Twenty feet below them, the multiple courses of brick at the wall’s base bowed under the hundreds of tons of sand, the mortar cracked in places, and wispy trickles of grit dribbled through the crevasses.
All at once the entire ten-foot width of the wall gave way. The wall failed completely, collapsing and falling outward into another chamber beyond like a burst dam. A tidal wave of sand swept through the breach, pushing the wall’s remnants like so much flotsam.
The four people who moments earlier were muttering their final prayers were borne along the tsunami and deposited unceremoniously in a tangle of limbs, the very sand that had been seconds from killing them cushioning their wild ride.
Mark was the first to recover, his booming whoop of joy bouncing from wall to wall in the large chamber. He reached across and held out a fist to Eric so they could tap knuckles. “Good call, my friend. Damned good call.”
Eric was a little pale. “I wasn’t so sure at the end.”
“Never a doubt.” Mark hoisted Stone to his feet, and they then helped Alana and Linda to theirs.
Alana threw her arms around Eric’s neck and kissed him as if predicting the wall’s collapse had made it happen. “Thank you,” she breathed into his ear.
“You’re welcome,” he replied awkwardly.
It took a few minutes to find their weapons and clean the sand from the barrels and receivers. The assault rifles weren’t designed to take this kind of punishment, so they had to be thorough.
They found themselves in another cave, still part of the same complex of limestone caverns riddling the hill above them. There was only one exit, a narrow cleft ten feet up the far wall and accessible by steps carved into the living rock.
“Now that we know this place is booby-trapped,” Linda said at the base of the stairs, “I’m taking point. Eric, you’re behind me, then Alana, then Mark. And from now on, we stick together, no exploring on your own. Everyone stay on your toes, and look for anything unusual—an odd rock, writing on the walls, anything.”
They climbed into the tight cave. Headroom wasn’t a problem, but the tunnel was so narrow it was difficult to walk without scraping their shoulders. The cave climbed steeply, and, with space so tight, their footing was uneven. A wrong step could twist an ankle. Linda was concentrating on her movements yet still aware of danger, and she spotted the trip wire well before she was going to trigger it.
It was a thin filament of copper that stretched across the tunnel at the level of her shins, with one end secured to the wall with an iron screw and the other vanishing up into the gloom ahead. She pointed it out to the others and cautiously stepped over it.
The sharply ascending tunnel ended another hundred feet from the trip wire in a small room with a low ceiling. They had to crawl under a wooden trestle built at the tunnel’s exit. The wire wrapped around a metal lever built into a device that would fall back when it was tripped. This in turn would release a carved-stone ball sitting on the angled cradle. The ball was about three feet around and weighed in at half a ton. A direct hit, after rolling and bouncing down the shaft, would crush a man flat, while a glancing blow would surely break bone.
“We should trigger it,” Mark said, mostly because the kid in him wanted to watch the stone hurtle down the tunnel.
“Leave it,” Alana said. The archaeologist in her hated the idea of disturbing what was the find of her career.
“We’ll compromise,” Linda said. She plucked a stone from the ground and wedged it under the boulder. Even if someone hit the trip wire and the lever were released, the rock would prevent it from moving.
There were a few other man-made items in the room—a battered wooden chest missing its lid, an empty sword scabbard for one of the Barbary pirate’s wicked scimitars made of beaten brass, a couple lengths of rope, and a half dozen thin metal shafts Mark identified as ramrods. They took the opportunity to change out their flashlight batteries, and started exploring further.
Three different tunnels branched off from what they called “the boulder room.” They explored one tunnel without incident and were halfway down the second one when Linda placed a foot on a hidden trigger. There was just the tiniest give under her foot, but she knew they were in trouble.
Just under the surface of the sandy passage, a wooden board had been buried and cleverly concealed. Her weight rasped a piece of steel against flint under the plank to produce enough sparks to ignite a fuse. The cask of gunpowder was secreted farther in the hole, and contained enough explosive to kill all four of them.
Linda jumped back instantly and, in a tackle that would have done a pro football player proud, pushed her three companions back until the whole pile of them went down. But the blast never came. Instead, the powder ignited and burned unevenly, a flaring, sputtering cauldron of fire that filled the tunnel with noxious white smoke. In the two hundred years since the trap had been set, the powder’s acidity had eaten through the wooden cask, so when it lit there was nothing to contain the fire and cause an explosive detonation.
“Everybody all right?” Linda asked when the last of the powder had burned itself out.
“I think so,” Alana answered, stifling a cough.
“I feel like I just went three rounds with Eddie in his dojo,” Eric replied, rubbing his ribs where Linda’s shoulder had hit him. “I never knew someone so small could hit so hard.”
“Amazing what a little adrenaline can do.” She stood and brushed herself off. “The fact that this tunnel’s booby-trapped tells me we’re on the right path.”
They kept going, and the tunnel started climbing. There was no way of knowing how deep they had gone or where they were in relation to the riverbank, but all of them felt they had to be getting close.
There was more evidence that people had spent a greater amount of time in this part of the cavern. There were marks in the sand coating the ground where men had walked, men who had constructed the elaborate traps they had already passed. Twice more, Linda stopped the party to check the ground, but they found no additional hidden bombs.
The tunnel turned sharply. Linda peered around the corner before committing herself and came up short. Around the bend stood an iron door embedded in the rock. The metal had a reddish hue, a tracery of rust having formed from exposure to damp air when the river still flowed. There was no lock or keyhole. The door was a featureless slab of metal, so they knew the hinges must be on the other side.
Linda dropped to one knee to dig through her pack.
Mark moved until he was directly in front of the door, spread his arms wide in a theatrical pose. “Open sesame,” he intoned. The door didn’t budge. He glanced over at Alana. “You know, I kind of thought that would work.”