2013: Beyond Armageddon (36 page)

On his other hand was a ring made from bone, taken from the disinterred and violated corpse of a long-dead Archbishop. Having waited patiently for the witching hour, when his power would be the greatest, the black priest began to read the passage he had chosen for his incantation. It was one of the apocryphal keys of Enoch, once used by alchemists and later translated into Satanic hymns. By the light of the small candle he began his dreamlike and worshipful murmuring in an attempt to conjure the legions of Hell. He chanted the words over and over, each recitation increasing the fervor with which he spoke them. Finally, after thirteen repetitions had worked him into a controlled frenzy, in a vile whisper he exclaimed down at Zeke directly below him:

“Open and admit me! Open, in the name of Satan, so that I may come with you on your journey! Bring me into you!”

The black priest blew out the candle. Moonlight coming through the window illuminated the wraith of smoke from the extinguished flame. He watched it floating upward, as though an imprisoned spirit had been freed from its earthly bond. As he stared through the gathering darkness at the floor beneath which Zeke lay sleeping, the foul mockery of a gloating grin sullied the possessed being’s lips. With eyes attuned to the night, he left the room and headed for the stairway at the end of the hall.

He must find a way to neutralize the relics.
When I’m through they will be worth nothing to you, Ezekiel. You will see who has the true power.

He silently crept up the stairs, becoming one with the blackness.

The sun was just coming up as the boat reached the anomaly. They’d taken the 30-foot outboard for ease of maneuverability on this first exploratory dive.

Mordecai was at the wheel. Hassan stood beside him, staring at the GPS chart plotter mounted into the dash. A boat-shaped icon representing their craft showed their progress as they approached the beginning of the faint gray survey line they’d come here to investigate.

Mordecai nodded at the GPS unit. “Those things have come a long way. Even a small one like that is accurate to within a few feet.” He throttled back. “Only twenty-five more yards. We don’t know how deep the anomaly is buried, but my guess is five, ten yards at most.” He cut the engine. “Please drop the anchor, Hassan.”

Standing at the stern facing backwards, Zeke was so engrossed in the scene that he paid no attention to Hassan’s approach. The predawn light was painting the normally forbidding cliffs along the western shore a stunning soft pink. The briny odor was barely noticeable in the early morning air; the rotten-egg smell of sulfur was absent altogether. An evaporation haze gently fluttered and roiled as it hung suspended in a thick layer three feet above the water. After last night’s encounter with the faces, Zeke imagined the haze as the Dead Sea giving up its ghosts. The movements within the spectral cloud were the death throes of the departing spirits.

Last night when he’d told Leah of the faces she had said, “That’s it. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“As much as I’d like to, we can’t be together every second,” he’d said. “You’ve got to keep on top of things here. Don’t you remember what Hassan said? You’re the heartbeat of the operation. I’ll be careful.”

The splash of the anchor yanked him back into the moment. The three men ran final checks on their equipment and suited up. Mordecai kept a running commentary of safety reminders.

Hassan turned on the small portable airlift to make sure it was working. Its motor was fairly quiet, but in the preternatural calm it sounded like a scream in a graveyard. He quickly turned it off. “That could wake the dead.”

“Let’s hope not,” Mordecai said. “Come on. Time to move some mud.”

They entered the water from a small dive platform they’d affixed to the transom above the outboard motor. Normally, five-to-ten pounds of lead in a weight belt enabled a diver to sink, but in the Dead Sea, legendary for being unable to sink in, each man wore an unheard-of forty pounds. Rather than put all the lead into waist belts, some was affixed to their legs and arms to lessen the burden on their lower backs.

The water here was barely ten feet deep. They quickly reached bottom and adjusted their buoyancy compensators until they hovered just above it.

Hassan carried a 200-foot reel of cord for marking off the boundaries of the first grid. After he and Zeke had strung a square 50 feet on each side, Zeke handled the airlift while Mordecai and Hassan began to dig. The four gloved hands dug much faster than they normally would; at this site, finding the tunnel took precedence over archaeology. The combined sound of the airlift and their breathing was only a soft drone.

