In Pavlovian fashion, Roselli licked his lips. Then he sighed and ran his fingers through the divot. ‘That’d be good.’
‘Neat?’
Looking wounded, Roselli nodded.
‘All right.’ Stokes patted him on the back. ‘It’ll be okay. I promise. Be back in a minute.’
Stokes pivoted on his good foot and made his way outside.
Roselli turned back to the centre of the room and stared at the veiled display case. The loose ends of the silky cover billowed against air pumping in from overhead vents. Or maybe something beneath it was stirring. Curiosity got the best of him and he stepped cautiously towards it. Cringing, he reached out and began to lift the cover. But the sudden sound of the door closing made him jump in fright. His eyes snapped to the door.
‘Stokes?’
The door’s locking mechanism turned over with a
clunk
.
‘Stokes!’
On the other side of the door, Stokes punched a code into the keypad mounted on the doorframe and activated the hermetic seal. Roselli’s screams barely permeated the dense walls. But soon, all would be silent.
Roselli’s fists throbbed as he pounded on the door again, leaving splotches of perspiration on the cold metal. Helpless anger blinded him to the futility of escaping the vault.
He’d tried unsuccessfully to access the sealed shelving units containing the bronze tools, thinking he might somehow be able to use an axe or chisel to pry open the door lock. With every fixture in the room bolted to the floor, and no loose implement to use as a striker, however, he’d resorted to using his fists on the glass. That effort, too, proved a waste of time and energy. Even if he’d been able to get to the tools, he knew that the primitive bronze would be too flimsy to have any effect on the formidable security door.
So he’d been reduced to what amounted to a child’s tantrum.
The ceiling vents steadily hummed. Instead of the climate control system scrubbing away contaminants, however, it was now sucking oxygen out from the room. The air reeked of ozone.
Finally, he turned and put his back against the door in defeat, slid down to the Berber carpet. He loosened his necktie, unbuttoned the shirt collar. Scanning the room again, he cursed the fact that there were no windows or secondary doors. Even the air ducts, he’d observed, seemed too tight for a mouse, let alone a 205-pound middle-aged man.
Each laboured breath became more shallow, more painful. It felt as if he was being slowly strangled by invisible hands. The grim reality quickly settled over him: there’d be no escape. This vault was to be his tomb. Ironically, what angered him now was that the cunning preacher had not made good on delivering the Scotch. All those years watching each other’s back in the most inhospitable war zones on the planet, and it came down to this. ‘If you’re going to kill me, a little civility would have been nice,’ he grumbled.
He wondered where Stokes would dump his body: at home, where his wife would assume high cholesterol and runaway blood pressure had finally gotten the best of him? At his office, where his secretary would grumble that he’d finally succeeded in working himself to death? Or in a Caesar’s Palace hotel room, where one might think his mounting gambling losses and excessive boozing had finally taken their toll?
‘Devious bastard,’ he said in a thin, wheezy voice.
His starved lungs made his chest heave up and down. His senses were beginning to feel foggy.
Perhaps this was a fitting end for what he’d done to assist Stokes these past years - to enable his ambitious plan for world domination, Armageddon, or whatever moniker might be ascribed to the delusional end game. Would justice ever find Stokes for what
he’d
done? If there was a God, why would He grant victory to such an evil prick? Whatever happened to good ole wrath, retribution and smite?
Determined not to go down without a fight, Roselli tried to think of how he could warn the others whom Stokes would consider a threat. From his jacket pocket, he pulled out his BlackBerry, confirmed that not one signal bar showed on the screen.
Lethargically, he moved towards the room’s centre with the PDA held close to the ceiling, hunting for a signal. Nothing. ‘That’s just great,’ he huffed.
The room started to spin, so he sat on the floor and propped himself up against the plinth. Every breath was a struggle.
