“That’s the bottomless pit you were talking about,” said Morgan. “When the Moors had the place, they said it was often used to hide treasure when outside forces were threatening to take the Rock from them. Many have tried to find it, and there are a few ‘Grandfather’s tales’ about Hell’s Throat. I read up on one the other night when we were prepping for this mission.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Elena.
“Well, Mum, it concerns a British soldier, Grimsby by name, who had a friend named Peter Provost who was led to Hell’s Throat by a couple of Moors. They threw in a torch, and it fell away to a mere spark before it vanished. Then they threw in stones, which clattered down and down until they could hear no further sound. Hence the rumors about that drop being bottomless. Well, this Provost fellow decided to rig out some ropes and climb down for a look. About ninety feet down, he came to a shelf of stone big enough for him to stand and walk along its edge. It led him to an aperture in the walls of the throat, and that opened onto a passage—or so he claimed. The man got marooned there when the two Moors that led him to the spot heard British soldiers coming and fled, dropping the rope that was tied fast to this Provost fellow. The rope fell over the brink into the abyss, and the man was stranded over 90 feet down.”
“Poor fellow,” said Elena. “How did he get out?”
“That’s the odd part,” said Morgan. “There was an attack on the British contingent by men from the Spanish Camp at nearby Son Roque. The two sides were always at each other’s throats. Well, this man Grimsby was taken prisoner, and transported out to a Spanish P.O.W. ship anchored in the bay. The Spaniards were trying to blockade the Rock with a little fleet out there, but here’s the strange twist in all of this. Days later, a boat arrived from Morocco, delivering yet another prisoner to that ship, and lo and behold, it was this Peter Provost, recognized immediately by Grimsby, in spite of the fact that he seemed dazed and haggard. The Moors said he had been found wandering the hills behind a village—on Ape’s Hill, in Morocco!”
“This is sounding all too familiar,” said Elena. “Was there anything else to the story?”
“Grimsby said that Provost was babbling on and on about pillars of fire, utter nonsense, but he did manage to extract something of what may have happened to him. In desperation, the man apparently followed a deep subterranean passage, which continued to descend for some time before it eventually turned up again. He was down to his last torch, which eventually guttered out, but in that eerie darkness, probing along with a walking stick, he claimed that a strange greenish glow was seen all about him, just enough for him to make way. All the while, he claimed he could hear the sound of water, high overhead. It wasn’t a dribble like the seepage that formed these stalactites, but the deep swell of some great body of water. So you know where this is going, aye?”
“The hidden passage under the Straits of Gibraltar,” said Elena.
“Aye, and it was said that Provost came upon a mummy of a Moor, a dagger still embedded in its bony chest, and saw two jars, both empty, but with a scatter of gold coins on the stony floor of the passage. By the time he was found, Provost was not in his right mind, but he continued to babble on about this hidden passage to the Spaniards, thinking they might be interested in it as a way into the Rock. They paid him no mind, and it seems he was never quite right in his own head again after that—assuming any of this can be believed.”
“Interesting,” said Elena. “Your map shows this cave is very near that place—Hell’s Throat. I think we’d best tell our Corporal to scout that passage out. Anyone else care to try and get through that gap up there? Let’s get some tooling up and see if we can widen it.”
Sergeant Keller told the Corporal to survey the way ahead and see how big the fissure was. The report came back that it was now beginning to descend, steeply in places, and as yet there was still no sign of the Macaque. It was then that Keller gave Mac Morgan a quick look.
“Corporal James,” he said, using his visor microphone. “Your TALOS signal just went yellow. Hold your position.”
The Sergeant had his visor down, and he could read the Corporal’s signal as a green dot, one of ten that corresponded to all the men in his squad. It had just turned yellow. Now he heard the Corporal’s voice in his earpiece, but it seemed fragmented, the signal losing integrity.
“You’re breaking up, Corporal. Reverse your steps and fall back until we get a clear signal. I repeat—fall back. Do you copy, James?”
Nothing came back but a fine wash of static. Then, to the Sergeant’s great surprise, he had only nine green dots on his visor. Nothing was reading for the Corporal at all, and where his amber dot had once been, a steady winking red dot was now displayed, indicating a malfunction. He looked at the others, a puzzled look on his face.
“We’ve lost him,” he said. “He went red.”
“Perhaps he stumbled and fell.”
“No sir, that red light indicates no signal from his TALOS suit at all now. Even if he was unconscious, I should still be able to read his suit, but it’s as if… he just vanished!”
MacRae was all business. “You men there—where’s that bloody tool satchel? On the double!”
Chapter 27
The ladder up was rigged in a matter of minutes, and a man was looking over the opening, well hidden in the shadows of the upper rock. It was seen that on one side of the rock, several scratches and scuff marks indicated someone else had tried to climb to the spot, perhaps with success, if Elena’s story bore credence.
“About that Grandfather’s tale,” said Elena to Mac. “It doesn’t seem like there was any movement in time.”
“Aye,” said Mac. “The fellow turns up days later when he’s delivered to that prison ship.”
“There was one odd thing, assuming the whole story isn’t bunk. What do you make of what he said about the pillars of fire?”
“Miss Fairchild… I think we can safely say that story was a load of rubbish, probably just concocted to bolster the legends concerning this place.”
“Oh? Then where’s our Corporal James?”
“My bet is that he met with an accident. Maybe his suit failed, and he lost his helmet lamp. We’ve no idea what’s beyond that stone. There may be a fairly treacherous passage back there.”
It was soon determined that the very narrow entrance that required the Corporal to slide in on his back could be opened with the setting of a small low-yield explosive charge. The Artisan Engineers had blasted numerous openings and tunnels into the limestone over the years, and it remained very stable, so there was little risk of a collapse. Yet for safety’s sake, they rigged out a remote detonator, and retired beyond the prison feature, about a hundred meters from the detonation. It went off without a hitch, and the Argonauts were quick to the scene, looming like automatons in the dust until it finally settled, their helmet headlamps casting long amber cones of light as they worked to clear out the broken stone and rubble.
“We’ve got that passage opened up enough for any of us to get through,” said MacRae. “But I’d recommend we send in a two man recon team first, and they should be tethered to us here with a sturdy rope. The men have rock climbing gear, and both Barret and Cooke have a good deal of experience. I don’t think the rest should proceed until they give the all clear. Perhaps they’ll find our man James quick enough. He wasn’t very far in.”
But they didn’t find the Corporal, which created yet another mystery to be solved. The way beyond the rock was a narrow throat and gradually opened to a passage allowing a man to stand with little difficulty. Yet it was bounded on every side by solid rock. The stony floor was unbroken or perforated by any pits of crevasses, and the walls, though wrinkled and irregular, offered no apertures or side tunnels of any kind. Above there was just the hint of new Stalactites beginning to form, and in places, the walls seemed wet with thin trails of water that glimmered in the helmet lamps.