A Treasure Deep

by Alton Gansky

  Pressing his skills beyond anything he ever thought possible, Perry powered forward until he lined up with the east side of the hole, lowered the bright yellow blade, and started forward. Earth came up like water before the prow of a ship. Perry dug a wide swath, pushing the excavated dirt down the side of the sinkhole. Jack’s excavator would need more room than the dozer could provide in a single pass, so Perry repositioned the dozer and dug in deep again. Back and forth, side to side, a wide and long slope appeared. Perry knew that he would have to lower the grade by at least twenty feet for the excavator to have a chance of reaching the buried chamber.

  The night wore on as Perry finished grading a level area for Jack’s trackhoe. He finally backed his machine out and watched Jack work his way down the all-too-steep slope, settle on the dirt pad Perry had created, and begin digging again, scooping dirt and piling it to the side. Perry could do nothing but wait, wishing it were he down there at the controls. He had tried to commandeer the excavator from Jack, citing the danger of taking such a large machine into a wide pit that hadn’t been properly shored. Jack had just smiled and said, “Get your own ride, buddy,” and started down the precipitous path before Perry could object.

  Jack moved the bucket with precision and determination, and Perry knew that each scoop of dirt moved them closer to their goal. Gleason stood waiting with Perry. Each man was eager to add his labor to the task, but nothing more could be done until Jack had dug to within a few feet of the buried cavity.

  “It has to be close now,” Gleason said. “I think we should start shoveling.”

  “I think you’re right,” Perry said. “If we’re on target, then we should be right over it.” Perry picked up a shovel and started down the incline toward Jack’s position. He noticed that Gleason was following with another shovel in his hand. “I can’t ask you to do this, Gleason. I don’t know how secure the walls of the pit are. They could cave in.”

  “You and Jack have put a nice angle on the walls. I don’t think it’ll collapse on us.”

  “The base can give way, and dirt can slide in faster than we can run,” Perry said. “As I understand it, being buried alive isn’t much fun.”

  “That’s why I plan on avoiding it. You’d be surprised how fast I can run when death is behind me. Now be quiet. Two shovels will work faster than one, and you know it.”

  “Three shovels,” a voice said. Brent approached from behind. “I didn’t come out here to watch. You made me part of the team when you told me what you suspect is in the chamber. I’m not going to sit in the stands.”

  Perry started to object, but Brent cut him off. “Save your breath, Mr. Sachs. I’m in for the duration.”

  Brent’s courage was remarkable, and Perry found himself filled with admiration. “Okay, kid,” Perry said, “but anyone who risks their life with me gets to call me Perry.”

  “Will do,” Brent said as he approached. “You know that when all this is over, the pizza is on you. Tell me where to put the business end of this shovel.”

  The three men walked to the excavator, and Perry told Jack what they were planning. “Once we’ve discovered the lid to this thing, we’ll try to find its edges. When we do, you can rip all the ground on two sides of the perimeter.”

  “Did you bring me a shovel?” Jack asked. “It’s getting a little cramped in here.”

  “You can use Brent’s. He’s young and won’t mind trotting back up to get another.”

  Digging continued, but muscles provided the power this time. Perry stood on the uneven ground over the chamber and dipped his blade in the dirt. He did it again and again, until, thirty inches down, the dense ground turned hard and the shovel hit something unforgiving. The others joined him in clearing a three-foot square hole revealing a hard, dark stone.

  “Bingo,” Jack said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see rock.”

  “Let’s expand the hole and make sure that we haven’t found just a rock.”

  “It’s pretty flat, Perry,” Gleason said. “I’d be surprised if it isn’t what that GPR showed.”

  Perry agreed, but he continued to dig. Fifteen minutes later the four men had doubled the size of the hole, and the rock remained consistent. “This has to be it,” Perry concluded. “Back to your office, Jack, and see if you can’t get rid of the last meter of dirt. I’ll guide you from out here. Let’s give him some room.”

  Gleason and Brent moved up the access incline that Perry had created with the dozer and watched. Jack moved the excavator’s bucket smoothly, following Perry’s hand signals with unwavering attention. Perry’s goal was to have Jack scrape another two feet off the chamber without damaging the stone lid beneath his feet. Formerly he would have been concerned about maintaining the integrity and appearance of the stone, but now his greatest fear was causing the ancient construction to fall in on itself and damage the treasure inside. If things had been different, if lives weren’t hinged on his success, he would’ve been more cautious. But patience now was too expensive a luxury.

  Jack was a maestro at the controls, making the beast of a machine behave and do what it was not designed to do, dig by the inch instead of the yard. Perry directed Jack to scrape from the hand-dug test hole to where he knew the front of the chamber must be. Once done, Perry picked up his shovel and started digging away the last foot of rocky soil. He had barely finished his second strike with the shovel when the others joined him.

  With a gently sloping, nearly fifty-foot wall of dirt just a few steps away, the men worked in concentrated intensity. Sweat oozed from every pore, breathing became labored, hands blistered, but no one complained.

  They pushed on toward the edge until they found it, then began digging at right angles. The edge remained.

