“Why?” asked Natasha, worry rising in her voice. “What’s the matter?”
Bennett paused to catch his breath, then said, “I’m going for it.”
“You’re gonna do what?”
But Bennett didn’t respond. He stuffed the radio back into his coat and checked Erin’s temperature again. It was 97.1. Her pulse was improving. Her head was resting on his backpack, and she was wrapped in two thick wool blankets. He gave her a kiss on the forehead and said a brief prayer. Then he scooped up his MP5, double-checked Donovan’s map, and proceeded as rapidly as he could down the tunnel.
Ten minutes later, as he raced through an ever-narrowing passageway, a cruel thought crossed his mind: Erin’s backpack had had the shovels and the metal detector. So even if he found his way to the right place, even if he found the scroll — which still seemed highly unlikely — what was he supposed to do then? How was he supposed to dig it up? It had been buried for more than two thousand years.
He shook off the thought and kept moving. He would simply have to blow up that bridge when he came to it.
The good news: the farther he went, the drier the tunnel got.
The bad news: it was getting colder — much colder — and his hands and feet were already numb. His gloves were soaked, so he’d left them behind. At least his socks and boots were dry. But he was shivering uncontrollably. He could feel his reflexes growing sluggish, and his head was throbbing.
And then more bad news: the tunnel abruptly branched off in four directions. Which route did he want? Which route had Donovan and Harkin taken, if they had even made it this far? He pulled the map from his pocket and studied it carefully, but there was no indication of a fork. He had hit another wall. Erin was waiting for him. He didn’t have time to check all these tunnels. He barely had time to check one.
“Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” Mordechai’s verse came back to mind. It had worked before. Maybe the Lord would bless him again. God certainly knew where the scroll was. And didn’t Jesus say, “Seek and you will find”? There was no time like the present.
He set the gun down and got on his knees to pray. When he opened his eyes again, he noticed dead ahead of him small bits of dried mud in almost a zigzag pattern. Curious, he picked up several pieces and examined them more closely. They were from the tread of a boot. Someone had been here before. Not in the last few minutes, but a whole lot more recently than two thousand years ago. Could Donovan and Harkin have made it this far? Could these be their boot prints? Who else could possibly have been down here? A smile crossed his face for the first time in days.
“Thank you, Father,” he whispered.
Then he grabbed the MP5 again and followed the prints. He heard the noise of a helicopter overhead. It sounded military — an Apache. Were the Israelis on to them? It didn’t really matter, he realized. There was nothing he could do about it now. He had to keep moving.
Bennett pressed ahead another two hundred yards before coming to another fork. He stopped again, caught his breath, and double-checked the map and his watch. None of these forks were marked, but the map did indicate that the spring waters of the Yarmuk River were nearby, and the markings on the map seemed to indicate that the ancient smuggler tunnels followed the path of the underground springs to the river itself.
He closed his eyes and strained to listen to every sound. The helicopter had briefly passed out of range, and now he noticed that through the smaller of the two tunnel branches he could hear the ever-so-faint sound of water trickling in the distance. That had to be it. He crawled into the small tunnel and before long was scrambling down a muddy embankment. The only way forward was through more icy waters. But at least he’d found the river, and his heart was racing. He had to be incredibly close now.
“Angel One to Base Camp, over.”
“Base Camp, over,” said Natasha. She heard the strain in her voice. She was increasingly fearful of getting caught.
“You still with me?” asked Bennett.
“Absolutely. What do you need?”
“What’s it looking like up there?”
“Not good,” she admitted. “There are now three choppers in the air — no, wait, there’s a fourth. They’re passing by every few minutes. I think they’re on to us. You need to get Er — Angel Two out of there now.”
“Any boots on the ground?”
Natasha picked up her pair of night-vision binoculars and scanned the horizon.
“There was a patrol that went by about forty-five minutes ago. I don’t see anything else at the moment.”
“What about the radios?”
“They’re using encrypted channels. The police bands have been pretty quiet. How much longer?”
“I don’t know,” said Bennett. “Just start thinking about how we get Angel Two out of here.”
“Will do,” she said, but the truth was, she had no idea.
It suddenly dawned on Bennett how much danger he was in.
His wife was battling hypothermia, as was he. But rather than getting either of them back to safety, he was advancing deep into the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria, moving under an active minefield, almost to a waterfall on the border with Syria, with Israeli gunships buzzing overhead, hunting a treasure that almost no one on the planet believed actually existed.
Some honeymoon.
The tunnel now narrowed sharply to a small hole in the granite floor. Bennett tossed a rock into the hole to gauge its depth, then pointed the flashlight of the MP5 to see what was down there.
No rodents. No vipers. Just a claustrophobic’s nightmare.
He lowered himself into the hole, then dropped to his belly and crawled forward about twenty or thirty yards. He soon found himself crawling through a partially collapsed tunnel, and when he came around the next corner, he thought his heart would stop.
He was staring into a man’s eyes.
46
Eye sockets, to be more precise.
Bennett shuddered. Not six inches from his face a skull stared back at him, and scattered behind it were shattered pieces of bone and electronics and small shreds of clothing. He pushed the skull aside and pulled himself into the slightly larger tunnel. To one side, he found a CIA-issue sidearm. A few feet away he found the dead man’s wallet. He took a deep breath and opened it.
The credit cards and the Continental Airlines ID gave the name Marcus T. Morelli, as did the Virginia driver’s license. But the face was Ray Donovan’s. He recognized Donovan immediately from the photo his brother had included in the materials he’d sent to Mordechai, and shuddered. No wonder the Agency had never found him. He’d been blown up by an underground land mine.
Bennett picked through the mangled metal device and scorched pieces of wiring scattered about. Might there be more mines down here?
He stuffed the wallet into his pocket and kept moving, crawling into an antechamber another dozen yards ahead. This room seemed much bigger than the last one, and the sound of the distant helicopter was much louder here. Looking around, Bennett realized that this once-hidden antechamber was now partially exposed to the northeast. The far side of the room had collapsed at some point, leaving a small mountain of rock and dirt in the center of the room. He would have to move fast. He couldn’t stay exposed here for long.
He looked at the floor again and found more bones. Unlike the first pile, though, these formed an intact skeleton.
The man’s clothes had largely been eaten away by rats and other rodents, as had, presumably, his flesh. But Bennett had no doubt who it was.