by Gregg Loomis
Two more attempts and he gave up. "Shaft's too narrow; I can't swing the rope with enough velocity to get to the top."
Gurt tied one end of rope to her belt. "We climb, then." Lang shook his head. "I climb. If I fall, I want to be sure there's someone to drive me to the nearest hospital."
"If you fall from there, a hospital you will not need," she observed.
Lang tried to ignore the truth in her observation as he sat so that his back was against one wall and his feet against the opposite. Using hands and feet pressed against the stone, he began to work his way upward and then stopped, reaching to the back of his belt.
He pulled out the Glock, holding it where she could see it. "I need to get rid of all the weight I can. Take this."
She caught it neatly, stuffing it into the back of her pants. She watched until he was nearly indistinguishable in the shadows above her head, playing out rope as he climbed. Soon she could mark his progress only by the grunts and exhalations of breath echoing down the shaft. Finally, it was quiet.
"Lang?",
There was a tug on the rope. "Gimme a minute. There! I've secured the rope to a boulder. Now I can pull you up."
Although she knew he could not see, she shook her head. ''A pull I do not need. I went through the same training as you and am even younger than you. I can climb myself."
There was a properly abashed silence from above as she began.
The top of the shaft opened onto what Lang guessed had been the courtyard. The destruction of the Cathars' redoubt had been complete: Cut stones were strewn in a semicircle, few of which still rested on another. The keep's tower had presented more of a problem, probably because of the attackers' impatience with tearing it down starting at the top. Instead, it looked as though it had been split lengthwise. Behind the courtyard yawned the mouth of a cave, not particularly deep, but as tall as Lang guessed the keep had been, located so that, once encircled by the outer wall, the defenders of this hill would have had a fortress assailable from only one direction.
As their guide had said yesterday, part of the top of the hill had fallen in, leaving the center of the cavern open to the sky and filling the interior with rubble of white stone. Anything that had been under the collapsing part of the cave's roof was going to remain there.
Without spoken agreement, Gurt and Lang separated, each slowly walking along the inner perimeter of the wall and into the shadowy darkness of the cave. Since the collapse, the white stone sides had become streaked, crumbling under the relentless force of the elements. Vines had managed to take root in what appeared to be solid rock. If this was the cave shown in the photograph on Blucher's CD, any inscriptions on its walls were going to-be difficult to find. In another year or two, exfoliation would obliterate them forever.
Lang swept his light from the top of the cave downward and across the rubble-strewn floor. Twice he stopped, thinking the beam had picked up what he was looking for, only to find that the natural fissures in the walls could briefly assume the appearance of human-made letters just as rocks on the floor took on the look of handmade objects. If Skorzeny had filled four truckloads from this cave, either he was taking largely geological specimens or the cave had deteriorated greatly in the last sixty years.
Problem was, which was it?
"Lang, here!" Gurt's voice had the tinge of an echo.
Impatiently, Lang picked his way around piles of debris to where she stood, her light steady on a section of wall no more than four or five feet above the floor. There was no doubt he was looking at man-made letters over holes carved into the stone.
"Is like a bee, bee…" Gurt was pointing to rows of evenly spaced holes cut into the rock.
"Honeycomb," Lang supplied, forgetting the inscription for a moment as he inserted a fist into one of the holes.
It was about two feet deep and perhaps ten inches across. Gurt looked puzzled. "A rack for wine?"
Lang shook his head. "Wine would have been somewhere underground to keep it as cool as possible. This would have been a library."
"For books?"
"For scrolls, I think."
"They did not have books?"
Lang nodded absently. "Of course they did. You've seen those beautifully illuminated Bibles. But in ancient times, libraries, like the one at Alexandria, would have had racks like these where scrolls could be stored in clay tubes."
The mystery of what Skorzeny may have needed trucks to haul away may have been answered, but that raised an even more perplexing question, one Lang voiced.
