In complete darkness, Threader unfurled just enough of the jib to ease the Penelope in toward the glowing spectacle of Kyropos. In my backpack I carried a hammer, a chisel, a waterproof bag, and a photograph of the scroll. We’d need the tools to deal with the plaster patch. The bag was for the scroll, essential against any possibility of the fragile artifact getting wet. We’d use the photograph for scroll verification.
I intended to avoid an encounter with the fanatics, but just in case, I stuffed Vito’s pistol under my belt. Niki had her knife and the flashlight. Father Jon carried a small wrecking bar and a pair of binoculars.
Niki and Father Jon climbed into the Zodiac. When I stepped in, I noticed that Father Jon was using the wrecking bar to poke at something in the water. “What is it?” I asked.
“I do not know,” said Father Jon. “It is something hard with little spikes poking out all over.”
Threader’s jaw dropped. “Father! Stop poking that damn thing! That’s a mine!”
“A what?”
“A mine! You’re gonna blow us to kingdom come!”
Father Jon recoiled as if he’d been bitten by a snake. He stumbled over Niki and plunged backward into the water. When he came up thrashing and gasping for air, the wrecking bar was gone. Niki and I lugged him back in the boat before he drew every shark in the region.
Threader, ignoring the choking monk, studied the mine. “Looks like World War II vintage. They’re still finding the odd one. Probably rusted from its tethering cable.” He tossed me the end of a rope. “Here, tie her on. I want to know where this baby is.” He secured the other end of the rope to the deck railing and then used a grappling hook to push the mine away from the Penelope. “There. That ought to keep you out of mischief.”
We paddled to shore and picked our way over ground spastic with tremors. From the cluster of boulders, we could see the torch-lit camp of the Children of Light. There was a puzzle. The fifty or so white-robed figures were lying like spokes in a wagon wheel around a large, flat stone. Father Jon studied the group through the binoculars.
“What are they doing?” Niki asked.
“I do not know. They are … they are lying facedown, their heads pointed toward the center rock … an altar, perhaps. They could be praying. I cannot tell for sure, but it … it looks like there is something on the altar. Vessels … many vessels … like the chalice for wine.”
I glanced toward the beach where four cabin-type cruisers lay anchored. “What about the boats? Anyone over there?”
“No movement. Nothing.”
“We’ll go in and have a look,” I said to Niki. “You gonna be a good girl and stay put?”
“Yes, daddy. Your little girl promises to stay put.” She wrinkled her bratty face. “Satisfied?”
It was the best I was going to get. I pulled the pistol from my belt, and the father and I started to our feet.
“Wait,” Niki said. With no warning, she grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me in for a long, hard kiss. “Stuart, promise me you will come back.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, recapturing my breath. “I’ve never been known to miss a free drink.” The tension between Niki and me was growing, and I wasn’t sure how to stop it, or even if I wanted to.
The father and I were a hundred yards from the camp, and still there was no movement from the fanatics. Strange. We eased in: fifty yards, twenty-five, close enough for me to toss a fist-sized rock a few feet from one of the figures. No response.
“Wait here,” I said, and I crawled to within a few yards of one of the prostrated figures, a man. He didn’t move—no sign of even a breath. I stood slowly, crouched, and trained the pistol on the middle of his back, not knowing exactly what I’d do if the man moved. I tapped his foot with my own. Nothing. I knelt again and felt the leg of the next person, a woman. Her flesh was cool, stiff. I stepped to the next body and pulled back the hood. It was another woman, probably in her twenties. I laid the backs of my fingers over her cold jugular. I was touching a corpse.
Father Jon, his face pale even in the glow of Kyropos, joined me. “They are … they are dead?”
“Looks that way.”
The father surveyed the bodies, stepped carefully to the altar, and lifted one of the chalices to his nose. “I do not know what this is. It is not wine. Poison perhaps.”
“Suicide?”
“It would appear to be so. I must have a prayer.”
“You do that, Father. I’m going to have a look around.”
I plucked a torch from the sand and trotted toward the wall of caves, the same caves, I suddenly realized, that I’d seen in my vision on the Rock. I stopped at the mouth of one of the caves. The ground heaved, and a flurry of stones peppered the area around the entrance. Going in was risky, too risky, but I had no choice. The shaking subsided. I stuffed my fear, ducked inside, and swept the eerie darkness with the torch and the pistol.
The cave was a large open chamber with a series of smaller rooms carved into the back. The rooms, all of them, had cots, neatly arranged in straight, barracks-like fashion. The fractured ceiling was a moving jigsaw puzzle ready to collapse. I scoured the walls, but there was no plaster patch.
A massive stockpile of arms filled the next cave: machine guns, pistols, shotguns, bazookas, ground-to-air missile launchers, wooden boxes filled with ammunition. There was enough firepower to equip a good-sized army, but there was no plaster patch.
Another cave, more weaponry. I started to leave, but something in the shadows caught my attention—a knee-high opening in the back wall.
With my heart about to pound through my chest, I pushed past my fear of being buried alive and squeezed through the hole. In another room, I stood and drew shallow breaths from the dead air, scared as hell.
I was staring at a room lined with rough wooden shelves, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of books. I laid the pistol on a shelf, planted the butt of the torch into the sandy floor, and lifted one of the leather-bound volumes. The musty smell of antiquity greeted me when I cracked it open. I couldn’t read Greek, but I knew I was looking at hand-copied lettering of that language, a calligraphic masterpiece. I wished Niki could have seen it. The brittle pages wanted to crumble in my fingers. I’d once done research on the lost library of Alexandria, mysteriously destroyed centuries before. Was I looking at a salvaged remnant of the half a million volumes, the crowning prize of that ancient intellectual world? Niki probably would have known.
