Spartan Gold

by Clive Cussler

  “The temple dates back to A.D. 70,” Sam said. “Constructed by Emperor Augustus.” He called up the location on Google Earth. Remi leaned over his shoulder. They could see nothing but jagged gray granite.

  “I don’t see anything,” Remi said.

  “It’s there,” Sam said. “It may be just a pile of stones, but it’s there.”

  “So if we look east of the temple . . .” Using her index finger she traced a line across the lake to the cliff along the southern shoreline. “I don’t see anything that looks like a bowl.”

  “Not enough resolution. We’ll probably have to be standing right on top of it.”

  “That’s great news,” Selma said when Sam and Remi called ten minutes later. She leaned back in her chair and took a sip of tea. Without her afternoon cup of Celestial Seasonings Red Zinger her afternoons tended to drag. “Let me do a little research and I’ll get back to you with an itinerary. I’ll try to get you on the first flight out in the morning.”

  “The sooner the better,” Remi said. “We’re in the home stretch.”

  “So if we’re to believe Bucklin’s story about the Immortals and the Spartans, then we’re assuming the Spartans took the Karyatids through Italy into the Grand St. Bernard, then . . . what?”

  “Then twenty-five hundred years later Napoleon somehow stumbles onto them. How or where we won’t know until we make the walk from the temple.”

  “Exciting stuff. It almost makes me wish I were there.”

  “And leave the comfort of your workroom?” Remi said. “We’re shocked.”

  “You’re right. I’ll look at the pictures when you get home.”

  They chatted for a few more minutes then hung up. Selma heard the scuff of a shoe and turned around to see one of the bodyguards Rube Haywood had sent moving toward the door.

  “Ben, isn’t it?” Selma called.

  He turned. “Right. Ben.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Uh . . . no. I just thought I heard something so I came down to have a look. Must have been you talking on the phone.”

  “Are you feeling all right?” asked Selma. “You don’t look well.”

  “Just fighting a little cold. Think I caught it from one of my little girls.”

  CHAPTER 56

  GRAND ST. BERNARD PASS, SWISS-ITALIAN BORDER

  There were two routes for reaching the pass, Sam and Remi discovered, from Aosta on the Italian side of the border and from Martigny on the Swiss side, the path Napoleon and his Reserve Army had followed almost two hundred years earlier. They chose the shorter of the two, from Aosta, following the SS27 north through Entroubles and Saint Rhémy, winding their way ever higher into the mountains to the entrance to the Grand St. Bernard Tunnel.

  A marvel of engineering, the tunnel cut straight through the mountain for nearly four miles, linking the Aosta and Martigny valleys and offering a weather- and avalanche-proof route beneath the pass above.

  “Another time,” Sam said as they drove past and continued up the SS27. It would add almost an hour to their drive and with no way of knowing how long it would take to follow the riddle’s last line, they erred on the side of caution.

  After another thirty minutes on the switchbacking road they passed through a narrow canyon and pulled into the lake basin. Split by the imaginary Swiss-Italian border, the lake was a rough oval of blue-green water surrounded by towering rock walls. On the eastern shore—the Swiss side—sat the hospice and monastery; on the western shore—the Italian side—three buildings: a hotel-bistro, staff quarters, and a cigar-shaped Carabinieri barracks and checkpoint. High above Sam and Remi the sun burned in a cloudless blue sky, glinting off the water and casting the peaks along the southern shoreline in shadow.

  Sam pulled into a parking spot at the lake’s edge across from the hotel. They got out and stretched. There were four other cars nearby. Tourists strolled along the road, taking pictures of the lake and surrounding peaks.

  Remi slipped on her sunglasses. “It’s stunning.”

  “Think about it,” Sam said. “We’re standing in the exact spot where Napoleon marched when America was only a couple decades old. For all we know, he’d just found the Karyatids and he and Laurent were hatching their plan.”

  “Or they were worrying about how to get out of these mountains alive in the middle of a blizzard.”

