Book of Stolen Tales (46 page)

“You and Woody Allen,” Shaheen laughed. “All right, my friend. Let's get moving. Down the rabbit hole.” He squeezed through first on his stomach because he had a thinner build than the rest of us. The older guy stayed on top with Ali; Ben came with us.

I almost called a stop to the whole thing then and there. We were damaging an important historic location and I felt extremely guilty. My brother would have been scathing about our hacking into a sacred site. Despite knowing this, I felt compelled to continue. We'd come so far, after all.

We had no idea what to expect or whether the tunnel would close in ahead. Shaheen turned his light on as I shimmied after him. His head and upper body wriggled comically as he propelled himself along, wormlike. I could hear Ben crawling along behind me. He moved more slowly because he was carrying a length of cable.

At this point the tunnel was barely a foot higher than our supine bodies although wide enough to give us a decent amount of room. Bowels of the earth would be a good description of the environment we pushed ourselves through; it reminded me of the tunnels in ant colonies. My greatest fear was the whole thing collapsing in on us.

Soon we arrived at a square opening framed in stone. Shaheen got through easily. My bigger shoulders and chest made it a harder go for me. Ben, brawnier still, almost got stuck. The tunnel here hadn't widened any but it was higher and changed from natural earth to manmade mud brick. I flashed my light on the surface. It seemed to have been smoothed out somehow, as if it had been planed or sanded. “I think we're in a culvert of some kind,” I said. “These bricks have been smoothed by water flow.”

Several times we passed large cavities in the sides of the tunnel. Shaheen flashed his light into them. Beyond a few feet the gaps appeared dead-ended. We made slow progress for more than half an hour before Shaheen suddenly quit moving.

We heard his voice through the communication system. “There's a void ahead,” he told us. “Hold on.” A few minutes later he asked Ben to run a length of cable over to him and told both of us to grip it. There were no projections in the walls of the tunnel to tie it to and we feared the stone wall would split if we hammered a spike into it.

Shaheen grasped the rope. I saw him sit up and direct his light down. The cable tugged hard as he slipped off the edge. When it went slack I shifted my body sideways and carefully inched over. The mud bricks dropped offsharply. I trained the light down.

He grinned up at me from a space about thirty feet deep. I tossed my light down to him and rolled onto my stomach, easing myself over the edge. Ben grunted as he braced himself, trying to cope on his own with my weight.

The room had clearly been constructed by human hands. The chamber floor and walls were surfaced with compact rows of baked brick, glazed to create a polished effect. A mosaic of a Babylonian griffin in red, white, black, and blue had been affixed to the back wall. Cut into the fourth wall, a sizable opening acted as an entrance to a flight of stairs. Rubble sealed the lower part of the stairs. We both stared at what lay on top of the rubble. Heaps of human bones.

“Would this have been a tomb?” Shaheen asked.

“Likely part of a building of some kind, not a tomb per se,” I said. “These mounds were built on repeatedly over thousands of years. When new structures were erected over old ones and they themselves disintegrated, rubble hid what lay underneath. But someone has cleared this out. Loretti and Hill wouldn't have had the time or equipment to do it so it was probably looters from long ago.”

“Well, this ends our own expedition.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Keep your light trained on the stair for a minute longer so I can see better.”

“Maybe—are you serious? We'd need a couple of centuries to
remove
all that debris.”

I examined the entranceway in detail, especially the joins where the brick face met the floor. “Do you notice anything?” I asked.

“Pretty straightforward, isn't it?”

“We're looking at a clever deception.” I passed my hand along the wall. “Anyone who dropped into this room would be drawn immediately to this fourth wall. It may look like a gateway but I think it's a trap.”

“You start down the steps and you're cut in half by swinging scythes or spikes coming out of the walls? Come on.”

“Nothing that dramatic. They've told us, actually. It's called ‘the land of no return, without exit.' If this really is a gateway, where are the doors?”

“What would they be made of?”

“Wood—cedar, most likely.”

“And you expect that to last six thousand years?”

“Nebuchadnezzar built Nergal's temple in the mid-500s
B.C
. And, yes, wood lasts that long. Not necessarily intact. There should at least be remnants and these bones are the only organic material here. And another thing.” I clicked on my light and trained it on the other walls. “Without cable how do you think we'd have made it back? Those walls are polished smooth; there are no hand- or footholds.”

Shaheen gave the walls a measured glance. “You're right.”

“Even standing on your shoulders with my arms fully extended I wouldn't be able to reach the rim of the tunnel. People in those days were a lot shorter. Once they'd discovered these stairs led nowhere, they'd be caught in here, temporarily at least. The bones prove it.”

I redirected my light to a perfectly round hole positioned close to the ceiling. It resembled a kind of drain, but if that was its purpose, it was in a very strange position. No water from rain or natural seepage from the water table could be drained away from that location. Rather, the water would pour into this chamber. It wasn't a drain at all but a conduit. Did it extend all the way to the ancient canal? I looked at the bones again. They weren't scattered helter-skelter around the stair. I could see them bunched up in a pile against the barrier of rubble.
As if after drowning, bodies had been pushed against the rubble by the force of water
.

“Here's what I think. People, early grave robbers or whatever, got trapped in here, unable to get out quickly because of the difficulty of climbing back up those walls. Then, someone activated a triggering mechanism and water poured in to drown them. Even if they floated to the top, the rising water would have inundated the entire tunnel and that would have been too far for them to get out without oxygen. This chamber is a blind, a false route.”

“That means we truly
have
reached a dead end.”

“Maybe not. Let's go back into the tunnel.”