Using the PDA’s stylus, Roselli navigated his address book and began drafting a mass e-mail - a warning to all who’d worked on the project, plus an admission of his participation in a most egregious act with consequences that potentially threatened humankind’s existence. That should get their attention, he thought. Maybe then the scientists would learn how they’d unwittingly participated in a sinister plot that would make the Manhattan Project seem like child’s play. Maybe then they would rally together and seek justice. The possibility gave Roselli hope.
Finally … full disclosure, he pondered.
Next, he prepared a second e-mail message, but assigned it a later delivery time. This one was meant for Stokes. What would prove to be Roselli’s shocking final message from the grave. When he finished the draft and read it over a final time, he couldn’t help but grin, despite the bleakness of his predicament.
Roselli edited delivery instructions for the two messages to ensure completion of two tasks: attempt delivery every minute until a signal is obtained and delivery confirmed; auto-delete the messages upon successful transmission.
The wheezing was heavier now; his vision, spotty.
From his pocket, he withdrew a tiny glass vial filled with white powder and uncapped its rubber stopper. With utmost care he sprinkled the tacky granules over the PDA’s keyboard and control buttons. Then he slipped the empty vial back into his jacket pocket, followed by the powered-on PDA.
He let his arms drop limply to the floor. The room seemed to be crushing in around him.
Burn in Hell, Stokes, he thought.
A minute later, darkness crept in from the corners of his vision. Then everything slipped into oblivion.
‘Keep back from the opening,’ Jason reminded Jam. ‘Let’s not have you catch a bullet with your face.’
‘Yes, mother,’ Jam replied.
Having clambered to the highpoint of the rubble heap that blocked the cave entrance, Jam had pulled away enough debris and stone to enable Camel - straddled beside him - to punch five feet of three-inch-wide conduit clear through to the other side. Not hard for Jason to imagine someone on the other side attempting to put a few bullets through the PVC pipe.
‘Good to go,’ Camel reported. ‘Pass the line up.’
The sand-coloured armoured flex cable hung in long loops from Hazo’s crooked elbow. The slight-statured Kurd passed Camel the business end of the line - a shielded optical lens tip. The cable’s other end connected to a toaster-sized portable command unit that was mostly lithium battery.
Camel began threading the Snake through the PVC.
‘Clear?’ Jason asked.
‘Yeah, it’s going through,’ Camel said. ‘Smooth as a colonoscopy. Keep it coming, Hazo.’
Meanwhile, Meat flipped back the device’s lid, which doubled as the LCD viewing screen, and powered on the unit. The setup was similar to a compact laptop: full-size keyboard, touchpad mouse, some simple controls. From the carrying case, he retrieved what looked like a videogame joystick, plugged it into a port on the unit’s rear panel. With the touch of a button, the halogen floodlight mounted on the Snake’s tip lit up. The streaming video came through bright and clear.
‘We have eyes,’ Meat reported. He reached into the case again, grabbed the unit’s headphones and put them on. Then he adjusted the audio level on the integrated microphone.
Jason came over and crouched beside him to get a look at the images coming back from inside the cave.
As Camel pushed more flex cable through the pipe, the camera advanced further down the bumpy slope of rocks until it found gravel.
‘Hold it there,’ Meat said. He pulled back on the joystick while pressing his thumb on the control button. Like a charmed cobra, the cable curled at the tip (an integrated hydraulic balance kept the camera level). The first clear pictures immediately shone bright and clear.
‘We’re in,’ Meat said. Just behind the blocked entry, smooth parallel walls set roughly two metres apart tapered off into the darkness. ‘Not your typical cave.’
‘No, it certainly isn’t.’ Jason studied the image, saw no sign of activity. ‘All right, Camel, keep it moving … slow and steady.’
‘Hear anything yet?’ Jason asked.
‘Nothing,’ he reported. ‘It’s quiet in there. Really quiet.’
Jam jumped off the pile and helped Hazo feed more loops to Camel.
A few metres in, Meat spotted something on the walls. ‘Hey, see that?’
‘Hold up,’ Jason called up to Camel. The picture steadied. ‘What is it?’ he asked Meat.