  “Or that. Okay, let’s find ourselves a temple. It should be on top of the hill behind the hotel.”

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” a voice called in Italian-accented English. They turned to see a slight man in a blue business suit trotting toward them from the hotel’s entrance.

  “Yes?” Sam said.

  “Pardon.” The man stepped around Sam and stopped at the bumper of their rental car. He looked at a piece of paper, then the license plate, then turned back to them. “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a message for you. A Selma is trying to reach you. She said it is urgent you call her. You may use the phone inside, if you wish.”

  They followed him inside and found a house phone in the lobby. Sam punched in his credit card number and dialed Selma. She picked up on the first ring. “Trouble,” she said.

  “We haven’t had a cell signal since Saint Rhémy. What is it?”

  “Yesterday when I was talking to you on the phone one of Rube’s bodyguards—Ben—was walking around the workroom. I didn’t think much of it at first, but it started nagging me. I did a scan on all the Mac Pros. Someone had installed a hardware keylogger, then removed it.”

  “In English, Selma.”

  “It’s essentially a USB drive loaded with software that records keystrokes. You plug it in and leave it. However long it was installed it downloaded everything I typed. Every e-mail, every document. Do you think Bondaruk got to him?”

  “Via Kholkov. Doesn’t matter right now. Is he there now?”

  “No, and he’s late for his shift.”

  “If he shows up, don’t let him in. Call the sheriff if you have to. When we hang up, call Rube and tell him what you told me. He’ll handle it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Assume we’ve got company coming.”

  They walked outside, grabbed their packs from the car, then circled to the back of the hotel and started up the slope. The grass was starting to green around the rock outcrops, and here and there they saw purple and yellow wildflowers poking up. When they reached the top of the hill, Sam pulled out his GPS unit and took a reading.

  “You think they’re already here?” Remi said, scanning the parking area with her camera’s zoom lens.

  “Maybe, but we can’t second-guess ourselves. There are hundreds of people here. Unless we want to leave and come back later, I vote we push on.”

  Remi nodded.

  Eyes fixed on the GPS screen, Sam walked south a hundred feet, then east for thirty, then stopped.

  “We’re standing on top of it.”

  Remi looked around. There was nothing. “You’re sure?”

  “There,” Sam said, pointing beneath his feet. They knelt down. Faintly visible in the rock was a chiseled straight line, roughly eighteen inches long. Soon they could make out other ruts, some intersecting, others moving off in different directions.

  “Must be what’s left of the foundation stones,” Remi said.

  They walked to what they guessed would have been the center of the temple, then faced east. Sam took a bearing with the GPS, picked out a landmark on the other side of the lake, and they headed back down the hill. At the bottom they crossed the road they’d driven in on and followed a path along the shore, past a stone block bistro fronted by a wooden walkway, then onto a rock shelf that ran along the water to a sheer ledge. Here they dropped down and followed a trail around a small cove to another flat area littered with boulders and patchy grass. Above them the cliff shot up at a fifty-degree angle. In the shade of the peaks, the temperature had dropped ten degrees.

&n
bsp; “End of the line,” Sam said. “Unless we’re supposed to climb.”

  “Maybe we missed something back the way we came.”

  “More likely two hundred years of erosion turned whatever ‘bowl’ was here into a saucer.”

  “Or we’re overthinking it and they were talking about the lake itself.”

  A gust of wind whipped Remi’s hair across her eyes and she brushed it away. To Sam’s right he heard a hollow whistling sound. He snapped his head around, eyes scanning.

  “What’s wrong?” Remi asked.

  Sam held a finger to his lips.

  The sound came again, from a few feet away. Sam moved down the face and stopped before a granite slab. It was ten feet tall and four feet wide. Two-thirds of the way up was a diagonal crack filled with yellow-green lichen. Sam stood on his tiptoes and pressed his fingertips to the crack.

  “There’s cool air blowing out,” he said. “There’s a void behind this. That top piece can’t weigh more than five hundred pounds. With the right leverage we could do it.”

