“What sort of things?”
Elena smiled. “The man claimed he fought the Germans at Gibraltar—said he was in the last detail holed up right here, in Saint Michael’s Cave. That was laughable to anyone who heard it, because they knew the Germans never set foot on the Rock during the war, at least not in the history I know. The story was filed away, the man released, and who knows what became of him. Then the Watch suddenly gets very keen to find him again. I got the order personally—locate Hobson, that’s the man’s name, and I suppose all the other watchstanders got the same order as well.”
“Ah…” said MacRae. “I remember that now.” The recollection of the conversation he had with Elena was clear in his mind. He had been trying to sort all this crazy business out concerning the keys, just after the Rodney went down, taking one from them forever, or so he believed.
“Someone sends you a message—Tovey himself from all accounts,” he remembered himself saying to her. “He sends you off to Delphi, and for what? That bloody box, that’s what. It brings the ship here, and gives us a shot at getting our hands on the key that went missing from the Elgin Marbles. I won’t ask how you knew about it, but there it is. Then, out of thin air, this Russian Captain produces yet another key. Some bloody fine rabbit he pulled out of his hat. And that was rather dramatic when he honed in on those engraved numbers being geographic coordinates. The key we lost on Rodney was supposed to open, or secure something in St. Michael’s Cave… I wonder what’s been hidden there, another of those thick metal doors and underground passages?”
“Those caves get very deep,” said Elena, “and there are segments that have not yet been fully excavated. But… there is one thing more I can tell you. It happened a year before we set out on this mission… A man stumbled into a bar in Ceuta harbor, right south of Gibraltar across the straits. He claimed the Germans had taken the Rock, but that he had found a way out. Said he was a British Sergeant fighting there when it happened, at least that was the story in the police report. They assumed he had one too many that night, and that he was just a vagrant sailor off a tramp steamer, but nobody claimed him when the authorities contacted the ships in port that day. He had no passport, but did carry some authentic looking documents—a ration book, right from the war—this war.”
“How did this come to your attention?”
“It was just one of those odd stories that bounced around the web for a day or two, but somebody in British intelligence got curious about this fellow’s tale. They got hold of that police report. The fellow had it chapter and verse. His name was in the register of troops assigned to garrison duty at Gibraltar in 1940.”
“Anybody could have gotten hold of that kind of information.”
“True, but his story included a few details that now strike a nerve or two. The man said he was up on Windmill Hill Flats, above Europa Road, when a British battleship ran the straits and shelled German positions in and around the harbor. After that, they got the order to withdraw to St. Michael’s Cave. Ring a bell?”
Those were details that were suddenly transformed from witless fancy to gospel truth after they arrived here. For this was an altered meridian, a changed historical account of the war. Now MacRae realized that that man was reporting details of events they had clearly seen happen here, and with that he realized that the British Sergeant must have come from this very same time—from this same bloody cave where he was standing right now. But how did he turn up in 2020, and still remain a man of thirty years?
The answer was as obvious as his own presence there, for he was a man of that era, yet marooned here in the 1940s. He traveled in time…. The bloody British Sergeant traveled in time! It was either that, or he had one wildly accurate imagination, recounting events like the daring sortie by the battleship Valiant to shell the Germans on the Rock during their Operation Felix. It was eerie, and it could be no coincidence. They were, at that very moment, engaged in a hunt to find something that had been hidden here in St. Michael’s Cave, just like that little side trip to the Oracle at Delphi that landed the Argos Fire here.
“Then this man Hobson found what we’re looking for,” he said to Elena, his eyes dark and serious.
“It seems so.”
“And he didn’t have to use all this equipment to do so.”
“That’s what’s been bothering me,” said Elena. “We naturally came down here, as deep as we could get to the newly discovered galleries of the cave site. But now I realize that these areas were not even discovered until 1942.”
“Aye, so that British Sergeant couldn’t have found anything down here. Then where would he have been back in ‘41 when the Germans were coming for them?”
They looked at one another, then MacRae turned to his own Sergeant Keller, whistling. “Sergeant, secure this operation and get the men back to the upper gallery—on the double.”
Mack Morgan came over, a question in his eyes. “What’s up?”
“We’re not in the right spot,” said Elena. “The search has to start in the old cave site, not the new galleries here.”
“But this lot is much deeper.”
“Yes, but it won’t get us where we need to go.”
“With all due respect, Mum, what makes you so sure of that?”
Elena simply smiled at him. “A British Sergeant told me so.”
Chapter 26
It wasn’t unusual to find a Barbary Ape roosting about the stony slopes of the Rock. They were fond of the place long before the British came in 1704, and the British Army took to supervising them and even providing a daily food ration of fruit and nuts. Living mostly on the eastern heights, the little troops began to range more freely over time. By 2021, they were among the top tourist attractions on Gibraltar, and a law had to be passed forbidding the feeding of any Macaque to prevent them from foraging in the town.
In 1942 there was only one small troop of seven monkeys on the Rock when the Germans had the place, and they fled, fulfilling the legend that Britain would hold the Rock only if the Apes were there. Once it was taken back by Montgomery, Churchill insisted that the population of Macaques be increased, issuing orders to troops in Morocco and Algeria to round up the monkeys and send them to Gibraltar.
Three troops now inhabited the place, content to live under British rule again, and deemed “loyal subjects of the Crown.” Yet it was most unusual to find one in the lower galleries of the cave systems, particularly here, in St. Michael’s Cave. Elena stared at the little fellow they encountered, quite curious.
They had moved through the Stalagmite Halls out of New St. Michael’s Cave, and then through the feature known as the Great Rift, seeing nothing unusual. This took them very near the entrance to the New Caves, where a winding hole called The Corkscrew burrowed straight down, connecting to the lower galleries of the old cave system. These were as deep as those in the new cave site, so they descended into a chamber known as The Grotto to continue their search. About mid-way through the lower series, they encountered the Barbary Ape, intent on something it was eating.
“How did he get down here?” asked Elena.
“Probably the same way we did,” said Morgan.