“The cave depth is at about thirty-five feet,” he said. “So we have plenty of bottom time. The water is not too cold, but there’s air in the cave. I chose to stay on the tank rather than breathe two-thousand-year-old air.”
“Yes, I understand,” she said, stuffing her hair into her diving hood. “This water stinks; I would have expected freshwater.”
“Me, too, but it’s not. It is very, very salty. The BCD vest was useless. You’ll need to stuff it with weights.”
She reached out a fingertip and then tasted the water. “This is like Dead Sea water,” she said. “How can that be, way up here?”
“I have no damned idea, unless it’s some geologic phenomenon that’s forcing Dead Sea water up into this cavern. The bottom is around a hundred ten feet, say thirty-three meters. I’ve already been down to the bottom; nothing there but clouds of silt and what looks like brickwork, but I didn’t have much bottom time at that depth, either.”
“So, we find the cave, go in, take a look, confirm the artifacts, and then come back out, yes?”
“Right, although you might want to translate some of the writing. I think it’s Aramaic.”
She cocked her head at him. “You can recognize Aramaic?”
“Recognize it, yes. I think, anyway. Adrian said she could actually read it.”
She just shook her head. Amateurs indeed.
“If we get separated, climb to the roof of the cavern and look for this light, which I’m hanging down into the slab hole. Surface here and I’ll come back for you. There’s a glow-stick at the cave mouth. Problem signal is three taps on your air tank with your knife. You have to go inverted to make it through the final neck of the cave into the air chamber. You okay with that?”
She took a deep breath. “I suppose we will find that out.”
“Okay. If you get jammed in the cave entrance, rotate until you can move forward. If I could make it, you can make it, no sweat.”
He reviewed the route to the cave entrance, noting that there was a second cave near the one they wanted, checked her diving rig, and asked her to check his. When they were both ready, they switched on their headlamps and masks, slipped into the water, and submerged. She signaled that she was breathing okay, and then he led her to the cave entrance, going across the cavern ceiling on a compass bearing until he thought he had the right spot and then swimming down to thirty-five feet.
Once again he found the wrong cave, but now the green glow-stick was just visible. He signaled for her to follow him, and her light kept up with him as he crabbed across the face of the west wall until he found the cave. He started in, but this time rolled inverted while there was still plenty of room. On his back now, he could see her headlamp behind him, and he gave her the sign to roll over onto her back. She was struggling with something, but then she came on. The extreme salinity of the water would probably plaster her to the roof of the cave, but that was okay because she could then hand-over-hand along the cave until they hit the air-water interface.
He pressed forward, going slower when the cave necked down. Then suddenly his face was out of the water and he was in. He dragged himself across the sand and then turned to help her come through the final, narrow opening. She instinctively reached for her mask, but he shook his hand in front of her face: Leave it on, remember? She nodded, sat up, and took a look around.
David stood up, keeping his mask in place, and took her by the hand. They walked up to the high end of the cave where he showed her the ragged skeleton and the oversized dagger. She bent down and studied the remains for a minute, touching the dagger with a finger of her gloved hand. Then he showed her where to stand to see up on the altarlike structure. She kept one hand on his shoulder while she took a look, and he felt her hand tighten on him when she saw the artifacts.
She stood there for a few minutes, just looking, shining her headlamp this way and that, before stepping back down. He put his mask close to hers and gave the thumbs-up sign. She nodded her head vigorously, her eyes ablaze with excitement. Then he took her to the right-hand cave wall and used the extra, handheld light he’d brought along to illuminate the wall. She studied the characters, tracing them out without touching them. Then she took the light from him and went searching along the wall. He figured she was trying to find the beginning of the text. He made a more detailed examination of the cave, looking to see if he’d missed anything the first time, but there was only sand and more of the small oil lamps.
He wondered how the man had gotten into the cave. He’d seen no stairs or handholds outside on the cistern wall, so the entrance had to be something that came down from the fortress, which should be just above their heads. He sat down on the sand, leaned back, and looked up. The cave walls came together like a medieval cathedral, some twenty-five feet or so above his head, but there was no visible entrance structure. He checked his watch. They should have a good fifty minutes to an hour of air remaining, more if they came off the tanks and used the air here in the cave.
Judith was playing the lights over the entire right-hand wall while she studied the script. As he got up to go over to where she was standing, he felt a distant thump. He turned reflexively to the air-water interface and noticed that the water moved slightly, as if disturbed by something. Judith was looking at him; she’d heard or felt it, too. They stood there for a moment, waiting to see if anything else happened. Definite thump, as if something very heavy had been dropped — oh, shit! The slab?
He waved Judith over, took a deep breath, and then took out his mouthpiece. “That sounded like the slab,” he said in a rush. “I think we better go see.” Then he put his mouthpiece back in. Her eyes were wide at the thought of that heavy stone slab being back in place. There was no way they could lift that. He saw the fear in her expression and moved quickly to the interface point.
When they cleared the cave’s entrance, he looked up for the reference light. There was no light. He tracked his bubbles and then scanned the whole ceiling area of the cistern.
There was no light.
She touched his shoulder and pointed down. Far below them, there was a glimmer. Son of a bitch, he thought. Son of a bitch!
He consulted his compass, oriented his body, and swam directly out into the cistern, rising as he did so. He felt her following along close behind. When he rose to the ceiling, he executed an expanding square search and immediately collided with something. He drew back and saw that it was a scuba air tank. He saw a second tank, bobbing with quiet clinks against the rock of the ceiling. Then he realized there were other objects, some of his supply bags, a positively buoyant flashlight, his and her street clothes. With a feeling of rising dread, he went back up to the ceiling, mask right up against the rock now, and searched along the surface until he found that rectangular seam.
The slab was back in place. They were trapped.
Yosef Ellerstein sat at his desk working on a draft of the paper he was going to present next week. It was late, and his thoughts were not really on the paper. He was still trying to work out what was going on with Yehudit Ressner and this American.
Two things were bothering him: The first was Gulder’s nonreaction to his call. He’d purportedly been assigned to watch Ressner because Skuratov was watching her, and Skuratov was a possible suspect in a plot to divert nuclear weapons material. Now the American was “missing,” Ressner was being evasive, and Gulder didn’t care? The second problem was the way Skuratov’s office, the so-called International Planning, had reacted to his message. Ho-hum, Professor. Thank you for your interest in national security. First, the grim old Russian had been all excited about the mysterious American, the nuclear power engineer. So much so that the American’s little unauthorized excursion on the mountain warranted putting him under surveillance when he came back to Tel Aviv after his visit to Masada. Yet now? Human voice mail at Skuratov’s office. First they care, now they don’t.