The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (43 page)

Tom held the flashlight above him, scanning the walls.

“It doesn’t go anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” asked Joe. “It’s got to go somewhere.”

Tom swept the floor with his yellow beam, looking for any crack, anything that looked different. “There’s no way out. The stairs stop; there is a short, flat floor. And then nothing.”

Rodriguez edged into the tight space, Rizzo and Annie remaining on the steps. The walls were uneven, scraped or dug out of the clay, the ceiling arched. But even in the apex of the arch, both Rodriguez and Bohannon were stooped over at the shoulders.

“No one’s going to build stairs down to here and not have a way out,” said Joe. “Look for something that’s not obvious.”

Rizzo, on the final step before the landing, turned his shoulders sideways. “Great. Look for something you don’t see.”

Tom swept his light around toward Rizzo, and stopped. “Sammy, you are right again. Look under your feet.”

Rizzo bent at his waist and looked between his legs. “What am I looking for?”

“Come down off the steps and turn around,” said Bohannon. He angled his flashlight to illuminate the ground at Rizzo’s feet. “Look at the face of the last step.”

Rizzo turned to face the steps.

“There’s something different about that step … see the section in the middle.” Unlike the other steps, which were solid, the bottom step appeared to be in three sections—two larger sections on each side and a smaller section, like the end of a brick, in the middle. “Joe, move back,” said Bohannon. “Annie, come down off the steps. Let’s all stand on the floor.”

The four of them squeezed into the small space.

“Annie, can you push against that section in the middle?”

Bracing herself with her hands out to the side walls, Annie placed the sole of her right boot against the three-inch-square space in the middle of the stair. The hard clay face of the section gave way and was pushed farther under the stair as Annie pressed harder with the front of her boot. They heard a soft, sliding sound as the lower seven steps slid back under the other steps and opened up a passageway.

“Man, I knew this was going to be fun,” said Rizzo. He edged past Annie and moved toward the opening. “First disappearing steps and now secret passageways. Jeremiah was a cool dude.”

The opening was about five feet high. Tom couldn’t tell how deep. He was maneuvering to get on his knees so he could crawl into the opening.

“Hold on, big guy. This is one adventure that has Rizz-Man written all over it. That space is just my size. Let me go check it out, and I’ll come back and report to you,
mon capitaine.
Annie, dig that lantern out of my pack, will ya?”

Bohannon didn’t like relinquishing responsibility, especially where there could be unknown dangers, but Rizzo was right. The space was just his size. He could walk in standing up and have a lot easier time checking out what was under the steps.

“Okay, but be careful. Take a look around, see what’s up ahead. But don’t go too far.”

Rizzo took the lantern, edged past Annie, and turned his head at the entrance to the opening. “Yes, Dad. And I’ll have the car home before dark. Don’t worry. I know how to avoid trouble.”

“Sure, Sammy,” said Joe, “just like the time you—”

“Gotta go.
Hasta la vista.
”

Rizzo quick-stepped through the opening. Almost immediately, all Tom could see was Rizzo’s shadow being illuminated by the light from the lantern. But it wasn’t long before Rizzo and the light turned left. For a few minutes there was a receding glow. Then darkness. And silence. Tom started counting the seconds in his mind.

Rodriguez was trying to find a position that was less excruciating for the aches in his back. “Stop worrying, Tom, he’ll be all right. He’s made it through more than most. Besides this gives us a chance to rest, and maybe we should pray for him and for us.”

Bohannon kept his eyes on where the shaft turned left. It remained dark. “Sure—good idea. But still, I hope he’s all right.”

Turning left, away from the steps, Rizzo held the lantern in front of him, illuminating the shaft. It was similar to the one he had just left—rough walls cut into the hard clay of the Euphrates plain, its roof vaulted just above his head. Despite the number of years these tunnels must have been in existence, they were in remarkably good repair. There were few cracks or gaps in the floor or walls, and the roof appeared to be as solid as the day it was first cut from the clay.

As he walked along the shaft, Rizzo was trying to gauge distance in his mind. His plan was to keep going until something changed, until he had something concrete to report to the others about what was ahead.

He heard the sound—a rolling gurgle—before he saw the source. The tunnel swerved a bit to the right and, as he came around the bend, the light from the lantern glinted off something in the distance, something moving along the floor.

“Yo, baby!” Rizzo snapped, stopping in his tracks and taking a quick step back.
What is that?
His heart was thumping like the drummer for Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band as he tried to decide whether it was more dangerous to stand his ground or run with headlong abandon back down the shaft. A seismic shiver registered a Richter response along his spine, as he shook from the tips of his toes to the end of his nose.

Rizzo squinted behind his Coke-bottle lenses and held the lantern higher. Something out there was moving. And it was moving along the floor. And it looked big.

Scenes of Jon Voight getting squeezed like a peach in
Anaconda
kept flooding Rizzo’s mind, a never-ending loop of reptilian rage, Hollywood-style.

“Yo, who are you?” Rizzo shouted, hoping to scare off, and not attract, whatever it was that was undulating over the floor of the shaft. “Go home and squeeze a grape!”

