Lions at Dawn

Chapter 25

It was an ancient network of limestone caves, its entrance perched 300 meters above the sea. Created by the slow seepage of seawater through the porous rock, the acidic conditions gradually wore away the stone, opening small cracks along the fault lines and widening them to deep passages that opened onto vast caverns. The numerous stalactites and stalagmites formed by the steady drip of this water were built over thousands of years, pale white teeth in places, and in others, deeply riven formations colored in ochre and amber hues.

Ages ago, prehistoric human left the traces of their rudimentary tools and bowls in the cave, and drew the images of their most desired prey in elegantly rustic depictions of herding animals like the Ibex. Those drawings were thought to be over 20,000 years old, spanning twice the length of any fragment of recorded human history. Yet some believe the caves were far older, for the discovery of two non-human skulls dated them to 40,000 years—Neanderthal skulls, the primate that failed to survive into modern times.

The ancient Greeks and Romans knew the place, for it was mentioned in Homer’s writings. Later, it was given a name because of its resemblance to a similar cave grotto found in Italy, a place where the Archangel Michael was said to have appeared. To the men who had delved into the towering rock above the cave, it was simply called “Old Saint Michael’s,” though the British had tried to change the name to “St. George’s Cave” in the 18th Century. That hubris failed to take root, and by the time of Queen Victoria, the cave became widely known as a place of magical beauty, its twisting pillars of stone serving as a background for ceremonial events like weddings, concerts and even a gala dance party at times.

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 remember 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 more 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.”

“Beyond that we get Brown’s seat, a shelf of stone where he believed this entire fissure ended. He said it looked to be impenetrable by any normal means of exploration.”

“Well that Macaque went this way, we all saw him. Have the men turned anything up?”

No trace of the beast had been found, which left the party with an unsettled feeling of mystery here. They were certain the monkey did not get past them. In fact, the men heard it making sounds up ahead of them, but could find no trace of the rascal.

“What’s directly above us?” asked Elena, eyeing the toothy falls of stalactites from the roof of the chamber.

“Lenora’s Cave,” said Morgan. “Then the Bell Chamber.”

“Lenora’s cave…” that rang a bell in Elena’s mind. “Wasn’t that the cave that was said to lead to the hidden tunnel under the Straits of Gibraltar?”

“Just an old tale,” said Morgan.

“You know they once thought this place was bottomless,” she said. “Let’s do a radar scan of the entire area near Brown’s seat—that shelf of rock over there. Look high and low.”

MacRae was looking at his compass, and now he held it out to the others. “Damn thing has gone bonkers,” he said. It was spinning this way and that, unable to find true north.

“This Lieutenant Brown mentions that as well,” said Morgan, reading again… “The fact of the magnetic needle being slightly deflected in some places, shows evidently strong traces of iron in the cave.”

“Well this is more than slightly deflected,” said MacRae. “It’s spinning about like a top now.”

“A magnetic anomaly, and well beneath Lenora’s Cave,” said Elena. “A missing Barbary Ape that had to have found some way forward from this point. Gentlemen, get busy.”

The ten man squad fanned out, their helmet lamps searching all the ground ahead. They nosed around the twisted pillars of limestone extending up from the floor, and probed with files and other tooling at the walls. Three men had the hand held ground penetrating radar sets, and it wasn’t long before they scanned some very interesting returns.

“I was expecting a solid mass,” said Morgan. “You know, one of those well machined doors like we found at Delphi, but this is reading quite the opposite. That monkey is on to something here. That big rock there reads solid, but these readings show a void beyond that stone.”

They were, in fact, standing before the very same stone where Sergeant Hobson had been prompted to get after the Barbary Ape the previous year, though none of them knew that at the moment. The Argonauts searched the sides of the rock, but it appeared to be emerging directly from the scored limestone wall behind it. Then they got perhaps the same break that had led Sergeant Hobson on. There came a skittering sound, and then something fell right onto the bill of the helmet worn by MacRae. He reached up, thinking to brush away some small lose stone fragment, but instead he was amazed to see a peanut shell fall to the cave floor, right between the toes of his boots. He stooped, confirming his find, and handing it to Elena, and now all eyes looked up, the beams of the ten helmets suddenly catching the amber glow of two eyes, cat like, in the shadow of the upper rock where it approached the wall. Then they vanished.

“There’s the little beastie,” said MacRae. “Come on lads, get that folded ladder up.”

