Lions at Dawn (Kirov Series Book 28) Page 22

  Over the years, many had probed into the deep recesses of the cave, thinking to find some archeological remains of human habitation. Nothing was ever found beyond the few relics of the Paleolithic era, old stone axes, arrow heads, thin bone needles and fragments of pottery that were discovered in an upper gallery.

  Eventually, the place came to be seen as just another part of the vast fortress redoubt that Gibraltar became, and an old Moorish stone wall guards its entrance to this day. Some who probed too deep simply vanished, like one Colonel Mitchell and another young officer in the 1830s. They simply disappeared without a trace, and numerous expeditions into the caves to find them failed to locate any trace of their passage, and no remains were ever found.

  They were not the only men to vanish within the labyrinthine passages of those caves. In 1941, a certain British Sergeant who refused to surrender to the Germans thought to hide himself deep in the lowermost galleries of the cave. He, too, was never seen again—at least not by the men of his own era. Legend held that somewhere, the entrance to a 15 mile long hidden tunnel could be found within the cave, one that led all the way beneath the straits of Gibraltar to Morocco. Even in Greek times, the place was said to be the entrance to Hades, a dark underworld domain of demons and devils. And the Famous Barbary Macaques that now came back to the Rock again were said to have used the passage to make their way to Gibraltar from the African continent.

  When the second great war came, the place had been designated as an emergency hospital site, and it was the last refuge of the British defenders when the Germans launched their ill-fated Operation Felix to capture the Rock. At that time, the artisan engineers had drilled out an alternate entrance to the site to allow for better air to circulate into the chambers below. When they blasted through the rock with their work, part of the cave floor gave way and revealed a whole new series of chambers delving deeper into the earth. They gazed in awe at the high hidden walls of what is now called ‘Cathedral Cave,’ the stone carved by Stalactites that fused to resemble a soaring pipe organ. In other places, the walls look as though an artist like H. R. Geiger might have carved them, curiously alien formations that appear almost skeletal in places.

  One day, the cave would become a tourist venue for over a million visitors each year, and tickets would be sold to admit guests to the hidden wonders within, the soaring chambers, deep pools of pristine water, and amazing rock formations. That time was still decades away in the 1940s, when the scourge of war made Gibraltar a bitterly contested redoubt commanding the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.

  After losing the Rock in 1941, now Great Britain had her prized outpost on the Pillars of Hercules back again, and another group of explorers were at work, this time armed with hand held ground penetrating radar. They had been lured there by a finely engineered series of numbers burned into the metal shaft of what looked to be nothing more than an old skeleton key. One enterprising man soon discovered the numbers were geographic coordinates, an exact location within St. Michael’s Cave.

  To reach it, a small troop of men and women formed up on the Argos Fire. Among them were Elena Fairchild, Mack Morgan, her Chief of Security, and Captain of the ship, Gordon MacRae, with ten men at arms—the Argonauts. Had they come here in 1941, the place would have remained completely unknown and inaccessible. It was only in 1942 that the Royal Engineers set their charges off, but found no rubble after the explosion, for it had all fallen through a gaping hole in the stone floor to reveal this additional network of caves. By now, in January of 1943, the Engineers had explored the site, finding a chamber extending some 370 meters. A flight of steps, and a trap door, were installed to permit access.

  “Look at the walls,” said MacRae. “All wet with flowing water. It’s carved out those curtain formations there, and look at those flowstones—amazing.”

  “Step through here,” said Morgan. “I’ve toured this place in our time. They call it the Boxing Ring, on account of these ropes the engineers have installed to serve as guides and hand holds. This is really the heart of this rift. There’s a magnificent pool of water up ahead.”

  “Won’t there be places that the men of this era have yet to uncover?”

  “Perhaps,” said Morgan. “A pity we can’t just use GPS to get to those exact coordinates. As it stands, this map will have to get us where we want to go, though we might even have to do a little engineering ourselves.”

