The Last Man

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Wow,” he said, momentarily forgetting their situation. “What was his name?”

  “Judah,” she said. “Judah Sicarius. Sicarius means Daggerman. I’m about halfway through it. It’s definitely first-century Aramaic.”

  “I can’t believe you can just read that stuff. It all looks like hieroglyphics to me.”

  “I can read it, all right, but it is not pleasant reading. How are we going to get out of this place, David Hall?”

  “Physics,” he said. “I hope, anyway. There’s a second pipe—at the top of the main cave. It’s an outlet pipe. I think this cistern is a recirculation system. My plan is to block the outlet and hope like hell that the inlet pipe remains pressurized. There has to be a pretty big pump down at that plant to get water all the way up to the main cistern.”

  “And this will work how?”

  “Water does not compress,” he said. “So if that pump keeps pumping, the pressure in the cistern will rise until at some point the force on the bottom of that slab will be more than it weighs, and then it will pop up out of the hole—but just for an instant. I plan to be there, and, hopefully, I’ll be able to jam that steel pipe over there into the crack. If I can do that, we can breathe, and if we can breathe, we can maybe think of something to get us out of here. Just one problem.”

  She walked back over to join him on the sand. “Just one? Wouldn’t that same pressure push the water all the way into this cave?”

  He smiled. “Knew you were smart, but yes, it will. Only we’re going to use that slab up there on the altar to block the entrance. That means you’re going to have to stay in here when I do this.”

  “I do not want to stay in here,” she began.

  “We have no choice—I’m going to need your air tank, and you are probably going to have to stand on that slab to keep the water out of this cave. Stand on it and pile on any weight we can find to keep it in place. Like that big menorah up there, and those rocks.”

  “But—”

  “I know, it’s probably going to leak by—but it’s all we have, Judith. That slab is around ten square feet. That’s fourteen hundred and forty square inches. If I can get the pressure in the main cistern to rise just five pounds per square inch, that will exert almost four tons of force, and that slab doesn’t weigh four tons.”

  She was silent, obviously frightened to death by the prospect of being trapped in this cave, with water rising and no breathing rig.

  He gripped her shoulders. “Look: This ought to work. As long as the pump down there at the plant doesn’t have some kind of back-pressure shutoff switch, the surge in the cistern water pressure ought to dislodge that slab. If I can get a pipe into the crack and wedge it open then maybe we’ll have air.”

  “Ought to. Maybe. Okay, and then what? What do we do—shout for help?”

  “Damn right. Or try to wedge the slab completely out. Or do something else—who knows? Anyway, if we can breathe, we can keep trying to get out of this mess. It’s called survival, Judith.”

  She turned away, her face in shadow. “Maybe you should just go do this thing, David Hall. I think maybe you want to survive more than I do.”

  He’d forgotten about Dov, and the fact that she had been reading the testimonial of the last Jew on the mountain, describing the killing of women and children. Masada might be a mountain of death, he thought, but he was determined not to join the nine hundred and sixty souls who had died in this place. Correction, he thought: nine hundred and sixty-one.

  “Help me find a round stone, Judith. Something about six inches in diameter. Then we need to move that altar slab.”

  29

  Ellerstein stood in the western palace gate and tried to get control of his breathing. After the first one hundred feet up the steep ramp, he had knocked the ashes out of his pipe. After the second hundred feet, he had taken a silent oath never to smoke again. He looked at his watch. Well past midnight. There was no sign of the colonel and his team. They were probably searching the ruins for signs of other humans up here. He turned right and walked into the casemate walls along the southwestern rim of the fortress. A big yellow moon was rising over Jordan, casting a sepulchral light through the shattered walls.

  When he got to the southernmost tip of the mountain, at the opposite end from the terraced villas, he looked down on the hostelry and tourist center, nearly eight hundred feet below. Much of it was in shadow, but he did see something that got his attention: There were two vehicles down there, Land Rovers from the look of them. They were not parked in the tourist parking lot, but rather behind the hostelry. Neither of the army detachments, coming up the coast road, would have been able to see them. They did not appear to be regular army vehicles; there were no Star of David markings, but there were whip antennas on both of them.

