Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

Gabriel jumped to his feet, but Karoly stepped forward with his gun aimed squarely between Gabriel’s eyes. “Just give me a reason,” he growled.

DeGroet stood over Sheba where she lay sprawled, her breath knocked out of her, her hair a wet heap against the stone. He put the tip of his walking stick against her throat. “Don’t do that again. Next time it’ll be my sword you’ll feel. Get up.”

Sheba climbed unsteadily to her feet. Karoly grabbed her arm roughly and pulled her to him.

“Where were we,” DeGroet said. “Ah, yes. You were counting to three?”

Gabriel looked from DeGroet to Karoly and then to Sheba. Her eyes shone apologetically. “Don’t,” he told her. “It’s all right.” He resumed his position on the ground, steadied his feet against the stone.

“One,” he said. “Two…” He looked over at Istvan, who nodded. “Three—”

He pushed with all the strength in his legs, and beside him he saw Istvan doing the same. Judging by the size of the man’s legs, he had no shortage of strength in them. The block moved—but only infinitesimally. “Again,” Gabriel said, and counted. It moved a bit more this time, sliding inward by a few inches. “One more. Kick this time.”

They both brought their knees to their chest and, when Gabriel called “Three,” kicked out, their soles landing sharply against the stone. The block slid in by half a foot or more—and then, after teetering for a second, fell inwards. There was silence for several seconds, then a large, reverberating thud that sounded like it had come from a long way below them.

Gabriel rolled over and approached the opening. Istvan was right behind him, gun in hand once more. Gabriel took his Zippo from his pocket, lit it. Inside, a corridor led along the length of the paw and deep into the rock behind it—but first there was a gaping pit, beginning an inch from the opening, and it was into this pit that the stone block had fallen. If they’d managed to pull the block out rather than push it, whoever had been the first to step into the opening would have fallen similarly.

“I need more light,” Gabriel said. He picked up the flashlight Sheba had been carrying from where it had fallen when she’d taken her spill. Shining it at the corridor’s ceiling, Gabriel saw a series of crossbeams stretching from wall to wall as well as columns supporting the ceiling. It looked almost like a tunnel in a mine, propped up to ensure stability.

The first of the crossbeams was directly above the pit.

Gabriel walked up to Karoly. “I need something from that bag. You can get it for me or you can let me get it myself—your choice.”

“What is it?”

“A coil of rope.”

“Get him the rope,” Karoly said to Sheba. “Nothing else. I see anything else come out of that bag, you’re a dead woman.”

“Understood,” Sheba said. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a hank of nylon rope.

Gabriel carried it back to the opening. It took three tries to get the end of the rope over the crossbeam and then much fishing with the middle portion of the rope to snag the far end and pull it far enough back across the pit for him to grab it. When he did, he tied a quick six-loop hangman’s knot and drew the rope tight around the beam, like a noose. He tested it with a few strong tugs. The beam held.

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Who goes first?”

They all looked at each other. Gabriel pictured DeGroet running scenarios in his head along the lines of the old missionaries-and-cannibals puzzle: If he sent Gabriel first, Gabriel could keep the rope on the far side and escape along the corridor, if he were willing to sacrifice Sheba, and DeGroet couldn’t be certain he wouldn’t; on the other hand, if DeGroet sent one of his men across first, he’d no longer have the advantage in terms of numbers back on this side of the pit…

“Ladies first,” DeGroet said, and he pulled Sheba toward the opening. She took hold of the rope, wrapped it several times around one fist, then grabbed it with her other hand as well. She gave Gabriel a concerned look, then lifted her feet and swung across. She staggered a bit when she landed and for a moment Gabriel thought she might slip backwards—but she steadied herself and remained upright. When she’d regained her balance, she threw the end of the rope back. Karoly caught it and, after pocketing his gun, followed her across.

Next came Gabriel. He tossed the flashlight across to Sheba, who shone the beam downward so it wouldn’t get in his eyes. Gabriel gripped the rope firmly and pushed off. He noticed as he swung that the crossbeam didn’t seem quite as stable as it had when he’d first tested it. But he made it safely across. When he landed, Karoly made a point of showing him that he had his gun out again and his finger tight against the trigger. “I see it,” Gabriel said. “You don’t have to wave it around.”

“Just as long as you don’t get any bright ideas,” Karoly said.

“If I were the type to get bright ideas,” Gabriel said, “I wouldn’t be here, would I?” He swung the rope back across the pit.

DeGroet caught it, handed his walking stick to Istvan, moved his grip around a bit till he got comfortable with it, and then swung across, the light hanging from his hip brushing a reflected arc against the stone wall. When he had landed, he had Istvan throw the walking stick to him. He snatched it one-handed out of the air.

Then he sent the rope back. Istvan took hold of it and walked up to the edge. He tugged on the rope a couple of times, wrapped it around one hand as Sheba had, held on with the other hand, and launched himself across.

When he’d made it halfway, the crossbeam snapped.

He vanished in a split second, plummeting into the pit. He screamed all the way down.

It took him as long to hit bottom as it had taken the stone block to fall. The sound of his impact, when it came, was quieter. That made it no less painful to hear.

“Unfortunate,” DeGroet said, after a moment. He aimed his stick down the corridor. “Now get moving.”

Chapter 25

Karoly had taken the flashlight back from Sheba and was shining it between them, lighting the path a few feet ahead. They were walking two abreast, Gabriel and Sheba in front, DeGroet and Karoly in the rear, the clicks of the old man’s stick against the stone floor punctuating their progress as they went.

The main corridor ended at an archway that led into a circular chamber, though there were other, smaller archways branching off to the left and right as well. Prodded by Karoly’s gun in his back, Gabriel walked forward.

The room was large enough that it took them some time to explore it all. There was no map on any of the walls, Gabriel noted, and no sculptures, of sphinxes or otherwise. What they did find was cages, their bars extending all the way from the rough-hewn floor to a ceiling some fourteen or fifteen feet overhead. In each there were metal shackles attached to the walls by heavy chains, the circular bands lying open and empty on the ground. Some cages had just one pair, some had two. One had three. And the walls were covered with the intricate swoops and whorls of the Sinhala alphabet, the faded ink showing dimly in the yellow beams of the flashlights.

“Please do us the kindness of translating this…this scribbling,” DeGroet said to Sheba.

“I’m no expert—” Sheba began

“Come now,” DeGroet said. “We both know that an expert is precisely what you are. I seem to recall seeing a paper of yours on Sri Lankan vowel variants in the Journal of Phonetics, and though I didn’t understand two words of it, I trust the peer reviewers wouldn’t have accepted it if its author had been illiterate in the languages it purported to analyze. Now—what does that say?” And he swung his stick to point at a passage inscribed beside the largest of the cages.