‘Something on the left wall,’ he replied, squinting tight at the screen. He toggled the joystick to get a better angle, then zoomed out for a wide shot.
When the picture came into focus, Jason was amazed at what he was seeing: the entire left wall was filled with narrative scenes carved in pristine bas-relief. The central figure depicted in the scenes was a shapely woman holding a cylindrical object that emanated wavy lines. Assembled around her were men and women presenting gifts and food. There was even a group genuflecting as if in worship. Beneath her feet was a repeating pattern of nautilus-shaped swirls. ‘Whoa,’ Meat said. ‘That’s weird.’ He panned side to side. ‘Looks like a mural or something.’
‘Sure does,’ Jason agreed. ‘Hazo, come take a look at this.’
The Kurd passed the coiled cable to Jam and joined them.
‘What do you make of that?’
Hazo’s brow rumpled. After ten seconds, he shook his head. ‘I don’t know this … ah … but this rosette here?’ He pointed to a bracelet on the woman’s wrist. ‘This means she is like a god, or how you say … ?’ He fished for the word.
‘Divine?’ Jason surmised.
‘Yes, divinity. This says divinity.’
‘So she’s a goddess. Some kind of religious image.’
‘I think so. But not Christian. And Muslims would never allow these pictures. Very blasphemous.’
Pointing to the swirls on the image, Jason asked, ‘Is this supposed to be a river?’
‘Um, yes. I’d agree with that.’
‘And what’s this in her hands?’
Hazo shook his head. ‘A large fruit … um, no … maybe a container. These lines …’ Hazo said, tilting his head sideways to ascertain a meaning. ‘Maybe a light?’
‘Or something radiating from it.’
Meat gave Jason a surprised look. ‘What, like magic?’
He shrugged. ‘All right, let’s document everything. Meat, take some still shots, then keep the camera moving along this wall.’
‘Got it,’ Meat said.
For the next ten minutes, Camel worked more cable through the pipe to push the camera deeper and deeper into the passage. The images on the left wall had become progressively disturbing. The swirls rose with each ‘frame’, and Hazo’s early guess that this portrayed rising flood waters proved correct, when later images showed bodies and animals being swept ‘downstream’ in elongated swirls.
Most disturbing, however, was how the story’s depiction of the woman progressed. Her devotees from frame one had obviously had a change of heart, because the final frames showed men binding her, then leading her away with spears to the mountains. The final frame depicted the woman’s gruesome beheading.
‘She must’ve gotten too lippy with them,’ Meat joked as he saved the image as a pix file.
Jason shook his head. ‘Not funny.’
At the end of the storyboard, the wall was covered top to bottom in wedge-shaped hashes laid out in neat rows. Jason asked Hazo to take a gander at what it might mean.
This time Hazo was quick to respond: ‘That looks like a very ancient alphabet. Maybe from Sumer.’
‘Sumer?’ Meat asked.
‘The southern region of ancient Iraq,’ Jason told him.
‘Yes,’ Hazo concurred. ‘Sumerian.’
‘So what is this place?’ Meat asked. ‘One of Saddam’s old bunkers? He liked all this ancient stuff, right? Thought he was the reincarnation of a Babylonian king or something …’
‘Correct,’ Hazo said. ‘King Nebuchadnezzar.’
Jason shook his head. ‘We’ve seen plenty of bunkers. Nothing like this.’ He rubbed his neck while glancing over at what remained of the optical cable. ‘Let’s push the camera in as far as we can. See if we can spot anything else.’
With the camera reoriented straight, the hewn passage walls abruptly transitioned to rough, uncut stone. Three metres deeper, the camera approached a split.
‘Which way?’ Meat asked Jason.
‘Left.’
‘Keep it moving … steady push,’ Meat called up to Camel. Working the joystick, he commanded the flex cable to bend along the turn.
‘How far in do you think we are right now?’ Jason asked.
Meat looked over at what little flex cable remained. ‘Eighteen, twenty metres maybe.’
The light stripped the shadows off the tunnel’s crenulated outcroppings.