The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies)

by Terry Brennan

  “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.

  32

  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.

  And looked into the void of another dark and threatening shaft.

  All three of them were now looking into the opening under the stairs, Annie’s flashlight illuminating the short shaft between them and the turn left. Tom didn’t want to give voice to his feelings, but Rizzo had now been gone almost thirty minutes, and unbidden images flashed into his mind.

  “Maybe we should go in and take a look around?” Annie’s question sounded more like a plea.

  Tom faced another critical decision. Should one go in, or should—

  “We’re all going,” said Annie, bringing her beam back into the landing so Tom could see her face. “If only one of us goes and Sammy needs help, will one be enough to help him? And if you think the two of you are going, you’re not leaving me here alone.”

  Tom read the resolve in his wife’s eyes and knew his decision was going to be a hard sell. “I’m sorry, but I think I go in and you and Joe stay here, just in case—”

  The sound coming down the stairway from above them stopped Tom’s words in his throat. There was the clank of metal against metal. Bohannon looked up the stairs. He thought he saw faint light where once there was pitch black. Then the light moved.

  “Inside, quick,” he whispered.

  Dropping down to their knees, first Annie, then Joe, then Tom crawled into the opening under the stairs. Annie crawled through the opening on the left, and Joe followed, but stopped just inside the junction, twisted around, and stuck his head out as Tom crawled into the shaft. “Turn off—”

  Rapid-fire gunshots erupted like a monstrous thunderstorm inside the tight, narrow stairway, ripping up the clay floor and sending ear-ringing echoes into the small shaft. Tom recoiled from the cacophony, his back pressed into the deepest part of the recess under the stairs, his flashlight at a cockeyed angle as its haft hit the floor.

  They could hear voices now, hard-soled boots thudding on each stair, and Tom could feel Joe and Annie inching away from the recess, into the shaft that had swallowed Rizzo. But Tom’s eyes weren’t on his wife, or on the opening of the space under the stairs—the opening through which the hard-soled men with the guns would soon come. No, his eyes were above his head, where the beam of his flashlight illuminated the roof of the recess.

  Above him, Tom could see the lowest step, where it and the steps above it had been pulled back into the recess when they released the latch. On the inside of the recessed steps, on the underside of the lowest step and the one above, Bohannon saw once again the small, square, brick-size section in the midst of the stair’s riser.

  We’ll be trapped.

  But we’ll be dead if I don’t. God help us.

  Bohannon raised his left hand and, without hesitation, pushed hard against the square section. There was a loud snap and the stairs above his head dropped down and slid forward, falling into place with a thud from the weight and with a strange hissing sound that Bohannon surmised somehow sealed the movable stairs to the clay floor and the walls surrounding it.

  “Tom!” cried Annie. “What did you do?”

  It didn’t take Rizzo long to measure his options. He had pulled himself from the water, but he was cold and wet. Stay here and hypothermia would probably kill him before he starved to death. There was no going back the way he came. And jumping once more into the racing water rushing into the black hole on the other side of the ledge he occupied was an invitation to drowning. His body was beginning to shiver. The remaining life span of the lantern was a dread-filled unknown.

  He looked into the beckoning darkness. His emotions and his mind were waging a titanic battle. Stay and die. Or go in that hole and risk a panic attack in the bowels of the earth.

  Rizzo remembered something from his youth. A prayer his mother would whisper when their situation was most dire. “Where there is faith, there is hope.”

  With the prayer echoing in his mind and the underground river pounding behind him, Samuel Leonard Rizzo took a deep breath, gathered up his courage and the lantern, and nudged it in front of him as he pushed his head and shoulders into the shaft.

  Annie Bohannon’s eyes pleaded with her husband.

  “We weren’t getting out that way—not anymore. And if we left the stairs open, how long do you think we would have survived when whoever is above us came for a visit?”

  There was no panic in Annie’s voice, only the flint of resolve. “We are not going to die in here. Tom, you will get me home.”

  Like synchronized swimmers, his wife and Rodriguez both took deep breaths and pushed back their shoulders. “There’s only one way to go,” said Joe, looking over his shoulder and down the shaft. “Let’s move.”

  “Okay, but we turn off one of the flashlights. From now on, unless it’s necessary, only one flashlight on at a time,” said Tom. “Joe, you go first … slowly. There’s a reason Sammy hasn’t come back.”

  Joe twisted around in the tight shaft and squeezed past Annie. As Joe and the light inched along the tunnel ahead of them, Tom came up behind his wife and laid his hand on her shoulder. “‘May the Lord bless and keep you. May the Lord make his countenance shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.’” Tom brushed his fingers across her cheek. “We’ll be okay.”

  Annie swallowed hard and nodded. On her hands and knees, she started following the fading light.

  33

  9:10 p.m., Babylon

  Rizzo shut his eyes for a moment, tried to relax, and then pushed on. His progress was excruciatingly slow. First Rizzo pushed the lantern along the floor of the shaft, as far as his arms would allow, and then crawled after it, trying not to lean upon his scraped and bleeding knees any more than necessary. But the shaft itself, while generally smooth from the water that once ran through it, was an undulating snake, swishing left, then right. He could see differing grades of erosion on the walls, signs that water often moved through these tunnels at changeable depths. The floor lifted in twisted knots of clay, the roof sweeping down to create narrow passages Rizzo needed to squeeze through. Only a supreme assault of his will kep
t Rizzo from curling up in a fetal ball to escape the walls pressing in on every side and crying himself to death. How long can I keep this up? Is it really worth the effort to push forward like this? Rizzman … who are you trying to kid? You need help. Rizzo’s head dropped to his hands. Are you up there?

  Joe had scrambled only a few yards when he stopped. “The shaft opens up. It gets higher.” Tom could see the light in front of him moving, sweeping around what must be a larger chamber. “I think we can stand.”

  Tom and Annie pushed through the opening into the expanded shaft and got to their feet. Standing erect felt glorious. Joe picked up the pace. It was frustrating for Tom, who couldn’t see anything but the dark backs of Joe and Annie. He kept straining to see if there was any other light in front of them, but it was nearly impossible. Then Joe stopped again.

  “Aawww, man. You’re not going to believe this.”

  Joe looked down at the fast-moving channel of water and wondered what could go wrong next.

  “There’s a river up here. Fast. Looks deep. And it’s in our way.”

  He turned and looked past Annie to his brother-in-law.

  “Unless you’ve got a bridge stuffed into that backpack, we’re in trouble.”

  It took a moment before Rizzo comprehended what he wasn’t seeing. The shaft came to an opening in the wall, but where he expected to see the shaft continuing off into the distance, there was nothing. The light crossed through the portal and was swallowed up by the dark beyond.

  The shaft came to an end.

  But where—

  Rizzo edged forward slowly, aware of the surface under his hands and the darkness beyond the tunnel. He didn’t want to trade the one for the other. Strange, how he had been so frantic to escape this tunnel and now it afforded him a sense of security and protection against the dark void before him.