, lay in shallow piles in the beds of a small fleet of dump trucks. Something more than coal mining was going on here. He crept across the yard toward the tunnel, determined to find out what it was.
“Hey, where you going?” A voice broke from the shadows at the entrance to the tunnel. Seabury pointed to a spot down the tunnel. “Not without a hard hat. Company rules.” The short, stocky Malay with the wide, sloping back of a turtle pointed in the direction of the Dry. “Get one there, and put it on.”
Seabury got a hard hat on a rack inside the door of the Dry, put it on, and came back. The Turtle stood with his arms folded across his chest, waiting for him. “What section you work?”
“Bulldozer,” Seabury said.
Turtle looked up, eyeing him suspiciously. “Why are you in here if your rig’s out there?”
“It’s noontime. I thought I’d take a little walk.”
Turtle checked his watch. “Almost one o’clock. Too late for that.”
Seabury brushed past him and started down the tunnel. The guy followed him, protesting.
“Hey, you need to get out of here.” He’d strayed too close. Seabury spun around and crashed a fist into his face. The Turtle was airborne a few seconds as the force of the blow hurled him off his feet, and he crashed unconscious against the wall of the tunnel. Seabury pulled him into a dark alcove a few feet away and headed back down the tunnel.
He’d never liked hitting a smaller man, but what could he do? He’d fought in alleys smelling of week-old garbage behind seedy sailor bars from Amsterdam to Cape Town; however, he’d always battled larger men. He put the thought aside and kept going, down through the dim light of the tunnel.
Ahead, a set of stairs appeared on his left. The area had been blown away during excavation. Now, a deep, hollowed chasm dropped straight down off the floor of the tunnel and formed a huge, underground bunker of interconnected tracks and tunnels at the bottom.
Seabury jolted. Two men came up from down below. The sound of their loud voices caught him off guard, and he ducked into a limestone crevice nearby. He saw them stop on the landing at the top of the stairs, inches from where he hid. His heart thumped like a trip-hammer inside his chest. His eyes enlarged, tense, nervous, as he heard them talking.
“It astounds me,” the shorter of the two said. “How can one man be so clever?”
“Barat’s a genius,” the other man said. “There’s enough gold here in the underground bunker to manipulate the gold price index several times over.”
“Yes. I’m not worried that the price of gold has gone down. Barat will buy gold at a cheaper price. Then, with his stockpile here, he’ll manipulate the market and drive the price back up. Each time I bought gold at a cheap price, it jumped back up, and I made a killing. You just can’t lose with Barat at the helm.”
“I agree,” the other man said.” We’re lucky to have him.”
They both chuckled and headed back out the tunnel. Seabury went below to the bunker. Stopping halfway down the steps, he allowed his eyes to adjust to the sudden surge of bright light in the cavern below. To his left, on the forward wall of the bunker stood a dark wall of tinted glass. It reminded him of the same type of luxury suites owned by high rollers at large NFL football stadiums in the United States. The place looked dark and foreboding. Below it, a network of tracks and trains stood idle near the entrance to several tunnels. Workers woke up, yawned, and stretched after a noon nap and returned to work.
Cautious, Seabury crept back up the stairs into the shadows, but he kept his eyes glued to the floor of the bunker. In the glow of bright light lay gold bullion bars—thousands of them stacked on steel platforms as high as the ceiling. The bullion was grated over with wire mesh.
Enough gold to manipulate the market, Seabury thought as he slipped back upstairs and out through the tunnel. He circled the high-powered winch, crawled unnoticed under the barbed wire fence, and slipped back quietly into the forest.
Stopping briefly, Seabury stared back into the yard. Men, gorged from eating heavy lunches of rice and fish, sauntered at a leisurely pace across the yard. They passed through a gate inside a steel fence toward machinery in the excavated area beyond the fence. They cranked up bulldozers and steam shovels. Soon, the powerful jaws of high-powered machinery clawed and gouged the earth at a controlled rate of production. As his eyes swung down near the front gate, Seabury spotted the security patrol. They passed through the gate, on their way to patrol the road down below the mine.
A half hour later, at two o’clock, Seabury rejoined his group. Hot and perspiring, they sat disgruntled, waiting inside the trees near the gulch at the foot of Muller Mountain. He spotted Hornsby first. The old man looked worried.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Lois asked, full of sarcasm.
Seabury pulled up inside a stand of pine and evergreen trees and stood next to them. “Just as I figured,” he said but nothing more. He glanced at Hornsby’s wrinkled brow.
“I don’t see it,” Hornsby fussed and fidgeted. “We looked all around while you were gone. The opening to the cave. It’s supposed to be here at the foot of the mountain on my left.” Slender evergreens, sharp thorns, and red bark formed a dense, impenetrable wall in front of them.
“Okay, I’m ready to go to work,” said Seabury, glancing back at Hornsby. “You’re sure this is the spot?”
Hornsby shrugged then nodded. Seabury hacked through the dense jungle vegetation with a machete, keeping the sound as dull and muted as possible. He had no idea who might be lurking in the area. He wondered if the Sicilian would double-back and try to find them.
