The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (44 page)

And looked into the void of another dark and threatening shaft.

All three of them were now looking into the opening under the stairs, Annie’s flashlight illuminating the short shaft between them and the turn left. Tom didn’t want to give voice to his feelings, but Rizzo had now been gone almost thirty minutes, and unbidden images flashed into his mind.

“Maybe we should go in and take a look around?” Annie’s question sounded more like a plea.

Tom faced another critical decision. Should one go in, or should—

“We’re all going,” said Annie, bringing her beam back into the landing so Tom could see her face. “If only one of us goes and Sammy needs help, will one be enough to help him? And if you think the two of you are going, you’re not leaving me here alone.”

Tom read the resolve in his wife’s eyes and knew his decision was going to be a hard sell. “I’m sorry, but I think I go in and you and Joe stay here, just in case—”

The sound coming down the stairway from above them stopped Tom’s words in his throat. There was the clank of metal against metal. Bohannon looked up the stairs. He thought he saw faint light where once there was pitch black. Then the light moved.

“Inside, quick,” he whispered.

Dropping down to their knees, first Annie, then Joe, then Tom crawled into the opening under the stairs. Annie crawled through the opening on the left, and Joe followed, but stopped just inside the junction, twisted around, and stuck his head out as Tom crawled into the shaft. “Turn off—”

Rapid-fire gunshots erupted like a monstrous thunderstorm inside the tight, narrow stairway, ripping up the clay floor and sending ear-ringing echoes into the small shaft. Tom recoiled from the cacophony, his back pressed into the deepest part of the recess under the stairs, his flashlight at a cockeyed angle as its haft hit the floor.

They could hear voices now, hard-soled boots thudding on each stair, and Tom could feel Joe and Annie inching away from the recess, into the shaft that had swallowed Rizzo. But Tom’s eyes weren’t on his wife, or on the opening of the space under the stairs—the opening through which the hard-soled men with the guns would soon come. No, his eyes were above his head, where the beam of his flashlight illuminated the roof of the recess.

Above him, Tom could see the lowest step, where it and the steps above it had been pulled back into the recess when they released the latch. On the inside of the recessed steps, on the underside of the lowest step and the one above, Bohannon saw once again the small, square, brick-size section in the midst of the stair’s riser.

We’ll be trapped.

But we’ll be dead if I don’t. God help us.

Bohannon raised his left hand and, without hesitation, pushed hard against the square section. There was a loud
snap
and the stairs above his head dropped down and slid forward, falling into place with a thud from the weight and with a strange hissing sound that Bohannon surmised somehow sealed the movable stairs to the clay floor and the walls surrounding it.

“Tom!” cried Annie. “What did you do?”

It didn’t take Rizzo long to measure his options. He had pulled himself from the water, but he was cold and wet. Stay here and hypothermia would probably kill him before he starved to death. There was no going back the way he came. And jumping once more into the racing water rushing into the black hole on the other side of the ledge he occupied was an invitation to drowning. His body was beginning to shiver. The remaining life span of the lantern was a dread-filled unknown.

He looked into the beckoning darkness. His emotions and his mind were waging a titanic battle. Stay and die. Or go in that hole and risk a panic attack in the bowels of the earth.

Rizzo remembered something from his youth. A prayer his mother would whisper when their situation was most dire.
“Where there is faith, there is hope.”

With the prayer echoing in his mind and the underground river pounding behind him, Samuel Leonard Rizzo took a deep breath, gathered up his courage and the lantern, and nudged it in front of him as he pushed his head and shoulders into the shaft.

Annie Bohannon’s eyes pleaded with her husband.

“We weren’t getting out that way—not anymore. And if we left the stairs open, how long do you think we would have survived when whoever is above us came for a visit?”

There was no panic in Annie’s voice, only the flint of resolve. “We are not going to die in here. Tom, you will get me home.”

Like synchronized swimmers, his wife and Rodriguez both took deep breaths and pushed back their shoulders. “There’s only one way to go,” said Joe, looking over his shoulder and down the shaft. “Let’s move.”

“Okay, but we turn off one of the flashlights. From now on, unless it’s necessary, only one flashlight on at a time,” said Tom. “Joe, you go first … slowly. There’s a reason Sammy hasn’t come back.”

Joe twisted around in the tight shaft and squeezed past Annie. As Joe and the light inched along the tunnel ahead of them, Tom came up behind his wife and laid his hand on her shoulder. “‘May the Lord bless and keep you. May the Lord make his countenance shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.’” Tom brushed his fingers across her cheek. “We’ll be okay.”

Annie swallowed hard and nodded. On her hands and knees, she started following the fading light.

9:10 p.m., Babylon

Rizzo shut his eyes for a moment, tried to relax, and then pushed on. His progress was excruciatingly slow. First Rizzo pushed the lantern along the floor of the shaft, as far as his arms would allow, and then crawled after it, trying not to lean upon his scraped and bleeding knees any more than necessary. But the shaft itself, while generally smooth from the water that once ran through it, was an undulating snake, swishing left, then right. He could see differing grades of erosion on the walls, signs that water often moved through these tunnels at changeable depths. The floor lifted in twisted knots of clay, the roof sweeping down to create narrow passages Rizzo needed to squeeze through. Only a supreme assault of his will kept Rizzo from curling up in a fetal ball to escape the walls pressing in on every side and crying himself to death.
How long can I keep this up? Is it really worth the effort to push forward like this? Rizzman … who are you trying to kid? You need help.
Rizzo’s head dropped to his hands.
Are you up there?

Joe had scrambled only a few yards when he stopped. “The shaft opens up. It gets higher.” Tom could see the light in front of him moving, sweeping around what must be a larger chamber. “I think we can stand.”

Tom and Annie pushed through the opening into the expanded shaft and got to their feet. Standing erect felt glorious. Joe picked up the pace. It was frustrating for Tom, who couldn’t see anything but the dark backs of Joe and Annie. He kept straining to see if there was any other light in front of them, but it was nearly impossible. Then Joe stopped again.

“Aawww, man. You’re not going to believe this.”

Joe looked down at the fast-moving channel of water and wondered what could go wrong next.

“There’s a river up here. Fast. Looks deep. And it’s in our way.”

He turned and looked past Annie to his brother-in-law.

“Unless you’ve got a bridge stuffed into that backpack, we’re in trouble.”

It took a moment before Rizzo comprehended what he
wasn’t
seeing. The shaft came to an opening in the wall, but where he expected to see the shaft continuing off into the distance, there was nothing. The light crossed through the portal and was swallowed up by the dark beyond.

The shaft came to an end.

But where—

Rizzo edged forward slowly, aware of the surface under his hands and the darkness beyond the tunnel. He didn’t want to trade the one for the other. Strange, how he had been so frantic to escape this tunnel and now it afforded him a sense of security and protection against the dark void before him.

A steady breeze now moving his thick, dark hair, Rizzo came to the edge of the opening. He was afraid to look over the edge and find a precipitous drop, dooming him to entombment in this tunnel but, as he extended the lantern through the opening, he saw something he didn’t expect.

There wasn’t much of a drop on the other side of the opening—six to ten feet and the space opened up into an irregular chamber about twenty feet high and just as wide. Its surfaces were smooth grooves carved out by fast-moving channels of water from long ago. And on the far side of the chamber were two tunnels. Two.

Rizzo calculated the distances in his mind. Probably six feet to the floor of the chamber from the lip of the opening. Not wise to try to jump with the lantern in his hands. And he wasn’t going to leave the lantern here. He took off his belt, lay on his stomach, and dangled the belt over the edge. Too short. Looping the belt back into his pants, Rizzo looked at his boots.