Hell Ship

CHAPTER 21

The choices in the second room were slightly different. Left and right were again options, but there was no option to go up again. They could go forward and down a new descending passage, or backtrack.

“This place is a maze,” observed Bones when he and Alex completed their ascent.

Dane nodded his agreement. “Another layer of security. Make a wrong turn and you’ll either get completely lost or more probably hit a literal dead end. So which way now?”

Alex reiterated her belief that the Sign of the Cross held the solution to the maze. “Forward and down I think. If it is a maze, then going back isn’t a correct solution.”

“Rule of three still applies?”

She shrugged.

“Thanks for those words of inspiration.” He counted down three treads and took a step.

This passage was exactly twice as long as the first and Dane could almost feel the weight of the mountain bearing down as he went deeper. Three steps. Three more steps.

The descent was, as before, uneventful. At the bottom, he flashed his light up the long straight shaft, signaling that he was done, and then inspected the chamber in which he now found himself.

Not counting the stairs he had just descended, there were only two ways out of this room: left or right.

Just like the Sign of the Cross.

“Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch,” he murmured, moving his hand through what he thought was the correct sequence. The mnemonic was a relic of a time when men wore pocket watches in their waistcoats and carried their wallets in the breast pocket of their jackets: watch on the right, wallet on the left.

He gravitated toward the left passage, but something was nagging at the back of his mind.

When Alex and Bones arrived, she confirmed that the next turn should be to the left, which prompted Dane to reveal his misgivings. “Are you sure? I keep thinking that going left first is wrong.”

Professor would have been able to shed light on the subject, but Dane had picked up a few bits of trivia regarding the negative associations with left handedness.

In the military, a left-handed salute was considered an insult. In the Bible, the right hand was always linked with divine favor, while the left sometimes indicated rejection by God. The Latin word for “left” was the root of the word “sinister.” In the Muslim world, the left hand was considered unclean. The term “left-hand path” was synonymous with black magic. So pervasive was the bias against lefties that in many places, children who were naturally left-handed were forcibly taught to use their right hand for most activities.

However, Dane had also heard that you could find your way through a maze by always turning left. And there was no denying that south-paws were some of the best baseball pitchers on earth.

“It’s left,” Alex persisted. “Trust me. I’m a good Catholic girl…well, a Catholic girl, anyway.”

“I dated a Russian chick once,” interjected Bones. “We were watching this horror movie where somebody crossed himself, and she said that Catholics do it wrong. In the Orthodox Church, they go right-to-left.”

“And you’re just remembering this now?”

Bones spread his hands guiltily.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Alex irritably. “The Templars were part of the Roman church. So regardless of who’s right, the Templars would have crossed themselves Catholic-style.”

Her insistence did not assuage his anxiety; rather, he was even more certain that he was forgetting something very important. Nevertheless, Alex was correct about the Templars and Catholicism. He moved to the left passage and shone his light down its length.

The entire passage appeared to be completely smooth. There were no murder holes pock-marking the walls and ceiling and nothing at all to break up the plane of the floor. If there was a trigger or a trap here, Dane could not see it.

“Just so you know,” he began, “I’m about to stake my life on you being right about going left, Catholic girl.”

Suddenly, Alex didn’t look quite so confident about her decision, which didn’t make him feel any better, but there was only one way to know for sure. He ventured into the passage, taking one careful step after another, poised to duck or throw himself to the side or beat a hasty retreat at the first click, crunch, bump or thump.

With no steps to count, he instead counted the number of paces, measuring the length of the passage by the length of his stride. When he’d gone about twenty meters, he saw a blank wall directly ahead and shadows to either side; a T-intersection.

He stopped. Something about that choice didn’t feel right. Before, there had been a circular room, like a Templar chapel, but not this time. Was this a warning that he’d gone the wrong way, or simply an indication that the number of choices was shrinking?

He started forward again, slowly, not counting his steps until he was almost at the junction. He saw that these new passages were considerably smaller than the ones they had traveled through to get here, barely knee-high from the floor.

He stopped again, shining his light into the one on the right, and saw that this first impression was wrong; the passages weren’t smaller, but rather were just lower. If he crawled through the opening, he would drop down three or four feet to the floor where he would be able to stand erect.

“This is wrong,” he muttered.

He recalled Bones advice to trust his gut. SEALs were trained to always put the mission first, but they were also taught to listen to their instincts. It was an unwritten rule that any member of a team could call off a mission if they had a really bad feeling about it; they might have to answer some hard questions later, but in the moment, those feelings were to be heeded.

“That’s it. Calling it.” He turned around and started back to where Bones and Alex were waiting.

That was when the floor dropped out from beneath him.