  From the packs he withdrew a pair of Petzl Cosmique ice axes and slipped them into his belt. Though unsure of what they’d find once they reached the pass, it had seemed unlikely the Karyatids were tucked away in a closet in the hospice. The most likely hiding place would be either in some high, hidden cranny or somewhere underground.

  Remi said, “Next adventure, less spelunking, more tropical beaches.”

  “Anyone looking?” Sam asked.

  They scanned the opposite side of the lake and the roads.

  Remi said, “If they are, they’re being careful about it.”

  “Do you mind playing ladder?”

  “Have I ever said no to that?”

  Sam slid his fingers into the crack and chinned himself up. Remi put her shoulders beneath his feet and he boosted himself onto the top of the slab. He turned himself around, his back against the slope. Next he jammed the pick end of each ax into the scree between the slab and the slope so the handles were pointing outward. He gripped a handle in each hand as if he was going to set dual parking brakes.

  “Look out below.”

  Sam set his jaw, heaved back on the ax handles, and pressed with his feet. The cracked slab tilted outward, teetered for a moment, then toppled over. Sam’s feet went with it. He spun himself onto his belly and crossed his arms, catching them on the ledge. The slab crashed to the ground, sending up a puff of dirt.

  “What do you see?” Remi asked.

  “A very dark tunnel. About two feet by two feet.”

  He dropped to the ground and they knelt beside the slab. He plucked the water bottle off his belt and dumped half the contents onto the face, washing away the dust.

  Stamped into the stone was a cicada.

  CHAPTER 57

  They donned their headlamps and climbing harnesses, then Sam boosted himself up the slab and shined his lamp into the entrance.

  “It’s straight and level for ten feet then widens out,” he said. “Can’t see any ledges.”

  He wriggled feet first into the tunnel, then leaned over and helped Remi up. Once she was perched atop the slab he continued backing inside, Remi crawling after him until they reached the wide part, where he turned around. The ceiling was three feet tall and covered in “popcorn,” tiny clusters of calcite.

  Ahead a funnel-shaped hole in the floor was partially plugged by a stalactite. They saw no other openings. They crawled ahead and Sam peeked down the hole. “There’s a platform about six feet below.”

  He rolled onto his back and kicked the stalactite until it broke loose from the ceiling. He shoved it away from the hole. “I’ll go,” Remi said, then scooted forward and slipped her legs through. Sam grabbed her hands and lowered her down until her feet found the platform. “Okay, feels solid.” He let go, then a moment later dropped down beside her, reaching up and manhandling the stalactite into the hole after himself. With a grating sound it fell into place. He took a rock screw from his belt and wedged it between the stalactite and the edge of the hole.

  “Early warning system,” he explained.

  Slightly canted, the platform was ten by six feet and ended at a ledge; over this they saw a thirty-degree diagonal chute. Under the glow of their headlamps it curved down and to the right.

  Sam pulled a coil of nine-millimeter climbing rope from his pack, clipped a carabiner on the end, then dropped it over the ledge, letting it clink down the chute. After he’d let out twenty feet of rope the carabiner came to a stop.

  “Another level spot,” Sam said. “What we don’t know is how wide.”

  “Lower me,” Remi said.

  He reeled in the carabiner and secured the rope to her harness. Feet braced against the wall, Sam lowered her down into the chute, letting out slack at her command until she called a halt. “Another platform,” she called up, her voice echoing. “Walls to the left and directly ahead, and a ledge to the right.” Sam heard her boots scuffing over loose rock. “And another diagonal chute.”

  “How wide is the platform?”

  “About the same as the one you’re on.”

  “Move against the wall. I’m coming down.”

  He dropped the coil over the edge, then lowered himself down until his feet touched the chute, at which point he dropped onto his butt and slid down to the platform. Remi helped him to his feet. The ceiling was taller, two feet above Sam’s head, and dotted with inch-long “soda straw” stalactites.

  Sam walked to the ledge and shined his headlamp down into the next chute. “I’m sensing a trend,” he told Remi.

