They settled back as the jet sped onward. Tess closed her eyes and, despite her uneasiness, tried to follow Gerrard's advice and nap. If her premonitions were justified, she knew she'd be needing all her strength.
EIGHT
The bump of the wheels touching down awakened her. Tess rubbed her sleep-swollen eyes and peered outside. Compared to the airport in Madrid, Bilbao's was small, its air less hazy. Perhaps a breeze from the nearby ocean dispersed the exhaust fumes of cars, she thought. Again they avoided the terminal and stopped at a remote section of the tarmac.
Outside, Gerrard spoke as enthusiastically as he had when they'd left Madrid. 'Are you ready for another flight?'
'Another? But I thought our destination was Bilbao.' Tess continued to hope that Father Baldwin was listening.
'Just so we could change to another aircraft. We'll be heading east now, past Pamplona.'
Tess repressed a cringe, remembering that Pamplona was close to where Priscilla Harding had said that she'd found images of Mithras hidden in caves, less sweated, wanting to run, but again Secret Service agents flanked her..
'My friend's estate doesn't have a landing strip,' Gerrard explained, 'so now we'll be using this.' He pointed.
The sight of the helicopter made Tess feel light-headed. Powerless, weak-kneed, disturbed by her lack of control, she was led aboard, and now with increasing panic, she discovered that there was space enough only for a pilot, Gerrard, Hugh Kelly, Craig, herself, and two Secret Service agents. Her protection kept dwindling, her isolation increasing. No matter the confidence that her attraction to Craig had earlier inspired in her, she suddenly felt doomed.
The helicopter's blades whined, turning, spinning, increasing speed until their sound was a whump-whump-whumping roar. With a mighty surge, the helicopter lifted straight up, and Tess, who directed a despairing glance toward Craig, noticed that his expression was equally intense.
He didn't wink this time, and she didn't smile in return. What she did was swallow something hot and bitter.
She forced herself to pay attention to her surroundings, knowing that every detail was important and that she had to regain her discipline.
Study the landscape, her mind insisted. If you get in trouble, you'd better know where you are.
In contrast with the arid, flat, middle portion of Spain, this area along the country's northern coast was lush and hilly. The valleys below her were occupied by farms in which stoop-shouldered men and women wielded scythes to cut tall grass. The men wore trousers, long-sleeved shirts, and wide- brimmed hats. The women had long dresses and handkerchiefs tied around their heads. The absence of motorized farm machinery, combined with the slate roofs and stone walls of the buildings, made Tess feel as if she was experiencing a time warp, that she was witnessing a scene from a previous century.
But those impressions were fleeting – brief, ineffectual attempts to distract herself from her terror.
'That's Pamplona past those hills on the right,' Gerrard said matter-of-factly. 'You can just make out a few tops of buildings. Northeast of us is the French-Spanish border. We're now in a district called Navarra, and those mountains ahead are the Spanish Pyrenees.'
Tess wondered fearfully how close the helicopter was to the Pyrenees in France, to the burned-out ruins of the heretic stronghold on Montsegur, to the site of the slaughter that the European crusaders had inflicted and from where more than seven hundred years ago, after a group of determined heretics had escaped with their precious statue, this insanity had begun.
The mountains were spectacular: high, rugged, limestone cliffs, their deep gorges churning with narrow, swift rivers, their slopes thick with pines and beeches.
The helicopter thundered nearer. The peaks seemed to grow, their outcrops more jagged, their steep drops more wild. How high must they be? Tess wondered. At least seven thousand feet, she concluded – not as tall as the ranges she was familiar with, those in Switzerland and Colorado where her father had sometimes taken her to ski. But these had sharper inclines that made them seem taller, and their ravines were more forbidding. Rugged, she'd thought earlier. Wild. The words gained emphasis as she stared at a rapidly looming gorge, feeling dizzy as she lowered her gaze.
Below, amid tangled woods, a narrow dirt road wound past random gigantic boulders, entering the gorge. Abruptly she glanced up and stiffened as the helicopter also entered the gorge, the whump-whump-whump of the rotors intensified by their deafening echo off the craggy wall of rock on each side, the passage so seemingly narrow that she feared the blades would collide with an outcrop.
At once, the gorge ended. She exhaled, relieved, then exhaled again when the helicopter began to descend. A small valley appeared. Dense forest encircled grassland, and at the center, surrounded by a maze of fenced enclosures, small buildings flanked a commanding structure toward which the helicopter quickly dipped.
The structure had stone walls and a slate roof, the same as the farmhouses that Tess had seen in the fields near Pamplona. But that was the only similarity. Because those farmhouses had been small and modest. But what she stared at now, her uneasiness aggravated by the increasing downward tilt and thrust of the helicopter, was so wide and tall, so impressive…
'It's a castle,' Gerrard explained. 'Not the kind you see in England or in France or for that matter, anywhere else in Europe. This is Spanish castle. In the south, they used a Moorish design, but this type that's common in the north. It doesn't have the turrets, the parapets, the moat, and the drawbridge that you'd expect. It's more like a cross between a manor house and a fortress. The stone and the slate are barriers against an attack by fire. The only exterior wood is…'
'At the windows.' Tess strained to make herself heard above the roar of the sharply descending helicopter. 'Shutters. Even from here, they look thick.'
Gerrard nodded. 'And inside each room, there's a set of doors. Equally thick. A farther barrier to keep flames from reaching inside. But in theory, no one could torch the shutters because as we get closer, you'll see narrow slits in the five-foot-thick stone walls. The slits are so narrow that an outside archer couldn't cross the open area around the castle to shoot flaming arrows without being hit by archers within the castle, and those defending archers, concealed behind those narrow slits, were impossible targets.'
As the helicopter slanted lower, approaching a landing pad, Tess noticed animals in the fields, horses in some while in others there were… 'Your friend's a rancher?' she asked.
Gerrard looked puzzled. Then the wrinkles in his forehead relaxed. 'Ah, I understand. You think those are cattle. They're not. They're bulls. My friend breeds them as a hobby. Some of them will be used next month in the famous bullfight festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. I'm sure you've read descriptions of it, the skyrocket each morning, the frantic bulls being forced to run through the streets, the villagers testing their bravery by trying to race ahead of the frightened herd, some of the young men falling, being trampled and often gored. Eight days and nights of parties. Eight afternoons of ritualized death.'
Tess indeed had read about it, and now that she was close enough, she was able to distinguish the characteristics of the animals, their muscular flanks, their broad humped backs, their long curved horns projecting from thickly boned foreheads.
Bulls.
They were so much a part of Spain's culture that Tess didn't make further connection right away. But then she suddenly noticed one particular bull that had been separated from the others.