  “That’s it,” Perry said. “Jack, dig in front of this edge, and let’s see if there’s a welcome mat and front door.”

  “I figure I can scoop out another eight feet of depth,” Jack said. “I can make the trench four or five feet wide.”

  “That’d be perfect,” Perry said.

  “I’m worried about the stability of the trench,” Jack admitted. “We’ll have to finish the digging by hand, and the trench could collapse on us.”

  Gleason spoke up. “Brent and I could bring up some plywood and two-by-fours. We could make a down-and-dirty shoring system.”

  Perry agreed. “Good idea, but let’s do it quickly.”

  As the men scrambled off, Perry felt a strong sense of thankfulness that God had given him friends of such courage and sacrifice. He prayed that he wouldn’t make a mistake that would cost them their lives. As dangerous as standing four stories below ground was, he knew a greater danger lay ahead.

  RUTHERFORD’S BODY WAS in bed, but his mind was elsewhere. He paid little attention to the predawn morning and even less attention to the nurse who washed his emaciated form with a damp sponge. It was a daily routine he’d successfully blocked from the forward part of his brain. Displacement. That’s what he called it, the ability to project his mind to another place, a place where he didn’t have to endure the indignity of having someone else do for him what nearly everyone in the world could do for themselves.

  The nurse—a likeable brunette whose name he should’ve known but that he had refused to learn—ran the wet sponge along a withered arm. He thought of the day. It was, at long last, here. By sundown, the items would be securely in place, manipulated by the skillful hands of Dr. Benton Carmack and under the vigilant eye of Rutherford himself. The work ahead would take weeks, maybe even months, but it would progress. All he had to do was live to see it, to benefit from it. And live he would, if mental strength and determination had anything to do with it.

  It was a thin hope, true, but slim hope was better than none. A drowning man would clutch at a thread if a rope were not available. This was his thread, his flimsy, last-ditch effort to beat the gods of disease that had afflicted him with this cruel disorder.

  It had to work. He would make it work. There were
no other options.

  The nurse rolled him on his side and applied the soap and sponge to his back.

  Chapter 20

  ANNE FITZGERALD AWOKE fresh and with a sense of vitality she had long missed. For the first time in years, her drive to get up was found in something other than work.

  Although it was still early, she slipped from bed, trod across the hardwood floor, and looked out the window. The black of the night sky was dissolving into a pale blue. Just outside her windowpane, several sparrows bickered over a few seeds from the surrounding plants. It amazed her that she took notice of the little creatures. She wasn’t one to pay attention to such things, at least not recently.

  Although she had yet to shower, she felt cleaner than usual and she knew why. A half-decade of bitterness had been washed away with unexpected efficiency. Today would be different. She had no idea how long the cathartic euphoria would last, but she planned to enjoy each moment of it. For now, she planned a quick wash and a brief breakfast at the Table and Grille. That would be nice: a casual breakfast, a cup of coffee, and the newspaper. Then she’d slip into her real estate office early and catch up on all the work that she had let slip over the last two days.

  Yes, she thought, this is going to be a great day.

  JOSEPH HAD NOT slept, and other than occasionally nodding off in the chair, Claire had remained awake as well. Joseph now sat motionless at the work counter, staring at the paper the dark-haired woman had brought him the previous evening. The moment she’d set it on the counter, Joseph had leaned over it until his nose hovered an inch from the paper. He rocked gently, then stopped. He moved his head side to side as he studied the paper, then up and down. After the woman had left, Claire had stepped to her son’s side and peered over his shoulder. The image on the paper puzzled her. All she could see were bands of black and gray laid out in neat columns.

  “What is this?” she asked Joseph, knowing no reply would come. Joseph continued to study the paper. She was sure he’d never seen anything like it. He had been known to stare at pictures of animals for hours until he had memorized every detail of their appearance, but he had never seen anything so abstract.

  She was also puzzled as to why they would bring such a picture to Joseph. What could they hope to achieve by that? Most likely he’d reject the document or, at best, copy it with the crayons they’d provided, just as he had with Henri’s precious fragments.

  Nothing made sense. Not their abduction, not their imprisonment, not this picture. She had nothing to offer. The document they wanted had been stolen months before, and she was certainly no expert in ancient languages.

  Claire returned to the chair and watched Joseph. He had been still, too still. His rhythmic rocking was absent. Instead, he stared and stared, and it frightened her. What did he see that she couldn’t?

  Joseph sat suddenly erect and tilted his head. A second later he picked up a black crayon, pushed the strange paper to the side, and began drawing.

  ANNE FOUND HER usual booth occupied by four burly men. One was telling a story, and the others listened with pre-laughter smiles pasted to their faces, anticipating the punch line.

  She surveyed the Tejon Table and Grille and found it unusually full. She took a seat at the counter. There were eight stools, and men occupied four of them. Each took notice of her and nodded. She returned the gesture then spied Sara coming out of the kitchen with three plates of food balanced on one arm and another in her free hand. The waitress looked frazzled.

