Hell Ship (22 page)

“Up,” said
Alex, confidently. “Start with ‘spectacles.’”

Bones rolled his eyes.
“I’m not looking forward to what comes next.”

“We go up the stairs.
Maybe there’s another seal we need to activate. Then we go down, and repeat the process, completing the cross in the correct order.”

“It beats anything I’ve got,” said Dane.

Bones however raised a hand. “I don’t like this. You were right to call it ‘multiple choice.’ This is a test, and I have a feeling that a wrong answer will mean something a lot worse than a bad grade.”

“You think it’s a trick question?” Dane moved toward the ascending staircase and scanned it with his light.
The beam showed the steps and a confined arched tunnel, both evidently carved of out of the solid bedrock of the mountain, but then he noticed a scattering of dark spots on the walls and ceiling further up the passage. A check of the other passages showed similar deformations.

“
Bones, I think this is where your knowledge of fictional swashbuckling archaeologists just might come in handy. Those holes and slits in the walls are murder holes, a common feature of medieval architecture. The gateway to a city would have little windows, just big enough to shoot an arrow through or pour boiling oil on an invader. If I had to guess, I’d say that if we step in the wrong place, something nasty will pop out.” He paused. “Any idea how we can get past them?”

“Trial and error?” suggested Bones.
“Tap on the steps, try to avoid getting skewered.”

“Might work.”
Dane rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Okay, let’s think like the guys who built this place. They wanted to keep it secret and safe, but they also knew that someday, the guy with the key would come. All the information that we’ve used to get here came from the key—the medallion. It showed us where to look and it opened the front door. There must be something about the key that will help us out here.”

“Too bad we don’t have the original,” said
Alex. “You got the best look at it. Was there anything else? Writing or other symbols?”

Dane shook his head.
“No. Just a triangle, a cross, and if you want to get technical about it, a circle in the center of the cross.”

“Thr
ee sides to the triangle. Maybe every third step is safe?”

“I like it.
Three was a very important number to the Templars. There were three classes: Knights, sergeants and chaplains. Their coffers were secured with a three different locks, and the keys given to three different knights. They would fast three times a year, and were only permitted to eat meat three times a week.”

“How do you know all this crap, Maddock?”

“I’ve done a lot of reading about them over the years. And, of course, all the research we did before coming here. Anyway, the number three…”

“There were three tests in
Last Crusade
!” Bones exclaimed.

“
Right. And before going into battle, a Templar would make the Sign of the Cross three times! That’s something every Templar would know.” Dane took a deep breath. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to know for sure.”

He extended his left foot up to the third tread on the ascending stairwell and
slowly, gingerly, transferred his weight to it. Nothing happened. He stepped up three more. Still nothing.

“Look at him stretch,” Bones said. “Sucks to be short, doesn’t it?”

Dane grimaced. At a shade under six feet tall, he was hardly short, but compared to Bones… He gave his head a shake and refocused on the task at hand.

The murder holes were all around him
, but whatever deadly potential they held remained unrealized. He went up to step number nine, then twelve, his pace quickening both with urgency to be done with the deathtrap and confidence that they had unlocked yet another Templar secret. Then, on what would have been the seventy-second step—a number that corresponded to the number of clauses in the original Templar code of behavior, and was the product of eight and nine, which were also important numbers to the Templars—he reached another landing.

And another circular room with four passages.

The choices in
the second room were slightly different. Left and right were again options, but there was no option to go up again. They could go forward and down a new descending passage, or backtrack.

“This place is a maze,” observed Bones when he and
Alex completed their ascent.

Dane nodded his agreement.
“Another layer of security. Make a wrong turn and you’ll either get completely lost or more probably hit a literal dead end. So which way now?”

Alex
reiterated her belief that the Sign of the Cross held the solution to the maze. “Forward and down I think. If it is a maze, then going back isn’t a correct solution.”

“Rule of three still applies?”

She shrugged.

“Thanks for those words of inspiration.”
He counted down three treads and took a step.

This passage was exactly twice as long as the first and Dane could almost feel the weight of the mountain bearing down as he went deeper.
Three steps. Three more steps.

The descent was, as before, uneventful.
At the bottom, he flashed his light up the long straight shaft, signaling that he was done, and then inspected the chamber in which he now found himself.

Not counting the stairs he had just descended, there were only two ways out of this room: left or right.

Just like the Sign of the Cross.

“Spectacles,
testicles, wallet, watch,” he murmured, moving his hand through what he thought was the correct sequence. The mnemonic was a relic of a time when men wore pocket watches in their waistcoats and carried their wallets in the breast pocket of their jackets: watch on the right, wallet on the left.

He gravitated toward the left passage, but something was nagging at the back of his mind.

When Alex and Bones arrived, she confirmed that the next turn should be to the left, which prompted Dane to reveal his misgivings. “Are you sure? I keep thinking that going left first is wrong.”

Professor
would have been able to shed light on the subject, but Dane had picked up a few bits of trivia regarding the negative associations with left handedness.

