P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“Help me find a round stone, Judith. Something about six inches in diameter. Then we need to move that altar slab.”

Ellerstein stood in the western palace gate and tried to get control of his breathing. After the first one hundred feet up the steep ramp, he had knocked the ashes out of his pipe. After the second hundred feet, he had taken a silent oath never to smoke again. He looked at his watch. Well past midnight. There was no sign of the colonel and his team. They were probably searching the ruins for signs of other humans up here. He turned right and walked into the casemate walls along the southwestern rim of the fortress. A big yellow moon was rising over Jordan, casting a sepulchral light through the shattered walls.

When he got to the southernmost tip of the mountain, at the opposite end from the terraced villas, he looked down on the hostelry and tourist center, nearly eight hundred feet below. Much of it was in shadow, but he did see something that got his attention: There were two vehicles down there, Land Rovers from the look of them. They were not parked in the tourist parking lot, but rather behind the hostelry. Neither of the army detachments, coming up the coast road, would have been able to see them. They did not appear to be regular army vehicles; there were no Star of David markings, but there were whip antennas on both of them.

He shivered in the suddenly cold air. Skuratov? If so, where was the Russian right now?

It took them a long time to rig everything, and by the end of it, the air in the cave was getting difficult to breathe. David sat down in the sand near the entrance and went over the plan again with Judith. He was still in his diving rig but using her air tank this time. He had pushed the long steel staging pipe partway into the entrance tunnel. Beside them stood the half of the cracked marble slab they had taken down from the altar. It was leaning against the cave wall, ready to be dropped in place.

“As soon as I go back out into the cistern, you drop this slab across the water here. Then pack the edges with every loose rock you can find. If you have to, stand on it if the water starts to come in.”

She had taken off her wet suit and was wearing just a bathing suit. He had the top of her wet suit wrapped up into a tight roll and tied to his side. That and a rock were going to block the outlet pipe. She nodded in the gloom; her headlamp was getting dim. “You know this thing is going to leak,” she said, looking down at the irregularly shaped air-water interface.

“Yes, it will, but I really don’t need too much pressure to lift that slab out there. Even two, three pounds per square inch ought to move it. Once it lifts, the pressure will release here.”

“Where will the water go then?”

“If I can wedge this pipe into the crack, it will flow out of the cave up above. Which is good — someone will have to see that once it’s daylight.”

“Not on the Sabbath, they won’t,” she said with a sigh. Her face was perspiring. The CO2 must be getting high in here, he thought. Time to get going.

“There’s some air left in my tank. Hit it from time to time. This shouldn’t take long. I’m going to swim out, leave the pipe in the tunnel here, go plug the outlet, then come back for the pipe and head up to the slab. When it moves, I’ll jam the pipe in as far as I can. Then I’ll come back for you.”

Confused, she shook her head. “We have only one tank,” she pointed out. “I can’t go up there.”

“We’ll wait here for an hour or so, let the water pump out into the cave up above and then out onto the side of the mountain. Then I’ll go release the plug. That should create a small air gap around the slab. We can buddy-breathe our way back up there.”

She sighed again, obviously unsure about all of this. He thought that he might be missing something, but his thinking was clouded by the bad air.

“Hang in there, Judith,” he said, squeezing her hand. “This has a good shot at working. Even if we have to wait twenty-four hours, someone will see that water trail and come look.”

“Not the people who dropped the slab in the first place,” she said.

“Always the optimist, hunh? Okay. Time to go.”

He fixed his mask and mouthpiece, turned on the tank, and slithered down into the purple water. She watched the trail of bubbles as he went and then switched off her light. The third light was still outside, at the tunnel entrance, so he’d have a reference to get back to her. She reached over in the darkness and found the remaining tank. David had said it would probably have fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of air left if she was careful.

She shook her head in the darkness. This was hopeless, in more ways than one. She didn’t believe the altar slab would keep the water out, and she’d have no way of communicating that problem to David. This cave would flood, and the treasures in it would eventually be consumed by the caustic salts in the water.

Those had to be Dov’s remains down there at the bottom of the main cistern, that distinctive suit and those white bone fragments. She was sure of it. There wasn’t another suit like that in all Israel. An image of Dov’s bones floated in front of her mind. She was doomed, and as she sat there, thinking about it, she didn’t much care.

The water pipes meant that someone, and it had to be the government, was using this big cistern for some purpose besides water storage. That strange Russian had been interested in what this American was doing down here. Interested and even concerned. Skuratov had ties to Dimona, which was only forty kilometers away — and if it was Skuratov who had trapped them in here, then it was probably Skuratov who had trapped Dov in here. She found herself wanting to get that outsized dagger from under the altar for one last meeting with Colonel Skuratov.

She sat there, aware that there was something she was supposed to be doing, but her brain wasn’t working very well. The air was becoming astringent, and each breath was fractionally less successful than the last. Then she remembered: the altar slab. She had to drop the altar slab over this tunnel and then weight it down. She turned on her light and took a deep breath and then another. She almost didn’t have the energy to get up, but she must: David was out there, trying like hell to get them both out.

She got up, approached the heavy marble slab, positioned it as best she could, and then tipped it over onto the air-water interface. It landed with a flat splash, its edges embedding in the wet sand. Then she began to gather rocks from the cave and put them in the cracks between the slab and the entrance tunnel walls. She packed them in with sand and then more rocks, working in slow motion as she tried to get her breath. She remembered about the tank and went over to it, picked up the breathing mouthpiece, and took some air. It revived her immediately, and she started working faster now, stuffing smaller rocks and more sand all around the slab, while watching for signs of water intrusion. He had said that at first there would be no leaks, but when the pressure rose, if it rose, she reminded herself, the water would show up at the edges.

Finally, she ran out of rocks. She eyed the huge menorah up on the altar structure, but they had decided it was much too heavy and at the same time too delicate to move. Same with the scroll cylinders. She was aching to open them but knew better. The Qumran scrolls had been the consistency of a piece of newspaper that keeps its shape in the fireplace after being used to start the fire. The merest breath could turn such a thing to dust. She looked around the cave one more time for anything else she could put on the slab. Her body was wet with perspiration, and she could smell the fear on her skin. She looked at her watch: two fifteen in the morning. Her depth gauge was still strapped to her wrist. It read thirty-two feet. She stepped onto the bed of rocks that covered the slab and sat down. She pulled the tank over and then switched off her headlamp. Now she could only wait. She put one hand out to the edge of the altar slab and burrowed it down into the sand. If it started getting wet, she would know she was in trouble. She laughed out loud — as if she were not in trouble right now?