P. Deutermann - The Last Man

At that moment, she heard the noise of a vehicle laboring up the coast road. A truck or a van. The army. She remembered that the army conducted random night patrols all along the coast of the Dead Sea historical sites. Some of the soldiers had been complaining about the night treks when she chatted them up in the restaurant. She waited until she heard the engine slowing down as it came closer to the tourist center. Breathing a sigh of relief, she quickly got dressed and headed for the lobby to talk to the patrol leader.

Water? David rocked back on his heels. Water. The damn thing was full of water. Well, Einstein, you thought it might be a cistern, didn’t you? So congratulations: You were right. But how in the hell… He wondered how long that water had been there. Since the Roman times? It was possible — the Romans would have found the smaller cistern on top, and its source of water would have been perfectly clear. There would have been no reason for them to suspect the much larger cistern underneath. He suddenly had this terrible feeling that Herod’s builders had probably created the little cistern out of a grotto in the first place, never suspecting the presence of the bigger one underneath.

No, wait. Wrong. There was the slab.

So someone had found it, as evidenced by that ring. Which meant that Adrian’s theory about something being hidden down there might still hold water. So to speak, he thought with a small grin. Who — the Zealots? King Herod? If it had been the Zealots, the secret would have died with them. He grew even more excited: This had been her premise all along. He looked at his watch. He was out of time. There was no way in hell that he was going to find out tonight.

Change of plan. Big change of plan: He would have to leave here tomorrow, no, make that today. Go back to Tel Aviv. Right on schedule. Tell his minders that he was going to spend the second week in the country as advertised, on his diving expedition to Caesarea Maritima. All finished with mighty Masada, pardon me, Metsadá, thank you very much. And scuba diving he would go, but not, as advertised, just down to Caesarea Maritima. Oh, yes, he would go through the motions for a couple of days, in case there were still watchers. Then, somehow, he would get back down here, only this time with his diving gear. For the dive of his life.

Time now to cover his tracks here. Using the poles, he reset the stone slab, slipping it sideways back into its opening. Then he used the sign to move all that sand back, smoothing it as best he could. He looked at his watch: Time to boogie, he thought.

He mounded a pile of the guano-laced sand right next to the entrance to deter any casual explorers who might come along. He buried the building stones, the harness, and the climbing wire under the sand for future use, then thrust his backpack, the sign, and the two steel pipes out of the entrance hole. He swept his tracks with a broken bush as he backed out of the hole. He rested for a moment in the chilly air outside, bathed now in bright moonlight. There was no looking away from the spectacular panorama almost a thousand feet below, the Dead Sea glittering in the moonlight, and the mysterious hollow hills of Jordan on the other side. From his perch outside the entrance to the cave, he could not see the tourist center, nor did he want to poke his head around that outcropping of rock. Leaving the sign, he gathered up the poles and his pack and headed up the slope to the eastern gate. Once inside the fortress he replaced the poles and then went back for the sign, which he used again to smooth out the line of his footprints that diverged from the Serpent Path toward the cistern. He replaced the sign by the Byzantine ruins, shouldered the backpack, and then headed across the plateau toward the western gate.

An hour later he had reached the top of the western ravine and stopped to rest. It was now almost four. He thought he could afford about ten minutes here. The sides of the western ravine were brightly lit by the moon, leaving deep shadow along the bottom of the rocky gorge. Up here on the top, however, there was none of the cover he had enjoyed coming up. Every rock, stunted bush, and undulation in the gullies along the main ravine stood out in clear relief in the crystal-clear desert air. He sat on the back side of a sand dune that formed the intersection between the western and the southern ravines.

Coming up he had stayed in the bottom of the southern ravine in deep shadow. Now it didn’t really matter, because in this moonlight there was no cover. He just had to hope that he wouldn’t run into a patrol halfway down the ravine. He assumed the patrols would not walk down along the bottom. The military guys always favored high ground.

Like way up here, at the head of both ravines. He stopped breathing when he heard a small sound.

He turned his head slowly and found himself nearly surrounded by ten motionless figures wearing gray desert camouflage uniforms, their helmeted faces in shadow in the bright moonlight, but the glinting muzzles of their submachine guns astonishingly visible. One of the men lifted his night-vision visor up onto his forehead.

“American,” he ordered. “You come.”

“No problem,” David said in a weak voice, his heart sinking even as his hands were going up in the air. La Ressner was going to be seriously pissed.

David breakfasted in splendid isolation that morning while enduring uniformly hostile looks from the hostel staff. Apparently everyone knew, and after the angry confrontation with Judith in the parking lot an hour before dawn he did not expect her to join him for the familiar cup of coffee.

Once back in the parking lot, the army guys had actually seemed underwhelmed by the enormity of his crime. With Ressner standing mutely to one side, the sergeant appeared to be mostly irritated by the stupidity of some American tourist’s trekking around the Judaean hills in the middle of the night. If we had just collided we might have shot you, he had pointed out. We don’t ask questions out there in the night, you know? It was only luck that Dr. Ressner here had come down and told us you might be sneaking out at night, so in fact we went looking for you. What if you had fallen in one of the ravines, or been bitten by a snake? Who would have found you then? That’s what the rules are for, to keep you safe, eh? More along that line. Lots more.

David had been studiously contrite and extremely earnest in his assurances that he wouldn’t do it again. One of the soldiers had said something in Hebrew, and the sergeant asked him what was in the backpack. David had quickly opened the pack and shown them the bottle of water, the flashlight, and the jacket, assuring them again that he had only wanted to go up there at night, to see what it was like.

The sergeant appeared to be getting progressively bored with it all and kept looking at his watch as if they still had a long trek ahead of them, which would be in hot daylight now, thanks to this idiot. He made a production of lighting up a cigarette and chewed David out some more, but with diminishing enthusiasm, and then they had grouped up and headed back up the ravine, leaving him to the not-so-tender mercies of Judith Ressner.

They faced off in the empty parking lot. From the look on her face, David had decided very quickly that a proactive defense was probably the best defense.

“I trusted you,” she began, visibly controlling her temper.

“Now wait a minute,” he interrupted. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Stupid, maybe, but it’s not like I was up there digging for buried treasure or something. I just needed to go up there, at night, without the tourists. To imagine what it was like. To imagine the fire lights of the Roman camps all around the mountain. To wander among the ruins, seeing them as the palaces they once were. It’s beautiful. Sad but beautiful.”