  “Hi, Mayor. Be with you in a sec.”

  “Okay,” Anne said, uncertain how to respond.

  Moments later Sara slipped behind the counter, poured a cup of coffee, and brought it to Anne. “You’re here early.”

  “I wanted to get a jump on the day,” Anne said, then leaned over and spoke softly. “Sara, what’s going on?”

  “You mean all the people,” Sara replied. “They’re with that construction group working up in the hills.”

  “Sachs Engineering?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. You want some eggs?”

  “Um, sure. The usual,” Anne said. “What are they all doing here?”

  “Eating, of course. How should I know any more than that? You want rye toast?”

  Anne was getting frustrated. “Rye is fine. Why are they all here right now?”

  A shrug was all the response the waitress offered. “Okay. I’ll have your food up in a moment. I have to run to the kitchen. Poor Tony is overwhelmed back there.” Sara turned and slipped away.

  “Day off,” a voice said to her right. She turned to see a man in his twenties taking a long draw from his coffee cup.

  “Excuse me?” Anne said.

  The young man swiveled his stool to better face Anne. He offered a smile of teeth as straight and white as piano keys. His skin was deeply tanned but still held the smoothness of youth. “We’ve been given the day off,” he said.

  “Then why are you here so early?” Anne inquired.

  “It’s one of the drawbacks of working construction. We’re used to getting up early.”

  “Why would you have the day off? I mean, isn’t that strange?”

  The man shrugged one shoulder. “Sachs knows what he’s doing. I’ve worked with him on several projects. He’s no dummy. If he wants us off-site, then he’s got a reason for it. None of us are going to complain about a day off with pay. So, is there anything fun to do in this town?”

  “Is Perry . . . Mr. Sachs here?” She looked around the room but didn’t see him.

  “Don’t waste your time, ma’am. I doubt he came down from the hills. He’s probably still up there.”

  “He stayed all night?”

  “I guess. A couple of us knocked on his motel room door and didn’t get a response. We thought he might like to have breakfast with us, but since he didn’t come to the door and a couple of the SUVs are missing, we assumed he stayed on-site. That’s the kind of guy he is. He’d give a bulldog a bad name.”

  Something wasn’t right. It was a feeling, illogical, nearly groundless, but Anne was certain that something was out of place. Rising from the stool, she turned toward the door.

  Sara called after her, “Hey, Mayor.” Anne didn’t turn around. “You don’t want your coffee? What about your breakfast?”

  Anne left the restaurant without looking back.

  THERE WASN’T AN inch of Perry’s body that didn’t ache. His side hurt from the beating he’d taken; his back hurt from the hours spent in the backhoe and with a shovel; his hands felt bruised to the bone from constant use of the shovel and hammer. The last tool was used to help Gleason and Brent build makeshift shoring out of plywood and two-by-fours, as Jack had continued to put the excavator through its paces. He worked with remarkable speed and accuracy. Together the weary team had uncovered the roof and the chamber and dug a ditch along one side—the side they assumed would be best to open.

  The top of the chamber had been fifteen meters below grade—forty-five feet. The trench in which they stood was another seven feet below that. Perry looked up past the fifty-plus feet of sharply sloped walls. Only the six-foot-wide trench was shored. The rest of the hole was bare ground, an OSHA inspector’s nightmare. Perry wasn’t feeling very good about it either. This was the second time

  in less than twenty-four hours he found himself at the bottom of

  a hole.

  A framed wall made of wood studs covered with plywood stood behind him. Double two-by-four braces that ran from the top of the wall to similar braces on the ground held the wall in place. The connections formed a triangle, nature’s strongest geometric shape.

  In front of Perry rose the stone wall of the chamber. He studied it intensely, as did Jack, Gleason, Brent, and Dr. Curtis. No one wanted to miss the next few moments, despite the great risks.

  When Perry was a teenager, his father had tried to tame his son with the aphorism “The difference between a fool and a brave man is motivation. The man who loses his life and leaves a grieving family
because he was seeking a thrill gets what he deserves, but a man who dies while attempting something great is a hero.” Perry got the message. He knew his dad would understand, even if this expedition left him without a son.

  “Piled stone construction,” Curtis said. “Just one stone on top of another. It’s a wonder it remained standing.”

  “It’s more than that, Doc,” Perry corrected. “Do you see how the surface is at an angle? The wall is thicker at the bottom than the top. It’s an ancient construction technique. The roof and static dirt loads are transferred to the walls which in turn transfer the load to the ground.”

  “But there’s no grout or anything,” Brent said. “It’s just . . . a pile of rocks.”

  “Look closer, kid,” Jack said. “Notice how the stones are fitted. You’re right, there’s no binder like mortar, but each stone is arranged to fit tightly with its neighbor. That took long, hard work.”

  “The roof is the same way,” Perry added. “It’s fitted stone, but there has to be something beneath to hold it up. It doesn’t matter how tightly you fit stone to stone on a horizontal surface, gravity is going to win. There’s no place to quarry stone, so this was the only way to do it. Gather large stones, organize them, then piece them together like a puzzle.”