The Oracle Code (28 page)

51

The Gates of Hades

Elis

Peloponnese Peninsula

Hellenic Republic (Greece)

February 23, 2013

Fitrat and his men brought their weapons to bear at the same moment Lourds’s light lifted the young boy’s features out of the darkness.

“Stop! Don’t shoot! He’s just a boy!” Lourds spoke in Dari, hoping that language would better serve him. “Captain, he’s just a boy!”

Fitrat told his men to hold their fire. Then he sent four of his men out of the well to secure the perimeter. He turned to Lourds. “I must apologize. Letting someone sneak up on us is very unprofessional.”

“Not a problem, Captain. I think we were all under the spell of this passageway. Under the circumstances—and especially in light of the fact that we’re all still alive—I think we can forgive ourselves.” Lourds approached the boy, who had not run even as the soldiers brandished their weapons and rushed by him.

The boy looked at him, wide-eyed with fear and breathing rapidly. “You must not go in there. It is forbidden.” He spoke in Greek.

“Forbidden by whom?”

The boy shook his head. “You must not go in there.”

“My name is Thomas Lourds. Who are you?”

On closer inspection, Lourds estimated the boy’s age at twelve or thirteen. He was slight and skinny, with black hair that hung in ringlets and eyes like coal.

“My name is Haros. I am the son of Haros, who was the son of Haros before him.”

“Thomas.” Marias spoke softly in English. “You do know what name Haros derives from, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Lourds was fascinated. “Charon. The ferryman.”

According to mythology, Charon was the boatman who carried the newly dead across the River Styx to the Underworld. He was always depicted as a bearded old man in dirty clothing. Sometimes he was shown as a living skeleton, a lot like the Grim Reaper.

“What are you doing here, Haros?”

“I came to stop you.” The boy looked past Lourds and into the yawning mouth of the passageway. “I cannot allow you to enter that place.”

“Is there anyone with you?”

The boy looked nervous. “You may not enter the cave. Only the dead may enter the cave.”

Fitrat, unaware of the conversation because he didn’t speak Greek, turned to Lourds. “No one else is out there. Apparently the boy is alone.”

Lourds nodded. He spoke to the boy. “We mean no harm. We came here to explore this cave.”

“Only the dead may pass.”

“What do you know of this place?”

Haros looked fearful. “This is where the dead go. Where Hades calls them home to the Underworld.”

“Have you been inside this cave?”

“No.” The boy looked past Lourds and into the darkness.

“Then how do you know where it goes?”

“I was told by my father.”

“Where is he?”

Haros nodded to the passageway. “In there.”

“Your father went into the cave?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t enter the cave unless—” Realizing what the boy was saying, Lourds stopped himself.

“My father died last year. But not before he passed on his knowledge to me.”

“Knowledge of what?”

“The cave and what lies beyond.”

“How did your father know?”

“His father told him.” The wind caught the boy’s cloak and pulled it out around him for a moment. He looked ethereal, especially when the lightning flared behind him.

The rain fell heavier now, and small rivulets had formed to run down into the well.

Corporal Rahimi stepped back down into the well and talked quickly with Fitrat. The captain turned to Lourds. “There are other people out there. Soldiers. Rahimi thinks they are Russians.”

Fear slithered down Lourds’s back. Here they were at the yawning gates of death itself, and their enemy had caught up with them. One of Fitrat’s men standing guard at the well’s edge suddenly fell backwards into the well at Lourds’s feet.

Instinctively, Lourds pulled the flashlight beam onto the fallen man. The first thing he noticed was the bullet hole between the man’s wide eyes. Then the sound of the gunshot whipped over them, followed by a cascade of them.

***

Linko knew from the way the Afghan soldiers acted that one of his men had been seen. At first, he was angry, ready to kill the man who had made such a mistake. Then he realized that he could accept it as fate and move in to take his quarry.

Surprise was still his, and they had nowhere they could go. His team had ringed them on all sides. And the cave was obviously the objective they had been searching for.

He took aim at one of the men beside the well, centered the sights over the man’s head, and took up trigger slack because he wanted first blood. When the rifle bucked against his shoulder, he gave a final warning to his men.

“Do not kill Professor Lourds.”

Then muzzle flashes sparked in the night around the well.

