He held her hand for a moment and turned off his headlamp. He looked up and could see a faint glow off to their left. Her headlamp was still there. Good. He looked down. There was a glow, but it was so diffused now in the silt as to be almost useless. He pointed down, and they began their descent. He left his light off. At a hundred feet they encountered the bottom. The glow was more distinct now, but it was way off to the southeastern side of the cistern. They swam that way, undoubtedly churning up silt clouds behind them, but David was focused on finding that light. It looked to be fifty feet away. Forty feet. They slowed to keep the silt disturbance minimized.
Thirty feet.
Twenty feet.
The light was visible now as a small purple glimmer. It’s probably buried in the silt, he thought; we’re lucky we could see it at all. They slowed even more, and then they were ten feet away. He looked for the pipe but couldn’t see it. It must be truly buried in all the silt, which was now boiling away from them along the bottom.
Away? Was there a current down here? He couldn’t imagine how that could be, but there was. Then he saw that they were almost up against the southeast wall of the cistern. He checked depth: one hundred twelve feet. They couldn’t stay here. But there, right in front of them, at a height of about six feet off the bottom, was a four-inch-diameter pipe protruding a foot out of the rock wall. A modern steel pipe, with a concrete-collared flange. What the hell was this, he wondered. He switched his head light on to examine it, but then something grabbed his forearm with a grip so strong he almost lost his mask whipping his head around.
It was Judith. She was pointing to something to the right of the pipe, something black, with glints of metal and what looked like glass. Oh, shit, he thought. That’s a wet suit… and a mask… and the white object behind the mask was a skull. The wet suit was striped with wide yellow and dark red bands. There were white bone fragments where the feet and hands had been.
Then Judith made a screaming noise in her mask, releasing a huge cloud of bubbles, and shot up out of sight like a rocket.
His immediate instinct was to follow her, but he remembered the staging pipe. He couldn’t come down here again. Taking a last look at the skeleton in the wet suit, he doused the light again and homed in on the partially buried reference light. He felt around for the pipe and grabbed it, but it was stuck under something. The silt was obscuring everything, turning his lamplight brown in the water.
He felt along the pipe until he encountered what felt like a huge timber. He swept away the silt cloud, trying to clear the water, trying to see what it was. Then he saw the glint of metal. Bright metal, like stainless steel. The silt returned, obscuring everything. He knew his time at this depth was going to kill him if he didn’t get upstairs in a hurry. He felt along the object. It was cylindrical, maybe two feet in diameter. He couldn’t tell how long it was. There was another one, and another one. At least three. Now he was stretched out, holding onto the staging pipe, and couldn’t move to his right anymore. He felt the stirrings of euphoria.
Gotta go, gotta go!
He went back to the pipe, wrestled with it, got it loose, and started up, hoping like hell Judith hadn’t gone all the way up to the ceiling at that speed. Hoping she’d remembered to blow air out of her lungs.
It was a struggle going up with the heavy pipe, but then he remembered his BCD. He adjusted the inflation slightly, and it was much easier going. He cursed himself for not thinking of that a whole lot earlier. His mind wasn’t working at top form just now. Nitrogen does that, a nasty little voice told him.
As he rose slowly past fifty feet he began to work his way to the west, dousing his headlamp so he could home in on the light that he hoped was still in that crevice by the cave entrance. He wondered where Judith was, and even more, what the hell that pipe was about, not to mention a dead scuba diver and stainless steel cylinders sitting on wooden beams down on the bottom. So much for their being the first humans in this cistern during the past two thousand years. This changed everything.
Holding the pipe across his chest now, he rose to the correct depth for the cave entrance while looking around for the light. When he finally spotted it, he adjusted his BCD to achieve neutral buoyancy and then kicked over toward the west wall. He was relieved to see Judith swim out of the darkness from below him. That was a good sign: she had not gone blasting all the way to the top of the cistern. When she saw David, she swam over to the entrance and retrieved her own headlamp. Together, they wrestled the staging pipe into the narrow cave and through the air-water interface, where they pulled it and themselves up onto the shallow sand. Then they flopped down on the sand themselves, resting on their air tanks and breathing noisily.
His headlamp illuminated her pale and frightened face. There was something major going on here that he didn’t understand. He looked around the cave and made a decision. He popped his mouthpiece out, lifted off his mask, and carefully sampled the cave air. It was musty and smelled faintly sulfurous, but there definitely was oxygen. When he felt that it was probably safe to breathe it, he gestured for her to do the same. She followed suit and then flopped back on her side, tucked her knees up to her chest, and began to sob, her headlamp shining down into the fine sand.
He slipped out of his scuba rig and shut off his air tank before going to her and securing her air. He kept his headlamp on but reached over and turned hers off to conserve the battery. She was shaking silently. He wanted to pick her up and hold her, but it would be awkward — she was still in her diving rig. She was following his instructions but keeping her eyes closed tight. He helped her out of her tank rig and then sat down beside her.
“What?” he asked softly, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Look, you panicked down there. That happens. Don’t—”
“No,” she sobbed. “No. I did not panic. Not in the way you mean.”
The hell you didn’t, he thought, but didn’t say it. “What, then?” he asked, unsure of what was going on.
She rubbed her eyes and then massaged the sides of her face where the mask had been. Her normally composed expression was shattered. She was more than a little white-eyed, and her skin was uncharacteristically pale against the oval frame of her hood.
“That suit down there?” she said. “I recognized that suit. Oh, David, my God! I think that, that… thing down there was my husband. That was Dov!”
Yosef Ellerstein was stopped by an army police truck on the Dead Sea highway just below Qumran. Israeli citizens were not forbidden to be in their cars at night in this area, but since there was technically nowhere for him to be going, the patrol leader naturally stopped the car and asked where Ellerstein was bound. He identified himself and then explained that there was a problem at Masada.
“Metsadá?” the young lieutenant asked. “It’s closed. What kind of a problem?”
“Do you know who Colonel Skuratov is?” Ellerstein asked the young officer.
“No. He is army?”
“Not exactly. He is Shin Bet. I think. He has something to do with security at the Dimona laboratories.”
“Dimona?” the officer echoed. He looked around, his face registering total confusion. “What does Dimona have to do with you, Professor? Or Metsadá, please?”
Ellerstein threw up his hands. He could see the faces of the other patrol troops looking at his car through the canvas windshields on the back of the truck. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I have done some occasional, um, research work for Colonel Skuratov. Listen: I believe that there is an American tourist up on the mountain, doing some unauthorized exploration. I believe Colonel Skuratov might be up there, too.”