Suddenly, the large totem pole and the earth underneath their feet began trembling. For a brief second, Sean took his eyes off the two men, bracing himself by bending his knees slightly. His gun, though, stayed pointed at them. The entire group took a few steps back, not sure what was happening.
The seven smaller poles began to move slowly. To the left, all the rods were sinking into the ground. On the right, they were rising but the post in the center never moved. The bizarre event lasted for only a minute, but when the pillars had stopped moving, their heights had changed to a more staggered look, like a staircase.
All five witnesses stood in silent awe for a minute, gazing at the oddity.
“So, what now, Schultzie?” Sean broke the silence.
Tommy looked perplexed. “That should have been it. Something‘s wrong.”
“Maybe you didn’t do it right,” Joe chimed in.
“No. Pretty sure that was it and that had to be the key.” He looked around as if expecting some kind of sign from Heaven to point the way to their goal. None came. “I don’t understand.”
The two captives stood silently while the others attempted to solve the problem; Ulrich’s eyes locked on Joe like a rattlesnake eyeing its prey.
Sean looked curiously at the scene. “Mac, keep an eye on those two.”
“What is it?” Tommy asked.
Tossing the gun to Tommy, Sean ignored his friend’s question for a moment and walked over to the totem that had lowered to where the top was only about four feet high. “They’re steps,” he finally answered. “The ancient Natives had a ritual for new warriors. It was the final test they had to pass. They had to stand on top of a pole like one of these for an entire night. If they could accomplish this without falling off, they would be initiated.”
“Realization came to Tommy. Of course. How did I forget that?”
“Beats me,” Sean said, hopping up onto the short log. “You’re the expert on Indians.” He grinned cynically down at his friend.
“Hope you know what you’re doing.”
“It’s only about five or six feet in between them. The problem isn’t the jumping, though. It’s the landing. The gradual escalation isn’t going to help either.”
He steadied himself on the two-foot-wide platform and leaped to the next one, making it look easy enough. Below, Tommy rejoined Joe and their new prisoners, still watching as Sean jumped to the third pole.
He made it to the center pole with relative ease. Again, he repeated the maneuver up to the fifth. The platform was up about fifteen feet at this point, and the jumping was becoming riskier each time. Thinking ahead, the final leap would be to a height around twenty-five feet, a point at which the danger would be broken bones or worse. He tried to shake the fear from his mind, but it was still in front of him as he made the next two leaps. The lack of concentration nearly cost him on the seventh as he shorted the distance by about a foot. His fingers caught the front lip of the stone, gripping tight, and his feet dangled below. Tommy made a quick movement to get below him in case he fell.
Struggling to keep his hold on the top, Sean hung over the ground, kicking his legs in an effort to worm his way up. With his right foot, he found the nose of a wolf’s face sticking out of the front of the tall facade and used it to brace himself while he hugged his way onto the platform.
His allies below exhaled a breath of relief as Sean hoisted himself up and readied for the last jump. “I’m okay,” he assured them. “Just lost my concentration for a second there.”
He let his eyes search the surroundings for a brief second, hoping that the location would be revealed from his current vantage point. It wasn’t. So, with trepidation, he moved to the very edge of the pole. He was surprised at how much his legs were burning at this point. Sean took pride in the fact that he exercised regularly and had very high endurance for physical activities. This routine must have been working out muscles that he was unaccustomed to using.
With every last ounce of leg power he could muster, Sean launched himself across the void. This time, adrenaline must have taken over because he almost overshot the thing, landing on the very back edge and waving his arms like a gymnast on a balance beam to keep from toppling over.
Steadying his weight back on the center of the beam, he gazed out across the landscape. Rolling forests lay out before his eyes. He couldn’t help being a little surprised at how such a small elevation could improve one’s view of things.
Sean’s eyes passed across the horizon as he turned around a full 360 degrees.
“You see anything?” Tommy shouted from below.
“Just a bunch of woods, the road...” Then his gaze locked onto something. “Wait a minute. There is something.” He pointed over toward what, to the group on the bottom, appeared to only be a thick growth of trees.
“What is it?”
“I don’t think you can see it from down there. But I see another totem, sticking up from the trees on that small hill, over in that direction.”
Tommy stood on his tiptoes in an attempt to locate what his friend had found.
Allyson, too, took a few steps closer to the row of stone faces to see if she could glimpse what Sean was pointing at.
For one second, Joe took his eyes off of the blond and Flattop to take a glance toward the forest. A second was all Ulrich needed to pull the hidden gun from his back and fire off three quick shots.
Joe stumbled and dropped his gun as one of the bullets found its mark, sending the man reeling backward, shock on his face as he collapsed to the ground.
In another instant motion, Ulrich had spun forward and grabbed Allyson around the neck, immediately putting the gun to her head.
Tommy looked on helplessly. He stood frozen, completely stunned by what had just transpired.
“Drop the weapon, Mr. Schultz. I may still have need of you, so don’t do anything stupid.”
Sean was crouching down on his perch, now looking at the scene below. Joe was still down, wet crimson soaking his shirt.
