The Templar Salvation

Chapter 48

His lungs were on fire. Maybe clear air was only five or six strokes ahead of him. Maybe he could make it there—if he calmed down. But the awareness of the impending drowning, the awareness of the finite amount of time he had left, was making it worse. It was flooding his body with adrenaline and stoking his heartbeat to a point where his lungs were ready to explode outward.

For a split second, Reilly imagined what drowning would be like, but he quickly quashed the thought and pushed harder, moving even faster now. His hand was still sliding against the smooth roof of the tunnel, desperately seeking out his salvation. For an instant there, it did feel like the roof was sloping upward, barely perceptibly, but enough to give him hope, enough to make him fight the water even harder—then something pulled against him, yanking him back.

The cable, the one around his waist. He’d run out.

His hands went into a frenzy, working feverishly at the knot, pulling and tugging ferociously until he broke free from its grip. He flung it aside and started again, but the reality of it all was flooding in, the realization that he had to die now, that his willpower was fighting a losing battle to contain his lungs’ need to let something in, anything, even if it was freezing cold water.

He felt a surge of blood in his forehead, a panic that raced through every neuron in his body and choked his very soul, and although he wasn’t ready to give up, although he absolutely did not want to die, the need to breathe in was stronger than him, stronger than he could now overcome—and in that moment of pure terror, in that instant when his life seemed like it was about to get flushed away in a surge of molten snow, something broke through, a signal, coming from the tips of his fingers, fighting off the dread with a stab of hope.

A coolness.

The coolness of air slipping past damp skin.

His fingers were in open air.

It sent an electric shock through his body and spurred him forward even faster. He planted his feet against the bottom and took a couple of steps forward, his hand groping the roof of the tunnel frantically, the water splashing against it and confusing his senses, his face turned up and staring desperately into the inky blackness above him—then he rose. He couldn’t last another second. He just burst up, his face tilted sideways, hoping his face wasn’t about to collide with solid rock.

He found air. The clearance was no more than a couple of inches, but it was enough. He inhaled furiously, letting the air howl into his lungs, coughing and sputtering from the water that was also trickling in, dizzy with oxygen and elation.

He didn’t move, not for a minute or so. He just let his heart calm down, let his lungs gorge themselves with air, let the tension seep out of his muscles. When he felt settled again, he took a couple of steps farther upstream, checking the roof as he did. It was rising again, slowly but surely. And in the distance, as if congratulating him on passing some kind of sadistic test, a wraithlike halo of light was beckoning him from the roof of the channel, maybe thirty or so yards upstream.

GETTING INTO THE SHAFT was the hardest part of the ordeal.

Reilly used the pick to hoist himself up into it, the move all the more arduous due to the added weight of his drenched clothes. His first few attempts ended in defeat as the soft tufa he’d planted the pick into crumbled under his weight and sent him splashing back into the stream, but he finally managed to hook it into a more solid patch and lift himself into the vertical shaft.

Like a moth drawn to the light, he climbed up and found himself in a similar passageway to the one he had left Tess in. He found the cabling on the wall and followed it first in one direction, then in the other until he found some steps that led upward.

Upward.

He found his way back to the mouth of the shaft and pulled the cabling off the wall beside it as a marker for his return trip, then followed the cabling through a seemingly endless series of chambers and passageways, smashing the light fixtures wherever he encountered them to lead him back to the shaft. And then it appeared, first as a hint of its presence, then quickly growing so it brought back the caves around him into view: sunlight, bright, glorious, and inviting.

He emerged in a canyon he didn’t recognize. There was no one around either, just a bare, desolate landscape. It was similar to the one that had led into the underground city—more rock formations of what looked like huge, upside-down incisors, more meringue-like hills—but it was a different canyon, of that he was certain. He used his pick to gouge a big X by the entrance of the cave dwelling he had emerged from, then, making sure he made a mental note of every turn he took and using his pick to leave markers behind at every bend, he staggered ahead, looking for help.

A lone mule, tied to a stake in the ground, interrupted his aimless wander. Then the rasp of a throat that had endured decades of nicotine damage added to his confusion.

“Merhaba, oradaki.”

He stopped and scanned his surroundings. There was no one around.

“Iste burada. Buradayim,” the voice called out.

He followed it upward and saw an old man just sitting there, in the middle of nowhere, perched on a rickety wooden chair in a small, exposed chapel that had been carved into the rock face. The man was waving at him with a slow, frail arm. A small table next to him displayed a few cans of soft drinks, while a tin kettle stood ready on a small camping gas burner.

The man flashed him a mostly toothless smile. “Icmek icin birsey ister misiniz, efendi?” he asked, pointing at the cans on the table.

Reilly shook his head and looked at him for a curious second, making sure the man was actually there and not some figment of his battered mind, then hurried over to him.

IT WAS ANOTHER THREE HOURS before he made it back to Tess. He’d brought help with him, in the form of the old man’s son and two grandsons, along with plenty of rope and a few flashlights.

He hadn’t been able to explain where he’d left her, not that he knew himself. The surest way to get back to her was to retrace his steps. With the aid of the locals, it was an easier journey than his solo trek. The submerged part of the channel was the only real challenge they faced; a bucket, held upside down like a diving bell, was the only available solution, but it did the trick. Reilly had also taken along the one thing he knew Tess would be happier to see than his own face: a plastic bag, one that was big enough to seal shut. To keep the codices, and Hosius’s document, dry.

The grin on her face when she saw it told him he was right.

That was the good news.

The bad news was confirmed once they finally got back to the entrance of the subterranean citadel that they had gone through on the way in.

Abdulkerim was still dead. And the Iranian had, it seemed, vanished.