  “That would be risky,” said Elena. “After all, whatever we find here was hidden for a purpose. We won’t want it to become generally known.”

  “Aye,” said MacRae. “Then let’s get to the radar sets, and have the men do a sweep of this whole area. They can feed the data to Mac’s tablet and we’ll get some 3D imaging of the region.”

  Morgan was already huddling with the Argonauts, seeming to be in conference with a cluster of androids. The troops had donned their special TALOS suits, short for “Tactical Assault Light Operations Suit.” In addition to advanced Kevlar protection, it had a reinforced exo-skeleton that could be engaged under power from a battery. The conduits in the arms, legs, and spine would be made rigid under power to provide additional strength when holding something of great weight.

  The suit exterior was also photo sensitive, and could be programmed to display differing camo schemes after sampling ambient light levels and measuring surrounding terrain colors. It could make the Argonauts into chameleons of a sort, allowing them to blend into any surrounding terrain. They could also provide heat in cold environments, or the inverse, and had a health monitoring capability for the wearer, filtermask, night vision visor, reserve oxygen and water, and lastly, an embedded computer that could run on solar energy.

  Every man in the ten man team was connected wirelessly, and the squad leader could call up an image on his visor display that would indicate the location of each man relative to his position, and note his general health condition by color. Sergeant Keller had the group today, a steady and reliable man that had been with the Argonauts for five years, declining promotion to Lieutenant three times so he could remain “Gunny” to the lads. He was a man who had found his preferred place in life, and when rigged out in full TALOS gear like this, with a Tech Assault Rifle slung over his shoulder, he was in seventh heaven. Three hours later they had swept the area and it was time for map work on the tablet.

  “This section here looks promising,” said Morgan. “Look at that mass index there. That has to be very solid rock, at least in the density of granite, but this whole formation is limestone—very porous. That’s how these bloody caves formed in the first place.”

  “How deep is it?” asked Elena.

  “It looks to be thirty feet beneath us… About there.” He pointed to a depression in the floor of the cave.

  “No good trying to dig that deep,” said Elena, and she looked perturbed. “This just isn’t what I expected. Something is wrong.”

  MacRae inclined his head. “Care to elaborate on that?”

  Elena thought for a moment. “Remember that story I told you about the man found in a bar in Ceuta claiming to be a British Sergeant from WWII? No one believed him of course, because that was in 2020, eighty years after the war, and the man of thirty years making the claim wouldn’t have even been born yet. It was just bar talk, until he ran afoul of the authorities and began spouting off things that were intriguing, to say the least.”

  “What sort of things?”

  Elena smiled. “The man claimed he fought the Germans at Gibraltar—said he was in the last detail holed up right here, in Saint Michael’s Cave. That was laughable to anyone who heard it, because they knew the Germans never set foot on the Rock during the war, at least not in the history I know. The story was filed away, the man released, and who knows what became of him. Then the Watch suddenly gets very keen to find him again. I got the order personally—locate Hobson, that’s the man’s name, and I suppose all the other watchstanders got the same order as well.”

  “Ah…” said MacRae. “I remembe
r that now.” The recollection of the conversation he had with Elena was clear in his mind. He had been trying to sort all this crazy business out concerning the keys, just after the Rodney went down, taking one from them forever, or so he believed.

  “Someone sends you a message—Tovey himself from all accounts,” he remembered himself saying to her. “He sends you off to Delphi, and for what? That bloody box, that’s what. It brings the ship here, and gives us a shot at getting our hands on the key that went missing from the Elgin Marbles. I won’t ask how you knew about it, but there it is. Then, out of thin air, this Russian Captain produces yet another key. Some bloody fine rabbit he pulled out of his hat. And that was rather dramatic when he honed in on those engraved numbers being geographic coordinates. The key we lost on Rodney was supposed to open, or secure something in St. Michael’s Cave... I wonder what’s been hidden there, another of those thick metal doors and underground passages?”

