“Judah,” she said. “Judah Sicarius. Sicarius means Daggerman. I’m about halfway through it. It’s definitely first-century Aramaic.”
“I can’t believe you can just read that stuff. It all looks like hieroglyphics to me.”
“I can read it, all right, but it is not pleasant reading. How are we going to get out of this place, David Hall?”
“Physics,” he said. “I hope, anyway. There’s a second pipe — at the top of the main cave. It’s an outlet pipe. I think this cistern is a recirculation system. My plan is to block the outlet and hope like hell that the inlet pipe remains pressurized. There has to be a pretty big pump down at that plant to get water all the way up to the main cistern.”
“And this will work how?”
“Water does not compress,” he said. “So if that pump keeps pumping, the pressure in the cistern will rise until at some point the force on the bottom of that slab will be more than it weighs, and then it will pop up out of the hole — but just for an instant. I plan to be there, and, hopefully, I’ll be able to jam that steel pipe over there into the crack. If I can do that, we can breathe, and if we can breathe, we can maybe think of something to get us out of here. Just one problem.”
She walked back over to join him on the sand. “Just one? Wouldn’t that same pressure push the water all the way into this cave?”
He smiled. “Knew you were smart, but yes, it will. Only we’re going to use that slab up there on the altar to block the entrance. That means you’re going to have to stay in here when I do this.”
“I do not want to stay in here,” she began.
“We have no choice — I’m going to need your air tank, and you are probably going to have to stand on that slab to keep the water out of this cave. Stand on it and pile on any weight we can find to keep it in place. Like that big menorah up there, and those rocks.”
“But—”
“I know, it’s probably going to leak by — but it’s all we have, Judith. That slab is around ten square feet. That’s fourteen hundred and forty square inches. If I can get the pressure in the main cistern to rise just five pounds per square inch, that will exert almost four tons of force, and that slab doesn’t weigh four tons.”
She was silent, obviously frightened to death by the prospect of being trapped in this cave, with water rising and no breathing rig.
He gripped her shoulders. “Look: This ought to work. As long as the pump down there at the plant doesn’t have some kind of back-pressure shutoff switch, the surge in the cistern water pressure ought to dislodge that slab. If I can get a pipe into the crack and wedge it open then maybe we’ll have air.”
“Ought to. Maybe. Okay, and then what? What do we do — shout for help?”
“Damn right. Or try to wedge the slab completely out. Or do something else — who knows? Anyway, if we can breathe, we can keep trying to get out of this mess. It’s called survival, Judith.”
She turned away, her face in shadow. “Maybe you should just go do this thing, David Hall. I think maybe you want to survive more than I do.”
He’d forgotten about Dov, and the fact that she had been reading the testimonial of the last Jew on the mountain, describing the killing of women and children. Masada might be a mountain of death, he thought, but he was determined not to join the nine hundred and sixty souls who had died in this place. Correction, he thought: nine hundred and sixty-one.
“Help me find a round stone, Judith. Something about six inches in diameter. Then we need to move that altar slab.”
29
Ellerstein stood in the western palace gate and tried to get control of his breathing. After the first one hundred feet up the steep ramp, he had knocked the ashes out of his pipe. After the second hundred feet, he had taken a silent oath never to smoke again. He looked at his watch. Well past midnight. There was no sign of the colonel and his team. They were probably searching the ruins for signs of other humans up here. He turned right and walked into the casemate walls along the southwestern rim of the fortress. A big yellow moon was rising over Jordan, casting a sepulchral light through the shattered walls.
When he got to the southernmost tip of the mountain, at the opposite end from the terraced villas, he looked down on the hostelry and tourist center, nearly eight hundred feet below. Much of it was in shadow, but he did see something that got his attention: There were two vehicles down there, Land Rovers from the look of them. They were not parked in the tourist parking lot, but rather behind the hostelry. Neither of the army detachments, coming up the coast road, would have been able to see them. They did not appear to be regular army vehicles; there were no Star of David markings, but there were whip antennas on both of them.
He shivered in the suddenly cold air. Skuratov? If so, where was the Russian right now?
It took them a long time to rig everything, and by the end of it, the air in the cave was getting difficult to breathe. David sat down in the sand near the entrance and went over the plan again with Judith. He was still in his diving rig but using her air tank this time. He had pushed the long steel staging pipe partway into the entrance tunnel. Beside them stood the half of the cracked marble slab they had taken down from the altar. It was leaning against the cave wall, ready to be dropped in place.
“As soon as I go back out into the cistern, you drop this slab across the water here. Then pack the edges with every loose rock you can find. If you have to, stand on it if the water starts to come in.”
She had taken off her wet suit and was wearing just a bathing suit. He had the top of her wet suit wrapped up into a tight roll and tied to his side. That and a rock were going to block the outlet pipe. She nodded in the gloom; her headlamp was getting dim. “You know this thing is going to leak,” she said, looking down at the irregularly shaped air-water interface.
“Yes, it will, but I really don’t need too much pressure to lift that slab out there. Even two, three pounds per square inch ought to move it. Once it lifts, the pressure will release here.”
“Where will the water go then?”
“If I can wedge this pipe into the crack, it will flow out of the cave up above. Which is good — someone will have to see that once it’s daylight.”
“Not on the Sabbath, they won’t,” she said with a sigh. Her face was perspiring. The CO2 must be getting high in here, he thought. Time to get going.
“There’s some air left in my tank. Hit it from time to time. This shouldn’t take long. I’m going to swim out, leave the pipe in the tunnel here, go plug the outlet, then come back for the pipe and head up to the slab. When it moves, I’ll jam the pipe in as far as I can. Then I’ll come back for you.”
Confused, she shook her head. “We have only one tank,” she pointed out. “I can’t go up there.”
“We’ll wait here for an hour or so, let the water pump out into the cave up above and then out onto the side of the mountain. Then I’ll go release the plug. That should create a small air gap around the slab. We can buddy-breathe our way back up there.”
She sighed again, obviously unsure about all of this. He thought that he might be missing something, but his thinking was clouded by the bad air.
“Hang in there, Judith,” he said, squeezing her hand. “This has a good shot at working. Even if we have to wait twenty-four hours, someone will see that water trail and come look.”
“Not the people who dropped the slab in the first place,” she said.
“Always the optimist, hunh? Okay. Time to go.”
He fixed his mask and mouthpiece, turned on the tank, and slithered down into the purple water. She watched the trail of bubbles as he went and then switched off her light. The third light was still outside, at the tunnel entrance, so he’d have a reference to get back to her. She reached over in the darkness and found the remaining tank. David had said it would probably have fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of air left if she was careful.