***

“Get down! Get down!” Fitrat raced up the steps and took up a position at the well’s side, taking advantage of the low wall as he brought up his pistol. He held his fire, though, and he cursed soundly.

Other Afghan soldiers took up positions as well and fired back at targets somewhere in the night.

Lourds sprang up the steps, caught Haros by the robe, and yanked the boy down into the well. He covered Haros with his own body and felt the boy trembling against him.

“See? You have invoked the wrath of Hades!” He hid his face in his hands.

“That isn’t Hades. That’s a group of Russians who have been after the tomb of Alexander the Great.”

“Stop firing! Stop firing! You are wasting bullets!” Fitrat shouted above the din. “The range is too great!”

The soldiers stopped firing and hunkered down. Already, two others had joined the first man on the ground. Both of them were dead as well.

Lourds looked at the dead men and knew that they would not be lying there so far from home if he had not brought them here. But he also knew that this was no time for recriminations if they were going to get out of the situation alive.

Fitrat knelt beside the three men, checking for pulses that were not there.

“Captain.”

Fitrat looked up at him.

“Can we get out of here?”

The captain shook his head. “They have us surrounded.”

“Then we have no choice. We have to go into the cave.”

Fitrat looked at the cave. “Knowing where it is supposed to lead?”

Lourds shook his head. “It doesn’t go there. That’s just a story. The worst part will be if it only goes back for a few feet and we still end up trapped, but even then, it’ll at least force the Russians to come at us through a chokepoint. And if we have any kind of luck, that passageway will open up somewhere else and we can get out of here.”

Fitrat nodded and started stripping the dead men of usable gear. “Rahimi. Help me.”

Leaving the boy against the wall, Lourds went to one of the bodies as well and took the man’s extra ammunition, equipment bag, and picked up the pistol from the ground.

In seconds, they were ready to go, and only a few bullets chopped into the well around them. So far, their attackers hadn’t gotten close enough to shoot down into the well.

Lourds gave the boy one of the spare flashlights and took his empty hand in his. “Come on.”

When the boy saw where he was headed, he balked. “No. You cannot go there.”

“We can’t stay out here, either.” Taking a final look around inside the cave before he ventured forth, Lourds threw a leg over the threshold and stepped inside.

***

Until he heard the gunfire, Dmitry didn’t know if they were getting closer to Lourds or not. He kept his men in a tight group and only advanced as quickly as his scout could confirm an area clear. The process was time-consuming, but it couldn’t be helped. Getting spotted by Linko and his men, then getting subsequently ambushed, would do no one any good.

Dmitry hadn’t come all this way to die. He still had grandchildren to help raise. And a promise he meant to keep.

When he heard the gunfire, though, he knew he could no longer hold back. In fact, it might already be too late to save the professor. He hoped this was not so because he rather liked Professor Lourds.

He cued his radio. “Okay, move in.” Then he pushed himself into a steady jog that he could maintain for miles even with the equipment pack he carried.

He ran through the sparse forest, heading for the location of the shots.

52

The Underworld

Elis

Peloponnese Peninsula

Hellenic Republic (Greece)

February 23, 2013

The sporadic gunfire echoed loudly in the narrow passageway. Lourds ran quickly and nearly fell when he reached a flight of stone steps carved into a steep grade. He slowed down and caught himself, barely managing to keep his balance. He shone his flashlight ahead of him.

The passageway went on for a long ways. At least there hadn’t been that sudden ending he’d feared.

“Keep going.” Fitrat waved him forward. “I’ve left two men to slow them down, but with limited ammo, they won’t be able to hold them off forever. We need to find another way out.”

Lourds pressed on, following the tunnel as it continued heading down at a sharp angle. Haros ran at Lourds’s side, evidently feeling more comfortable with him than with anyone else.

“What do you know about this tunnel?”

“It leads to Hades, as I said.”

“Why do you know about this place?”

“Because my father taught me after my grandfather died. It has always been so in my family.”

“Why?” Lourds ducked under a section of the roof. “Low ceiling!” he called in Dari for the men behind him.

“Because my family was chosen to be the priests of Hades. The duty has been handed down from generation, from one to another, since the temple was built. There has only been one priest allowed at any time.”

Lourds remembered that from the stories he’d researched. “That was thousands of years ago.”

“I know.”

“Have you ever seen the well open?”

“No. The way has been blocked since before my father’s father twenty-six times back.”

