“That might be the other entrance,” Remi said. “I’ll check it out.”
“Too risky.”
Behind them a voice echoed down the tunnel: “Anything?” It was K holkov. In turn, two voices called back, “Nothing!”
“Bondaruk, Kholkov, and two others,” Sam said.
“I’m going,” Remi said.
“Remi—”
“There’s less chance of me getting stuck. If I do we’ll need your strength to get me back out. Don’t worry, I’ll just go in a few feet and see what there is to see.”
Sam frowned, but nodded.
She took off her pack and harness. Sam knotted one end of the rope to her ankle and she dropped to her belly and crawled into the split. When she was up to her ankles Sam put his mouth near the opening and rasped, “That’s far enough.”
“Hold on, there’s something just ahead.”
Her feet disappeared and Sam could hear her scrabbling over loose rock. After thirty seconds the sound stopped. Sam held his breath. Finally he heard Remi’s whispered voice: “There’s another cavern, Sam.”
He took off his own pack and belt, stacked them atop Remi’s, then jammed the
“Okay, now you,” Remi called.
Sam lay flat and wriggled into the opening. The sides and ceiling closed around him, brushing his elbows and the top of his head.
Then, behind him, a noise.
He stopped.
Footsteps pounded down the tunnel, followed by the sound of boots skidding on gravel. A flashlight beam danced off the rock walls.
“There he is!” a voice said. “I’ve got them!”
Sam scrambled forward, hands clawing at the floor, boots pushing off the sides.
“You! Stop!”
Sam kept going. Ten feet away was another slit; silhouetted by her headlamp, Remi’s head appeared. Her hands came into view, then a carabiner, at the end of her rope, clattered across the floor toward him. He grabbed, kept crawling. Remi began hauling the rope hand over hand.
“Shoot him!” Kholkov shouted.
There was a roar. The tunnel filled with orange light. Sam felt a sting on his left calf. He grabbed Remi’s outstretched hand, coiled his legs, and shoved hard. He tumbled out headfirst, did a clumsy somersault, and landed in a heap. The gun roared twice more, the bullets ricocheting harmlessly through the slit just above their heads.
Sam rolled over and sat up. Remi crouched beside him and lifted his pant leg. “Just a crease,” she said. “An inch to the right and you wouldn’t have a heel.”
“Small miracles.”
She pulled the first-aid kit from her pack and quickly wrapped the wound with an elastic bandage. Sam stood up, tested the leg, and nodded his approval.
From inside the slit came sounds of crawling.
“We need to block it,” Sam said.
He and Remi looked around the cavern. None of the stalactites was narrow enough to break loose. Something near the right-hand wall caught Sam’s eye. He jogged over. He picked up what looked like a pole, but quickly recognized it for what it was: a spear. The hardwood shaft was amazingly well preserved, coated in a lacquer of some kind.
“Spartan?” Sam asked.
“No, the head is shaped wrong. Persian, I think.”
Sam hefted the spear, sprinted back, and pressed himself against the rock beneath the split. “Turn around and go back,” he shouted.
No response.
“Last chance!”
“Go to hell!”
The gun boomed again. The bullet thunked into the opposite wall.
“Suit yourself,” Sam muttered. He popped up, cocked his arm, and jammed the spear into the opening. It struck something soft and they heard a gasp. Sam jerked the spear back out, then ducked down. They waited, expecting to hear their pursuer calling to his comrade, but there was only silence.
Sam peeked his head up. A man lay motionless a few feet inside the slit. Sam reached in and grabbed his gun, a .357 Magnum revolver.
“I’ll take it,” Remi said. “You’ve got your hands full. Unless you want to part with your poker.” Sam handed her the revolver and she said, “It’ll take them a while to get him out.”
“Bondaruk won’t bother unless he has no other choice,” Sam predicted. “They’re trying to find another entrance.”
They looked around to get their bearings. This cavern was kidney shaped and smaller than the main one, with a twelve-foot ceiling and an exit in the right-hand wall.
Sam and Remi searched among the stalactites but found no other man-made objects.
“How many Persians and Spartans did Bucklin say survived?” Sam asked.
“Twenty or so Spartans and thirty Persians.”
“Remi, look at this.”
She walked over to where Sam was standing beside what looked like a pair of stalactites. They were hollow, their sides reaching up like flowstone flower petals. The spaces inside were perfectly cylindrical.
“Nothing in nature is that uniform,” Remi said. “They were here, Sam.”
“And there’s only one place they could have gone.”
They walked to the wall and ducked into the tunnel, which meandered for twenty feet before opening onto a ledge. Another rock bridge, this one only two feet wide, stretched across a chasm and into another tunnel. Sam leaned right, then left, checking the bridge’s thickness.
“Seems solid enough, but . . .” He looked around. There were no stalactites to rope onto. “My turn.”
Before Remi could protest, Sam stepped onto the bridge. He stopped, stood still for a few seconds, then made his way across. Remi joined him. They wound their way through a tightly packed forest of stalactites, then stepped into an open space.
They stopped short.
Remi murmured, “Sam . . .”
“I see them.”
Caught in their headlamps, the Karyatids lay side by side on the floor, their golden faces staring at the ceiling. Sam and Remi walked forward and knelt down.
Cast with immaculate care, the women’s golden torsos were draped in robes so finely detailed Sam and Remi could see tiny creases and stitching. On each woman’s head rested a laurel wreath; each stem and leaf and bud was a work of art unto itself.
“Who moved them?” Remi said. “Laurent? How could he have done it by himself?”
“That,” Sam replied, then pointed.
Lying beside the wall was a makeshift sled constructed of a half dozen overlapping shields. Made of lacquered wicker and leather, each shield was a five-foot-tall hourglass. They were bound together with what looked like catgut to form a shallow canoe shape.
“We saw one of these at Bondaruk’s estate,” Sam said. “It’s a Persian
“But why leave them here?”