It took all of five minutes, but Sergeant Keller led the way up, noting scratches on the rock as he went. At the very top, it first seemed that there was no way to proceed, but as he eased himself to the place where they had seen the Macaque, he called down.

“A break on the rock up here,” he said. “But I don’t think I can get through.” It was too small for the broad chested Sergeant, but they had a smaller man in the team, and he climbed up to the place, and was barely able to squeeze through.

“A very narrow passage,” he said. “I’ll have to slide through on my back.” For a time, Corporal James was only able to move by squirming on his back and using his shoulder blades to keep him going, but gradually, the passage opened up a bit. They heard him calling, seeming very distant now, his voice becoming a slight echo of itself.

“Switch to your helmet radio,” said the Sergeant.

Morgan looked at Elena. “Well I think we’re on to something here. Is it another chamber, Sergeant?”

“No sir, my man James says it’s more of a long passage, very winding, and the walls are scored with well faulted rock. He says it resembles Hell’s Throat.”

“That’s the bottomless pit you were talking about,” said Morgan. “When the Moors had the place, they said it was often used to hide treasure when outside forces were threatening to take the Rock from them. Many have tried to find it, and there are a few ‘Grandfather’s tales’ about Hell’s Throat. I read up on one the other night when we were prepping for this mission.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Elena.

“Well, Mum, it concerns a British soldier, Grimsby by name, who had a friend named Peter Provost who was led to Hell’s Throat by a couple of Moors. They threw in a torch, and it fell away to a mere spark before it vanished. Then they threw in stones, which clattered down and down until they could hear no further sound. Hence the rumors about that drop being bottomless. Well, this Provost fellow decided to rig out some ropes and climb down for a look. About ninety feet down, he came to a shelf of stone big enough for him to stand and walk along its edge. It led him to an aperture in the walls of the throat, and that opened onto a passage—or so he claimed. The man got marooned there when the two Moors that led him to the spot heard British soldiers coming and fled, dropping the rope that was tied fast to this Provost fellow. The rope fell over the brink into the abyss, and the man was stranded over 90 feet down.”

“Poor fellow,” said Elena. “How did he get out?”

“That’s the odd part,” said Morgan. “There was an attack on the British contingent by men from the Spanish Camp at nearby Son Roque. The two sides were always at each other’s throats. Well, this man Grimsby was taken prisoner, and transported out to a Spanish P.O.W. ship anchored in the bay. The Spaniards were trying to blockade the Rock with a little fleet out there, but here’s the strange twist in all of this. Days later, a boat arrived from Morocco, delivering yet another prisoner to that ship, and lo and behold, it was this Peter Provost, recognized immediately by Grimsby, in spite of the fact that he seemed dazed and haggard. The Moors said he had been found wandering the hills behind a village—on Ape’s Hill, in Morocco!”

“This is sounding all too familiar,” said Elena. “Was there anything else to the story?”

“Grimsby said that Provost was babbling on and on about pillars of fire, utter nonsense, but he did manage to extract something of what may have happened to him. In desperation, the man apparently followed a deep subterranean passage, which continued to descend for some time before it eventually turned up again. He was down to his last torch, which eventually guttered out, but in that eerie darkness, probing along with a walking stick, he claimed that a strange greenish glow was seen all about him, just enough for him to make way. All the while, he claimed he could hear the sound of water, high overhead. It wasn’t a dribble like the seepage that formed these stalactites, but the deep swell of some great body of water. So you know where this is going, aye?”

“The hidden passage under the Straits of Gibraltar,” said Elena.

“Aye, and it was said that Provost came upon a mummy of a Moor, a dagger still embedded in its bony chest, and saw two jars, both empty, but with a scatter of gold coins on the stony floor of the passage. By the time he was found, Provost was not in his right mind, but he continued to babble on about this hidden passage to the Spaniards, thinking they might be interested in it as a way into the Rock. They paid him no mind, and it seems he was never quite right in his own head again after that—assuming any of this can be believed.”

“Interesting,” said Elena. “Your map shows this cave is very near that place—Hell’s Throat. I think we’d best tell our Corporal to scout that passage out. Anyone else care to try and get through that gap up there? Let’s get some tooling up and see if we can widen it.”

Sergeant Keller told the Corporal to survey the way ahead and see how big the fissure was. The report came back that it was now beginning to descend, steeply in places, and as yet there was still no sign of the Macaque. It was then that Keller gave Mac Morgan a quick look.

“Corporal James,” he said, using his visor microphone. “Your TALOS signal just went yellow. Hold your position.”

