Alex Lukeman - The Cup

The streets were empty except for an occasional, furtive figure. Occasional shots punctuated the night as one of Assad's snipers fired.

Haddad had encountered little difficulty crossing the government lines. Confident in their ultimate victory, Assad's men were getting careless. Now Haddad was on the street leading to the ruined Syriac church and the library hidden beneath it.

It hadn't taken more than a few hours to discover someone who could tell him where the library was located. His informant had resisted at first but then had been most cooperative. Haddad was a master at inflicting unbearable pain and it always worked. Before he died, the student he'd questioned told him the library was often empty at night. The shelling and bombing were greatest during the day. That was when the people who knew about it sought shelter. If his luck held, there would be no one there to interfere with the search for the cup.

The street had been heavily shelled. Not a single building was intact. In the dark it was difficult to determine which was the one he sought. The student had said there was a door in a side wall that opened onto a path leading through the rubble to a wooden trapdoor. The door concealed steps going down into a basement far below street level, safe from the bombs and shells. The library was as much a place of physical refuge as a place where the mind could find a moment of normalcy in the midst of so much insanity.

Haddad stumbled on a piece of masonry and saw part of the Syriac diamond cross carved into the stone. He had found what was left of the church.

The shell of the church was mostly intact. An alley ran between the church and a burned out apartment building next door. Haddad turned down the alley. A shell screamed overhead and exploded, sending bits of debris raining down on him. In the flare of light from the explosion, Haddad saw the door. He readied his AK and went through, picking his way along a path barely visible in the rubble.

The heavy wooden trap door was there, just as he'd been told. Haddad bent down, grabbed the edge and lifted it up. A faint light shone below, at the foot of a flight of stone steps.

Haddad started down the steps. As he neared bottom he heard voices.

They will help me look, he thought.

At the bottom was a large room. All four walls were lined from floor to ceiling with shelves filled with books salvaged from the ruins of the city. Anyone would recognize the room as a library. There were even couches and chairs, where one could sit and read at leisure. The room provided surreal contrast to the devastation above, an illusion of safety.

Two men stood talking. They hadn't heard him come in and had their backs to him. Haddad raised his AK.

"I'm looking for something," he said. "Perhaps you can help me find it."

The men turned around. Haddad saw they were young, students no more than twenty or twenty-one years old.

"You don't need your weapon here, brother," one of them said. "Here, we leave the war upstairs."

"I'm not your brother," Haddad said.

Haddad looked at the walls filled with books. There was no obvious door or place where something could be hidden. The floor was stone, covered with tattered rugs.

Where was the cup hidden?

"You." Haddad gestured with his rifle. "Begin pulling those rugs off the floor."

"I won't," one of the two students said. "You can't do that."

Haddad drove the butt of his rifle into the man's stomach. He doubled over in pain. Haddad stepped back and aimed the rifle at him.

"I won't ask again."

"Do as he says, Ibrihim," his companion said.

"But…"

"Just do it."

The second man began pushing furniture off a rug.

"A good decision," Haddad said. He turned to the Ibrihim, bent over and holding his stomach. "Help him. Now."

Haddad watched as they moved the furniture and took up the rugs. He followed them around the room, looking for the telltale lines of a crypt set into the floor.

He found nothing.

"Start pulling those books away from the walls."

Ibrihim opened his mouth to protest but one look at Haddad's expression and the way he held the AK silenced him. Books and shelves began to pile up along the walls. On the third wall, Haddad saw the arched outline of a passage bricked up centuries before. It had been hidden behind the shelves

"Take that floor lamp. Break down the wall where you see the arch."

Grumbling, the men picked up a floor lamp with a heavy base.

"You are thinking you can use the lamp to attack me," Haddad said. "Is it worth your life? Use the lamp like a battering ram. Break down the wall."

"Why are you doing this?" the second man said. "We're students. We are not part of this war."

Haddad pointed his rifle at the man.

"All right, all right."

"Don't provoke him, Jalal. Do as he says."

The men swung the heavy base of the lamp into the bricks. The ancient mortar cracked. Dust dribbled down the face of the wall. They swung the lamp again and then again. A few bricks tumbled out of the wall.

"Keep going," Haddad said.

After four more blows the bricked up opening crumbled, revealing a lightless passage behind. An ancient odor of dust and something unpleasant wafted into the room.

"We've done as you asked," Jalal said. "Let us go."

"All right," Haddad said.

He pulled the trigger. The burst took Ibrihim in the chest and knocked him back against the wall. He fell forward onto the floor. Haddad swung the muzzle and shot Jalal. He walked over and fired a single shot to the head of each man, then spat on the bodies.

"Shia dogs," he said.

A Hercules C-130 carrying Nick and the others approached Lebanon at 35,000 feet, the maximum height for a HAHO jump. They'd spent a half hour on pure oxygen to purge most of the nitrogen from their blood before climbing over 10,000 feet. The depths of the ocean were not the only place where humans could come down with a painful and fatal case of the bends.

Selena had made one military jump at high altitude, but a HAHO jump was a different ballgame. The jump over the Himalayas had been high up but the target hadn’t been that far below and she's been down in a matter of minutes. Even with her long history of sky diving and sport jumping, the Tibet mission had taught her that what she'd learned as a civilian paled in comparison to what the military went through on a mission.

As in Tibet, Selena had a fitted mask and plenty of oxygen. Jumping that high and then gliding for many miles meant long exposure to the cold outside the aircraft and increased danger of hypoxia. To combat the cold she wore a high altitude suit and heavy over gloves. Her chute was a high glide ratio variation designed specifically for HAHO jumps. There would be no freefalling on this mission. They would pop chutes as soon as they left the plane. Nick had warned her that the shock when it opened would be unlike anything she'd experienced before. Then they would begin a long, flat glide to the target in Darraya, more than fifty miles away.

Selena was nervous. A jump like this was right up at the top of special forces skills and a lot could go wrong. It was a long way from the life she'd led before the Project.

Unlike Tibet, their gear had been distributed to equalize weight. They would be a long time in the air. Heavy objects fell faster under a chute and she weighed less than Nick and the others. It was enough to alter her rate of descent and make it impossible to keep the team together. The result was that she was burdened with more than usual to make up for the weight differential.

The container with her gear rested at her feet, under the orange strap bench where she sat. In the air she would be a flying pack mule, but she wouldn't have to carry it all on the ground.