She sobbed once in desperation, watching the water press past the edges of the slab, wetting the marble now. David’s plan was working — the cistern was pressurizing — but could she hold this thing? She hadn’t followed the math he used to compute the lifting force, but this piece of marble was about one-quarter the size of the big slab up there. Then she felt it: The slab actually moved, making a squelching sound all around its edges. A small wave of water shot out from three sides before the thing settled back. There was nothing more she could do to hold it, so she knelt down, trying to concentrate her weight. The marble trembled again, a small movement, but a lot more water squirted by the edges this time. She could not hold it. She began to weep as what felt like a soft, giant hand began to move the piece of marble.
David felt rather than saw the slab move above his head. One minute he had been pressing the pipe against the crack; the next moment it had jumped up at an angle and was now wedged in the crack. He shone his light at the point where they joined and saw that he had jammed up one corner of the slab. Swirling particles in the water were streaming up into the crack. He grabbed the iron ring, repositioned his arm, and tried to shove the pipe farther into the crack, but it didn’t move.
He relaxed for a moment, gathered all his strength, pulled hard on the ring as a fulcrum, and then put a steady push up on the pipe. After a minute, when he almost could no longer hold it, the slab shifted again, and this time the pipe slid several inches into the crack. He could feel the water rushing by his mask now, as the cistern relieved the pressure up into the bat cave above.
He relaxed his grip on the pipe and took a deep breath from the tank. A difficult deep breath, he realized. Dammit! The tank was quitting on him. He let go of the steel pipe and hung by one hand from the ring. He looked up at the pipe. He had managed to shove perhaps two feet of it through the crack. Then he realized that if the slab moved again, the pipe could slip out and plunge to the bottom of the cistern.
He got out his knife and slipped it, blade up, between his diving boot and the pant leg of his wet suit. Then he cut directly up, all the way to his thigh. The pant leg opened up but did not come off. He made a second cut, creating a strip of the rubbery material the length of his leg. He cut that off and then tied the pipe off to the iron ring as best he could. It wasn’t terrific, but better than nothing. He took another deep breath and then felt a pressure dip in his ears. Not too big, but definitely something.
The Zealots’ cave. That damned piece of marble had let go.
He consulted his compass, pointed west, switched off his headlamp, and then swam down hard toward the opposite wall, the extra air tank banging his hip. He saw the reference light when he was passing through twenty-five feet. He turned twenty degrees to the right and pushed down to the light and the cave entrance. He rolled over onto his back, switched on his light, and started in, but the extra tank snagged on something. He whipped out his knife and cut the tank loose from the harness, grabbed it with his other hand, and struggled backward into the tight tunnel. When he came to the end he hit his head on something: the slab. It wasn’t wedged anymore, though: It was loose in the interface, and he could feel water passing around it. He pulled the extra tank up and banged on the slab to get her attention, but nothing happened. Jesus Christ, had the cave flooded?
Then the slab did move, and he saw her hands scrabbling along the edge, trying to dislodge it. He put his back into it then, and between them they got the thing onto its edge and he was through and standing up in chest-deep water. The marble dropped back into the hole with a flat slap.
David looked at Judith, whose white face told the story. “I couldn’t hold it,” she sobbed. “The water came in everywhere.”
He glanced around the cave, which was now almost one-third full of water. It had risen past the bottom lines of writing on one wall. “Look,” he said, pointing his headlamp. “It’s going back down. I got the pipe into the big slab. The fill system should be pumping water into that cave and outside.”
She collapsed onto her knees in the water and put her face in her hands. He noticed how stuffy the air was in the cave and pushed the spare tank over.
“Here,” he said, switching over the regulator connection and pushing his mouthpiece into her face. “Breathe.”
She grabbed at the mouthpiece and took several deep breaths before he cautioned her to slow down. Then he took a couple of breaths himself. He watched her face. She was calming down, but the whites of her eyes were still showing.
“We’ll let the water go out onto the mountainside for as long as we can stand it in here,” he said. “Then I’ll go unplug the outlet pipe, and hopefully we’ll get an airspace up there by the slab. After that, it’s a matter of time before someone sees all that water.”
“Hopefully,” she murmured. “Always with the hopefully.”
She was trying to crack wise, but her voice gave her away. He needed to distract her. “Yeah, well, look,” he said. “We’re still alive, and this cave is still intact. We have some air now. Someone’s going to see all that water.”
“So now we what, just wait?”
“Yes. We just wait.” He shone his light over the writing on the wall. “You can actually read all this?”
She straightened and looked up at the script, her headlamp throwing a bobbing yellow circle on the wall. “I’ve read almost half of it,” she said. “It’s still terrible.”
“Where does it begin?” he asked, taking another hit on the spare tank.
“There,” she said, getting up and wading over toward the altar structure. The water was definitely receding, he thought. The parts of the writing that had been wetted were beginning to run down the wall.
“Here. It begins like this: I am Judah Sicarius, son of Joseph. I shall be the Last Man.”
Ellerstein finally found the colonel and his team up on the northernmost tip of the fortress. They had apparently just climbed back up from the terraces. The colonel was not surprised to see him.
“My people reported you had come up here, Professor,” he explained. His face looked even younger in the bright moonlight. Beyond them, over a thousand feet below, the Dead Sea glinted silver all the way across to the dark Jordanian hills. A night bird cried out in the darkness down on the Serpent Path. To their left stood the labyrinth of the palace storerooms, and beyond that, the cable-car tower contrasted dramatically with the two-thousand-year-old ruins. Seeing Ellerstein, the soldiers with the colonel took a break, lighting up cigarettes and enjoying the expansive view.
“So, Coloneclass="underline" anything?”
“Not a damned thing, Professor. No Americans, no Russians, no Arabs or white-eyed Palestinian Islamicide bombers, as best I can tell. How about you — did you see anything?” The colonel was trying to hide his sarcasm, but he wasn’t succeeding very well.
“Nothing up here, no,” Ellerstein said, fumbling with his pipe, “but there are two Land Rovers parked out in the dark behind the hostelry. Those yours, Colonel?”
The colonel looked at him for a moment and then snapped an order to the radio operator. The man dropped his cigarette and made an urgent transmission. He listened for a reply and then shook his head at the colonel.
“Goddammit,” the colonel said. He turned to the sergeant. “Get somebody on that, right away. Find out whose they are.” The radio operator got busy, and the colonel found his own cigarettes. “The hostelry is supposed to be covered by the regular coast road patrol,” he said. “They didn’t mention anything about any vehicles back there, but we’ve searched this whole place. There’s no one up here except us.”