We hitched up the rope and made our way back up the tunnel until we reached one of the cavities we'd noticed before. It proved to be only a hollow space created when a fissure caved in. The second opening we came across was different, an empty space extending inward at least six feet before it appeared to bend. When I ventured into it and shone the light around the bend, another flight of steps appeared.

I had a chance at that point to tell the other two it held nothing of interest. The foreboding I'd felt hadn't left me since we climbed into the tunnel, and here it was greatly magnified. Deep in my bones I knew we were not meant to see what lay ahead. At the same time, the pull to go on was almost irresistible. I made up my mind to tell Shaheen I could see nothing here, that this route too was blocked. But it was too late. He appeared at my shoulder and shone his light on the stairs.

“You've found another entrance,” he said. “Let's get in there.”

I knew he'd go in without me anyway so I hoisted myself into the gap and swung my legs down to touch the top of the stairs, which ended at another gate, this one with doors.
Doors
was a misnomer. Although bronze hinges held some of the organic material in place, the doors were barely more than deteriorated strips of wood with a prominent gap torn through the middle. Niches in the walls surrounding the gate held fired-clay cones.

“The Mesopotamian version of a lantern. These would have been filled with oil and set alight,” I said to Shaheen as he squeezed through the gap.

Some of the wood splinters from the ruined door fell away in a puff of dry wood dust, releasing a faint scent of cedar. “Another set of stairs here,” he said. A minute or so later he exclaimed, “What do you know!”

When I reached him, the cause of his excitement was plain. At his feet were a couple of discarded plastic water bottles and energy bar wrappers.

Shaheen pointed to them. “Army issue. Loretti and Hill were here. No question.” Ben, who'd come up from behind, voiced his agreement.

A cloud of black flies hovered around me as we descended the stairway. They seemed to have materialized out of thin air and hung persistently near my head even though I waved my hand around to bat them away. I suddenly felt overcome with apprehension, much more acutely this time. Aboveground I could dismiss the underworld gods as relics of a primitive age. Quaint emblems of the past. In this dim warren the powerful mythic realities felt overwhelming. We'd broken into territory that ancient people held sacred and also greatly feared. Who was I to ignore their wisdom? The warnings about what lay ahead swung back to me with an alarming ferocity.

The thrill of discovery had left me. I felt gripped by sober second thought and instinctively recoiled at the thought of going any farther. We had no business being here. I knew that from the moment we started digging. Too late for misgivings. Shaheen had already crossed the threshold of the first gate and had a mission to find the source of the stone weight. He had the instincts and tenacity of a pit bull and backing off wasn't in his vocabulary. Whatever lay ahead, I wouldn't abandon him.

Forty-Eight

I
t was a considerable surprise, then, when Shaheen instructed us to wait. The three of us crouched together, poised at the top of the flight of stairs. If we were going in, despite my apprehension, I wanted to get it over with. The suits were hot and uncomfortable; the helmets made it tough to breathe. My throat ached. I couldn't understand Shaheen's reluctance.

“Why are we stopping?”

“Waiting for reinforcements,” he replied. “This is the real thing and I don't think three of us is enough. John, why don't you get ahead of me? Your knowledge of these old sites is much better than mine.”

We changed positions. In hindsight, perhaps I let false pride obscure what should have been obvious. Even when I heard the rustle of someone making his way toward us, I didn't suspect a thing. There had been signs, though, and I'd been oblivious to them. Shaheen had spoken into the intercom system right after we left the false chamber and I couldn't figure out why I didn't hear what he said. He must have had a second line of communication, closed off to me.

Another sign. Shaheen's reluctance to go the official route, not using military personnel to stand guard while we explored the site. And who were Ali, Ben, and the other contractor, really? I had only Shaheen's word for it that they were on America's side. Shaheen's insistence on taking me to Iraq when he could have called on any number of archaeological experts for this expedition was another red flag. Now I knew why.

A man made his way toward us and edged through the opening. He was suited and booted like us. When he lifted his head my body went rigid with shock. Mancini.

Shaheen had his pistol out, aimed at me. His voice sounded harsh through the intercom. “I'm a good shot even from much farther away. And
my
bullets will work.”

“You bastard,” I raged. “You're a total scum. A fucking traitor. Shoot that thing off in here you'll just bury us all.”

His tinny laugh sailed through the speaker. I couldn't hear Mancini but saw his sly smile through the Plexiglas plate of his helmet.

“They're hollow points. They'll cut up your insides so bad it will look like someone put them in a blender. They won't leave your body, so no impact on the surrounding walls. Don't put it to the test. Get going. You're our front man in case there're problems ahead.”

“Forget it. I'm not moving.”

He tightened his fingers around the grip. “You've got about ten seconds.”

He calculated I'd be too unnerved by the sight of his gun to try anything so I took him by surprise when I bashed him in the chest with my jacklight. I tried to knock his gun aside with my right arm, but I was up against all his military training. He deflected the blow and jammed the gun barrel into my neck. “You get one stupid move, not two. Move it.”

The only hope I had was time. If I slowed down and stayed alert as we descended the stairs, there was a minuscule chance some opportunity would present itself, another cavity perhaps, or a new branch I could run into. I clammed up and moved at a snail's pace toward the first entrance.

This flight of stairs differed dramatically from the one above. It had the same polished brick on the floor and roof as in the false chamber but the walls were plastered, probably over a similar type of brick. Most of the frescoes here were intact, startling and stunningly well executed—frightening hybrids, chimeras the Greeks had called them. Vulture-headed lions with claws extended; fish bodies with human heads and feet; thick, coiled snakes. They were intended as warnings. Altogether too late for me.