Over the years, many had probed into the deep recesses of the cave, thinking to find some archeological remains of human habitation. Nothing was ever found beyond the few relics of the Paleolithic era, old stone axes, arrow heads, thin bone needles and fragments of pottery that were discovered in an upper gallery.
Eventually, the place came to be seen as just another part of the vast fortress redoubt that Gibraltar became, and an old Moorish stone wall guards its entrance to this day. Some who probed too deep simply vanished, like one Colonel Mitchell and another young officer in the 1830s. They simply disappeared without a trace, and numerous expeditions into the caves to find them failed to locate any trace of their passage, and no remains were ever found.
They were not the only men to vanish within the labyrinthine passages of those caves. In 1941, a certain British Sergeant who refused to surrender to the Germans thought to hide himself deep in the lowermost galleries of the cave. He, too, was never seen again—at least not by the men of his own era. Legend held that somewhere, the entrance to a 15 mile long hidden tunnel could be found within the cave, one that led all the way beneath the straits of Gibraltar to Morocco. Even in Greek times, the place was said to be the entrance to Hades, a dark underworld domain of demons and devils. And the Famous Barbary Macaques that now came back to the Rock again were said to have used the passage to make their way to Gibraltar from the African continent.
When the second great war came, the place had been designated as an emergency hospital site, and it was the last refuge of the British defenders when the Germans launched their ill-fated Operation Felix to capture the Rock. At that time, the artisan engineers had drilled out an alternate entrance to the site to allow for better air to circulate into the chambers below. When they blasted through the rock with their work, part of the cave floor gave way and revealed a whole new series of chambers delving deeper into the earth. They gazed in awe at the high hidden walls of what is now called ‘Cathedral Cave,’ the stone carved by Stalactites that fused to resemble a soaring pipe organ. In other places, the walls look as though an artist like H. R. Geiger might have carved them, curiously alien formations that appear almost skeletal in places.
One day, the cave would become a tourist venue for over a million visitors each year, and tickets would be sold to admit guests to the hidden wonders within, the soaring chambers, deep pools of pristine water, and amazing rock formations. That time was still decades away in the 1940s, when the scourge of war made Gibraltar a bitterly contested redoubt commanding the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.
After losing the Rock in 1941, now Great Britain had her prized outpost on the Pillars of Hercules back again, and another group of explorers were at work, this time armed with hand held ground penetrating radar. They had been lured there by a finely engineered series of numbers burned into the metal shaft of what looked to be nothing more than an old skeleton key. One enterprising man soon discovered the numbers were geographic coordinates, an exact location within St. Michael’s Cave.
To reach it, a small troop of men and women formed up on the Argos Fire. Among them were Elena Fairchild, Mack Morgan, her Chief of Security, and Captain of the ship, Gordon MacRae, with ten men at arms—the Argonauts. Had they come here in 1941, the place would have remained completely unknown and inaccessible. It was only in 1942 that the Royal Engineers set their charges off, but found no rubble after the explosion, for it had all fallen through a gaping hole in the stone floor to reveal this additional network of caves. By now, in January of 1943, the Engineers had explored the site, finding a chamber extending some 370 meters. A flight of steps, and a trap door, were installed to permit access.
“Look at the walls,” said MacRae. “All wet with flowing water. It’s carved out those curtain formations there, and look at those flowstones—amazing.”
“Step through here,” said Morgan. “I’ve toured this place in our time. They call it the Boxing Ring, on account of these ropes the engineers have installed to serve as guides and hand holds. This is really the heart of this rift. There’s a magnificent pool of water up ahead.”
“Won’t there be places that the men of this era have yet to uncover?”
“Perhaps,” said Morgan. “A pity we can’t just use GPS to get to those exact coordinates. As it stands, this map will have to get us where we want to go, though we might even have to do a little engineering ourselves.”
“That would be risky,” said Elena. “After all, whatever we find here was hidden for a purpose. We won’t want it to become generally known.”
“Aye,” said MacRae. “Then let’s get to the radar sets, and have the men do a sweep of this whole area. They can feed the data to Mac’s tablet and we’ll get some 3D imaging of the region.”
Morgan was already huddling with the Argonauts, seeming to be in conference with a cluster of androids. The troops had donned their special TALOS suits, short for “Tactical Assault Light Operations Suit.” In addition to advanced Kevlar protection, it had a reinforced exo-skeleton that could be engaged under power from a battery. The conduits in the arms, legs, and spine would be made rigid under power to provide additional strength when holding something of great weight.
The suit exterior was also photo sensitive, and could be programmed to display differing camo schemes after sampling ambient light levels and measuring surrounding terrain colors. It could make the Argonauts into chameleons of a sort, allowing them to blend into any surrounding terrain. They could also provide heat in cold environments, or the inverse, and had a health monitoring capability for the wearer, filtermask, night vision visor, reserve oxygen and water, and lastly, an embedded computer that could run on solar energy.
Every man in the ten man team was connected wirelessly, and the squad leader could call up an image on his visor display that would indicate the location of each man relative to his position, and note his general health condition by color. Sergeant Keller had the group today, a steady and reliable man that had been with the Argonauts for five years, declining promotion to Lieutenant three times so he could remain “Gunny” to the lads. He was a man who had found his preferred place in life, and when rigged out in full TALOS gear like this, with a Tech Assault Rifle slung over his shoulder, he was in seventh heaven. Three hours later they had swept the area and it was time for map work on the tablet.
“This section here looks promising,” said Morgan. “Look at that mass index there. That has to be very solid rock, at least in the density of granite, but this whole formation is limestone—very porous. That’s how these bloody caves formed in the first place.”
“How deep is it?” asked Elena.
“It looks to be thirty feet beneath us… About there.” He pointed to a depression in the floor of the cave.
“No good trying to dig that deep,” said Elena, and she looked perturbed. “This just isn’t what I expected. Something is wrong.”
MacRae inclined his head. “Care to elaborate on that?”
Elena thought for a moment. “Remember that story I told you about the man found in a bar in Ceuta claiming to be a British Sergeant from WWII? No one believed him of course, because that was in 2020, eighty years after the war, and the man of thirty years making the claim wouldn’t have even been born yet. It was just bar talk, until he ran afoul of the authorities and began spouting off things that were intriguing, to say the least.”