She shook her head in the darkness. This was hopeless, in more ways than one. She didn’t believe the altar slab would keep the water out, and she’d have no way of communicating that problem to David. This cave would flood, and the treasures in it would eventually be consumed by the caustic salts in the water.
Those had to be Dov’s remains down there at the bottom of the main cistern, that distinctive suit and those white bone fragments. She was sure of it. There wasn’t another suit like that in all Israel. An image of Dov’s bones floated in front of her mind. She was doomed, and as she sat there, thinking about it, she didn’t much care.
The water pipes meant that someone, and it had to be the government, was using this big cistern for some purpose besides water storage. That strange Russian had been interested in what this American was doing down here. Interested and even concerned. Skuratov had ties to Dimona, which was only forty kilometers away — and if it was Skuratov who had trapped them in here, then it was probably Skuratov who had trapped Dov in here. She found herself wanting to get that outsized dagger from under the altar for one last meeting with Colonel Skuratov.
She sat there, aware that there was something she was supposed to be doing, but her brain wasn’t working very well. The air was becoming astringent, and each breath was fractionally less successful than the last. Then she remembered: the altar slab. She had to drop the altar slab over this tunnel and then weight it down. She turned on her light and took a deep breath and then another. She almost didn’t have the energy to get up, but she must: David was out there, trying like hell to get them both out.
She got up, approached the heavy marble slab, positioned it as best she could, and then tipped it over onto the air-water interface. It landed with a flat splash, its edges embedding in the wet sand. Then she began to gather rocks from the cave and put them in the cracks between the slab and the entrance tunnel walls. She packed them in with sand and then more rocks, working in slow motion as she tried to get her breath. She remembered about the tank and went over to it, picked up the breathing mouthpiece, and took some air. It revived her immediately, and she started working faster now, stuffing smaller rocks and more sand all around the slab, while watching for signs of water intrusion. He had said that at first there would be no leaks, but when the pressure rose, if it rose, she reminded herself, the water would show up at the edges.
Finally, she ran out of rocks. She eyed the huge menorah up on the altar structure, but they had decided it was much too heavy and at the same time too delicate to move. Same with the scroll cylinders. She was aching to open them but knew better. The Qumran scrolls had been the consistency of a piece of newspaper that keeps its shape in the fireplace after being used to start the fire. The merest breath could turn such a thing to dust. She looked around the cave one more time for anything else she could put on the slab. Her body was wet with perspiration, and she could smell the fear on her skin. She looked at her watch: two fifteen in the morning. Her depth gauge was still strapped to her wrist. It read thirty-two feet. She stepped onto the bed of rocks that covered the slab and sat down. She pulled the tank over and then switched off her headlamp. Now she could only wait. She put one hand out to the edge of the altar slab and burrowed it down into the sand. If it started getting wet, she would know she was in trouble. She laughed out loud — as if she were not in trouble right now?
David waited underneath the cistern slab, slowly treading water, the long staging pipe balanced at the midpoint under his left arm. With his right hand he held on to the iron ring on the underside of the slab. He kept his headlamp on, to watch two things: the slab itself and his depth gauge. If his theory was correct, a pressure increase in the cistern ought to register on his depth gauge. Behind him, floating next to his head, was a real prize: one of the two extra air tanks, which he had discovered bobbing along the ceiling near the outlet pipe. He had secured it to his harness with a small nylon strap and would take it back to the cave after he jammed the pipe.
He looked at the depth gauge. No change. It had read just above zero feet when he put his arm up against the big slab. He thought about Judith, waiting down in that increasingly airless cave. He felt bad enough about getting her involved in this mess, and the discovery of her husband’s remains at the bottom of the cistern had been a dreadful shock. Hell, who could blame her — the government had obviously lied through its teeth about what happened to Dr. Dov Ressner, physicist of Dimona. What really bothered him was trying to figure out why someone had trapped them in this cistern. Was it because whoever it was realized they might discover Dov’s remains? Or was it because of those two pipes coming into a two-thousand-year-old Masada cistern?
He thought he felt his ears squeeze just a tiny bit. He looked at the depth gauge. No change.
Wait — there was a change: not quite two feet. Definite movement. Good — the cistern system was being pressurized. It might take longer than he had planned on, because it was a really big cistern and a relatively small pipe. The big question was whether or not the pump over in that building would sense unusual back pressure and shut down. If it did, they were finished.
He blinked his eyes behind the mask and stared at the gauge. Now there was no doubt: The depth gauge had moved. He watched the big stone slab above his head, breathing as slowly as he could, conserving energy and air. He ran through the math again: Say the slab weighed five hundred pounds. If it was fourteen hundred square inches in area, at even just two pounds additional pressure, the water would be exerting twenty-eight hundred pounds of force on a five-hundred-pound slab. It ought to move. As long as some unknown opening in the Zealots’ cave didn’t fail and relieve the pressure. He refused to think about the treasure cave, the point most likely to do just that. He positioned the end of the staging pipe right up against the crack. Then he waited, and prayed.
30
Judith was drifting in a CO2-induced haze when she thought she felt something. She tried to focus. What was it? Something, that’s all. Don’t worry. Relax. Then her brain sparked: Was that a pressure in her ears? She straightened up and switched on her headlamp. It was definitely more yellow now than white. She looked at the depth gauge on her wrist. Had it moved? Not much, if at all. Then what? What had she felt?
Her bare left hand, submerged in the sand, was tingling. She tried to concentrate, but it was very difficult. What was different? The sand was different. It was wet sand. She jerked her hand out and shone the light down. Definitely wet. The sand was wet. All around the slab, the sand was wet. Really wet.
She stood up too quickly and nearly tipped over. She blinked her eyes and steadied herself. Then she remembered and stepped back onto the marble slab. Had to keep it wedged in position, long enough for the pressure out there in the main cistern to dislodge the upper slab.
She focused the light. No longer just wet sand. There was visible water now, oozing up around the edges of the slab. She cast the light around the cave, but there was nothing else to pile on the slab. Every loose rock, her scuba tank, her weight belt. She wished they could have moved the huge menorah, but that was impossible. It would take four men to move that thing. She was pretty sure it was nearly solid metal, possibly even gold. An amazing treasure, the find of all finds, and it was going to be drowned here in this cave.