Ambrose hopped lightly up and over the piece of collapsed wall that Ethan had been skirting. He waved back toward the bunker. 'The gold. I said that we'd need more staff now that you found the gold.'
'Oh, it's chocolate,' explained Ethan, guessing Ambrose had missed the joke. 'It was a trick. Claire’s warped sense of humor.’
'I know,' smiled Rourke. 'But holding a gold coin in a place like this, even a chocolate one, gives you a strange feeling, right?’
Ethan knew exactly what Rourke meant. He had sprinted to the bunker after all. Maria, his wife, teased Ethan by saying there was a little Indiana Jones, a little treasure hunter, in every archaeologist. She had threatened to buy Harrison Ford's whip and hat from eBay last Christmas.
Ethan remembered he had wanted to catch up privately with Rourke for a few days now. He was planning to visit Rourke's security tent next time he was passing, but now was just as good. 'Did you get a chance to question your staff for me?'
Rourke looked confused for a moment, and then he realized what Ethan meant. 'The flashlight? You still worried about that little flashlight?'
'I'm worried about what it means.'
Rourke squeezed Ethan's shoulder. 'It means that you aren't getting enough sleep. That's all it can mean. It's the end of season.'
Ethan looked back toward the bunker. 'That place was sealed for six hundred years! How could the flashlight have gotten in there before our first dive?'
'Lots of ways.'
'Name one.'
Rourke raised one eyebrow. 'We've been through this.'
'Humor me.'
'Somebody dropped it from the surface. Maybe they kicked it in by accident when they were moving around the antechamber.'
'It was too far in for that,' said Ethan.
'OK. It was on your own dive gear, and it fell off, and then you found it.'
'It wasn't part of my gear.'
'So someone got their gear mixed up and clipped their flashlight on your vest by mistake. It has to be something as simple as that. But you won't know until you ask your team.'
'No. I'm not ready for that.'
'With respect, Ethan, I think you're being paranoid. You know these people. Every one of them. From what I hear, half these people learned their archaeology in your lectures. None of them penetrated the bunker before you. It just didn't happen. There's some other explanation, probably staring you right in the face.'
'You're right,' conceded Ethan. 'I know you're right. It's just…it doesn't feel right. The flashlight was way off in front of me, about twenty minutes into the dive, through an archway and well inside another chamber. It was half buried in silt.'
Ethan pulled out the flashlight and hit the switch to light it up. The strong beam of light was obvious on the front of Rourke’s khaki uniform, even in daylight. 'Look, the batteries still work!'
Rourke shrugged. 'Then you explain it.'
'I can't. I excavated the bunker entrance myself. We were practically sleeping in that chamber for three days before the first dive. There's no way someone could get in there before us.'
Ethan found the flashlight on their first dive into the flooded bunker. He was diving with Claire, and at first assumed she had dropped her flashlight. When they'd surfaced, she'd said the flashlight wasn't hers. Realizing something was amiss, he'd asked Claire not to mention the flashlight to anyone. Something like this could throw the entire integrity of his research into question, and as they stripped off their dive gear, he couldn't shake the feeling that someone else had beaten him to the punch. Before the day was out he'd checked the flashlight against everyone's dive equipment, without even mentioning his concerns to Nina. No one was missing their dive flashlight.
So if they were the first people in the bunker in six hundred years, whose flashlight was it?
Rourke changed the subject. 'Do you mind if I ask you another question? Before you break for the season there's something that's been really bugging me. It's about the bunkers.'
Rourke's questions had become something of a lynchpin in a relationship between two men who otherwise had very little in common. His always insightful questions often led Ethan down new roads of enquiry, and were in a large part responsible for Ethan wondering about Rourke's choice of occupation. 'Of course I don't mind, Ambrose, you know that. Ask away.'
Rourke thought for a moment, then said, 'I've seen hundreds of bunkers and fortified earthworks. They're all usually designed with a particular enemy in mind. You can tell from the layout, the way they're constructed, their location — you know, those kinds of things. I've worked security on dozens. I've even helped plan a few. You can tell a lot about what the defenders expected from the way they designed their fortifications.'
Ethan found himself fascinated with Rourke’s train of thought. It had never occurred to him, stupidly, that a modern hands-on security expert might be the best person to help decipher the questions he himself was struggling with.
'And?' prompted Ethan eagerly.
Rourke indicated the entire Plaza with one precise hand gesture. 'Well, why weren't these people defending themselves against attack from the outside?'
'I don't follow,' said Ethan.
'The bunker entrances, the tiers, lines of sight, the high ground locations — they all face the Gallery, not the surrounding landscape. They're all pointing right into the middle of the Plaza.'
'Toward the Gallery? You sure?'
Rourke licked his lips. 'The danger wasn't from the outside. These people were defending themselves from something that was already here.'
Alone in the bunker antechamber, Claire scanned the six piles of dive gear she needed to prep for storage. Regulators first, then do the scuba tanks.
She couldn't wipe the smile from her face.
The chocolate coins had worked perfectly. The prank was exactly what she needed to break the stifling mood settling over the camp. End of season always had that effect. It felt like a big family breaking up.
Marco and Patrick had already prepped their gear for storage. Good boys, those two. Once Marco had stopped coming on to her, they had gotten along famously. She grabbed up the box of reusable sandwich-bags and began sealing every regulator's mouthpiece.
Apparently the divers found it challenging to work underwater with a mouth full of cockroaches — especially the giant things that passed for cockroaches around here. You couldn't kill one with a shovel. Squatting over the gear, she felt the half a dozen scraps of paper crinkle in her pocket. This last day had been an email and address swapping frenzy. Everyone was trading contact details, and she was surprised by the half a dozen contacts people had pressed onto her. People she actually wanted to stay in contact with, and who apparently felt likewise.
She felt pleasantly surprised. It wasn't that she didn't fit in, just that she was always so busy. She was awake before dawn and usually exhausted and asleep seconds after her head hit the pillow. Socializing, apparently the high point for many of the volunteers and staff, was even more exhausting. They called her the 'Sherriff', but so what? She was paid to kick ass and put out fires. She decided to treat it like a compliment, even if it was partly a criticism. What did they expect when her problem was safety on the most dangerous excavation in the world?
Half of them didn't even realize that the biggest safety risk wasn't actually inside the site, but rather completely surrounding it. An oxbow bend of the river completely surrounded the Plaza. That made her site flood prone. And not just a little flood prone. Six industrial-grade pumps ran twenty-four-seven to keep their boots dry. Without the pumps, the place would be a seven-hundred-meter-wide swimming pool. Same with the silt walls surrounding the site. They kept the river out, but needed constant monitoring. Twice now they had needed the walls assessed to ensure their integrity was up to the task. Ambrose Rourke had been helpful in that regard, sourcing an engineering consultant to perform the assessment and helping Claire oversee the structural upgrades.