Lourds did the math and figured out that no one had been inside the cave system in at least five hundred years. “Do you believe this passageway leads to Hades?”

Haros hesitated, then shrugged. “I do not know. Sometimes, I think. It is a cool story.”

“Ever tell your friends?”

“No. It is forbidden. If my father had found out I did something like that—” Haros fell silent. “I don’t know what would have happened.” Then a look of pain crossed his face. “I did tell one person. My best friend. I told him, and he laughed at me, and the next day, my father died in a boating accident. I never told anyone again. When I saw you here tonight, I knew I had to stop you. I swore to prevent anyone from coming here. I have failed at that.”

“We didn’t have a choice, Haros.”

“And if you had? Would you have turned away when I asked?”

Lourds didn’t want to answer the question.

The passageway suddenly forked in a small cavern.

Lourds hesitated, playing his flashlight over both branches. “Do you know which way to go?”

“No.” Haros looked scared. “We do not want to go much farther.”

“Why?”

“Because my father told me there is the Place of Dreams and that I should beware of it.”

“What Place of Dreams?”

“It is a cavern somewhere in here, a place where the Oracle came and dreamed her dreams after the Romans tore down her temple.”

“The Oracle came here?”

“Yes. She had no choice but to go into hiding. So she came here.”

Fitrat stood impatiently behind Lourds. “Professor.”

Lourds chose the branch on the right and charged through. “Why did the Oracle come here?”

“Many people remember the Oracle, Pythia, as a representative of Apollo, but that was not the truth of the matter.”

Marias trailed after the boy. “That is true, Thomas. In the beginning, the office of the Oracle was held by the goddesses Themis and Phoebe, and the cave where she prophesized was sacred to Gaia herself.”

Haros nodded. “As my father told me. When the Romans tore down the Oracle’s home, Hades honored a request from Gaia and built her a new home here.”

That made sense to Lourds. After the Oracle was routed from her home, prophesies continued for a time. She had to be operating from somewhere. And Elis had been a major trade port at the time. There would have been ample opportunity for several people to speak to the Oracle.

“You said no one was allowed past the wall. How did the people speak to the Oracle?”

“She went out to meet them in the harbor. She had a building where she did her business every seventh day. One day, the last Oracle died, and she went beyond the wall.” Haros pursed his lips. “Somewhere within this passageway, before you reach the River Styx, is the Oracle’s Place of Dreams where she came to find answers to questions she had been asked.”

***

Linko halted at the cave that held the branching tunnels. A single grenade had gotten them past the chokepoint at the tunnel’s entrance. He’d feared it might bring down the wall and close off the cave, but he’d had no choice. Now, he shone his flashlight around, looking for any kind of mark Lourds or the others might have left. He didn’t want to go stumbling around in the dark and end up getting lost. Losing Lourds now would be unacceptable.

“Gedenidze. Bring the thermal imager, quickly.”

The FSB agent trotted up and snapped on the thermal imager he had mounted on his rifle. After a few seconds of directing it at the two openings ahead of them, he nodded. “I have them. To the right. They are staying massed together.”

Linko peered over the man’s shoulder and saw the pool of red that indicated human temperatures. Against the cold backdrop of the cave, getting a reading was child’s play.

“All right. Do not lose them.” Linko trotted forward once more and kept listening. Although the heat signatures of the group could be seen, he didn’t know how far ahead they were.

He kept going into the darkness.

***

Six more times, Lourds was presented with choices on which tunnel to take. He hoped that his decisions weren’t going to lead them back around in a circle, or into the path of the Russians pursuing them, but he didn’t want to end up lost, either. The tunnel and cave system had turned out to be a lot larger than he’d imagined.

“My god. Thomas.” Marias caught Lourds by the shoulder and brought him to a halt.

“What?”

“Up there.”

Lourds added his flashlight beam to Marias’s and spotted a set of curving steps that let up to a cave opening above them. In the darkness, concentrating on the light ahead of him, Lourds had missed the steps.

The opening was at least sixty feet above them.

But beside the opening, mounted on the wall, lay two beautiful, golden serpents curled around a staff.

“That is a caduceus. Hermes carried one.”

“I know.” Lourds’s mind was flying. “Apollo was reputed to have wound the body of Pythia around a staff, which he later gave to Hermes as a peace offering. But he killed the snake to provide a home for the Oracle.”