"Problem is, why would Cathars in the thirteenth century be writing on loose parchment when the rest of Europe had started using bindings?"
Gurt pointed to the carved letters. "There the explanation may be."
He reached out and touched some sort of growth that obscured part of the inscription. "We're gonna have to cut this away."
Gurt grabbed several sprigs and started to pull before Lang could grab her arm. "Cut it, not pull it loose. Shallow as those roots are, they have to be widespread. Yank them hard enough and the face of the rock will crumble."
Nodding her understanding, she handed him her flashlight and took a small knife from her pocket. Where had she gotten it? He had never seen it before and, harmless enough, it was not something that would have cleared airport security. Whatever its source, it sliced cleanly through each branch and root. In minutes, the wall in front of Lang was clear of vegetation.
Lang stepped back, the better to play his flashlight across the lines of letters. His first impression was of precision. This inscription was not some ancient graffiti scratched into rock but the measured characters of a professional mason. Time, moisture, and other natural forces had effectively erased several letters, their former presence noted only by blank spaces.
IMPERATORIULIANACCUSAT (-) REBILLISREXUS IUDEAIUMIUBITREGI (-)UNUSDEISEPELIT
"Julian, Emperor…," he read aloud. Gurt followed the flashlight's beam with interest. "Who?"
Without looking away, Lang said, "Julian. Roman emperor in the late fourth century. In Christian writing, he's always referred to as 'Julian the Apostate.' He was the first non-Christian emperor since Constantine, the last pagan, reinstituted the persecution of the followers of Christ."
Gurt looked closer, playing her own light along the lines. "This was here cut by a Roman emperor?"
Absorbed by the antiquity of what he was reading for the second time, Lang shook his head. "Most likely at his order." He pointed to a word. " 'IUBIT,' he commands. I doubt Julian ever came here after he took the throne. Before then, he was governor of this part of Gaul. He wasn't emperor long. An inscription attributed to him is rare."
"How do we know it wasn't actually written here by the Cathars? Anyone could have, er, forged such writing. It could be a forgery. Then what?"
"Send it to Dan Rather."
"Who?"
"Never mind."
Lang frowned. Either he was misreading the Latin or something was wrong.
A light breeze hummed across the opening above while he ran his fingers along the words.
"What does it say?" Gurt asked.
"I'm not sure. I can't tell, for instance, whether this word, accusat, is missing the ending. It's chipped off. I can't tell if someone is making an accusation, made an accusation, or of whom. Likewise, the word regi. It has something to do with a palace, a feminine, first-declension noun. But without the last two or three letters, I can only guess if whatever Julian's talking about belongs to the palace, is in the palace, and so forth."
Gurt understood that the endings of nouns denoted not only the gender of the thing in question but also case-nominative, genitive, dative, or accusative. Although frequently dropped in conversation, German still had endings that indicated whether the thing possessed was being subjected to or was simply mentioned. The few remaining equivalents in English were like. the" 's" added to denote possession-that is, the dog's bone or the "s" or "es" to create the plural.
"Is Latin like German in th
at the whole sentence has to be read before you can put the words into the order that makes sense in English?" Gurt asked.
"No," Lang responded, too occupied to engage in a discussion of linguistics.
In German sentences containing more than a single clause, the verbs were frequently stacked at the end so that the reader had to pair them up and determine what made the most sense. This, of course, in addition to infinitives that were not only split but permanently rent asunder. A German would to the railroad station quickly go, for example.
"There's not enough light to read all of this in con text," Lang finally said, putting down his flashlight. "If you'll move your beam slowly, I'll copy down the words and then we can photograph them."
It took Lang about ten minutes to carefully transcribe the inscription, underlining letters that were too worn or chipped to positively identify. He then used the camera he had purchased the previous night to take two shots directly in front of the carving before moving to each side, letting the small flash attachment cast shadows that would make the words more legible.