  He shivered in the suddenly cold air. Skuratov? If so, where was the Russian right now?

  * * *

  It took them a long time to rig everything, and by the end of it, the air in the cave was getting difficult to breathe. David sat down in the sand near the entrance and went over the plan again with Judith. He was still in his diving rig but using her air tank this time. He had pushed the long steel staging pipe partway into the entrance tunnel. Beside them stood the half of the cracked marble slab they had taken down from the altar. It was leaning against the cave wall, ready to be dropped in place.

  “As soon as I go back out into the cistern, you drop this slab across the water here. Then pack the edges with every loose rock you can find. If you have to, stand on it if the water starts to come in.”

  She had taken off her wet suit and was wearing just a bathing suit. He had the top of her wet suit wrapped up into a tight roll and tied to his side. That and a rock were going to block the outlet pipe. She nodded in the gloom; her headlamp was getting dim. “You know this thing is going to leak,” she said, looking down at the irregularly shaped air-water interface.

  “Yes, it will, but I really don’t need too much pressure to lift that slab out there. Even two, three pounds per square inch ought to move it. Once it lifts, the pressure will release here.”

  “Where will the water go then?”

  “If I can wedge this pipe into the crack, it will flow out of the cave up above. Which is good—someone will have to see that once it’s daylight.”

  “Not on the Sabbath, they won’t,” she said with a sigh. Her face was perspiring. The CO2 must be getting high in here, he thought. Time to get going.

  “There’s some air left in my tank. Hit it from time to time. This shouldn’t take long. I’m going to swim out, leave the pipe in the tunnel here, go plug the outlet, then come back for the pipe and head up to the slab. When it moves, I’ll jam the pipe in as far as I can. Then I’ll come back for you.”

  Confused, she shook her head. “We have only one tank,” she pointed out. “I can’t go up there.”

  “We’ll wait here for an hour or so, let the water pump out into the cave up above and then out onto the side of the mountain. Then I’ll go release the plug. That should create a small air gap around the slab. We can buddy-breathe our way back up there.”

  She sighed again, obviously unsure about all of this. He thought that he might be missing something, but his thinking was clouded by the bad air.

  “Hang in there, Judith,” he said, squeezing her hand. “This has a good shot at working. Even if we have to wait twenty-four hours, someone will see that water trail and come look.”

  “Not the people who dropped the slab in the first place,” she said.

  “Always the optimist, hunh? Okay. Time to go.”

  He fixed his mask and mouthpiece, turned on the tank, and slithered down into the purple water. She watched the trail of bubbles as he went and then switched off her light. The third light was still outside, at the tunnel entrance, so he’d have a reference to get back to her. She reached over in the darkness and found the remaining tank. David had said it would probably have fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of air left if she was c
areful.

  She shook her head in the darkness. This was hopeless, in more ways than one. She didn’t believe the altar slab would keep the water out, and she’d have no way of communicating that problem to David. This cave would flood, and the treasures in it would eventually be consumed by the caustic salts in the water.

  Those had to be Dov’s remains down there at the bottom of the main cistern, that distinctive suit and those white bone fragments. She was sure of it. There wasn’t another suit like that in all Israel. An image of Dov’s bones floated in front of her mind. She was doomed, and as she sat there, thinking about it, she didn’t much care.

  The water pipes meant that someone, and it had to be the government, was using this big cistern for some purpose besides water storage. That strange Russian had been interested in what this American was doing down here. Interested and even concerned. Skuratov had ties to Dimona, which was only forty kilometers away—and if it was Skuratov who had trapped them in here, then it was probably Skuratov who had trapped Dov in here. She found herself wanting to get that outsized dagger from under the altar for one last meeting with Colonel Skuratov.

  She sat there, aware that there was something she was supposed to be doing, but her brain wasn’t working very well. The air was becoming astringent, and each breath was fractionally less successful than the last. Then she remembered: the altar slab. She had to drop the altar slab over this tunnel and then weight it down. She turned on her light and took a deep breath and then another. She almost didn’t have the energy to get up, but she must: David was out there, trying like hell to get them both out.

