What the hell, she wondered. Had she totally misread the American? That he’d failed to “score” that night in her apartment and had decided to just move on? She frowned. Not at all, she thought. That good-night kiss. There’d been a gentle promise there. She thought about it. Then she remembered he had originally been planning some more diving expeditions, although that was unlikely after what had happened at Caesarea. She fished in her purse for the receipts from the dive shop and made one more call.
David was suited up and ready to go into the cistern just before noon. Everything with the Land Rover and the morning ascent to the fortress had gone as planned. As long as he got back down before the entire place shut down for Shabbat, he could make sure the security people got a correct head count. Stupid tourist just wandered off somewhere.
He checked his gear for the umpteenth time, switched on his headlamp, activated his dive console, and then lowered himself into the black rectangle of water at the bottom of the slab opening. He had pulled two of the steel staging pipes across the opening so he would have something to grab when he came back up. He’d also attached a hundred-foot-long rope to one of the pipes and then tied a spare handheld battery lamp to the end of it and added a few rocks in a catch bag. He switched the lamp on and then lowered eighty feet of the rig into the water, paying out line until it hung straight down. This would give him a reference point within the cistern to lead him back up to the hole. From the surface, he could not make out the light down below in the black water.
He’d measured the water temperature and found it to be warmer than he had expected, sixty-two degrees. Although this was far from warm, he calculated that this would give him an extra two minutes at maximum depth. He’d split the difference in his calculations and set the bottom time for fifteen minutes, with bottom time defined as the time from beginning of his descent until beginning of his ascent. If he came up to a lesser depth sooner than that, he’d gain an extra few minutes at the lesser depth, but not much. He was using the rules for recreational diving and trying to be conservative.
He sat there on the edge for a moment. What are you waiting for? he asked himself. The image of that wet-suited figure hovering above him looked back at him from the black surface. Was he really ready to go back underwater? He’d been mentally skating around a grimmer possibility regarding the incident in the harbor. Had someone tried to warn him off what he was doing? If so, that someone had to know what he was up to, and if that was true, the someone might decide to take even harsher measures now that he’d come back to the mountain. He shook his head like a wet dog to clear away the dark thoughts and then dropped into the water.
He adjusted his mask and regulator and let go of the pipe. He was now neutrally buoyant, not floating anymore but definitely not sinking. He arced over and began to swim down into the cistern. The water was not exactly clear, but it wasn’t murky either. He turned periodically to sight in on the reference line with its dangling light, which was more visible now that he was heading down into the cavern. Of the walls he could see absolutely nothing, and he experienced a moment of vertigo as he stopped, suspended in a volume of water, his headlamp sending refracted beams of light into the void. He was absolutely, positively breaking all the rules here: a deep dive, by himself, no backup on the surface, and into a cavern about which he knew nothing. Brave? Yes, but not very bright, as he had heard his Uncle Jack say all too often.
After three minutes, he finally reached the bottom and hovered upright, paddling upward with gentle flapping motions to stay near the bottom. Then he bent over to touch the bottom and found, to his amazement, that it was littered with what looked like crusty, earthen half-sized bricks. There was a film of superfine silt along the bottom, and his efforts to inspect the bricks immediately enveloped him in a brown cloud. He swam sideways away from the silt cloud until the water cleared. He looked around for the reference light and found it behind him, not where he expected it to be. He looked straight up to assure himself that his bubbles were going up, not sideways or even down. They were. His wrist depth gauge indicated one hundred and four feet. He looked at his dive console compass and then started swimming due west, which should take him to the interior wall of the cavern. After a minute and a half he came up against it, a smooth rock surface that appeared to be natural, not man-hewn like the cisterns in the fortress’s side walls.
Suspicions confirmed, he thought; much too big to have been man-made. He turned right, or north, and swam along the wall, ascending now to eighty feet, looking for steps or a ladder of some sort cut into the wall, but there was nothing. He did notice that there was a thin, boiling cloud of silt trailing behind him.
He kept an eye on the glow of his reference light out in the middle and realized that after a minute or so, it was moving to his right, which meant the cavern was indeed spherical, with a continuously curving wall. When he got to what should be the north side, he checked his time and found he had about eight minutes left, based on a hundred-and-ten-foot dive. He kept checking his compass, and when he was swimming in a southerly direction he ascended to seventy feet, some thirty-five feet off the floor of the cavern. Here there were no more silt clouds. The bottom must be layered with very fine mud particles. He kept going until he was headed west again, which meant he had reached the southern curve of the sphere. Still no features worth mentioning, just smooth rock walls, with the occasional vein of quartz gleaming back at him.
He stopped when he was pointed north again, alongside the west wall, and checked time and depth. The timer was based on the deep dive of a hundred and ten feet, but he had been at eighty to seventy feet longer than he had been at the deepest depth. He had a few extra minutes. He was comfortable enough from the exertion of breathing and swimming, but he knew he dared not push it. One of the first deadly things nitrogen did was to cloud a diver’s judgment. He checked his reference light once more and was just barely able to see its glow out there in the middle somewhere. He realized he should have left another light on up at the exit hole, in case something happened to the reference light.
Crazy shit you’re doing down here, he thought. His old diving instructor would kick his ass three ways for this: long, hard, and often. Along with a lot of Israelis, too, he thought with a mental smile. He ascended again, now up to fifty feet, and reversed course, going back counterclockwise around the vast cavern, looking for anything at all. He’d made it all the way around the southern and eastern sides when his timer alarm pulsed. He reset it for two more minutes and kept going; if he was going to break all the safety rules, why not one more? Was that nitrogen talking?
He had traversed what should have been the western face when the timer pulsed again, and this time he turned his face up and began the ascent, straight up the wall.
Fifteen feet up a dark shadow caught his eye. He stopped and turned around.
There.
He swam over to the shadow and saw that a large round boulder was protruding out of the smooth rock wall like a bulging eyeball. It stuck out enough to create a shadow when his headlamp hit it from below. He swam around it, wondering why there would be this discontinuity in the otherwise smooth cistern wall. There was another shadow ten feet away. He swam over to this and discovered a narrow opening. A cave? He put his head in and saw that the cave was very shallow, a pit more than a cave. It ended about eight feet back. He pulled out and saw yet another shadow. Same thing — another small fissure that went nowhere.
He went back to the boulder and checked his console. Thirty-five feet. Air to spare. Swimming in place beneath it, he ran his hand over the slippery rock surface. Bits of rock fell away, as if it were rotten. It looked like sandstone, and the water had corroded the edges. He saw a small cloud of silt squirt out around the bottom of the boulder. Silt? Why would there be silt up here on the side of the cistern? There shouldn’t be—