“Mr. Wyatt, if you would be so kind as to join us now.” Ulrich motioned for him to return the way he’d just gone.
Going down was much easier than the jumping up had been, and in less than a minute, Sean was back on the ground. The guard had retrieved his gun and now had it trained on Wyatt.
To say that Sean was frustrated would be an understatement. He’d forgotten the cardinal rule of his training. Always check a detainee for other weapons. Now they were all back to square one. Worse than that, now Allyson was in danger. “Leave her out of this,” he demanded.
She squirmed against Ulrich’s grip, and a look of terror filled her eyes.
“Now, now,” Ulrich whispered. “Don’t struggle. I would hate to have to kill you, my dear.” He didn’t respond to Sean’s request.
Her mouth couldn’t form the angry words she wanted to say. The man’s vice-like grip around her throat barely let in enough air.
“Let her go!” Sean shouted this time. “She has nothing to do with this! The cops are on their way. What are you going to do? It’s over!”
The blond man answered with a twisted smile. “Then I suppose we should hurry.” He motioned with his gun at the area Sean had pointed out a few minutes before. “Now! Or I kill her right here!”
“We can’t just leave him here.” Wyatt motioned to his friend lying on the ground, motionless.
“You will do as I say, or she dies!”
Tommy and Sean had no choice. For a moment, their eyes locked, desperate and bewildered. Then they started trudging into the forest, Sean leading the way. The guard was right behind them, holding his gun at waist level, followed by Ulrich, who’d taken his arm from around Allyson’s neck and forced her to walk in front of him, holding the pistol at the small of her back.
“What are we gonna do, Sean?” Tommy asked. His voice sounded like a child’s.
“I don’t know, Schultzie.” He looked around as they waded through the tall grass, hoping the police were on the
ir way. “But we’re running out of time.”
Chapter 55
Eastern Georgia
Ulrich forced the group to move quickly through the forest. He had overheard Sean’s conversation with the police so time, he knew, was running out. With a feverish urgency bordering on madness, the blond man trudged through the undergrowth. He snapped his head left and right every time a twig broke under someone’s foot.
The guard, too, looked uneasy, making sure he covered a 360-degree area with his gun as he swung it around wildly.
Sean’s thoughts wandered to Joe. He hoped that the police would find him fast enough to get him medical treatment. The wound hadn’t looked good, and Mac must have lost a great deal of blood in a short amount of time.
After a few more minutes of marching through the trees, the group arrived at the spot Wyatt had seen earlier.
Tommy stared at one of the most impressive monuments he had ever seen. Loose dirt surrounded it, indicating that the massive thing was mostly buried, if not totally underground.
The woods had been somewhat flat up until they got to that point. There, the forest floor gave rise to a small hill with the enormous totem pole at its base. Just beyond it, at the foot of the hillside, gaped an opening to a cave.
Ulrich motioned toward the entrance, “Quickly, inside!”
The three captives obeyed and swiftly scurried over to the opening. It was a hole about seven feet high and four feet wide. A pile of grass and dirt lay next to it, alluding to the fact that the entrance had been covered for centuries. Ulrich removed a pen-sized aluminum flashlight from a cargo pocket. The guard did the same.
Sean turned around at the edge of the dark corridor. “Are we supposed to just go on through the dark?”
The blond replied with a fake pitying grin and tossed him the small light. “Lucky for you, I brought an extra. Now move!” He flicked the gun, herding Sean and the others into the darkness.
Sean led the way in with Tommy just behind, followed by the stumpy guard, then Allyson and Ulrich. There were cobwebs everywhere, and it was a struggle just to maintain sanity while brushing them away every five or six feet. Apparently, the spiders that had spun them had long since died or given up trying to catch anything in the ancient place.
The walls of the walkway were smoothly carved stone cut with laser precision. Overhead, the ceiling was also a perfectly scored surface.
Tommy broke the awed silence as they moved farther underground. “Do you realize what we are seeing? No one has been inside of this hall for maybe thousands of years. We are the first humans to set foot here in millennia.”
“Yeah,” Sean responded only half interested. The current situation overwhelmed his admiration of the surroundings.
The passageway came to a corner and turned ninety degrees to the left, sloping down somewhat steeply. Another twenty or so feet, the same turn was repeated, continuing downward almost like a spiral staircase without the stairs.
After turning left several times, descending deeper into the earth, the group came to a point where they could go no farther. In front of them stood a wall made from the same stone as the rest of the corridor. The difference was that the other walls had no identifying markings. This one did.
Hieroglyphics of amazing detail jumped out from the solid rock canvas before them. There was no mistaking the inscriptions’ origin. Various Egyptian deities, animals, symbols, and other characters were easily recognizable even to the novice historian.
“Amazing,” Tommy whispered.
Sean reached out slowly so the two men with guns wouldn’t freak out. He traced the outline of a glyph that he’d never seen before. It was a picture of some kind of boat with figures of people and animals surrounding it.
“That must be one of the boats that brought the Egyptians over to the Americas. Looks like they brought a bunch of animals with them. Probably as a food source.”
