He saw the disbelief in the lieutenant’s eyes. “I know,” Ellerstein continued. “It’s complicated. Look, let’s go down there, you and me. I think we need to get up on the mountain.”
“The site is closed and the cable car is shut down, Professor. That place, it’s four hundred meters straight up. How do you propose to get up on that mountain?” The way he said this made it clear that he didn’t think Ellerstein was up to it.
“The same way the Romans did,” Ellerstein replied.
The lieutenant blinked. The ramp. “Okay,” he said, “but first, I think I need to contact my headquarters.”
“Yes, you do that, Lieutenant,” Ellerstein nodded. “Emphasize that name, Skuratov. They won’t know me from spit, but they should recognize that name. In the meantime, I think we need to get down there. Something bad is going on. I’m sure of it.”
The lieutenant gave him a faintly patronizing look, shook his head doubtfully, and asked him to pull off the road and wait. Then he went back to the truck, climbed into the cab, and got on his radio. Ellerstein maneuvered his car to the side, shut the engine down, and waited.
He was sure of it, he’d said. Something bad was going on down there. He still could not make the connection between Dimona and Masada. Or maybe it was a connection between Skuratov and Masada. What in the world could it be? He looked in his mirror but could not see what was going on inside the truck because of the headlamps. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Then there was movement behind him, a banging of truck doors. The lieutenant came back to his car.
“Battalion says to go down there and to take you with us, Professor. My orders are to sweep the site and to report.”
“Did they recognize the name Skuratov?”
“You know, that’s weird. At first, the duty officer gave me a ‘wait, out.’ Then he said to turn you around and have you return to Jerusalem. But then he said hold on, and this time he comes back and says to get down there. There will be a special security force coming over. An entire company.” The lieutenant looked at him to see if he understood the significance of that. Ellerstein, like just about every other adult Israeli male, had been in the army.
“A full company?” he exclaimed. “That’s a hundred men?”
“Yes. Probably special forces. He wouldn’t say anything more on the unsecure radio net. Just to move out, right now. So, Professor: We go, yes?”
“Absolutely — is that military road back up to the Roman camp still there?”
“Yes. You will please follow us, Professor. Oh, I told them that you thought this Colonel Skuratov may already be up there. Apparently that’s why the Dimona security reaction force is coming over. Does that make any sense to you?”
The army company was the Dimona reaction force? Oh-oh, he thought. “It just might, Lieutenant,” Ellerstein said. He should be calling Gulder, but he had no phone. “It just might. We should hurry now, okay?”
“That was Dov?” David asked, staring at her. “Are you sure? I mean—”
“It’s the suit,” she said. She swallowed a couple of times to clear her throat. “There was a theory several years back about wet suits for the open ocean. If they bore the striped markings of venomous sea snakes, larger predators would stay away. Dov believed it and had a suit made with those colored stripes. It was unique. Other divers used to kid him about it. I would have to… to—”
“Yes, right, I understand, but I think that’s out of the question right now. You shouldn’t go back down to that depth again, and I damn sure can’t go back down that deep for a while. Besides, we need to figure out how we’re going to get out of this cave.”
Her face went crooked again. “Someone closed the entrance up above, yes?”
He looked around at the dimly lit walls of the cave. “Sure looks that way. You saw all our stuff in the cistern, and I had that slab wedged way back from the hole.”
“So someone must have known we were down here?”
“Yeah, and that’s what’s got me scared. I think someone wants us to stay down here.”
“Just like Dov,” she whispered, her eyes filling again. He pulled her over to him again, and she wept for a few minutes. He felt a wave of sympathy and had to resist the urge to kiss the top of her head. Then she took a deep breath and pulled away, wiping her eyes.
He rolled away, stood up, and began to scan the walls and the ceiling with his headlamp. Two skeletons in the mountain, he thought. One ancient, one not so ancient. A modern pipe pumping water into the cistern. A familiar-looking pipe, at that. Then he remembered the geothermal plant. The pipe coming out of that building had pointed back at the mountain. Same size. Same pipe? Was that why the young scientist had been diving into the big cistern? Or did it have something to do with those cylinders?
He was wasting time and, more importantly, air. There were two air tanks bobbing against the ceiling out there in the main cistern, but they were only partially full. Add to that what was left in their tanks here. They had three lights, all with used batteries. There was a waterproof flashlight floating up there with the tanks, but no food and no potable water, unless they went back down and looked for their water bottles. Going back down to the bottom was out of the question, and the silt on the bottom would make it impossible, anyway. He had one staging pipe and absolutely no idea of what to do next. He went back over to Judith, sat down, patted her arm, and then turned off his headlamp. She gripped his hand in the sudden darkness.
“Need to conserve the batteries,” he said. “While we think this out. The big question is, how did that guy by the altar over there get into this cave? I didn’t see any ledge or indications he came in the way we came, and there was a big boulder blocking the cave entrance when I first found it.”
She thought about it, still clutching his hand. The darkness was absolute.
“If the cistern was empty at the time of the siege, there may have been ladders up to this cave.”
“The bottom is a hundred and some feet down from the slab entrance. By my depth gauge, the entrance to this cave is at about forty feet. That’s a damn tall ladder. Plus, the entrance to the cave was sealed when I found it. No, I think there’s another way in. Up above us somewhere. And—” He stopped.
“And what?”
“Well, if there is an entrance, it must be sealed, too. Otherwise, this cave would be filled with water. Look.”
He switched on his headlamp and pointed it down at his depth gauge. It read thirty-three feet. He switched the light off. “Once I dislodged that boulder out of the entrance, the water in the cistern pressurized the air in this side cave to an equilibrium state. There’s a problem, though: If we do find a way out from this cave, when we open it, the water from the main cistern will fill this cave until the two levels are equal.”
“Why?”
“Because the pressures would have to equalize. We’re sitting in a bubble of compressed air. If we release this pressure, there’ll be a small tidal wave in here.”
“My God, all this would be lost. The writing is done in lampblack. The water out there would dissolve it all, especially what’s in those scroll holders.”
“Yeah, it might,” he said, “but what are our options? I don’t want to die here.”
She was quiet. He was aware that every breath they took was consuming precious oxygen and beginning to fill the cave with carbon dioxide. They had to do something.