  She got up, approached the heavy marble slab, positioned it as best she could, and then tipped it over onto the air-water interface. It landed with a flat splash, its edges embedding in the wet sand. Then she began to gather rocks from the cave and put them in the cracks between the slab and the entrance tunnel walls. She packed them in with sand and then more rocks, working in slow motion as she tried to get her breath. She remembered about the tank and went over to it, picked up the breathing mouthpiece, and took some air. It revived her immediately, and she started working faster now, stuffing smaller rocks and more sand all around the slab, while watching for signs of water intrusion. He had said that at first there would be no leaks, but when the pressure rose, if it rose, she reminded herself, the water would show up at the edges.

  Finally, she ran out of rocks. She eyed the huge menorah up on the altar structure, but they had decided it was much too heavy and at the same time too delicate to move. Same with the scroll cylinders. She was aching to open them but knew better. The Qumran scrolls had been the consistency of a piece of newspaper that keeps its shape in the fireplace after being used to start the fire. The merest breath could turn such a thing to dust. She looked around the cave one more time for anything else she could put on the slab. Her body was wet with perspiration, and she could smell the fear on her skin. She looked at her watch: two fifteen in the morning. Her depth gauge was still strapped to her wrist. It read thirty-two feet. She stepped onto the bed of rocks that covered the slab and sat down. She pulled the tank over and then switched off her headlamp. Now she could only wait. She put one hand out to the edge of the altar slab and burrowed it down into the sand. If it started getting wet, she would know she was in trouble. She laughed out loud—as if she were not in trouble right now?

  * * *

  David waited underneath the cistern slab, slowly treading water, the long staging pipe balanced at the midpoint under his left arm. With his right hand he held on to the iron ring on the underside of the slab. He kept his headlamp on, to watch two things: the slab itself and his depth gauge. If his theory was correct, a pressure increase in the cistern ought to register on his depth gauge. Behind him, floating next to his head, was a real prize: one of the two extra air tanks, which he had discovered bobbing along the ceiling near the outlet pipe. He had secured it to his harness with a small nylon strap and would take it back to the cave after he jammed the pipe.

  He looked at the depth gauge. No change. It had read just above zero feet when he put his arm up against the big slab. He thought about Judith, waiting down in that increasingly airless cave. He felt bad enough about getting her involved in this mess, and the discovery of her husband’s remains at the bottom of the cistern had been a dreadful shock. Hell, who could blame her—the government had obviously lied through its teeth about what happened to Dr. Dov Ressner, physicist of Dimona. What really bothered him was trying to figure out why someone had trapped them in this cistern. Was it because whoever it was realized they might discover Dov’s remains? Or was it because of those two pipes coming into a two-thousand-year-old Masada cistern?

  He thought he felt his ears squeeze just a tiny bit. He looked at the depth gauge. No change.

  Wait—there was a change: not quite two feet. Definite movement. Good—the cistern system was being pressurized. It might take longer than he had planned on, because it was a really big cistern and a relatively small pipe. The big question was whether or not the pump over in that building would sense unusual back pressure and shut down. If it did, they were finished.

  He blinked his eyes behind the mask and stared at the gauge. Now there was no doubt: The depth gauge had moved. He watched the big stone slab above his head, breathing as slowly as he could, conserving energy and air. He ran through the math again: Say the slab weighed five hundred pounds. If it was fourteen hundred square inches in area, at even just two pounds additional pressure, the water would be exerting twenty-eight hundred pounds of force on a five-hundred-pound slab. It ought to move. As long as some unknown opening in the Zealots’ cave didn’t fail and relieve the pressure. He refused to think about the treasure cave, the point most likely to do just that. He positioned the end of the staging pipe right up against the crack. Then he waited, and prayed.

