Blowback

“Your legs and everything else are okay? Nothing’s broken as far as you can tell? You can move everything? Fingers? Toes?”

“Just the shoulder,” replied Alcott. “I think it’s bruised.”

It was an absolute miracle. “I can’t believe I’m looking at you, “He said. “What happened? Judging by how much rope I played out, we’ve got to be at least eighty feet down.”

Jillian used her good arm to brush the snow off her climbing pants as she replied, “I did what you told me. I let the rope out nice and slow.”

Harvath was dumbstruck. “How? How is that possible?”

“I’ve got to admit, it scared the hell out of me. I just grabbed the rope as hard as I could.”

“But when it drew tight, it would have pulled you in and smashed you against the wall.”

Jillian shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever we were standing on was made up of a lot of snow, because a huge slab of it wound up between me and the cliff face and broke the impact, but my shoulder still bore some of the brunt of it.”

Harvath marveled at her. “And you just lowered yourself the rest of the way down here?”

Jillian looked at him as if he was a moron. “I had about five hundred pounds of snow on top of me. The only way I was going was down.”

“I think you’re going to find going up a lot less stressful than coming down.”

“I’d better.”

“In the meantime,” said Harvath as he fished through Alcott’s pack and came up with a headlamp for her that matched his own, “maybe we ought to see what we came all the way down here for.”

Jillian took the lamp from Harvath and placed it over her head. As they turned the lamps on, they saw the only path available to them-a narrow ramp that led deeper into the bowels of the ice cave.

The four-foot-wide passageway sloped downward at such an angle that they had to lean back in their crampons to prevent picking up too much speed and losing control.

The walls of ice were so close on each side that they could reach out and touch them both at the same time. It was like walking through a narrow slot canyon.

After several minutes, the path began to level out, and Harvath and Alcott no longer needed to lean back in their crampons. As they approached the end of the passageway, they crawled beneath a jagged overhang and entered a wide antechamber. The chamber was honeycombed with low tunnels feeding off in all directions. The most magnificent feature of all, though, was a soaring, translucent wall of ice at the far end of the room. Even from where they stood, there was no mistaking what was frozen behind it. Ignoring everything else in the chamber, they walked over to get as close a look as possible.

The ceiling of the antechamber rose steadily higher, and the light from their headlamps cast an otherworldly glow over the scene. Like some sort of enormous, subzero aquarium, the wall of ice held three perfectly preserved elephants.

There was no question what they were looking at. They had unearthed Dr. Ellyson’s discovery, and both Scot and Jillian were speechless.

Finally, Harvath tugged on Jillian’s parka, and they spread out to examine other portions of the cavern. Moving deeper into one of the tunnels, they began finding bodies-remnants of Hannibal ’s elite guard. There had to be over thirty of them, most of which were still encased in ice of varying degrees of thickness. Modern equipment lay scattered across the tunnel floor, and they could see places where the ice had been purposely melted away to remove some of the frozen bodies and strip them of their artifacts and God only knows what else.

The naturally formed tunnels bent and doubled back on each other, and Jillian and Harvath drifted in different directions, allowing their own natural sense of curiosity and wonder dictate their individual courses. Even when they were in separate tunnels, the echo of crampons scrapping along the floor of ice notified each of the other.

The lights from their headlamps were the only accompaniment to their own private thoughts as they stared into the face of history. Here and there, Harvath came across random artifacts, propped up against walls or carefully arranged inside narrow alcoves of ice, waiting to be catalogued and placed in plastic bags to be taken back to the Lavoines’ barn. They had stumbled upon an amazing work in progress, and though many of the artifacts had already been removed, the historical significance of what remained was still astounding.

Looking at the breastplated soldiers frozen in the walls of ice with their eyes bulging and mouths agape in silent screams was like passing through some sort of ancient house of horrors. It looked as if they had all been preserved in a state of abject terror. And just like the elephants, they seemed as if they could come back to life at any second and burst through the ice with their swords and war hammers held high, ready to do battle.