“Would make sense,” Sean agreed. Then he turned his attention to a couple of oddities on either side of the path.
Carved into the stone were two hollow spaces. Within each vacancy sat a stone bird. The two animals faced each other from across the corridor, and each had a small inscription below it.
Ulrich was obviously irritated by their halt in progress. “Where is the chamber?”
“He always like this?” Sean jerked his thumb toward the blond man.
“You have no idea,” Tommy chuckled in spite of himself.
“I’m glad you two are comfortable with the fact that you are about to die,” Ulrich threatened.
Sean’s smile disappeared for a moment as he turned to face the murderer’s blue-gray eyes. Then he turned back to his friend. “Still, I think those guys down in Peru were way worse.”
Tommy couldn’t help but outright laugh. “Yeah. Probably.”
“I knew it!” Allyson exclaimed as she gave Sean a chiding glare. “I knew you guys were up to something in Peru!”
Obviously tired of the little trip down memory lane, Ulrich forced the gun barrel to the back of her head.
Both friends’ faces turned somber.
Tommy spoke up. “All right. All right. Obviously, we can’t just move this wall. It’s got to be, like, two or three tons, easy.” His eyes scanned the smooth surface.
“What do these markings say? Can you translate it?” Ulrich urged.
“Basically, it’s a story of how the people came here. Apparently, there was one man who they believed to be some kind of a savior for their people, someone who would take them to a new land.”
“Sounds like the Moses story from the Bible.” Allyson final spoke up.
Glad to see she was no longer in shock, Sean turned to her. “Sort of like that. But this story predates that one. These hieroglyphs are from a much earlier Egyptian kingdom.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I wonder what they wanted to get away from?”
“Yeah,” Tommy continued. “You can tell from the construction of the characters, the lines, the way they have been carved, these are some of the more ancient forms of Egyptian writing.
“You see,” he went on, “eventually, the Egyptians went to a more abbreviated form of writing called hieratic. It was much simpler and faster for their scribes to use than what you are looking at right now. This must come from the time around the Old Kingdom.”
While Tommy kept reading the wall, the guard’s attention had been distracted by the bird in the left wall. His right hand held the gun, but the man’s curiosity led his left hand to the smooth stone of the carving’s head.
He was just about to feel it when Tommy yelled, “Stop!”
The guard yanked his hand back, startled.
“Don’t touch anything,” Tommy ordered. “There is a riddle here. I think this whole place might be booby trapped.”
Ulrich cast the guard a warning glance.
“It says, ‘To find the way, the birds will guide you. The one that returns shall doom bring forth. The other shall lead you home.’”
“Ok,” Sean said. His face contorted into a sarcastic smirk. “That seems simple enough. To move the wall, we have to do something with one of these birds.” He looked at one and then the other.
“Yeah, but if we choose the wrong one, we may not get out of here alive,” Tommy added.
“How do you know which bird? They look the same to me,” Allyson asked.
“I’m not sure,” Tommy replied, scratching his head. “The one that returns...I wonder what that means.
“It must have something to do with the writing beneath the birds. But the language is different than on the wall. Looks a lot like the writing on the back of the stone I found at the Vann house.” Tommy pondered the problem.
“Can you read it?” Ulrich butted in.
“Not really. That was why I sent the stone to Frank to begin with.”
Sean reached into his pocket. “You mean this stone?”
He opened his palm, producing the medallion.
“Where did you get that?”
Tommy took the stone and examined it closely then looked at one of the stone birds. He stepped over to the sculpture and pointed to the word underneath it. “These birds must be the raven and the dove.”
“Which is which though?”
Ulrich watched silently off to the side, keeping his gun on the hostages.
“We have to assume that this one here is the raven. It is the first one in the riddle and the word on the stone matches the writing below. But that is only half of the solution.”
“Which one returned?”
“I’m not sure.” Tommy stepped across the small space to the other bird. “Both of the birds look the same.”
Then he leaned down to look at something that appeared to be clutched in the bird’s claws. “Looks like some kind of branch.”
“That’s it!” Sean exclaimed.
“What’s it?”
“It’s an olive branch. In the flood story from the Bible, Noah released a raven and a dove from the ark. The raven came back. At first, the dove did as well, and when it did, it carried an olive branch. A week or so later, Noah sent the dove out again; the second time, it did not return.”
Sean knelt down at the base of the stone dove, examining it closely. With both hands, he reached around the bird’s head and pulled. The sculpture gave way to the force of Wyatt’s hands and bent forward. A deep grinding sound reverberated through the ancient passageway, and the dusty floor beneath them shook violently as the huge stone wall began to rise slowly. All five of the visitors could not help but stare at the site of the heavy door being lifted. Even Ulrich looked a little shocked by the power that must have surely been required to move such an enormous weight.
Not surprisingly, a tremendous amount of dust hung in the air after the huge stone’s journey had finished at the top of the portal. Ulrich motioned for the prisoners to go on through to the other side. Beyond the cloud of debris in front of them, more darkness awaited.
Sean Wyatt Compilation Box Set Page 27