The Templar Salvation (2010) (48 page)

“Probably not.”

“You don’t sound too hopeful.”

Reilly shrugged again, remembering his thoughts in the car, when Ertugrul had picked them up at the airport. “Ever since Ajax, every time we’ve gone head to head with the Iranians … we’ve lost. The embassy in Tehran. The choppers in the desert. The hostages in Beirut. Iran-Contra. The insurgents in Iraq. Even the goddamn World Cup, back in 1998. We’ve lost every time.”

“Not this time though,” she said, trying to believe it.

“Damn right,” he said, hugging her close to him.

She snuggled up against his chest, listening to his breathing, and something inside her stirred. An anger, a resolve, a hunger. She righted herself and turned to face him, then moved in and planted her mouth on his, lifting her leg to sit astride him.

“Hey,” he mumbled.

“Shut up,” she mouthed back.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you think?”

Her fingers were working on loosening his belt.

“We’re supposed to conserve energy,” he managed in between hungry mouthfuls of her.

“Stop talking then.” She was now tugging down her own pants.

“Tess,” he started to say, but she interrupted him, squeezing his face in her hands.

“If we’re going to die here,” she whispered into his ear, lowering herself onto him as she tasted the saltiness of a lone tear that slid down her cheek and trickled onto her lip, “I want to die knowing there’s a big smile on your face. Even if I can’t see it.”

Chapter 47

R
eilly was the first to stir. The silence around him was surreal, and it took him a moment to process where he was. He sensed Tess, asleep beside him on the hard ground, her breathing shallow and calm. He didn’t know how much time had passed since they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms and didn’t have a clue as to what time of day or night it was.

He sat up, slowly, twisting his head around to stretch the stiffness out of his neck, conscious that every movement he made—the brushing of cloth against cloth, the tiniest scrape of his shoe against the hard ground—was getting amplified out of all proportion. It made the natural isolation chamber he was in feel even more unnerving. He rubbed his eyes, then looked around, more out of instinct than out of necessity, given the stygian darkness around him—and something registered. Something he hadn’t first noticed.

There was an odd shimmer in the air, a kind of phosphorescence, floating across the walls of the cavern. It was barely visible, faint and ghostly. At first, he wasn’t sure it was actually there, or if it was just some kind of a reaction in his retinas, maybe due to being deprived of any kind of light. He tried blinking the tiredness away and focused on the wall again.

It was there.

A spectral glow of light, filtering through.

From outside.

Hope swelled inside him. He got up and, his arms outstretched to keep him from hitting anything, he advanced slowly across the cavern. The glimmer wasn’t enough to light his way, but he felt marginally more comfortable moving around with it there than without it. It seemed to be coming from a tunnel that led away from the cavern, one he and Tess had, he thought, checked out. He crouched and crept through the passageway, his splayed fingers feeling the walls around him.

They found an opening in the tunnel wall. It was waist-high, a round hole around three feet in diameter. The light seemed to be gliding in from there. Reilly ran his hands along its ledge, letting his touch do the exploring. The ledge was only about a foot and a half deep. Beyond it was a void. A void that dropped down—and rose up.

A shaft.

Reilly leaned right into it for a closer look. Light—daylight—was definitely seeping in from above. But there was something else. Noise, from below. The gentle murmur of water. Not a gush. More of a slow meander.

He backed out of the hole and got down on his haunches, his fingers searching the ground. He found a plum-sized piece of loose rock and picked it up. He leaned back into the opening, extended his arm over the hole, and dropped the stone. After about two seconds, and without bouncing against any bends in the shaft, it struck water with a clean splash that echoed up to him.

He knew he’d found a well that culminated in some kind of ventilation shaft. He guessed that the sun was possibly at an angle where its rays were coming through the shaft with enough strength to find their way down to the tunnel he was in, but if that was the case, it meant that the light wouldn’t necessarily be there for long. He started drawing a mental picture of how the well could be laid out. During their fruitless exploration the night before, Tess had told him about the underground cities’ elaborate water-collection and ventilation systems, designed to allow the escaping villagers to bunker down for extended periods of time while hiding out from invading forces. The ventilation shafts extended all the way to the bottom of the complex and were barely narrow enough for a human adult to crawl through. They had gates and spikes built into them to block any uninvited guests. The design also catered to a safe supply of drinking water, one that couldn’t be cut off or tampered with from the outside. The villagers had dug wells that allowed access to subterranean streams, and carved out other shafts that collected rainwater from the surface. Both systems had to be well hidden to block enemies aboveground from either crawling in or pouring poison into them.

Reilly thought it over. He doubted he could make it up to the surface through a ventilation shaft. On the other hand, Tess had told him that the handful of wells in the underground settlements were usually connected to one another through a system of channels. Given that it was the height of summer, he thought there was a chance that the water level down there was manageable. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, he could use the well to reach another part of the complex—one that wasn’t blocked to the outside world.

He roused Tess from her sleep and showed her what he’d found. The glimmer was fading, no doubt from the sun’s shifting position. They had to move fast.