In the military, a left-handed salute was considered an insult.
In the Bible, the right hand was always linked with divine favor, while the left sometimes indicated rejection by God. The Latin word for “left” was the root of the word “sinister.” In the Muslim world, the left hand was considered unclean. The term “left-hand path” was synonymous with black magic. So pervasive was the bias against lefties that in many places, children who were naturally left-handed were forcibly taught to use their right hand for most activities.

However, Dane had also heard that you could find your way through a maze by always turning left.
And there was no denying that south-paws were some of the best baseball pitchers on earth.

“It’s left,”
Alex persisted. “Trust me. I’m a good Catholic girl…well, a Catholic girl, anyway.”

“I dated a Russian chick once,” interjected Bones.
“We were watching this horror movie where somebody crossed himself, and she said that Catholics do it wrong. In the Orthodox Church, they go right-to-left.”

“And you’re just remembering this now?”

Bones spread his hands guiltily.

“It doesn’t matter,” said
Alex irritably. “The Templars were part of the Roman church. So regardless of who’s
right
, the Templars would have crossed themselves Catholic-style.”

Her insistence did not assuage his anxiety; rather, he was even more certain that he was forgetting something ve
ry important. Nevertheless, Alex was correct about the Templars and Catholicism. He moved to the left passage and shone his light down its length.

The
entire passage appeared to be completely smooth. There were no murder holes pock-marking the walls and ceiling and nothing at all to break up the plane of the floor. If there was a trigger or a trap here, Dane could not see it.

“
Just so you know,” he began, “I’m about to stake my life on you being right about going left, Catholic girl.”

Suddenly,
Alex didn’t look quite so confident about her decision, which didn’t make him feel any better, but there was only one way to know for sure. He ventured into the passage, taking one careful step after another, poised to duck or throw himself to the side or beat a hasty retreat at the first click, crunch, bump or thump.

With no steps to count, he instead counted the number of paces, measuring the length of the passage by the length of his stride.
When he’d gone about twenty meters, he saw a blank wall directly ahead and shadows to either side; a T-intersection.

He stopped.
Something about that choice didn’t feel right. Before, there had been a circular room, like a Templar chapel, but not this time. Was this a warning that he’d gone the wrong way, or simply an indication that the number of choices was shrinking?

He started forward again, slowly, not counting his steps until he was almost at the junction.
He saw that these new passages were considerably smaller than the ones they had traveled through to get here, barely knee-high from the floor.

He stopped again, shining his light into the one on the right, and saw that this first impression was wrong; the passages weren’t smaller, but rather were just lower.
If he crawled through the opening, he would drop down three or four feet to the floor where he would be able to stand erect.

“This is wrong,” he muttered.

He recalled Bones advice to trust his gut. SEALs were trained to always put the mission first, but they were also taught to listen to their instincts. It was an unwritten rule that any member of a team could call off a mission if they had a really bad feeling about it; they might have to answer some hard questions later, but in the moment, those feelings were to be heeded.

“That’s it. Calling it.” He turned around and started back to where Bones and
Alex were waiting.

That was when the floor dropped out from beneath him.

The unexpected movement caused him to fall flat—or rather almost flat. The entire length of the passage was now slanted down at about a thirty degree angle, away from the entrance and toward the T-intersection.

Suddenly a tremendous boom seemed t
o resonate through the entire mountain. He caught a glimpse of motion and heard a grinding sound growing louder; something was moving down the slope toward him. He raised his flashlight and saw a block of stone, easily the size of a mini-van and almost completely filling the passage, sliding his way.

He scrambled to his feet and instinctively drew back from the relentless rock.
If he didn’t get out of its way, it would pulverize him against the end of the passage. But which passage should he take?

In his peripheral vision he saw that both of the intersecting p
assages were now more or less level with where he was standing. He wouldn’t even need to crawl to get through the openings and escape being crushed, but he would have to make a decision.

Quickly.

Left or right? Either outcome was uncertain, but certainly better than staying where he was.

Don’t think, just go.

Trust your gut
!

He did.

John Lee Ray, flanked
by Scalpel and the rest of his inner circle, disembarked the funicular at Schwandegg Station and made their way down the stairs to the base of the elevated structure. Rooster’s last call had placed him at the northernmost corner of the building, where he claimed Maddock had found an entrance to a secret passage.

Ray had initiated movement even before Rooster had finished his first report.
He had immediately recalled his men to their hotel, and within ten minutes, they were racing down the motorway in two rented cars. In the time it took for them to make the short road trip to Mulenen and the lower terminus of the Niesenbahn, Maddock and his crew had moved halfway up the mountain and found the entrance to the Templar vault.

Scalpel had been livid at the news of Maddock’s survival.
“I should have put a bullet in his skull.”

“I’d say it’s a good thing you didn’t.
He’s shown us the way.”

“
But he’s going to beat us to the treasure.”

Ray smiled patiently.
“In this race, the prize doesn’t go to the man who crosses the finish line first, but to the man who’s still breathing at the end of the day.”

“Maddock won’t be.
I promise you that.”

But as
Scalpel grunted a little with each painful step down the stairs, Ray wondered if maybe he should have left the man behind. His thirst for vengeance had certainly imbued him with the will to overcome his disability, but was it enough? Would Scalpel’s handicap betray him at a critical moment, putting the entire endeavor in jeopardy?