Ellerstein got up and fixed himself a small cognac, even though he knew he’d had enough booze for one night. He wanted to light up his pipe but had rationed himself to three pipes a day now and the ration book was empty. He grumbled to himself and put the unlit pipe in his mouth anyway. He sucked noisily on it while he thought about the situation. Then something occurred to him.
What was the common denominator to all this? Herod’s fortress down on the Dead Sea. He sat back down at his desk to think about that. Could it be? He picked up the phone and called the Skuratov contact number. This time no one answered. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 10:00 P.M. He let the phone ring, but there was still no answer, not even voice mail. He hung up, surprised. He did not know where Skuratov’s operations center was located, Dimona, probably, with a local telephone link near or in Tel Aviv. Wouldn’t it always be fully manned? A Shin Bet control room? Now no one was answering. Then he called Yehudit Ressner at home. Again, no answer, and when her voice mail came on, he hung up. He sucked harder on the pipe, the desire for just one more cognac rising again. Something was very wrong here.
Suppose, he mused, just suppose Skuratov already knows that the American has done a runner. He’s taken his watchers off Judith, so he calls her, and she’s not there. For that paranoid old Russian, the two of them together conjures up Masada again, and there’s something about Masada that that old man has been reacting to like an exposed nerve. He looked out his study window into a cool, clear night. The lights of his neighborhood were subdued by the density of the buildings and the many trees. The rains would come soon.
He poured himself a small splash of cognac, thinking that soon he would be a true alcoholic. Skuratov was supposedly a high-ranking Shin Bet officer, whose responsibility was the security of the Israeli atomic weapons program laboratories. For some unknown reason, he’s sensitive about Masada, which is, admittedly, only forty kilometers or so from the Dimona atomic energy center. He is also thought to be involved with what Gulder called the new Kanna’im. And where had all the old Zealots ended their days? Masada. Great God: Was there a connection? It all kept coming back to Masada.
He heaved a sigh of resignation as he put down the cognac, untouched. He got up and went to find his old army coat and his car keys. Something was telling him to go see for himself. Now. Tonight. Go down to Masada.
It’s crazy. It’s Shabbat. Still something kept telling him:
Go. Now — and take a gun.
27
David wasted no time once he realized that the slab was down. He signaled for Judith to follow him back to the cave. At the entrance, he pantomimed that she was to wait right there while he made an emergency dive to the bottom of the cistern. She protested, but he insisted. He gestured for her to remain at the cave entrance so he could find it again quickly, homing in on her headlamp. She finally understood and parked herself in the entrance. He swam back away from her, oriented himself with the compass again, and headed down to the bottom of the cistern.
He did the dive calculations as he went down, his ears cracking. A hundred-plus feet. He didn’t intend to stay down there, but if someone had come into the bat cave and thrown everything there into the cistern, there might be some of those steel staging poles. He swam straight down, or as straight as he could with no visual cues, feeling the pressure squeeze his body. Going deep in a third dive in one day violated the nitrogen safety rules, but he had to know. Besides, he would be “surfacing” into air pressurized at thirty-five feet of water, which would act like a decompression stop. Sort of, anyway. He hoped it wouldn’t be a permanent one.
As he neared the bottom his headlamp illuminated a light cloud of silt. The bottom had been stirred up, probably by the avalanche of stuff thrown down from the bat cave. He slowed, hovering vertical now, his arms extended, until he felt his fingers pressing into soft mud. Moving slowly so as not to stir up any more silt, he felt around for anything on the bottom. Nothing. Then he had an idea. He switched off his headlamp. Sure enough, the reference light was glowing about fifty feet away. He swam over there, grabbed it, fastened it onto his arm, and encountered some cans of food, but no pipes. He expanded his search area and finally felt rather than saw a single staging pipe. Then a second one. He tried to lift them both but realized he would need help getting two of them to the cave entrance. He put the pipe back down near the second one and strapped the reference light onto one of the poles, pointing up. Then he swam back up toward the western wall of the cistern, shutting off his headlamp again as he passed through fifty feet, watching for Judith’s light. It appeared to his right, barely visible. He had gone way off course coming back up. He stopped and looked down. The reference light was just visible in the murky water, but it was visible.
He got to Judith and signaled that she needed to come down with him. He showed her the depth and pointed to her ears. She gave him the thumbs-up okay sign. He reached over and took off her headlamp and jammed it into a crevice near the entrance to the cave. Then he turned to swim back down, making sure she was following. Two minutes later they were on top of the pipes and the reference light. He explained with gestures that he wanted to take the two pipes back to the cave. She nodded. He tied the reference light’s rubber cord to one of the pipes in case they dropped one or both going up, then got the end of one pole in each hand. Judith lifted the other ends. Then they began to ascend, facing each other with the twelve-foot-long pipes between them like a stretcher.
At one point, near sixty feet, she stopped and shook her head, as if she were having problems clearing her ears. He stopped and watched her face grimacing in the mask. Then she nodded, and they started up again. Ten feet higher she stopped again and then suddenly grabbed her right ear, releasing her grip on one pipe. He tried to hold on to the pipe, but it slipped right out of his glove and disappeared down into the gloom, the reference light going with it. Not a total disaster, he thought. I can find it again with that light.
Judith was shaking her head and pointing down. She wanted to go back down to adjust the pressure on her ear. He nodded, holding on tight to the remaining pipe, and they maneuvered back down to sixty feet again. He watched her carefully as she went through more facial contortions behind her mask to clear her ear passage. Finally she signaled okay and they started up again. By the time he realized she was going up a whole lot faster than he was, the pipe was extended out to the full length of his arm and he couldn’t hold it. He almost yelled, but it was too late. He lost his grip on the pipe, which put its entire weight on her arm, and she dropped it immediately. They stopped ascending and watched it disappear into the depth below.
He swore mentally at their bad luck and then closed with her. He tried to read panic in her eyes behind the faceplate of her mask, but there was only embarrassment. He indicated they had to go back. To get one pipe this time, he signaled. She understood. Not that they had any choice, he thought. Only one pipe had a light on it. The other one was lost forever in all that silt. Plus, they couldn’t safely keep going back down to that depth.