The unexpected movement caused him to fall flat — or rather almost flat. The entire length of the passage was now slanted down at about a thirty degree angle, away from the entrance and toward the T-intersection.

Suddenly a tremendous boom seemed to resonate through the entire mountain. He caught a glimpse of motion and heard a grinding sound growing louder; something was moving down the slope toward him. He raised his flashlight and saw a block of stone, easily the size of a mini-van and almost completely filling the passage, sliding his way.

He scrambled to his feet and instinctively drew back from the relentless rock. If he didn’t get out of its way, it would pulverize him against the end of the passage. But which passage should he take?

In his peripheral vision he saw that both of the intersecting passages were now more or less level with where he was standing. He wouldn’t even need to crawl to get through the openings and escape being crushed, but he would have to make a decision.

Quickly.

Left or right? Either outcome was uncertain, but certainly better than staying where he was.

Don’t think, just go.

Trust your gut!

He did.

John Lee Ray, flanked by Scalpel and the rest of his inner circle, disembarked the funicular at Schwandegg Station and made their way down the stairs to the base of the elevated structure. Rooster’s last call had placed him at the northernmost corner of the building, where he claimed Maddock had found an entrance to a secret passage.

Ray had initiated movement even before Rooster had finished his first report. He had immediately recalled his men to their hotel, and within ten minutes, they were racing down the motorway in two rented cars. In the time it took for them to make the short road trip to Mulenen and the lower terminus of the Niesenbahn, Maddock and his crew had moved halfway up the mountain and found the entrance to the Templar vault.

Scalpel had been livid at the news of Maddock’s survival. “I should have put a bullet in his skull.”

“I’d say it’s a good thing you didn’t. He’s shown us the way.”

“But he’s going to beat us to the treasure.”

Ray smiled patiently. “In this race, the prize doesn’t go to the man who crosses the finish line first, but to the man who’s still breathing at the end of the day.”

“Maddock won’t be. I promise you that.”

But as Scalpel grunted a little with each painful step down the stairs, Ray wondered if maybe he should have left the man behind. His thirst for vengeance had certainly imbued him with the will to overcome his disability, but was it enough? Would Scalpel’s handicap betray him at a critical moment, putting the entire endeavor in jeopardy?

If he was a dog, thought Ray, I probably would have put him down by now.

They found Rooster sitting casually with his back to what looked at first glance like a structural cornerstone. The mercenary got to his feet and eased open the false rock face like a doorman admitting them to a secure building.

“How long have they been in there?”

“About half an hour,” said Rooster. “I thought about going in after them, but they’re pussyfooting all the way. I couldn’t risk them doubling back and discovering me. Also, no cell reception down there.”

Ray nodded. “Good work. This almost atones for your increasingly impertinent demeanor.”

Rooster laughed, evidently misinterpreting the comment as a joke.

“Are they armed?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Good.” Ray took a pistol from the concealed holster under his left arm. “Then let’s keep it simple. Find them, kill them. We’ll worry about cleaning up the mess later.”

They descended the stairs single file, all armed with pistols and flashlights, and carrying enough high explosives to blast through any obstacles that came along. Ray took the lead and Scalpel was right behind him, gritting his teeth with each step, but nevertheless keeping pace with his employer.

Ray circled the entrance chamber, shining his light down each of the four passages. “Which way did Maddock go?”

Rooster shook his head. “I couldn’t tell.”

“Six of us and four ways to go. We’ll reconnoiter these tunnels for — say one hundred meters — and then report back here.” He randomly assigned a direction for each of the able-bodied men, leaving himself and Scalpel behind, ostensibly to coordinate.

Things went bad very quickly.

The man he’d sent up the stairs — his demolitions man, callsign: Paycheck — made it only halfway up the flight before a loud snap heralded a cacophony of metallic twangs and a veritable hailstorm of projectiles. Paycheck, howling in pain and surprise, tumbled back down the steps, surrounded by the broken shafts of a dozen crossbow bolts. Miraculously, only two of the arrows had found their target; one shaft protruded from Paycheck’s right thigh, while another had grazed the side of his head, opening a superficial but bloody gash above his left ear.

“Freeze!” Ray shouted, only now grasping that the Templar’s security measures had put the rest of his team in danger. His warning came too late.

Viper, who was scouting the right hand passage, heard both the tumult of the first trap springing and his employer’s warning, but before he could reverse direction, he felt the floor shift ever so slightly under foot, and then something struck the top of his head, not a crossbow bolt but a jet of liquid.