  30

  Judith was drifting in a CO2-induced haze when she thought she felt something. She tried to focus. What was it? Something, that’s all. Don’t worry. Relax. Then her brain sparked: Was that a pressure in her ears? She straightened up and switched on her headlamp. It was definitely more yellow now than white. She looked at the depth gauge on her wrist. Had it moved? Not much, if at all. Then what? What had she felt?

  Her bare left hand, submerged in the sand, was tingling. She tried to concentrate, but it was very difficult. What was different? The sand was different. It was wet sand. She jerked her hand out and shone the light down. Definitely wet. The sand was wet. All around the slab, the sand was wet. Really wet.

  She stood up too quickly and nearly tipped over. She blinked her eyes and steadied herself. Then she remembered and stepped back onto the marble slab. Had to keep it wedged in position, long enough for the pressure out there in the main cistern to dislodge the upper slab.

  She focused the light. No longer just wet sand. There was visible water now, oozing up around the edges of the slab. She cast the light around the cave, but there was nothing else to pile on the slab. Every loose rock, her scuba tank, her weight belt. She wished they could have moved the huge menorah, but that was impossible. It would take four men to move that thing. She was pretty sure it was nearly solid metal, possibly even gold. An amazing treasure, the find of all finds, and it was going to be drowned here in this cave.

  She sobbed once in desperation, watching the water press past the edges of the slab, wetting the marble now. David’s plan was working—the cistern was pressurizing—but could she hold this thing? She hadn’t followed the math he used to compute the lifting force, but this piece of marble was about one-quarter the size of the big slab up there. Then she felt it: The slab actually moved, making a squelching sound all around its edges. A small wave of water shot out from three sides before the thing settled back. There was nothing more she could do to hold it, so she knelt down, trying to concentrate her weight. The marble trembled again, a small movement, but a lot more water squirted by the edges this time. She could not hold it. She began to weep as what fe
lt like a soft, giant hand began to move the piece of marble.

  * * *

  David felt rather than saw the slab move above his head. One minute he had been pressing the pipe against the crack; the next moment it had jumped up at an angle and was now wedged in the crack. He shone his light at the point where they joined and saw that he had jammed up one corner of the slab. Swirling particles in the water were streaming up into the crack. He grabbed the iron ring, repositioned his arm, and tried to shove the pipe farther into the crack, but it didn’t move.

  He relaxed for a moment, gathered all his strength, pulled hard on the ring as a fulcrum, and then put a steady push up on the pipe. After a minute, when he almost could no longer hold it, the slab shifted again, and this time the pipe slid several inches into the crack. He could feel the water rushing by his mask now, as the cistern relieved the pressure up into the bat cave above.

  He relaxed his grip on the pipe and took a deep breath from the tank. A difficult deep breath, he realized. Dammit! The tank was quitting on him. He let go of the steel pipe and hung by one hand from the ring. He looked up at the pipe. He had managed to shove perhaps two feet of it through the crack. Then he realized that if the slab moved again, the pipe could slip out and plunge to the bottom of the cistern.

  He got out his knife and slipped it, blade up, between his diving boot and the pant leg of his wet suit. Then he cut directly up, all the way to his thigh. The pant leg opened up but did not come off. He made a second cut, creating a strip of the rubbery material the length of his leg. He cut that off and then tied the pipe off to the iron ring as best he could. It wasn’t terrific, but better than nothing. He took another deep breath and then felt a pressure dip in his ears. Not too big, but definitely something.

  The Zealots’ cave. That damned piece of marble had let go.

  He consulted his compass, pointed west, switched off his headlamp, and then swam down hard toward the opposite wall, the extra air tank banging his hip. He saw the reference light when he was passing through twenty-five feet. He turned twenty degrees to the right and pushed down to the light and the cave entrance. He rolled over onto his back, switched on his light, and started in, but the extra tank snagged on something. He whipped out his knife and cut the tank loose from the harness, grabbed it with his other hand, and struggled backward into the tight tunnel. When he came to the end he hit his head on something: the slab. It wasn’t wedged anymore, though: It was loose in the interface, and he could feel water passing around it. He pulled the extra tank up and banged on the slab to get her attention, but nothing happened. Jesus Christ, had the cave flooded?