Clive Cussler - The Kingdom

Standing side by side, Sam and Remi peered into the opening, which rose away from them at a forty-five-degree angle for twenty feet before rounding over a jagged bump in the floor.

“Sam, do you see what-”

“I think I do.”

Jutting over the ridge in the floor was what appeared to be the sole of a boot.

CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL

The lack of treads on the boot’s sole told Sam and Remi they weren’t looking at a modern piece of footwear, and the skeletal toe poking through a rotted patch in the boot told them the owner had long since departed the earthly plane.

“Is it strange that this sort of thing doesn’t shock me anymore?” Remi said, staring at the foot.

“We’ve stumbled across our fair share of skeletons,” Sam agreed. Such surprises were part and parcel of their avocation. “See any trip wires?”

“No.”

“Let’s take a look around.”

Sam braced his legs against one wall, his back against the other, and let Remi use his arm to pull herself up. He made his way up the slope and over the hump in the floor. After panning his headlamp around the space, he called, “All clear. You’re going to want to see this, Remi.”

She was beside him in an instant. Kneeling together, they examined the skeleton.

Protected from the elements and predators, and entombed in the relative dryness of the cave, the remains had partially mummified. The clothes, which appeared to be made mostly of laminated and layered leather, remained largely intact.

“I don’t see any obvious signs of trauma,” Remi said.

“How old?”

“Just speculating . . . at least four hundred years.”

“In the same range as the spear.”

“Right.”

“This looks like a uniform,” said Sam, touching a sleeve.

“Then that makes more sense,” replied Remi, pointing. Jutting from what had once been a belt sheath was the hilt of a dagger. She panned her headlamp around the space, then murmured, “Home sweet home.”

“Home, perhaps,” Sam replied, “but sweet? . . . I suppose everything’s relative.”

A few paces from the flat area on which the skeleton lay, the tunnel widened into an alcove of roughly a hundred square feet. In several hand-carved niches in the rock walls were the stubs of crude candles. At the base of one wall, nestled in a natural hollow, were the remains of a fire; beside it, a pile of small animal bones. At the far end of the alcove were the remains of what looked like a bedroll, and, beside it, a sheathed sword, half a dozen crudely honed spears, a compound bow, and a quiver containing eight arrows. A scattering of miscellaneous items occupied the remainder of the floor: a pail, a coil of half-rotted rope, a leather pack, a round wood-and-leather shield, a wooden chest . . .

Remi stood up and began walking around the space.

“He was definitely expecting unfriendly company,” Sam observed. “This has all the signs of a last stand. But to what end?”

“Maybe it has something to do with this,” Remi said, and knelt down beside the wooden chest. Sam walked over. About the size of a small ottoman, the chest was a perfect cube made of a dark, heavily lacquered hardwood, with leather carrying straps on three sides and double shoulder straps on the fourth. Sam and Remi could find no hinges, no locking mechanisms. The seams were so well formed, they were nearly invisible. Engraved into the top of the chest were four intricate Asian characters in a two-by-two grid pattern.

“Do you recognize the language?” Sam asked.

“No.”

“This is remarkable,” Sam said. “Even with modern woodworking tools it takes incredible skill to create something like this.”

He rapped on the side with his knuckles and got a solid thud in return. “Doesn’t sound hollow.” Gently he rocked the chest from side to side. From within came a faint rattling sound. “But it is. Fairly light too. I don’t see any other markings? You?”

Remi leaned down and from side to side, examining it. She shook her head. “Bottom?” Sam tipped it. Remi checked, then said, “Nothing there, either.”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build this,” said Sam, “and it looks like our friend here was prepared to give his life to protect it.”

“It may be more than that,” Remi added. “Unless we’ve stumbled onto the mother of all coincidences, I think we may have found what Lewis King was looking for.”

“If so, how did he miss this? He was so close.”

“If he didn’t make it across the pit,” Remi replied, “could he have survived?”

“Only one person knows the answer to that.”

They turned their attention to documenting the contents of the cave. Not knowing how soon they would return, and unable to take with them but a fraction of the artifacts, they would have to rely on digital photographs, drawings, and notes. Luckily, Remi’s background and training made her well equipped to do just this. After two hours of painstaking work, she proclaimed the job done.

“Wait,” Remi said, then knelt beside the shield.

Sam joined her. “What is it?”

“These scratches . . . the light caught them. I think . . .” She leaned over, took a deep breath, and blew on the shield’s leather surface. An accumulation of rotted leather dust scattered.

“Not a scratch,” Sam observed, and blew clear some more dust, then again and again until the shield’s surface was exposed.

As Remi had suspected, the scratches were in fact an etching burned into the leather itself.

“Is that a dragon?” Remi asked.

“Or a dinosaur. Probably his crest or that of his unit,” Sam guessed.

Remi took a couple dozen shots of the etching, and they stood up. “That’ll do it,” she said. “What about the chest?”

“We have to take it. My gut tells me it was why our friend had barricaded himself in here. Whatever’s inside was something he thought worth dying for.”

“I agree.”

It took only a few minutes for Sam to jury-rig a web of straps that allowed him to piggyback the chest on his own pack. They took a last look around the cave, nodded a good-bye to the skeleton, and departed.

In the lead, Sam crawled up to the lip of the pit and peeked over. “Now, that’s a problem.”

“Care to be more specific?” Remi said.

“The rope’s given way at the other end. It’s dangling into the pit.”

“Can you rig a-”

“Not with any confidence. We’re above the other opening. At this angle, if I try to cinch the slipknot into place, it’ll just slide off. There’d be no way to take up the slack.”

“That leaves only one option, then.”

Sam nodded. “Down.”

It took but a minute for Sam to secure himself to the line. As he did, Remi set up a second belay point by hammering a piton into a crack just below the opening. Once it was set, Sam began a slow rappel, walking himself over and around the jutting stalagmites, while Remi kept watch from above, occasionally telling him to pause and adjust position to minimize the rope chafing on the protrusions.

After two minutes of careful work, he stopped. “I’ve reached the other cam. Good news: the cam tore free.”

If the rope had parted, they would have had to splice their remaining line onto the loose end. Now he had sixty feet of line beneath him. Whether that would be enough to reach the bottom was still an unknown. If what awaited them was the icy cold water of the Bagmati River, they would have fifteen minutes at most to find a way out before succumbing to hypothermia.

“I’ll take that as a good omen,” replied Remi.

Foot by foot, careful step by careful step, Sam kept descending, his headlamp receding into a small rectangle of light.