  “Those caves get very deep,” said Elena, “and there are segments that have not yet been fully excavated. But… there is one thing more I can tell you. It happened a year before we set out on this mission… A man stumbled into a bar in Ceuta harbor, right south of Gibraltar across the straits. He claimed the Germans had taken the Rock, but that he had found a way out. Said he was a British Sergeant fighting there when it happened, at least that was the story in the police report. They assumed he had one too many that night, and that he was just a vagrant sailor off a tramp steamer, but nobody claimed him when the authorities contacted the ships in port that day. He had no passport, but did carry some authentic looking documents—a ration book, right from the war—this war.”

  “How did this come to your attention?”

  “It was just one of those odd stories that bounced around the web for a day or two, but somebody in British intelligence got curious about this fellow’s tale. They got hold of that police report. The fellow had it chapter and verse. His name was in the register of troops assigned to garrison duty at Gibraltar in 1940.”

  “Anybody could have gotten hold of that kind of information.”

  “True, but his story included a few details that now strike a nerve or two. The man said he was up on Windmill Hill Flats, above Europa Road, when a British battleship ran the straits and shelled German positions in and around the harbor. After that, they got the order to withdraw to St. Michael’s Cave. Ring a bell?”

  Those were details that were suddenly transformed from witless fancy to gospel truth after they arrived here. For this was an altered meridian, a changed historical account of the war. Now MacRae realized that that man was reporting details of events they had clearly seen happen here, and with that he realized that the British Sergeant must have come from this very same time—from this same bloody cave where he was standing right now. But how did he turn up in 2020, and still remain a man of thirty years?

  The answer was as obvious as his own presence there, for he was a man of that era, yet marooned here in the 1940s. He traveled in time…. The bloody British Sergeant traveled in time! It was either that, or he had one wildly accurate imagination, recounting events like the daring sortie by the battleship Valiant to shell the Germans on the Rock during their Operation Felix. It was eerie, and it could be no coincidence. They were, at that very moment, engaged in a hunt to find something that had been hidden here in St. Michael’s Cave, just like that little side trip to the Oracle at Delphi that landed the Argos Fire here.

  “Then this man Hobson found what we’re looking for,” he said to Elena, his eyes dark and serious.

  “It seems so.”

  “And he didn’t have to use all this equipment to do so.”

  “That’s what’s been bothering me,” said Elena. “We naturally came down here, as deep as we could get to the newly discovered galleries of the cave site. But now I realize that these areas were not even discovered until 1942.”

  “Aye, so that British Sergeant couldn’t have found anything down here. Then where would he have been back in ‘41 when the Germans were coming for them?”

  They looked at one another, then MacRae turned to his own Sergeant Keller, whistling. “Sergeant, secure this operation and get the men back to the upper gallery—on the double.”

  Mack Morgan came over, a question in his eyes. “What’s up?”

  “We’re not in the right spot,” said Elena. “The search has to start in the old cave site, not the new galleries here.”

  “But this lot is much deeper.”

  “Yes, but it won’t get us where we need to go.”

  “With all due respect, Mum, what makes you so sure of that?”

  Elena simply smiled at him. “A British Sergeant told me so.”

  Chapter 26

  It wasn’t unusual to find a Barbary Ape roosting about the stony slopes of the Rock. They were fond of the place long before the British came in 1704, and the British Army took to supervising them and even providing a daily food ration of fruit and nuts. Living mostly on the eastern heights, the little troops began to range more freely over time. By 2021, they were among the top tourist attractions on Gibraltar, and a law had to be passed forbidding the feeding of any Macaque to prevent them from foraging in the town.

  In 1942 there was only one small troop of seven monkeys on the Rock when the Germans had the place, and they fled, fulfilling the legend that Britain would hold the Rock only if the Apes were there. Once it was taken back by Montgomery, Churchill insisted that the population of Macaques be increased, issuing orders to troops in Morocco and Algeria to round up the monkeys and send them to Gibraltar.