Nothing happened. The shape kept moving, as if it were on a conveyor belt passing perpendicular to the shaft, and continued to emit that throaty gurgling that sounded to Rizzo as if the unknown beast were swallowing its dinner. Or the appetizer to its dinner.

Rizzo was about to beat a tactical retreat—
no sense getting swallowed by some slithering slime
—when the light went on in his brain, and he felt like a doofus.

He lifted the lantern again and began pacing purposefully toward the moving mass that glinted in the distance—an underground river that no longer looked like Smaug, the Terrible.

The river wasn’t as wide as he first thought. As it raced past the openings of the shaft, the water sloshed up into each side of the tunnel making it look wider than it was. But it looked very deep, moving fast, coming out of a well-worn hole in the wall on the left side of the tunnel and rushing into an almost identical hole on the other. Rizzo approached carefully, wondering why the river didn’t just veer off into the shaft he occupied, while he looked for slick spots on the clay floor. As the floor got wetter, Rizzo’s footing got more precarious, so he stopped and leaned against the side wall, holding out the lantern to better see whether this fast-moving river was passable.

He held the lantern aloft and could just see the outlines on the other side. This was one of those times when his small size was a disadvantage. He flexed up to stand on his toes and stretched out his arm.

8:22 p.m., Babylon

Joe was slumped into an awkward and painful-looking semi-sitting position in the opening under the steps, like a hound waiting for his master to come back through a door. Tom could see Joe’s lips were moving, but his eyes didn’t leave the darkened shaft.

“Are you okay, Joe?”

“No … yeah … I was just …” Rodriguez turned his head to look at Bohannon. “How do you believe?”

“What?”

Joe shifted on his haunches and faced Bohannon.

“Tom, I’ve got to be honest. When we went to the ballgame, and I said I wished I had the kind of faith you have? Well, honestly, I could feel something then. I don’t know when or how—there have been so many unexplainable things that we’ve experienced—but somewhere along the way, I began to think that all this stuff you’ve been saying, been living, was real. Not only your faith was real, but your God was real, Deirdre’s God, my mom’s God. This Jesus I was taught as a kid, somewhere in this adventure, he became real to me, too. And when I was on top of Temple Mount and fire was pouring out of the sky and spreading in my direction, when the platform imploded and started sucking everything into the chasm, including the truck I was hiding in, that was the day I found myself praying and believing that my prayers were being heard.”

“But …?”

Joe turned his gaze back to the opening. “But when fear comes, how do you hold on to that faith? When you want to believe, but … How long do you think we should give him?”

Tom looked at his watch. “It’s only been ten minutes.”

“Seems like an hour.”

“I know,” said Annie. “He’ll be okay. Give him time. He’s probably being very careful. If I know Sammy, he won’t come back until he’s got something important to tell us.”

The rushing water, surprisingly cold, hit him like a torrent. Rizzo didn’t have time to register that his left foot had slipped across the slick floor. His right arm—stretched out and up, holding the lantern—doomed his right shoulder to slide away from the wall. What his mind registered was terror … panic … that flashing millisecond of realization that this might be the last moment of his life. And then self-preservation kicked in.

Rizzo was jostled back and forth, moving fast with the water, but not tumbling. He kicked toward what he thought was up, his lungs starved for breath, and broke the surface.

Rizzo pumped with his legs, strained for some semblance of stability by frantically waving his left arm through the water, fought a frustrating battle to keep the lantern close to the surface, emitting a deep twilight into the water tunnel, and tried with limited success to keep at least his nose above water without shredding his head against the roof speeding past, so close.

All of this happened within heartbeats, each fact like a photo being developed in front of his face. He realized that, for once, his small size was an advantage. He had more room to maneuver. But then another, more urgent thought hit.
How long can I do this?

Panic began to rise once more—there, but out of his control.
I gotta get outta here.

The soles of his boots slammed into the hard surface of a wall, but his leg muscles—tense and alert like the rest of his body—acted like shock absorbers, gathering up the momentum of the rushing water and pushing his body up higher. His shoulders thrust up from the torrent, Rizzo rose to almost a sitting position. The roof of the tunnel had been eroded higher by the pounding water at this junction. In the fleeting moment he was above the water, Rizzo realized that the water, after piling up against the wall, was running off to the right.

Rizzo curled his body as he took a deep breath and pushed against the wall with all his might, forcing his body to the left. For a heartbeat, the current held him, but then he began to sink as he pushed farther into the water, to the left, away from where the torrent now raced into the blackness. Rizzo flailed with his left arm, pulling himself deeper into the backwater, kicking with his legs, until the back of his neck collided with the edge of the wall behind him.

Closing his eyes, relief wrestling with terror—relief that he hadn’t drowned and had been able to escape from the rampaging torrent; terror at being lost, alone, and trapped—Rizzo pulled in deep draughts of the dank air and tried to slow his heart, hoping he wouldn’t die here from a heart attack after surviving the river. For the moment, he was alive. And alive was better than dead. And he wasn’t about to give up.

A ledge?

The lantern was still lit … he could tell that from the faint light that illuminated this backwater. He pulled the lantern from the water, steadied it against his chest, and forced his failing body to twist to its left. As he rotated on his shoulder, Rizzo reached out with his left hand to steady himself against the ledge and reached up with his right hand to place the lantern on the edge of wet clay.