He was stepping up to take close-ups when he and Gurt exchanged puzzled looks, unsure if the other heard the sound that seemed to be getting closer, the beating whup-whup of a small, non-turbine-powered helicopter. What, Lang wondered, would be so pressing in this rural community as to justify a chopper?
The answer came when the sound became stationary directly overhead. As one, both looked up to the jagged section of sky that showed through the now-open cave roof. Lang recognized the aircraft hovering like a huge insect as one of the smaller Sikorsky models available for personal transportation worldwide. From the angle at which Lang was looking, he could not see the identifying letters or numbers.
"Who…?"
Lang's question was cut short as a man, his face masked by goggles, leaned out of the open doorway of the 'copter and dropped something. For only a millisecond, the object was silhouetted against the sky, but that was long enough.
Lang shoved Gurt into one of the natural niches in the wall, shallow but better than nothing. The second he heard an impact nearby, he sprung. He had less than five seconds, considerably less if the man in the aircraft above had enough experience to count off two or three so the weapon would explode on impact. Lang saw the plastic cylinder perhaps eight or nine inches on the cave floor not a foot away. In a single motion, Lang scooped it up and underhanded it toward the opening of the cave mouth. He watched it describe a gentle parabola before he threw himself flat, ignoring the sharp edges of rock.
He never knew whether he hit the floor of the cave before the ground shook with an explosion that, even from outside the cave, sent rock fragments buzzing through the air like angry bees.
Instantly on his feet, he raced to where Gurt was shaking her head, attempting to clear her ears of the concussion. "What in…?"
He propelled her toward the opening. "Later."
No time to explain that he had instantly recognized the object launched from the overhead chopper as an "offensive" hand grenade as distinguishable from the more familiar fragmentation "pineapple" that was basically unchanged since World War Two. The grenade the unknown people overhead had chosen had the same "pin"-activated fuse with the same delay, but contained high explosives in a plastic wrapper rather than cast iron intended to shatter. The choice of such a weapon revealed a plan: to use the MklIAl offensive grenade's content to collapse the cave, burying him and Gurt alive if they were not already dead from the shrapnel-like chips of rock. Either way, they would never be found.
Her hand in his, they sprinted across the courtyard. Behind them, a muffled explosion told them the men above had no intention of giving up.
The malignant shadow of the helicopter beat them to the shaft, its patient hovering an announcement that. there was no escape. Lang glanced around. To try descending through the narrow hole would be suicidal. Even if a near miss failed to collapse the tunnel, its tight confines would make it impossible to avoid the rock shards. Between their escape route and the cave was open ground littered with the evenly carved stones that had been the wall. There was not so much as a tree or bush to provide shelter.
The helicopter's passenger leaned out again, lobbing another grenade, and Lang threw Gurt to the ground, partially covering her with his own body. The following explosion seemed to jar even his teeth, but he was thankful he was still alive. The cordite-tainted air was welcomed as he forced breath back into lungs the concussion had emptied.
Almost before the shower of dirt and rock splinters settled, Gurt pushed him aside and sprang to her feet, a sure target for the stone chips with which the next grenade would fill the air. Lang snatched at an ankle, missed, and stumbled to his feet in pursuit.
His legs refused to obey his commands, moving at a pace that seemed almost leisurely. But then, everything seemed sluggish, to take on the dreamlike quality of a film in slow motion.
As gracefully as any ballerina, Gurt spun as she drew the Glock from her belt, making it an extension of her outstretched arms to point upward. The man in the helicopter used both hands also, one to hold the grenade, the other to pull the pin. As he extended his arm to drop high explosives directly onto Gurt, two shots came, so close as to be indistinguishable.
The man leaning out of the chopper stood erect, his mouth forming a perfect 0, as though he was astonished either at the two holes centered neatly above his eyes or the fact that the hand grenade was still in his hand. Then he disappeared from the doorway.
Lang screamed a ·warning, knowing what was about to happen. For what seemed forever, nothing did.