The Sergeant had his visor down, and he could read the Corporal’s signal as a green dot, one of ten that corresponded to all the men in his squad. It had just turned yellow. Now he heard the Corporal’s voice in his earpiece, but it seemed fragmented, the signal losing integrity.

“You’re breaking up, Corporal. Reverse your steps and fall back until we get a clear signal. I repeat—fall back. Do you copy, James?”

Nothing came back but a fine wash of static. Then, to the Sergeant’s great surprise, he had only nine green dots on his visor. Nothing was reading for the Corporal at all, and where his amber dot had once been, a steady winking red dot was now displayed, indicating a malfunction. He looked at the others, a puzzled look on his face.

“We’ve lost him,” he said. “He went red.”

“Perhaps he stumbled and fell.”

“No sir, that red light indicates no signal from his TALOS suit at all now. Even if he was unconscious, I should still be able to read his suit, but it’s as if… he just vanished!”

MacRae was all business. “You men there—where’s that bloody tool satchel? On the double!”

Chapter 27

The ladder up was rigged in a matter of minutes, and a man was looking over the opening, well hidden in the shadows of the upper rock. It was seen that on one side of the rock, several scratches and scuff marks indicated someone else had tried to climb to the spot, perhaps with success, if Elena’s story bore credence.

“About that Grandfather’s tale,” said Elena to Mac. “It doesn’t seem like there was any movement in time.”

“Aye,” said Mac. “The fellow turns up days later when he’s delivered to that prison ship.”

“There was one odd thing, assuming the whole story isn’t bunk. What do you make of what he said about the pillars of fire?”

“Miss Fairchild… I think we can safely say that story was a load of rubbish, probably just concocted to bolster the legends concerning this place.”

“Oh? Then where’s our Corporal James?”

“My bet is that he met with an accident. Maybe his suit failed, and he lost his helmet lamp. We’ve no idea what’s beyond that stone. There may be a fairly treacherous passage back there.”

It was soon determined that the very narrow entrance that required the Corporal to slide in on his back could be opened with the setting of a small low-yield explosive charge. The Artisan Engineers had blasted numerous openings and tunnels into the limestone over the years, and it remained very stable, so there was little risk of a collapse. Yet for safety’s sake, they rigged out a remote detonator, and retired beyond the prison feature, about a hundred meters from the detonation. It went off without a hitch, and the Argonauts were quick to the scene, looming like automatons in the dust until it finally settled, their helmet headlamps casting long amber cones of light as they worked to clear out the broken stone and rubble.

“We’ve got that passage opened up enough for any of us to get through,” said MacRae. “But I’d recommend we send in a two man recon team first, and they should be tethered to us here with a sturdy rope. The men have rock climbing gear, and both Barret and Cooke have a good deal of experience. I don’t think the rest should proceed until they give the all clear. Perhaps they’ll find our man James quick enough. He wasn’t very far in.”

But they didn’t find the Corporal, which created yet another mystery to be solved. The way beyond the rock was a narrow throat and gradually opened to a passage allowing a man to stand with little difficulty. Yet it was bounded on every side by solid rock. The stony floor was unbroken or perforated by any pits of crevasses, and the walls, though wrinkled and irregular, offered no apertures or side tunnels of any kind. Above there was just the hint of new Stalactites beginning to form, and in places, the walls seemed wet with thin trails of water that glimmered in the helmet lamps.

As the two men pushed on, the party beyond the rock played out the sturdy nylon rope, keeping just enough tension to have a bit of a tactile connection to the recon team, letting them pull the rope on as they advanced. All the while, Sergeant Keller was keeping a close watch on the condition of both men with his helmet visor, relieved that they remained solid green.

Then one man went yellow and he immediately ordered the team to halt. “Scout team. Stand where you are,” he said quickly. “Reverse five paces.”

He watched, seeing the yellow light, Private Barret, shift from yellow to green. He told the men to look as far ahead as they could for any sign of the Corporal, but nothing was reported. “Very well, hold position there and await further orders.” The Sergeant turned to Morgan. “Sir, this is about the spot where I lost contact with Corporal James. I just saw one of the scouts losing signal integrity, and so I’ve halted the team.”

“How far in have they gone?”

“Looks to be about 50 meters from the rope we’ve played out, and I’m not sure why we can’t maintain a signal hold. These rocks aren’t all that dense and the TALOS suits should be able to broadcast out 500 meters under these conditions. It’s been well tested.”