There was no time to ponder the mystery. I spotted a second room and ducked in. Shelves filled with scrolls, thousands, lined the walls like neatly stacked firewood. Overwhelmed by the sheer number, I started to reach for one but stopped when a flicker of light suddenly danced through the entrance. I figured it was Father Jon, but I reached for the pistol anyway. I’d left it in the first room. I was relieved to see the father’s face appear through the opening, a torch in one hand, one of the old books in the other.
Father Jon held up the book, his eyes twinkling in the torchlight. “Did you see this?” He was breathless with excitement. “There must be hundr—” He suddenly noticed the hoard of scrolls. “Mother of God!” He moved toward one of the shelves like a witness to the Resurrection. With trembling hands, he laid down the book and lifted one of the scrolls. “Aramaic,” he announced just above a whisper. “Isaiah.” He turned a slow, gaping gaze on me. “We do not have Isaiah in Aramaic, only Hebrew … and Greek. The world, it … it has never seen this.”
Then, another shock wave rocked the room. The stone above our heads cracked with the earsplitting blast of cannon fire. The ground shook and threatened to knock us from our feet. A bed-sized chunk of ceiling moved directly above the father. I grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked just as the monster dropped, burying the entire rack of scrolls in an impenetrable grave.
Through choking dust, I could see Father Jon scramble over the heap, clawing violently, futilely, at the huge slab. The light of the remaining torch was enough for me to see that the walls had become a web of newly opened fractures.
“It’s no use,” I screamed above the horrific din. “This place is gonna go!”
The words had just left my mouth when the shaking resumed. I grabbed Father Jon’s arm and forced him back through the entrance.
That’s when I saw it—a mailbox-sized hole in the wall. Even through the thick dust, I could see that the outer rim of the hole still bore the remains of a plaster plug, cracked out, no doubt, in the last few minutes.
Enormous slabs of stone groaned and shifted overhead, dropping bushels of dirt and rock over everything. I scrambled for the hole and thrust my hand into the opening. I felt a soft, cylindrical package about two inches in diameter. I snatched it out. There was no time to put it in the backpack. I stuffed it inside my T-shirt and then dashed for the opening. Just then, something hit me in the back of the head with enough force to send me to my knees. Dazed, I crawled through the thick curtain of choking dust until I reached the entrance. I stood, but a blast of hot air slammed into my back and threw me facedown into the sand.
“Avalanche!” I heard Father Jon scream.
In the next instant, the father was tugging at my arm. Coaxing me to my feet, Father Jon led me like a stumbling invalid over corpses and stones to the fragile protection of a huge boulder near the water’s edge. We hunkered into the sand. The doomsdayer boats blazed at the shore, victims of the shower of flaming missiles that rained down in every direction. We were like insects cowering behind a tiny stone about to be buried alive in the horrific onslaught. There was nothing we could do but wait.
Then, the hideous roar subsided. I glanced around the boulder. I could see that the avalanche was spent, but it had swallowed the caves and the corpses.
Father Jon slumped against the boulder and stared blankly at the burning boats.
“God is with us this day,” he said. “But, to think that I had in my hands the book of Isaiah … in Aramaic … it is … it is almost more than I can bear.” With both palms, he tried to wipe the strain of remorse from his face. “I will go to my grave regretting that I put it back on the shelf.”
A stabbing pain erupted in the back of my head. I pulled the leather package from my shirt and handed it to Father Jon. “Maybe not all’s lost,” I said, leaning my head gingerly against the boulder. “I’ve got a feeling we got the brass ring.”
Father Jon studied the leather object; then, with the dexterity of a surgeon, he carefully untied the thong and he unrolled the wrapping that protected what appeared to be a parchment roll. Slowly, he unfurled a portion of the scroll.
I removed my backpack to get the photograph and the waterproof bag. When I handed the photo to Father Jon, I noticed something odd in one of the shoulder straps, a tiny bulge, as if a pebble had somehow gotten wedged between the two layers of fabric that formed the strap. At the top of the strap, on the inside, I noticed a patch of black fabric adhesive tape. When I peeled it back, I saw that the tape covered a small slit. I worked the lump out through the slit. The tiny object was no pebble, but a black capsule, an antitheft device installed, no doubt, by the retailer. It was an expensive backpack, but it was still odd, I thought, that they’d go to that much trouble to guard against shoplifters. I tossed the capsule.
“It … it is Linear A,” Father Jon announced in an almost breathless whisper.” It only took another moment for him to let out a gasp. “This is it! My God, we have the scroll!”
My sudden flush of joy was countered by the sight of blood oozing down the front of my shirt. The falling rock had opened a gash in the back of my throbbing head.
Then, the beach trembled, and I could hear a new wave of rock cascading down the cliffs.
“Get the scroll in the bag,” I said, struggling to my feet. “We’ve got to get out of here.” When I stood, a wave of blackness washed over my vision. I thought I was going to faint. Father Jon zipped the scroll in the waterproof bag; he started to hand it to me but stopped.
“You are bleeding,” he said, looking at the front of my shirt. “Give me the backpack. I will carry the scroll.”
“I’m all right,” I barked. I stuffed the scroll in the backpack and slipped it on. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
We ran over the undulating sand toward the rocks where Niki waited. When we reached the rocks, a blaze of blinding light blasted into my eyes. I threw up an arm to block the beam.
“Niki, turn that thing off.”
A man’s laugh, sinister, chilling, stopped me cold.
Gustavo Giacopetti.
J Douglas Bottorff 