“It’s what I expected,” he said at last. “The opening’s gone back to the land.”
They stopped on the hillside. Afternoon shadows strung out across the ground beneath them. The air turned cold and crisp.
“We’ll search a while longer,” Seabury said. “See what we come up with.”
Seabury tramped on ahead. Near the large, scaly trunk of a white pine tree, he stopped and wiped his brow with his forearm. He turned around and looked back at Hornsby. The elderly scholar stood close by. Lois and Gretchen waited farther down a deer trail that led to a small stream at the foot of the mountain.
“Maybe we’re on the wrong side.” Hornsby studied the map, rubbed his goatee. A look of frustration entered his pale blue eyes. “The arrow points straight up above the stream, fifty paces up from the base of the mountain.”
“Okay. Let’s try again,” Seabury said. “We’ll double-back down the mountain fifty paces.” He looked at Hornsby. “I’ve noticed something, Harlan.”
“What’s that?”
“If you turn the map to twelve o’clock, the arrow points slightly off to the right of center. That could make a big difference when we retrace our steps back up the hill.”
They went back down the hill, retraced their steps, angled slightly to the right, and counted out another fifty paces. Lois and Gretchen huddled together, shook their heads, and looked skeptical. Seabury and Hornsby moved back up the hill past them.
Seabury stopped at a spot on the side of the mountain. He pointed up ahead. “This has to be it, or we’ve come a long way for nothing.”
A raw wind blew through the trees. The stream gurgled on down below him. Dark birds flew out of sunlit trees. Seabury hacked through a small opening. Hot, his face was red from the physical exertion. Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead and into his eyes. He wiped them on his shirt sleeve and kept hacking his way through. Gradually, he fought through the undergrowth into a small clearing, four by five feet wide—just enough to crawl through in a low, military crouch.
There it was. Hidden over the centuries, lost in time, and shrouded in mystery—the entrance to the ancient tunnel. Seabury stepped inside with his flashlight glowing. He switched it back and forth, up and down excitedly. Omigod, omigod, he repeated in his mind. His beam cut through a wall of darkness onto a domed arch above his head.
He studied it a moment and then directed the light down onto the walls below. Giddy with excitement, he saw the same inscriptions as the ones he’d seen the first time he laid eyes on the map—palm prints, fish, small birds in flight, letters done in Javanese hieroglyphics.
Moving his gaze off the wall, for a moment, he wondered if his mind might be playing tricks on him, again. He took a deep breath, let the air out slowly, his hands still shaking on the flashlight. No. There it was. The cave. It opened up and went back into the darkness. Beyond a pillared archway, he saw what he was looking so hard to find. The cave opened to reveal the entrance to a temple inside. My God, it’s the temple. He couldn’t contain his emotions. It’s really here…I’ve found it. I’ve found it. He yelled out happily like a child, and for a moment, he stood back in awe, taking it all in.
After a while, he went back outside. He crept through the trees and deep patches of underbrush, down onto the trail. He waved Hornsby, Lois, and Gretchen over.
“Found it,” he said excitedly. “Up ahead. You can’t believe it.” He guided them into th
e clearing, through the dense, tangled brush, and they entered the cave.
“Now, it’s time to look for buried treasure,” he said.
“We’re going to be rich,” Gretchen said.
“We haven’t found anything, yet,” Lois said.
Hornsby adjusted the rucksack on his shoulder. His eyes moved in a dream-like spell up and down the walls of the cave. They glowed behind his flashlight. “Look. The paintings.” He pointed higher. He saw palm prints, two fish, and two birds. Then, to his astonishment, he saw the Tree of Life painted on the karsts and limestone surface. “The walls hold a chronological human ancestor distribution,” he said. “It’s Aboriginal, either Maros or Tewet, but I’m not entirely sure.”
He shone his light closer and said, “The tribes lived in West Kalimantan. They spread throughout the Moluccas Archipelago down to Papua and Australia in the southern hemisphere. This is really quite a remarkable discovery, folks.”
“Shall we?” Seabury pointed the flashlight back into the darkness.
They moved through the pillared arch onto a floor of large, square, brown stones. “It’s amazing,” Lois said with renewed vigor. “Except for cracks and chips in the stone, the floor after all these centuries looks well preserved.”
“Whooooa!” Gretchen yelled out. The echo rocked the cave and reached her ear. “Hey, did you hear that?”
“Stop it, Gretch,” Lois snapped at her. “Don’t act so childish.” Seabury and Harlan exchanged glances but said nothing.
Seabury switched his flashlight back and forth, and he motioned them ahead. “Come on. Let’s get started.”
At Seabury’s side, Hornsby clutched the map firmly in his hand and said, “This place is all about the King and his garden. That’s what the map tells me.”
* * * *
Outside the cave, exactly one and a half hours before, the Sicilian had seen them drive through the front gate, cross the field, and go into the mountains. He had seen the big guy head off toward the mine and return. He cursed his luck when his engine had overheated and then a flat tire had set him back another twenty minutes.
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