They soon found that even normal voice communications were starting to show interference, prompting the Sergeant to order the men to fall back another five meters until they recovered signal strength.

“They’ve seen nothing?” asked Elena.

“Not yet,” said the Sergeant. “But Barret reports the passage makes a bend to the right and seems to descend ahead of their present position. That could be the spot where we lost the Corporal. Shall I have him edge forward? The second man can keep a firm hold on him with the rope.”

“Very well. Proceed.”

The Sergeant ordered Barret to narrate every step he took, so he could hear him as long as possible. As he advanced, there was rising static on the voice line, until his voice was lost in the wash.

“Hold fast to that tether,” the Sergeant cautioned his other man. Cooke was still in signal range, and Keller could hear his breathing over the open connection. His condition dot was safely green, but the yellow dot for Barret had him worried. Then it happened.

Cooke had his helmet lamp focused ahead on his mate, the rope between the two men kept taut as Barret advanced. He saw the other man reach the bend in the passage ahead, and then disappear around the corner. Seconds later, the rope when completely limp and fell slack to the stony floor of the passage. Quite surprised, he called out to Barret, for the man could not have been more than fifteen meters ahead of him. All he heard was the echo of his own voice. He tried calling on his helmet radio, but there was nothing but static.

“Damn,” he swore, reporting the incident to the Sergeant, who already suspected the worst. The yellow dot for Barret had gone red… Cooke was ordered to pull on the rope, thinking the other man may have fallen, meeting some unseen stumbling block that may have taken down Corporal James as well. That might account for the rope going suddenly slack like that. Barret could be on the floor of the passage now, but it was not so.

As Private Cooke pulled slowly on the rope, it offered no resistance at all, yet it had been firmly clipped to the other man’s waist belt on the TALOS suit, and with a very sturdy clasp. As he gathered the rope in, he soon came to its end, seeing there was now no clasp at all. The end of the rope seemed singed and burnt, fused as if cut clean through by a laser, or perhaps an acetylene torch. There was no knife work involved. The charred end was ample evidence that it had been severed by some kind of heat. He activated his radio and reported what had happened.

“We’ve lost Barret,” said the Sergeant. “Cooke says the rope went slack, and it’s been burned clean through.”

“Burned?”

“He says the end is seared—still warm in his hand.”

“Can’t say I like the sound of that,” said MacRae rubbing the stubble on his chin. He eyed Miss Fairchild, seeing the worry in her eyes.

“Well, what’s happened to them?” she asked. “We should have rigged out a video on the second man.”

“Wouldn’t have helped,” said Morgan, coming over after huddling with Sergeant Keller. “There’s a blind turn, about fifteen meters ahead of the second man. Private Barret vanished after he made that turn, so the other man would have to be right on his heels to see anything, and we might have lost the two of them in that instance. Cooke has called out for him, and Barret should hear him easily enough, but nothing comes back, and the TALOS suit reads no signal at all, just like the Corporal.”

“Alright,” said Elena. “I think it’s fair to say we’ve found the source of our magnetic anomaly. If the information we have about the time rifts is accurate, then I think we may have found one right here.”

“Unsecured?” said MacRae. “I thought these rifts were to be under lock and key. That’s what all this bloody business with the keys is about, right?”

“So we believed. Who knows, these passages and caves twist off in all directions down here. We may have just uncovered an approach to this rift that the key makers never found.”

“The key makers? Who are they?” Captain MacRae was getting too many questions and not enough answers.

“Somebody had to engineer these keys and place them in the artifacts where they’ve been found. Someone had to put that key into the Selene Horse.”

“Aye,” said MacRae, “and when did he do that? And Why? For this little foray here? If that key was supposed to secure something here, then what’s happened to our men?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out now,” said Elena, determined.”

“But we don’t even have the key that was supposed to correspond to this place—assuming we’re on the right coordinates that man Dorland reported. We’ll never have that key, Elena. It went down with Rodney.”

“Never say never,” she winked at him. “We won’t find it here—not in this time, but who’s to say we couldn’t find it in some other time.”

“What? Some other time? You act as though we’re at liberty to just shift about as we please. We’re marooned, the way I see things. You believe that box sent us here simply to retrieve the key that was aboard the Rodney. Well, that’s all gone to hell, and what I see here in this little jaunt is just sour grapes. If there is another door here, and built of the stuff like we saw at Delphi, then we’ll never get through it with demolitions. That site looked to be damn near impregnable, save for that key—and where did that one come from?”

