I dug up more bones. A few femurs, a hand, a spine, but I managed to expose the wooden crossbar. It was held in place by two large iron U-bolts. I kicked the wooden bar from one end, slowly moving it all the way through the U-bolt. But the door didn’t exactly swing open. It didn’t move at all. It was all I could do to stick the shovel in the crack between the doors and lever them apart, because on the other side of the doors was more dirt.
Another shot reverberated through the tunnel, this one closer than the last. Bones crunched beneath my feet, the gritty earth lodging in my fingernails, as I rocked the big door back and forth. But I knew I was making progress. Slowly but steadily, I opened a big enough gap between the doors for me to stand between them.
There was more earth on the other side of the doors, but when I stabbed it with the shovel, the blade went through it more easily than I had expected. I speared the shovel into the dirt again and it went in even easier than before. On the third try, the shovel cut through the dirt like butter. I knew right then that my luck had changed. It was almost too good to be true. Because when I twisted the shaft of the shovel and wiggled it back and forth, a finger of light shone through. I could see blue sky. We were out.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Meryem!” I called out.
I turned and found myself staring down the barrel of a gun.
Chapter 50
Meryem aimed the barrel of the AK-47 squarely at my head. The machine gun didn’t bother me as much as the grenade she held in her other hand. But most disturbing was the smartphone she clutched alongside the grenade. Because the fact that she possessed the phone told me that Meryem was not what she seemed.
She stared down at the bones beneath my feet.
“These are my people,” Meryem said.
“These are bones,” I replied. “They haven’t been people for a long time.”
“These are the Kurdish people who gave their lives to hide the Device. I am a Kurd. I am sorry for not being honest with you about this, but it’s time you learned the truth, Michael.”
Not good, I thought. Not good at all. I knew that Meryem was Turkish. But I had dismissed Kate’s notion that Meryem might be Kurdish because Kate was a liar. Of course, sometimes liars told the truth.
“My people died in this place long ago so the Device could be hidden and not found. They knew they would not see their families again and they accepted it. They hid these weapons and built this tunnel. They sacrificed themselves so we might one day have a homeland. But the location of this place was lost. Now that you have helped me find it again, my people will not have died in vain.”
Meryem stepped forward, keeping the AK-47 leveled at me. The bandolier fit nicely over her shoulders, causing her breasts to swell where it cut between them over her damp T-shirt. I laughed to myself. Not only had I read the situation wrong, I had been betrayed.
“Get a new phone?” I asked.
“The telephone is not your concern, Michael. Dig.”
I dug. A basic tunnel to the outside was beginning to take shape.
“So you want to tell me who you’re working with?”
“No. I would like you to dig.”
I stayed quiet only because Meryem made a call and I wanted to listen to what she had to say. The conversation was very brief and in Turkish. I couldn’t make out much of it, but I managed to pick out the word, Kale. A second later she hung up. Then she pulled the pin on the grenade.
“What are you planning on doing with that?” I asked.
“Please, Michael. Enough questions. Dig the hole.”
The tunnel in the dirt was bigger now. Big enough that I could see through it. I was looking into some kind of dilapidated, roofless structure, the blue sky visible above. I was happy to be getting out of there, but for whatever reason, Meryem considered me the enemy. Azad, I thought. The whole situation with that guy had never sat well with me. That’s why I had asked her about him again on the gulet. But she had told me that he was just a job and I had believed her. Or was it simply that I had believed her kiss? I needed to buy time. Lucky for me, she had her hands full. Literally. Mobile phone, grenade, and machine gun. Not a great combination.
I heard more gunfire from farther down the tunnel. It was loud this time which meant it was close. I turned back and Meryem smiled sadly. Then she tossed the grenade. Not at me, but backward, above the truck and through the tunnel. It was a decent throw. But she had to turn away from me to lob it. And I used that precious fraction of a second to burrow my way into the hole I had dug.
I didn’t think Meryem would shoot, and even if she did, I was now behind the barn door and surrounded by earth. But I knew that I didn’t have much time to get through the dirt pile and out into the open. And the tunnel was tighter than I had anticipated. There was a pause followed by a thunderous shock wave, after which I felt the hard barrel of a gun jam into the small of my back. I had been quick, but not quick enough.
“I was just leaving,” I said.
I couldn’t see Meryem, but I could feel her behind me.
“The grenade was to stop your friend Kate.”
“Kate is no friend of mine.”
“Maybe so, Michael. But your allegiances do not matter now. Now we do what must be done.”
There was no sense arguing with an armed woman, so I pulled myself out into the daylight. Meryem wriggled through the tunnel after me. She kept the AK aimed squarely at me, but I still believed I knew her. I believed that I could get through to her. That bit of arrogance proved to be my first mistake. But my much larger error, was to think that I knew Meryem at all.
Chapter 51
I rolled down the pile of dirt to find myself crouched inside what remained of an old barn built into the hillside. There were four walls, the roof long since caved in to the dirt floor below, weathered ceramic tiles crunched beneath my feet. Aging agricultural implements took up the space on the left of me, and there was nothing to my right. The wall opposite the pile of dirt consisted of another set of barn doors even more gray and weathered than the ones I had just climbed through. I pulled what I thought was a pebble from my ear, but when I looked at it more carefully, I saw that it was a tiny bone. Not my own, but almost as unnerving.
“Raise your hands, Michael Chase,” Meryem said.
I turned to see that she was carefully keeping me covered with the rifle as she scrabbled through the hole in the dirt.
“Meryem, enough with this crap. We’re on the same side here.”
She slid to the bottom of the pile, ten feet away from me, the barrel of her rifle carefully trained on my center mass.
“We were never on the same side, it is time you understood this.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I don’t have any kind of deal with Kate.”
“Maybe you do not. Maybe you do. I don’t care.”
“What are you trying to do here?”
“Hands on your head. I won’t say it again.”
“Or what?”
She lowered the barrel of the gun and shot the ground at my feet. Dirt flew and I did as I was told. I put my hands on my head. I was beginning to doubt my plan to reason with her. Then I heard the distant rattling of a diesel engine. I figured we were probably by a road.
“You want to tell me what’s up?”