02 The Secret on Ararat Read Free Page A

backpack and started up the slope.
    Twenty minutes later he was standing on a horizontal outcrop, wiping the sweat from his eyes and trying to catch his breath. In front of him was a tangle of wire—what had clearly once been a chain-link fence designed to seal off the gaping hole in the rock. This was what had caught his eye from the bottom of the mountain. He crouched down and gingerly eased himself around the wire, stepping into the mouth of the cave.
    He pulled his flashlight out of his backpack and switched it on. The two cardinal rules of cave exploration came unbidden into his mind: Never cave alone, and never cave without three sources of light.
And, I guess you could add, never enter a cave when you know there’s a psycho lurking in there somewhere
, he thought.
    Although the cave entrance was relatively wide, it quickly narrowed, and Murphy soon had to crawl on his hands and knees over the floor of loose stones and grit. After a few minutes of gentle twists and turns, the only light he could see was the beam of his torch, and the familiar thrill, a unique mix of anxiety and excitement that all speleologists experience on entering a new cave system, took over. It had been years since he’d been caving, but the smell of damp limestone and the instant adrenaline surge reminded him of caving holidays with Laura in Mexico—and particularly the extraordinary Flint-Mammoth Cave System in Kentucky. It was said to be over 224 miles long—the longest in the world—and while they’d covered only a fraction of it, the sense of infinite depth was awesome. If you kept going, you could imagine you might eventually reach hell itself. But that wasn’t the deepest cave. That distinction belonged to the Gouffre Jean Bernard in France, which wound its way 4,600 feet below the earth. Every year they’d planned on making the expedition, and every year they’d never quite managed to find the time in their hectic lives of teaching and digging for artifacts. And then …
    Murphy shook his head and refocused on the task at hand. He could feel the humidity increasing as the temperature in the cave plummeted. Drops of water fromstalactites on the ceiling started falling onto the back of his head and over his face, and he wiped them away with his sleeve. He pushed himself on, despite the soreness in his knees and elbows, hoping the cave wasn’t narrowing further. After another ten minutes, he decided to take a breather, easing himself onto his back. Energy conservation was a key element of survival in this kind of unfamiliar environment. Something he’d learned from Laura. “You’ve got to pace yourself, Murphy,” she used to tell him. “It isn’t a race, you know.”
    And he needed to keep his wits sharp. He wasn’t just dealing with an unmapped cave system where he might plunge off a sheer cliff into fathomless space, or which at any moment could narrow into a stone vise from which he’d never be able to extricate himself. At every step he had to remember why he was here. Methuselah had planned it all. And that meant there was some artifact of great value for an archaeologist—especially a biblical archaeologist—waiting for him at the end of his journey. But Methuselah wouldn’t be content to see him rack up a few scrapes and bruises in search of his prize. For his own insane reasons, Methuselah required Murphy to risk his life. That was how you played the game.
    And the game could begin at any moment.
    Taking a deep, calming breath, he rolled back onto his hands and knees and crawled forward. Soon the cave walls started to get higher and the floor flattened and broadened out. After a few minutes he could walk easily without ducking his head, and then a sudden turn brought him to a large chamber. Playing his flashlight over the walls, he looked for some sign that someone had been here before him. Something out of place, anythingthat didn’t look natural. But all he could see was water glistening on sheer black walls and