Paul Christopher - The Sword of the Templars

Wanounou looked at Holliday. “Well?”

Holliday shrugged. “Suits me.”

They went to the right, where the passage was wide enough to let them walk three abreast. They walked on for another hundred yards, and then the passage suddenly opened up again, the roof soaring above their heads. The sound of falling water thundered.

“Incredible,” breathed Peggy as the light from both men’s flashlights played over the way ahead. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

In front of them lay an immense underground lake. At its far end a waterfall gushed down fifty feet before striking the main pool. Except where the waterfall struck, the water was as black as pitch.

This time it was the Israeli archaeology professor who spoke the words.

“ ‘In the black waters of the Pilgrim’s Fortress a treasured silver scroll is found,’ ” he whispered. “This has to be it.”

“Where?” Peggy said. “All I see is a big reservoir of water. You think an arm is going to come up out of the water like the Lady of the Lake or something?”

“Maybe,” murmured Holliday, excitement slowly coming into his voice. He pointed the beam of his flashlight into the center of the pool. A small island had formed over a million years or so, limestone in solution dripping from the roof of the cavern to fall into the water, eventually, drop by drop, eon after eon, building up and creating a small solid hillock rising into the open air.

Now the island and the long, wax-like dripping from the ceiling seemed to be reaching out to each other. In another hundred thousand years perhaps they’d even join together to form a solid column of stone.

“What?” Peggy said. “All I see is one of those stalacthingumajiggies. What’s so special about that?”

“Stalag-thingumajiggy,” corrected Wanounou. “Stalac tites come down, stalagmites go up.”

“Whatever,” said Peggy, exasperated. “It’s cold, it’s creepy, and there’s no scroll, silver, or otherwise. Can we go home now?”

“Look at the base of the stalagmite,” instructed Holliday, holding the beam of the flashlight steady.

“That’s no natural formation,” said Wanounou. A right angle of stone seemed to be jutting out from the frozen ooze of dripstone, surrounding it like the corner of a cube.

“The base of a column?”

“An altar?”

“Maybe.”

“You think there might be something underneath it?” Peggy asked, suddenly understanding.

“Could be,” said Wanounou, staring out across the water.

“Well, let’s go and find out,” she urged.

“How do you propose doing that?” asked the professor.

Peggy shrugged. “Swim out with Doc’s rock hammer and whack the thing until it breaks. Like opening a piсata.”

“Hardly rates as good archaeological field technique,” responded Wanounou.

“To hell with that,” said Peggy. “Let’s do it.”

“I told you, I’m not much of a swimmer,” the professor said.

“It’s two hundred feet,” said Peggy. “A hamster could swim that far.”

“I can’t swim at all actually,” admitted Wanounou, coloring with embarrassment. “I never learned.”

“Doc?”

“It was your idea,” said Holliday. “I’m willing to come back later with a rubber raft and the right tools and do it properly.”

“And go down that stairway again?” Peggy scoffed. “No way,” she said. She toed off her sneakers and undid her jeans.

“What are you doing?” Wanounou said, startled.

“Going for a swim,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the pool. She wriggled out of the jeans, pulled the T-shirt over her head, and put out her hand. “The hammer,” she said to Holliday. He handed it to her, grinning, and she jammed it into the waistband of her panties. Wanounou looked at her as though she was insane.

“What?” Peggy frowned. “Do I need a bikini wax or something?”

The professor blushed furiously.

Peggy turned around and dipped the toes of one foot into the water. She winced.

“Cold.” She shivered.

“Come on, kiddo, if you can do the creek behind Uncle Henry’s in May you can do a cave in Israel during August.”

She gave him a nasty look, wrapped her arms around herself, and stepped tentatively out into the pool.

“Anything nasty likely to be in here with me?” Peggy called out, looking back at Wanounou and Holliday, her voice echoing loudly around the cathedral-sized cavern. “The bottom feels slimy.”

“Microbial mats,” said Wanounou. “A bit of ooze, that’s all. Nothing that bites.”

“No blind worm snakes?”

“No blind worm snakes.”

She was up to her waist now. She took a breath, held it, then ducked herself completely under the surface. She came up sputtering.

“Freezing!” she yelped. “And salty.”

She arched forward gracefully, slipping into the water fully, stroking across the surface of the pool with barely a ripple, doing a perfect, powerful Australian crawl.

“Astounding,” said Wanounou, clearly in awe. “Beautiful.”

“She was always the porpoise in the family,” said Holliday proudly, touched by the Israeli’s appreciation of her. “As far as I know this is a first for her.”

It took Peggy less than a minute to swim to the little stone island. Reaching it, she pulled herself out of the water, slicked the hair off her face in a quick gesture, then pulled the geologist’s hammer from the waistband of her panties. She turned back to the men waiting on the far shore.

“Anywhere in particular?” she called out, raising her voice over the steady noise from the waterfall.

“They’re a lot more fragile than they look,” Wanounou called back. “Just about anywhere should do it.”

Peggy turned back to the stone and raised the hammer.

“There goes a thousand years of work by Mother Nature,” muttered the professor under his breath.

Peggy brought the hammer down hard, the sound ringing like a church bell. Nothing seemed to happen. She raised the hammer and brought it down a second time.

“It’s cracking!” she called out, excited. She began pounding at the rocky extrusion, finally shattering it. “It’s some kind of statue, I think!” She pounded harder. On the shore Wanounou winced with every blow.

“A statue,” he whispered. “And she’s destroying it.”

Peggy kept on hammering. Suddenly she stopped.

“What is it?” Holliday called out.

Peggy started hammering again, more carefully and with less force.

“There’s something inside!” Peggy boomed.

“What is it?” Holliday called again. Peggy turned, put the hammer back into the waistband of her panties. She had something else tucked into the crook of her arm.

“What is it?” Wanounou asked Holliday.

“I can’t see. Some sort of jar, I think.”

Peggy slipped into the water again and began side-stroking back to shore. In another minute she was back again and climbing out of the water. Shivering and covered in goose bumps, she handed the object in her hand to Holliday. It appeared to be a plain alabaster jar about ten inches long, three in diameter, and sealed with some black, tarry substance at the upper end.

“I think the statue was of the Virgin Mary,” said Peggy, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering as she pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Made of clay. There were praying hands, I’m pretty sure.” She sat down on the stone and began tugging on her jeans again. “That was inside. Is it the scroll, do you think?”

“Someone went to a great deal of trouble to keep it hidden, that’s for sure,” said Holliday.

“Then let’s get it open,” said Peggy.

“Not here,” said Wanounou firmly. “We don’t have the right tools.”