Then the helicopter dissolved into a fiery orange ball that reached all the way to the ground. The force of the explosion knocked Lang onto his back. The last thing he remembered before everything went dark was the transformation of flame in the sky to a greasy, roiling black cloud.
Lang reckoned he had been unconscious only a few seconds. He sat up and looked around. The blast had knocked him flat and out of the hailstorm of flying debris. Unidentifiable pieces of metal, still smoking, surrounded him. Shakily, he got to his feet and realized that not all the wreckage was inorganic. Bile rose in his throat as he stepped over the charred remains of a human hand, wedding ring still attached.
"Gurt!"
There was no answer.
Trying to swallow both nausea and growing panic, he forced himself to make an orderly search of concentric circles. After a couple of minutes, hope flickered like a candle in a breeze. After twenty, it died.
Explosions can do weird things, he told himself. Stories of victims of World War II's bombing of London were replete with women dashing into the streets after a direct hit, unharmed other than the fact that their clothing had been completely blown off, of men finding themselves buried under rubble blocks away from where they had been when the bomb had hit.
No doubt true, but there was no Gurt, bomb-denuded or otherwise.
Despair became fear-fear he would find her, or, worse, some grisly part of her. The thought finally overcame his resistance to the urge. '-He knelt and vomited his breakfast.
He staggered to his feet, swaying like a drunk as his empty stomach continued to cramp and convulse. His view of the cave and of the surrounding white hills blurred with tears. He had never felt so alone as on this hilltop an ocean away from home. Not even when Dawn died. At least then he had had ample time to prepare. Gurt had been snatched away in an instant.
He lifted his chin, looking into a sky so innocently blue it was hard to believe that, just minutes before, it had been filled with death. He forced his mounting grief aside for the moment, thinking as he had been trained to do so many years ago.
Even as remote as this area was, someone had most likely heard the series of explosions, possibly seen the fireball of the helicopter. He must assume the authorities were on their way. With only fragments, it would take months to even establish the number of people who had perished here, if in fact it could be ascertained at all by time-consuming compari
sons of DNA. Unless that DNA had been previously recorded, it would serve only to number the dead, not identify them.
Lang moved mechanically, straining to keep his mind concentrated on the tasks at hand. He stooped to retrieve the camera from where it had fallen when the blast had knocked him down. Surprisingly, it was unbroken. Using the rope still in place, he descended through the shaft. Unlocking the car's trunk, he took out Gurt's purse. His control momentarily slipped as a rogue memory of how he had teased her about its size interrupted the routine and tears wet his cheeks. Checking the bag's contents to make certain it contained nothing of significance, he returned it to the trunk. Sliding into the front seat, he opened the glove box, pocketing only Gurt's passport. No need to involve her now.
The rented car would be traced to Joel Couch. His passport and the few human remains on the mountain should make Lang Reilly officially dead at least until DNA proved otherwise. That should keep the Frankfurt Police, if not all of Interpol, quiet for the time being.
Joel Couch would seek revenge.
He took a final look at the hilltop, from which smoke was still rising. Fists clenched, he spoke aloud through gritted teeth. "You bastards, you fucking bastards! No matter who you-are, this world is too small for both of us, and I don't plan on leaving."
He took some small comfort from the fact that the threat was not idle. He had tracked the killers of his sister and nephew, and, if necessary, he would end his days in pursuit of whoever was responsible for Gurt.
His hand involuntarily went to the pocket where he had put the paper with the Latin phrases on it. He'd get them this time, too. At least now he had a starting point.
Pocketing the car keys, he turned his back on the Mercedes and began to trudge along the narrow country road.
He had gone less than a mile before a pair of police cars, sirens wailing, blurred past, headed in the direction from which he had come. Minutes later, he hitched a ride in a tractor-towed wagon dusty with remains of winter wheat. Turning his back to the machine's driver, he released the tight grip on his emotions and sobbed.