He staggered back, wiping away the oily substance that dripped down from his hair and stung his eyes. His first thought was that he had been poisoned, and the strange chemical taste and smell of the liquid seemed to confirm that. But then an oddly familiar rasping sound from behind the walls reminded him that oily chemicals had other hazardous properties.

Hidden from Viper’s view, a counterweight powered mechanism, similar in design to a trebuchet, had just struck a piece of flint against a long steel blade, producing a shower of bright sparks. Some of the sparks hit the gutter which had channeled the oil when the trap was triggered, igniting the vapors there in a whoosh, transforming the dripping murder holes into fountains of fire.

Viper was already backpedaling away from the trap, but the slippery floor and his blindness conspired against him. His feet flew out from under him and he landed on his back, surrounded by a pool of oil as spurts of flame erupted all around.

The mercenary didn’t bother trying to get up. He twisted away from the oil slick, rolling along the floor, over and over again to extinguish the fires that kept flashing up on his clothes. His hair — which he kept shorn nearly to his scalp — was scorched away in a flash, but he beat his arms against his cranium to prevent the fire from doing any more damage. He didn’t stop rolling until he was almost back at the entrance chamber.

On the descending staircase, a burly Texan who went by the name Cowboy, didn’t hear the sound of traps springing or Ray’s shouted warning. He moved confidently down the steps — seventy-two of them, though he didn’t keep count — until he reached a dead end. The passage just stopped, the last stair tread butting up against a wall. There was a square of stone protruding about an inch from the wall, and reasoning that it might activate another secret passage, Cowboy pushed on it experimentally.

The square slid into the wall and Cowboy heard a loud snap.

The stair tread he was standing on abruptly dropped six inches. The step right behind it dropped too, a full twelve inches, so that it was flush with the first.

Cowboy instantly understood what was happening. Every single step of the staircase was settling, sliding down into increasingly deep recesses that would ultimately leave him at the bottom of a thirty-foot deep shaft. The higher steps were settling more slowly, but there was already a visible gap at the top.

He ran, vaulting onto the steps and bounding up them like his life depended on it, which it probably did. Each time his foot landed on a step, his weight hastened the settling process, and the shifting surface caused him to stumble repeatedly, until he was not so much running up the stairs as crawling. By the time he had clawed his way to the top, at least six feet separated the last step from the opening to the central chamber. Cowboy threw himself at the opening, knowing that if he didn’t catch it on the first try, he wouldn’t get another chance.

His forearms hit the stone threshold, his hands caught the edge, and then his full weight came down on his fingertips as the stair tread beneath his feet dropped away.

An ordinary man might have been able to hold himself there for a few seconds before his strength failed, but Cowboy was no ordinary man. A veteran soldier, he was like all John Lee Ray’s men, in exceptional physical condition. The muscles in his arms and across his back flexed and bulged until they strained the fabric of his shirt. The seams at the shoulder tore open with an audible rasp. Fighting both gravity and the friction of his torso against the sheer stone wall, he slowly hauled himself up until his chin was level with the opening.

“Help!” he gasped, not realizing that he was not the only one in a dire situation. No help came.

He swung his right elbow forward, then his left, so that both arms were entirely on the smooth floor of the chamber. He felt himself slipping, and tried to dig his fingers into the stone like claws. Fingernails bent and ripped free of their cuticles.

“No, damn it!”

His slide stopped as if his hissed denial had somehow altered the laws of nature. He strained again, and this time got his upper torso onto the stone floor. Another heave and he was free of the trap. Panting from the exertion and seething with anger.

It would be a few minutes before Cowboy would realize that he had fared better than any of the others.

Down the left-hand passage, Rooster had also heard the shouted warning a moment too late. He had, as he was wont to do, strode quickly and boldly to the far end of the chamber. There he had discovered a T-junction, though to access either of the intersecting passages he would have to crawl through a low opening and drop down a few feet.

He was just about to kneel down to shine his light into one of these passages when the floor dropped beneath him.

It took him a second to realize that the passage had tilted, angling down to where he now found himself on hands and knees. He was just starting to rise to his feet when he heard the deep-bass thunder of a huge stone block dropping out of the ceiling near the mouth of the passage to slam down on the sloping floor. It immediately began sliding toward him.

Rooster scrambled back, aware that if he didn’t get out of the way, the block would smash him against the back wall, and the only way to get out of the way was to dive into one of the adjoining passages.

Which one?

The stone ground ominously along the sloping passage. There was no time to think about it; he had to move. He turned to the right because that seemed the more natural way to go and dove out of the way of the sliding block. One corner of it struck a glancing blow, just enough to make him stumble but not enough to hurt, and then the massive rock settled into place, completely covering the mouth of the side passage.

Rooster recovered from his near-fall and stood upright directing his light forward to see where the passage went.