  For the next fifteen minutes they descended, following a series of winding platforms and chute formations until finally they found themselves in a barn-sized cavern with a stalactite-spiked ceiling and walls covered in mottled brown-and-cream-colored flowstone. Barrel stalagmites jutted from the floor like gnarled fire hydrants.

  Sam pulled a chem-light tube from his pack, cracked it, and shook it until it glowed neon green. He dropped it behind a nearby barrel so it couldn’t be seen from the platform above.

  Directly ahead lay a dead-end wall; to their right were three tunnels, each a vertical fissure in the wall. To their left a curtain of dragon’s-teeth stalactites dropped to within a foot of the floor.

  “We’re at least a hundred feet underground,” Remi said. “Sam, there’s no way anyone could have gotten the Karyatids down this way.”

  “I know. There must be another entrance. Farther down the pass, I’m betting. Do you hear that?”

  Somewhere to their left beyond the dragon’s teeth came the sound of rushing water. “Waterfall.”

  They walked down the curtain, stopping to peek beneath it every few feet. At the midpoint they found a section of dragon’s teeth had broken off, creating a waist-high gap. On the other side lay a four-foot-wide rock bridge spanning a crevasse; halfway across a thin curtain of water tumbled into the chasm, sending up a cloud of mist that sparkled in the beams of their headlamps. Barely visible through the waterfall they could see the dark outline of another tunnel.

  “It’s incredible!” Remi called over the rush. “Is it from the lake?”

  Sam put his mouth beside her ear. “Probably snowmelt runoff. It probably won’t be here in another couple months.”

  They walked back the way they’d come.

  Somewhere in the distance came a metallic ping, followed by silence, then a series of pings as Sam’s rock screw bounced down the chutes above.

  “It may have just slipped,” Remi said.

  They crept back to the platform and stood still, listening. A minute passed. Two minutes, then an echoing voice: “Lower me down.”

  “Damn,” Sam muttered.

  The voice was unmistakable: Hadeon Bondaruk.

  “How long do we have?” Remi asked.

  “He’ll have more people. Twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

  “He must think we’re on the right track,” Remi said. “He’s come to claim his prize.”

  At t
hat moment there was only a handful of people who knew this cave was the likely hiding place for the columns: Sam and Remi, and Bondaruk and whoever was with him. Bondaruk couldn’t allow them to get out alive.

  Sam said, “Then he’s going to be disappointed. Come on.”

  They zigzagged their way through the stalagmites to the opposite wall and checked each tunnel in turn. Down the first tunnel and the middle tunnel they could see nothing but darkness. The third one jogged left after six feet. Sam looked at Remi and shrugged. She shrugged back and said, “Coin toss.”

  They slipped through the fissure and followed the bend. Remi tripped and fell; she rolled onto her butt, rubbing her knee. Sam helped her up. “I’m okay,” she said. “What was that?”

  An object on the floor glittered in her headlamp. Sam walked past her and picked it up. It was a straight, narrow sword about two feet long. Though heavily tarnished, spots of bright steel showed along the blade.

  “This is a Xiphos, Remi. It was carried by Spartan infantrymen. My God, they were here.” He shook himself from his reverie and they continued on.

  The tunnel continued on for another fifty feet, turning this way and that until merging with a three-way intersection. “Left is the middle tunnel, I think. Leads back to the cavern,” Sam said.

  “No, thanks.”

  After twenty feet the tunnel began sloping downward, first gently, then more dramatically until they were sidestepping and groping the walls for handholds. The minutes ticked by. They turned a corner and Sam skidded to a stop, sliding a few feet before bumping into a wall.

  “Dead end,” Remi said.

  “Not quite.”

  Where the wall met the floor there was a horizontal split. Sam crouched down and shined his headlamp inside. It was barely eighteen inches high. Cool air gushed from the opening.

  “That might be the other entrance,” Remi said. “I’ll check it out.”

  “Too risky.”

  Behind them a voice echoed down the tunnel: “Anything?” It was K holkov. In turn, two voices called back, “Nothing!”