The three men fell into a smooth working routine and relatively quick progress was made. In an hour they’d dug a trench about ten yards wide and two deep. A few yards before they reached the rope boundary to complete the first pass, Hassan’s voice broke the silence. “Come. Look at this.”

Zeke and Mordecai floated over.

Jutting through the mud about two inches was a slightly curved craggy black ridge, about three feet long. It reminded Zeke of lava rock he and Leah had seen in Maui.

Mordecai pulled off a glove and ran his fingertips across it, then squeezed to gauge its solidity. “Rock. Let’s see where it leads us.”

Following the curving line of the stony ridge, they uncovered a section about ten yards long to a depth of one yard.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Mordecai said.

He grabbed the rock with both hands and, gently at first, then with gradually increasing force, tugged on it to get a sense of how big it might be, and how deeply it might be embedded.

It wouldn’t budge. It gave the impression of being quite large. Possibly enormous. “Notice that it doesn’t stick straight up,” Mordecai said. “It’s at about a 45-degree angle.”

“Something that fell over in antiquity, maybe?” Hassan suggested.

“Maybe. If it continues to curve we might be looking at a circle.”

“A well, maybe,” Hassan said. “Or some kind of catchment for water.”

“Could be. Let’s follow it as far as we can. Don’t worry about depth; let’s just get the top of it exposed, see how big of a structure we’re dealing with.”

Exposing the top of the ridge was relatively easy work, little more than running their hands along either side. They finished just as Mordecai’s wrist computer began to beep, telling them it was time to head up. Stopping their ascent just below the surface to look at what they’d uncovered, through the murky water they saw a jagged circle of rock, at least thirty, maybe forty yards in diameter, completely filled with mud.

“It’s big,” Zeke said.

“Yes,” Mordecai said. “We’re going to need a dredge.”

Mordecai contacted the same industrial dredging company they’d used to clear the salt crust from the sea bottom. Motivated by a $10,000 bonus, a team of technicians completed the job in less than a week. A downward-sloping shaft, eighty yards long and nearly forty in diameter, hewn out of the subterranean rock for an unknown purpose, had been cleared. Only the sea water that flowed into it remained inside.

The dredge operator had told them that the shaft continued past the section he’d cleared. When he’d reached the end of the downward slope and thought he was done, he’d had to remove at least a ton more material because of backfill sliding down from the next section, which inexplicably changed course and sloped upward. With the help of specially trained divers, themselves helped by gravity, they’d cleared that section, at least as far as they could see. Whatever was past that point was beyond the scope of the dredging operation. Only diving could reveal what lay beyond.

While the dredging had gone on, Mordecai had given Zeke and Hassan an intensive course on cave diving. Throughout, his main emphasis had been on safety. They’d be facing many new dangers in the claustrophobic environment of a tunnel. With no light from above to show which way was up, it would be easy to get disoriented. If anything went wrong—and, sooner or later, especially with cave diving, something always did—panic could kill them. They’d have to run a penetration line to show them the way out.

At the shallow depth they’d been working, decompression stops on the way to the surface hadn’t been necessary. But at the bottom of the tunnel, they’d be somewhere around three hundred feet deeper, which would mean several deco stops to avoid the bends. The descent might only take fifteen minutes, but the ascent could take forty-five. Or more.

They’d still be equipped for voice communication, but from that range and with that much solid material between the transmitter and receiver, contact with the surface would almost certainly be impossible. Adding in factors like water density, salinity, temperature and “who knows what,” diver-to-diver might also be lost. They’d spent hours going over hand signals, and Mordecai had emphasized the importance of not getting separated. In that event the penetration line became a lifeline.

On and on it went. Even though Mordecai tried not to overload them with information, the training sessions each ran eight hours.

The 72’ catamaran would be used to manage the dive. Since only Hell Squad members could be used for this part of the dig, that left Leah and Unger to handle the surface duties. While Mordecai trained his underwater team, ex-Israeli Navy commando Joe Dayagi trained Leah and Unger on everything they needed to know.

