P. Deutermann - The Last Man

David waited underneath the cistern slab, slowly treading water, the long staging pipe balanced at the midpoint under his left arm. With his right hand he held on to the iron ring on the underside of the slab. He kept his headlamp on, to watch two things: the slab itself and his depth gauge. If his theory was correct, a pressure increase in the cistern ought to register on his depth gauge. Behind him, floating next to his head, was a real prize: one of the two extra air tanks, which he had discovered bobbing along the ceiling near the outlet pipe. He had secured it to his harness with a small nylon strap and would take it back to the cave after he jammed the pipe.

He looked at the depth gauge. No change. It had read just above zero feet when he put his arm up against the big slab. He thought about Judith, waiting down in that increasingly airless cave. He felt bad enough about getting her involved in this mess, and the discovery of her husband’s remains at the bottom of the cistern had been a dreadful shock. Hell, who could blame her — the government had obviously lied through its teeth about what happened to Dr. Dov Ressner, physicist of Dimona. What really bothered him was trying to figure out why someone had trapped them in this cistern. Was it because whoever it was realized they might discover Dov’s remains? Or was it because of those two pipes coming into a two-thousand-year-old Masada cistern?

He thought he felt his ears squeeze just a tiny bit. He looked at the depth gauge. No change.

Wait — there was a change: not quite two feet. Definite movement. Good — the cistern system was being pressurized. It might take longer than he had planned on, because it was a really big cistern and a relatively small pipe. The big question was whether or not the pump over in that building would sense unusual back pressure and shut down. If it did, they were finished.

He blinked his eyes behind the mask and stared at the gauge. Now there was no doubt: The depth gauge had moved. He watched the big stone slab above his head, breathing as slowly as he could, conserving energy and air. He ran through the math again: Say the slab weighed five hundred pounds. If it was fourteen hundred square inches in area, at even just two pounds additional pressure, the water would be exerting twenty-eight hundred pounds of force on a five-hundred-pound slab. It ought to move. As long as some unknown opening in the Zealots’ cave didn’t fail and relieve the pressure. He refused to think about the treasure cave, the point most likely to do just that. He positioned the end of the staging pipe right up against the crack. Then he waited, and prayed.

Judith was drifting in a CO2-induced haze when she thought she felt something. She tried to focus. What was it? Something, that’s all. Don’t worry. Relax. Then her brain sparked: Was that a pressure in her ears? She straightened up and switched on her headlamp. It was definitely more yellow now than white. She looked at the depth gauge on her wrist. Had it moved? Not much, if at all. Then what? What had she felt?

Her bare left hand, submerged in the sand, was tingling. She tried to concentrate, but it was very difficult. What was different? The sand was different. It was wet sand. She jerked her hand out and shone the light down. Definitely wet. The sand was wet. All around the slab, the sand was wet. Really wet.

She stood up too quickly and nearly tipped over. She blinked her eyes and steadied herself. Then she remembered and stepped back onto the marble slab. Had to keep it wedged in position, long enough for the pressure out there in the main cistern to dislodge the upper slab.

She focused the light. No longer just wet sand. There was visible water now, oozing up around the edges of the slab. She cast the light around the cave, but there was nothing else to pile on the slab. Every loose rock, her scuba tank, her weight belt. She wished they could have moved the huge menorah, but that was impossible. It would take four men to move that thing. She was pretty sure it was nearly solid metal, possibly even gold. An amazing treasure, the find of all finds, and it was going to be drowned here in this cave.

She sobbed once in desperation, watching the water press past the edges of the slab, wetting the marble now. David’s plan was working — the cistern was pressurizing — but could she hold this thing? She hadn’t followed the math he used to compute the lifting force, but this piece of marble was about one-quarter the size of the big slab up there. Then she felt it: The slab actually moved, making a squelching sound all around its edges. A small wave of water shot out from three sides before the thing settled back. There was nothing more she could do to hold it, so she knelt down, trying to concentrate her weight. The marble trembled again, a small movement, but a lot more water squirted by the edges this time. She could not hold it. She began to weep as what felt like a soft, giant hand began to move the piece of marble.

David felt rather than saw the slab move above his head. One minute he had been pressing the pipe against the crack; the next moment it had jumped up at an angle and was now wedged in the crack. He shone his light at the point where they joined and saw that he had jammed up one corner of the slab. Swirling particles in the water were streaming up into the crack. He grabbed the iron ring, repositioned his arm, and tried to shove the pipe farther into the crack, but it didn’t move.

He relaxed for a moment, gathered all his strength, pulled hard on the ring as a fulcrum, and then put a steady push up on the pipe. After a minute, when he almost could no longer hold it, the slab shifted again, and this time the pipe slid several inches into the crack. He could feel the water rushing by his mask now, as the cistern relieved the pressure up into the bat cave above.

He relaxed his grip on the pipe and took a deep breath from the tank. A difficult deep breath, he realized. Dammit! The tank was quitting on him. He let go of the steel pipe and hung by one hand from the ring. He looked up at the pipe. He had managed to shove perhaps two feet of it through the crack. Then he realized that if the slab moved again, the pipe could slip out and plunge to the bottom of the cistern.

He got out his knife and slipped it, blade up, between his diving boot and the pant leg of his wet suit. Then he cut directly up, all the way to his thigh. The pant leg opened up but did not come off. He made a second cut, creating a strip of the rubbery material the length of his leg. He cut that off and then tied the pipe off to the iron ring as best he could. It wasn’t terrific, but better than nothing. He took another deep breath and then felt a pressure dip in his ears. Not too big, but definitely something.

The Zealots’ cave. That damned piece of marble had let go.

He consulted his compass, pointed west, switched off his headlamp, and then swam down hard toward the opposite wall, the extra air tank banging his hip. He saw the reference light when he was passing through twenty-five feet. He turned twenty degrees to the right and pushed down to the light and the cave entrance. He rolled over onto his back, switched on his light, and started in, but the extra tank snagged on something. He whipped out his knife and cut the tank loose from the harness, grabbed it with his other hand, and struggled backward into the tight tunnel. When he came to the end he hit his head on something: the slab. It wasn’t wedged anymore, though: It was loose in the interface, and he could feel water passing around it. He pulled the extra tank up and banged on the slab to get her attention, but nothing happened. Jesus Christ, had the cave flooded?