“I’ll go first,” he told her. “Keep an ear out in case any help shows up from the tunnels.”

Her hand reached out and grabbed his arm, stilling him. “Don’t. There’s water down there. What if you can’t get back up?”

“We don’t have a choice,” he said. He dredged up a smile, though it was barely visible. “It’s summer. The levels can’t be that high.”

“I’d buy that—if it weren’t for the melting snow, doofus.”

“I’ll be fine,” he assured her with a slight chuckle.

She frowned. “The codices,” she said. “If there’s water … they might get damaged. Beyond repair.”

“So leave them behind.”

“We might never find them again.”

Reilly reached up and cupped her cheek in his hand. “What’s more important? Your life, or these books?”

She didn’t answer, but he felt her nod slightly. Then her tone went dead serious again. “What if you don’t find your way back?”

Reilly could just about see the reflection in her eyes. That comment was harder to deflect. She was right. Then he remembered something, and glimpsed a possible solution on the wall behind her.

“The electrical cabling. Help me rip it off the walls.”

They went around the passageways and caverns in the darkness, feeling their way around and yanking as much electrical cabling as they could. They managed to gather a couple of hundred yards of it and tied the various sections together to make it one continuous length.

Reilly took one end of it and tied it onto the fixings of one of the wall lights. He tugged at it, hard. It didn’t budge. The fixing itself seemed solid enough to hold his weight, and the cable was strong. The weak link was the soft rock the fixture was anchored into. He had no way of knowing if it would hold, or if would just crumble off. Regardless, he dumped the big roll of cable down the well, then Tess handed him the pick-shovel combo tool from the Iranian’s rucksack.

“You’ve got the gun. Use it if you have to,” he said.

Tess nodded, still clearly uncomfortable with the idea of his leaving. She gave him a deep kiss, then he climbed into the hole.

“I’ll be back,” he told her.

“You’d better be,” Tess replied, her hand holding on to his tightly for a few seconds more before finally letting go.

THE CLIMB DOWN WAS, as Reilly’s drill instructor back at Quantico liked to say, character-building. Character-building, and slow. He made his way down one small, precarious move at a time, his back pressed against the wall of the tunnel, his arms and legs sprung out against the opposite face of the narrow passage, his taut muscles clamping him into place.

The way back up, if there was one, wasn’t going to be much fun either.

The tunnel didn’t widen, which allowed him to make it all the way down until his foot felt water, after what he estimated was a descent of not far from a hundred feet. He held there for a moment and caught his breath, hesitating. He had no way of knowing how deep the channel was. If he let go and allowed himself to fall into it, and if it was too deep for him to stand in, he risked getting carried away by the current—and drowning, if the canal didn’t have an air gap above it.

He didn’t have much choice.

He took hold of the cable and, slowly, eased himself off the wall and onto it, his legs the last to let go of the tunnel. The cable held. He breathed out with relief and, one hand at a time, lowered himself down into the water. The stream was, surprisingly, freezing. Surprisingly, because of the intense heat aboveground. Tess’s comment about the melting snow brought a small smile to his face. He kept going until the water was up to his armpits—then his feet felt something and landed on solid ground.

“I’m down,” he yelled up. “I can stand in it.”

“Can you see anything?” she shouted back.

He looked downstream. The pale shimmer on the water’s surface disappeared into blackness. He turned the opposite way. It was just as dark.

His heart sank.

“No,” he shouted, trying to keep his voice even.

Tess went quiet. “What do you want to do?” she finally asked.

He moved away from under the shaft and took a couple of steps upstream, his hands holding on to the cable tightly. There was an air gap between the surface of the water and the roof of the channel. If he bent his knees and crouched through, he’d be able to walk upstream—for a while, anyway. He couldn’t see how far it stayed that way. He tried the same downstream. The roof was lower there, and after barely a half dozen steps, it disappeared underwater.

He called up to her. “I’m going to see if there’s another shaft out of this place. Upstream looks doable.”

Tess went quiet again. After a beat, she said, “Good luck, tiger.”

“I love you,” he hollered back.

“I’m almost thinking it was worth getting into this mess just to hear you say it,” she laughed.

He reeled in the cable and tied its end around his waist, then started hiking up the channel.

The bottom was smooth and slippery, the soft tufa buffed and polished by eons of water. He had to move slowly and with extreme care, and even though the flow of the stream wasn’t too overpowering, it was still there. The difficulty was in having to use his arms to keep feeling the roof of the channel in search of another shaft. He narrowly lost his footing twice from the awkward stance, but before long it became a moot point as the roof dropped down and disappeared underwater.

The air gap was gone.

Reilly stood there for a beat, frozen, exhausted, his fingers and toes aching from the constant exertion. He stared into the blackness, contemplating what it meant if he had to make his way back to Tess without having found a way out. He cursed inwardly, wanting to yell out his rage and pound his fists against the damn tunnel walls, but he held back and sucked in some deep breaths and tried to calm himself down.

He refused to give up.