Working together, they rolled the projector over the uneven ground and into the ruins of Alamut castle. To call them ruins was generous. It was difficult to imagine what the fortress might have looked like in its heyday. The Mongols had almost completely razed it. Only the outline of the buildings was visible now; the foundation footings carved into the stone, showing where walls had once stood. Fiona had laid out strips of white engineers’ tape to form a search grid, and directed Newcombe to start in the nearest corner.
Newcombe set out the seismograph and switched the device on for half a minute. When it was turned off again, he beckoned Fiona to look at the reading on the seismograph drum. The graph showed a series of oscillating peaks. “This is the reading I took when I calibrated it,” he explained, pointing to a section of ink lines. “And this is from the section we just tested.”
“They look the same.”
“That’s because the composition of the ground is the same; solid rock in both places. The waves from the device cause the stone to vibrate, and the seismograph measures those vibrations. If there was a void underneath, from a tunnel or a chamber, the reading wouldn’t be the same. If it was close to the surface, there might not be any reading at all.”
Fiona appeared to be truly impressed. “This could revolutionize archaeology.”
It was for just such a purpose that Nikola Tesla had conceived the device, and Newcombe was pleased that, in its first practical use, the projector was being implemented as a tool for scientific exploration, and not as a weapon.
On the fourteenth test, in a grid about halfway down the second search lane, the device recorded the first deviating pattern. Based on the lack of vibrations recorded on the seismograph, Newcombe suspected that there might be a large void just a few feet down, but advised caution. He moved the next grid, and took another reading with the same results.
Fiona’s excitement gave way to impatience, but she stayed at a distance, pacing as Newcombe completed the lane and then started the next. Four squares in a row had shown evidence of empty space below the ruins, and that was good enough for the ambitious archaeologist. When the tests showed a void beneath the grid squares adjacent to the first four, Fiona intervened.
“I do love your machine, Findlay, but there’s only one way to know if it’s really doing us any good, and that’s to dig.” She turned to her labor party. “Grab your picks and shovels, chaps. Time to earn our pay.”
Newcombe peered at her through his borrowed spectacles and sighed. He admired her take-charge attitude, but she was making the classic mistake of working hard when she ought to be working smart. “If my calculations are correct, there’s a good three feet of solid sandstone between us and the void below. It will take you hours of digging just to break through, and a lot longer than that make an opening large enough to allow you to go inside.”
“That rather goes with the territory, unfortunately. So unless you’ve got a better idea, clear off so we can get to work.”
It was evident to Newcombe that the goodwill he had earned by employing the wave projector to narrow the search had already begun to evaporate. Nevertheless, he smiled. “I would have thought that by now, you would know that I always have a better idea.”
Four men, wearing loose turbans and attire similar to that worn by Dariush, stood at the corners of the room, brandishing rifles.
Dariush calmly stepped past the gunmen and barked an order.
Rahman started fearfully and rushed to the center of the room, his hands raised. Almost as an afterthought, he explained. “They want us to stand here.”
Dodge held Dariush’s stare. “What’s going on here?”
He knew his words would be meaningless to the Iranian villager, but he wasn’t about to cower.
Dariush snarled something and Dodge didn’t need to speak his language to know that he had just been told to shut up. Nora apparently wasn’t conversant in the unspoken language of threatening postures, and she chose that moment to look around the room. “Where’s Brian?”
Dariush’s eyes widened as he realized that he had lost one of the group along the way. He started to shout a warning to his confederates, but before the words could leave his mouth, the missing member of the party swept into the room like the storm that had become his nickname.
Hurley’s long arms stretched out and snared the turbans of the two gunmen closest to him. He slammed the men’s heads together, and the resounding crack of their skulls colliding echoed in the small space.
The remaining captors immediately turned their rifles toward the new arrival, but Hurley was faster. Even as the two unconscious men slumped to the floor, Hurricane drew the matching .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols from his concealed shoulder holsters, and fired both simultaneously.
The report was deafening, and even Dodge, who had heard the enormous hand-cannons fired before, involuntarily clapped his hands over his ears. The two gunmen however didn’t hear the shots, nor would they ever hear anything again.
Hurricane brought the pistols together and swung both barrels toward their treacherous guide, but Dariush had already fallen to the floor, covering his head with his hands. Dodge’s ears were ringing, but he thought he heard the prostrated man whimper, doubtless pleading for mercy.
Hurricane frowned, holstering his smoking guns as swiftly as he had drawn them, and then reached down, and with one hand, lifted the villager completely off the floor as easily as he might a rag doll. “Start talking,” Hurricane growled.
Dariush must have understood what sort of question had been asked, for he immediately started babbling in Farsi.
Rahman had sagged against the wall in bewilderment, aghast at the unexpected treachery and violence, but when Dariush started talking, he shook it off. “He says that someone hired them to take us prisoner. A foreigner who knew we were coming. They didn’t intend to harm us.”
Hurricane wasn’t impressed. “That’s what everyone says, right before they pull the trigger.” He shook Dariush. “Who?”
“Barron.” Nora said it like a curse.
“Impossible,” declared Anya. “He could not have known we were coming. My spy aboard his ship would have warned me.”
The helpless villager continued to whimper, and when Rahman pressed him for an answer to Hurley’s question, he claimed ignorance.
“He is part of a revolutionary group,” Rahman explained. “Trying to overthrow Reza Shah. He received his orders from someone else.”
“Revolutionaries.” Hurricane spat the word, glancing accusingly at Anya.
“Who gave him those orders?” Dodge asked.
Dariush pointed to one of the unmoving figures on the floor.
“Oh.” Hurricane regarded his quivering captive a moment longer, and then disdainfully dropped him.
Dodge saw Anya snatch up a discarded rifle, and almost without thinking, he grabbed one as well. A quick glance told him it was a Lee-Enfield Number 1 Mark III .303, standard issue for the British Army during the Great War. The weapon looked about that old, and appeared to have seen a lot of use. He turned to Hurley. “Now what?”
Hurricane shook his head. “This is a dead end. We should get out of here.”
“Do you think the village is safe?”
“I don’t see an alternative.”
Nora snapped her fingers. “The waterworks! We can sneak out through the cistern.”
Hurricane’s brow creased. “I’m not sure how that improves our situation, but at least we’d have the high ground. ‘Course, it also puts us on Barron’s doorstep.”
“One thing at a time,” Dodge said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Hurricane collected the rest of the arsenal belonging to their ill-fated would-be captors, and gave the rifles to Rahman and Nora, more to remove temptation from the cowering Dariush than because he felt they needed to be armed. Nora seemed more comfortable holding the weapon than the Iranian did.