The beam showed a blank wall, about eight feet in front of him.

Dead end.

Rooster felt dread creep over him. He was completely sealed in.

He turned back to the block that had imprisoned him and started pounding on it, hoping to somehow signal to the others. The stone absorbed his blows without the slightest noise. He did however hear another sound, the same grinding that had accompanied the sliding block, but this time the noise was all around him.

He turned the light every direction looking for the source, realizing only when he felt it pressing against the top of his head that it was the ceiling that was moving… lowering. Desperately, he tried to brace it up with his body, but the massive weight bore him down to his knees, and kept coming.

In the last few seconds of his life, Rooster wondered what would have happened if he had chosen the other passage.

“Maddock!”

Bones and Alex both cried out together, but the ominous noise of the massive stone block sliding down the passageway drowned out their voices. The tunnel was filled with a cloud of dust, blocking their view of what happened next, but they didn’t need to see to know. There was a loud crunch as the block reached the end of the passage and settled into place. From somewhere deep inside the mountain, they could hear more stone blocks moving.

Alex started down the passage, but Bones held her back. “No way are you going down there.”

“I sent him down there.” Guilt twisted her face. “You tried to tell me. It’s my fault.”

Bones shook his head, but had no words to ease her grief.

“Yes, it is,” announced another voice. “And I will never let you live it down, Catholic girl.”

The words were broken up by a fit of coughing, but there was no mistaking the voice. As a dust-streaked figure emerged from the passage, Alex wrestled out of Bones’ slackening grip and rushed forward to intercept Maddock with an embrace that sent him into another coughing fit.

Bones overcame his stunned paralysis and started forward as well, throwing his arms wide as if to sweep them both into a bear hug. Maddock held up a hand to ward him off. “Slow down there, sailor. What do you say we just shake hands?”

“Maddock, you are the luckiest man I’ve ever met,” Bones said, still wagging his head in disbelief. “So are you walking through walls now?”

Maddock grinned. “Nope. Easier to go over them. I realized there was a big gap at the top of that block, so I climbed up onto it before it smacked the wall.”

Alex squeezed again. “I am so, so sorry.”

“Forget it. It was coin-flip really and I made the choice that seemed right.” He glanced down the opposing passage. “You know, just before I was almost squished like a bug, it occurred to me that the Templars were influenced by the architecture of the Byzantine Empire. That’s what the books say, anyway. So maybe the Templars picked up some other influences of the Eastern Church.”

“You’re saying we should go right?”

“I think it’s worth a shot.”

Bones cleared his throat. “All right, Houdini. You’ve hogged enough glory for one day. I’ll take it from here.”

Dane had to resist the urge to argue. He was the team leader; it was his job to lead — from the front. But leading wasn’t the same as walking point. He was part of a team, and that meant letting other people shoulder some of the responsibility.

He disengaged from Alex’s embrace, though when she held onto his hand, he didn’t shake loose, and nodded. “Right behind you.”

Bones approached the tunnel cautiously. “Smooth floor. I don’t see any holes for traps.”

“It’s your call,” said Dane. “I probably used up all my luck anyway.”

“All right. Stand back in case I come running out like my hair’s on fire.” Bones edged forward into the tunnel, sweeping high and low with the light before each step forward. Soon, only the glow of his light was visible, and then even that disappeared briefly, before shining back down the tunnel.

“That’s the all clear.” Hand in hand, Dane and Alex went down the tunnel to join him. At about the one hundred meter mark, the tunnel swung sharply to the left and a few steps later, ended in another circular room with three more arched openings.

“This time, left,” declared Alex, with some of her earlier confidence.

Bones answered with a mock salute and promptly headed down that tunnel. Dane and Alex didn’t wait for the all clear. They were closing in; Dane felt it in his gut. The secret doors, the traps, this entire elaborate cross-shaped labyrinth — it was all proof that the Templar treasure vault was real, and they were about to open it.

Perhaps because it corresponded to the long lateral motion that completed the Sign of the Cross, the length of this passage was at least twice as long as the previous one, and when it finally ended, they found themselves in yet another circular chamber, but this time there was only other way out, at the top of a staircase that spiraled around the circumference of the room.

Bones paused there shining his light up to illuminate a high domed ceiling and another door at the top of the stairs, perhaps forty vertical feet above. “Well, I don’t see any murder holes.”

“Either we’re done with traps,” said Dane, “or they’ve saved the best for last. I say we go find out.”

Dane felt his blood go ice cold when a languorous voice spoke from the tunnel behind him. “Why I think that’s a fantastic idea, Mr. Maddock. I would very much like to see what’s up there.”