“Gordon,” she said with an admonishing look, “we can deal with all of that later. Right now I’ve two missing men to worry about.”

“Aye, you’re right, but how do you want to proceed?

“Something is odd about these disappearances. It would seem to me that those men might simply backtrack and get to where they were before they vanished.”

“At the moment, we have no way of knowing what’s around that bend up ahead in the passage, and anyone who gets cheeky enough to have a look goes missing. The path may drop off to a bad fall. It could be anything.”

“What we do know is that getting forward seems easy enough, but getting back must be quite difficult. This bit with the rope getting severed like that is eerie. It’s as if the man was sent somewhere else, entered some kind of rift like those the American Physics Professor talked about. After all, that’s what we think these keys are supposed to secure. One was aligned right along that stairway at Ilanskiy, as Captain Fedorov reported.”

“So you figure we’ve found another here?”

“I can’t think of any other explanation, and it’s a one way ticket for some reason. Suppose now, in 1943, it’s easy enough to get around that bend in the passage. The man walks right in to a rift, and time spirits him away. But that inconvenient tether presents a little problem, so it just gets severed when he shifts. What you say might be correct. There could be a drop off there, or some other hazard. But think of it this way. If our men do shift to some other time, the passage may have changed. These formations have been fairly stable, but something could have happened between now and then that changed things. Suppose they shifted forward, but ten years before the time where they arrive, there was a collapse of this part of the passage. Now, when they look over their shoulder, there is no way back.”

MacRae thought about that, then something darker entered his mind. “Suppose they move in time as you suggest,” he said. “But there’s no clear space for them when they arrive at the other end. Taking your collapse scenario, they could just be shifting forward into rubble and fallen rock. They could be…”

The conclusion the Captain had presented was dark indeed. They could be dead, killed trying to manifest into solid rock. This rift, if that was what existed here, was unsecured. They had not found any engineered gateway, nor could they have opened it if they did, not having the key.

“So what’s our play?” said MacRae. “Do we send in another man? Pardon the metaphor, but won’t that be like throwing good money after bad? Do we all just follow suit and try our luck in that passage. If you want my advice, I say we should secure this site, leave a team here on watch incase those men do get back, and get the bloody hell out of here. This place is eerie enough without having men slipping through cracks in time.”

“The Macaque,” said Elena. “You know how damn clever those things are, and you saw what it had in hand with that candy wrapper.”

“You’re saying it used this passage here to get to the future somehow?”

“How else would it have that Milky Way bar? When we showed up, it fled this way on purpose. It must have known that this was no dead end. No… I think it knew exactly what it was doing. It went right up that rock to the top where we found that entrance. I think it used this passage before.”

“To come and go? Then why can’t our men get back here?”

“This might be a one way street,” said Elena, thinking. “Those Barbary Apes have been here so long that they must have explored every nook and cranny on the Rock. Nobody pays them any mind. They might have found another way back to this time—another segment of this rift. Look at all these caves and passages down here. Suppose the time rift here is like that, not just one locality, but a network like these caves. This route might go in one direction, and the Apes might get back here by another route.”

“And how does that help us now? Our men are still gone—god only knows where.”

“All I know is that the Macaque got through—to some place beyond that rock, and our men got somewhere as well. If they have their wits about them, they’ll try and follow that monkey.”

“Monkey business,” said MacRae, shaking his head. “That’s what this has all come down to now.”

Elena decided. “I’ll take your suggestion on how we proceed from here. We’ll leave a three man team here under Sergeant Keller, but I’ll not risk another man in that passage. Get Private Cooke back. I think we’ve proved there’s a rift here, but we haven’t found any gate or door that the key off Rodney might open. So we’re not in the correct place to transit this rift, and as we’ve seen, this is dangerous work.”

“No argument there. But I’d pay a high price to get those men back, or to even know where they’ve gone. What further business do we have here? Is there any way we can get ourselves home?”

“I don’t know. In fact, I’m not even sure that our home waters even exist any longer. The only way we’ll ever know where this rift goes is to either take that passage behind James and Barret, or to find that damn key that was on the Rodney.”

“Assuming we ever find what it’s supposed to open here.”

“Oh, we’ll find it Gordon. If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

“I wish I was so confident in that, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, I’ll be the first to give the damn thing a good hard knock. We’ve no key, and we won’t get it open, if there is a door here. What’s the point?”

Elena gave him a knowing look. Then she said something that opened a whole new set of questions for MacRae. “We’ll find that key,” she said. “Not here… not now. But we’ll find it.”