Now, as dawn broke over the Holy Land, Leah slowly brought the large boat to a perfect stop at the marker buoy they’d left above the entrance to the tunnel. Standing beside her in his monk’s habit, Anthony Unger gave her a thumbs up. Ten feet below, leading to an unknown destination, the mouth of the tunnel waited.

Leah cut the engine. When its rumble finally died out, the unearthly early morning silence of the Dead Sea was jarring. They left the wheelhouse to join the dive team in the control room. Mordecai, Zeke, and Hassan exuded a quiet confidence.

“We’ve been over everything a million times,” Mordecai said, “but if anyone has any questions, we can go over them a million more.”

No one said anything.

“We’ve only got one chance at this,” he said. “No room for mistakes. What’s that thing you always used to say in the Army, Zeke?”

Zeke smiled. “Okay. Let’s do this right. Huddle up.” He held out his hand, palm down. The group picked up their cue, each stacking a hand on top of another. “All right,” Zeke said. “We’re in, we’re out, and nobody gets hurt.” They broke the huddle with a shout.

As they began heading for the stern, Leah grabbed Zeke’s hand and pulled him back. “You better take your advice, buddy. Don’t you dare get hurt down there. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear, girlfriend. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” He patted the St. Peter’s crucifix he’d secured to his belt in a watertight bag.

“You better be.”

She kissed his cheek and they went to join the others. Minutes later she watched their headlamps disappear into the blackness of the Devil’s Sea.

The divers stabilized a few feet above the bottom and Mordecai led the way. He tied the beginning of a reel of cord that would be their penetration line to the anchor line of the boat, letting it unspool as he swam. The extreme buoyancy of the water made the reel virtually weightless. If they needed more than the hundred yards on his reel, Zeke was close behind with another hundred-yard reel that could be linked to the first. Hassan brought up the rear. Both men had a gloved hand sliding along the line to keep it taut and to avoid getting separated from the group.

Mordecai tested the voice comm. “Can you hear me?”

Both men responded in the affirmative, and they followed him into the tunnel.

They swam in silence, their bobbing headlamps casting flickering shadows on the stone that encircled them. Like fireflies coursing through the artery of some impossibly huge sleeping behemoth, they swam inexorably ahead.

The darkness deepened as they went, as if it were a palpable force trying to repel their beams of light. Soon the light no longer reached the surrounding tunnel. Without that boundary to keep them oriented, the sensation became one of floating through an inky void in deep space.

Mordecai glanced over his shoulder. Zeke was only a few feet behind, but his light barely reached Mordecai’s fins. Hassan may as well not have existed at all.

Mordecai finned slowly through the dense black liquid, concentrating intensely on the sliver of light ahead to avoid feelings of disorientation. It was far darker in here than any cave he’d ever been in. If he was starting to feel uneasy, he knew the others must be, too.

Even though everything was going well so far, Hassan felt apprehensive. The extremely poor visibility was bad enough, but there was something else. He sensed an alien presence, a watcher somewhere in the oppressive gloom.

You were talking pretty tough on land, my friend. Now you are afraid of the dark?

No. Of course not. Well, maybe. A little.

As much as he tried not to, he kept looking over his shoulder, fighting the feeling that something might be coming up behind him. Which was ridiculous, since this was a sea in which nothing lived. And even if something was coming up on him, he couldn’t see it anyway. He could barely see his flippers. This place was like a black hole, with a gravitational pull so strong it sucked in all the surrounding light.

In the last few minutes he’d developed a nervous habit. Keeping one hand on the penetration line, he kept swimming over to touch the stone wall of the shaft, just to reassure himself he hadn’t drifted off into complete nothingness. Several times his panic level got dangerously high before his hand felt the hard craggy surface, and he would curse himself for being a superstitious fool.

Just now he was nervous again. His hand had been out for at least a minute and not felt anything. He was going through his usual bag of tricks to quell his rising fear, chiding himself, questioning his manhood, trying to laugh it off.

He concentrated on the feeble beam of his headlight. Zeke should be just in front of him, but he hadn’t seen him for quite a while. He spoke into the voice-activated microphone inside his full-face mask.