  Three troops now inhabited the place, content to live under British rule again, and deemed “loyal subjects of the Crown.” Yet it was most unusual to find one in the lower galleries of the cave systems, particularly here, in St. Michael’s Cave. Elena stared at the little fellow they encountered, quite curious.

  They had moved through the Stalagmite Halls out of New St. Michael’s Cave, and then through the feature known as the Great Rift, seeing nothing unusual. This took them very near the entrance to the New Caves, where a winding hole called The Corkscrew burrowed straight down, connecting to the lower galleries of the old cave system. These were as deep as those in the new cave site, so they descended into a chamber known as The Grotto to continue their search. About mid-way through the lower series, they encountered the Barbary Ape, intent on something it was eating.

  “How did he get down here?” asked Elena.

  “Probably the same way we did,” said Morgan.

  The bright helmet mounted flashlights on the Argonauts, and perhaps their strange appearance in those TALOS suits, were suddenly enough to send the beast looking for safer ground. He scampered away, and when they reached the spot where he had been, Elena stooped to pick up a remnant of the food he had been eating.

  “Chocolate?”

  “Probably a treat from one of the garrison soldiers,” said MacRae. “The rascal didn’t want to share it with his troop, and came down here for a little private feast.”

  Then they found it, the dull brown wrapper, torn but largely intact, and there, written prominently across the front in green italic letters, it read “Milky Way.” A small oval below this indicated this was the “fun size.”

  “How did he get hold of that?” said Elena. “Isn’t that an American candy bar?”

  They stared at one another, until Miss Fairchild produced a tab device and looked it up. The Mars Candy Company, created by the family of the same name, was 100 years old and a worldwide operation with over $100 million in annual sales for that single product, only one revenue stream in its $33 Billion annual haul. In Europe the treat was simply called the “Mars Bar,” so finding this one here was most unusual, and a closer look at the crumpled candy bar wrapper sent Elena’s pulse into another gear.

  “Did any of the men bring this in here?”

  She was most insistent, but the entire squad was grilled and no one admitted to the crime. “Damn!” she exclaimed mor
e than swore, her voice edged with a sense of awe. “Look at this. First off, this wrapper wouldn’t have looked like this in 1942. The original wrappers were white, as in this image I called up. Now look under that flap at the bottom. Get some more light over here.”

  Three Argonauts leaned in around the others, focusing their helmet lights, and Elena squinted. “Can’t make it out,” she said, frustrated. Then the eagle-eyed Mac Morgan reached for the wrapper and was able to read the fine print.

  “It’s just marketing drivel,” he began. “Says ‘we value your questions and comments. Call…” he stopped short. “Good Lord…. It lists an 800 telephone number and a bloody web address… milkywaybar.com!” He looked at the others, completely befuddled. “Are you certain none of the men brought this in here?”

  Elena looked from Morgan to Captain MacRae, then wheeled about to find Sergeant Keller. “Find that monkey,” she said. “Now.”

  Two of the men had seen it scamper down into the cave feature known as the Prison. Morgan had been using a map reference to guide them, and he had also called up a document created during an earlier geological survey of these caves. One Captain Jerome and a Doctor Jackson of the 86th Regiment, with Sergeant Hanson and Bombardier Robert Smith of the Royal Artillery, had written up extensive notes.

  “They once thought this feature was the lowermost end of things here,” he said, then read from his pad: “All preceding explorers had arrived at the conclusion that ‘the Prison’ was the extreme end of this cavern, and it was only by means of great labor, and care, that we were enabled to prove the contrary. The axis of fracture, the lines of stratification, and above all the currents of air which were manifest… together with the sound, convinced me that there were other large caverns in this wonderful fissure, beyond the one we were in now…”

  “That would be Hanson’s Cave up ahead,” said MacRae, named for that Sergeant he had with him that day.”