“And Hermes was also a psychopomp, a deliverer of the dead to Hades. He moved between the conscious and unconscious minds.” Marias didn’t take his gaze away. “We cannot leave this unexplored.”

Lourds was torn. “It could be a dead end. We could be boxing ourselves in.”

Fitrat looked at the cave. “It’s defensible. And we all missed it in the dark. Maybe the Russians will too. We could run for a lot longer and maybe never find a place as good as this.”

“All right.” Lourds headed up the steps with Haros at his side. There was barely room for both of them. The steps were broad, but they were steep as well. Worn indentations on the surface showed the path had been traveled many times. He couldn’t help wondering who had come this way and what had brought them.

When he reached the top, what he saw took his breath away. The opening led to a cave at least fifty yards across. A stone dais occupied the center of the room, but that wasn’t what most caught his attention. His flashlight beam picked up the mosaics on the walls, all of them made from gemstones or pieces of colored glass. The flashlight sparked from ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst, and a myriad other colors.

All of the mosaics were of women dressed in virgin white. In some, the women knelt at the foot of a beautiful man who glowed with the radiance of the sun. In others, they held court over dozens of men who were obviously enthralled by them.

Dazed, Lourds entered the room and moved from image to image. One of them showed armed Roman soldiers closing in on a woman in white. In the sky, a dark figure with a menacing helm and driving a chariot with four black horses flew toward her. In the next, several Roman soldiers lay withered and dying on the ground. The woman in white had joined the dark figure in the chariot.

“Do you see this?” Marias flicked his beam over the mosaics.

“Yes.” Lourds couldn’t help but feast his eyes on the artwork, on the sheer history that lay before them. Even though the stories couldn’t possibly be true, the artwork was a study in artifacts. But he was also grimly aware that Haros was at his side, and the boy was terrified.

“We should not be here. We should not be here.” Haros spoke in a thin, quiet voice.

Boris, I wish you had lived long enough to see where your trail led. You deserve the recognition for this.

Fitrat ordered three of his men to take up positions in the cave at the opening, but he sent Corporal Rahimi to the opening at the back to explore their options. The remaining soldiers moved quickly and efficiently.

“It is another tunnel.” Rahimi shone his flashlight into the darkness. “I cannot see how much farther it goes.”

“Then at least we have a way out of this place if things go badly. If we get lucky, the Russians will pass us by and we can double back and be gone before they know it.”

Lourds paid little attention to Fitrat and the soldiers, as he and Marias began exploring the cave.

“Thomas, over here.”

Lourds joined Marias at the back wall. As he got closer, he spotted the compartments carved into the stone. Inside the compartments were scrolls. His heart leaped for joy, and a new adrenaline rush swept over him.

“Look at this.” Marias tapped the end of the wooden roller of the scroll he held. The engraved image of a lion was unmistakable. “I saw this and it caught my eye. Do you remember the story of Philip II, the father of Alexander, and how he had the dream of sealing up his wife’s womb with a lion seal on it?”

Lourds shook his head. “No. On this one, you’re ahead of me. And I think I’d remember something like that.”

Marias grinned. “Shortly after Philip married Olympias, his fourth wife—the man had several—he had a dream. In the dream, he saw himself sealing his wife’s womb with the seal of a lion.”

“Not your everyday dream, that’s for sure.”

“There were a couple of different interpretations offered for the dream. One was that Olympias was already pregnant by the time of the marriage.”

“Explains the need for a wedding.”

“And the other is that Alexander was actually the son of Zeus, and Olympias was claiming demi-godhood for her son.”

“A popular claim back in the day.”

“Agreed. Anyway, I picked up this scroll because it had the lion on it and I thought immediately of Alexander. As it turns out, that was more prophetic than I had believed.”

“Well, this is the room of the Oracle. It’s a place for prophesies.”

Marias opened the scroll. “Look. This is the story of Alexander’s death. It says here that the scroll will tell the tale of how Alexander’s tomb was brought from the world and taken to the Underworld for Hades to reclaim the weapons and armor. The Oracle ordered men to find the tomb and bring it here.” He grinned at Lourds. “If it is down here, we will find it.”

“If we get out of this alive.”

Fitrat turned to them and spoke in hushed tones. “I hear them coming. Shut off your lights.”