Pact With the Devil Part III Second Half

[randy_o]

Indy chanced a quick peek. "Oh, dear God!" he whispered in horror. "I was wrong - It's the death bell!"

The first six monks bore a wooden pallet on which a brown shrouded body lay. The rest of the community followed, carrying candles and chanting softly.

Jones glanced up at the row of narrow windows near the roof. The light coming in was faint and tinged with the pink glow of sunset.

"Blast! What rotten luck! I don't understand it. That man must have just died, or we'd have heard the bell sooner. I've never heard of a burial this late in the day."

"It's Friday, Indy," Jakob said. "They must have him laid within the crypt before sunset so that his unburied corpse will not profane the Sabbath."

The two men looked each other in the eye.

"And when they enter the crypt and see…"

Jones nodded grimly.

Taking care not to be seen, the two archaeologists edged from pillar to pillar, working their way toward the back of the chapel, and bolted out the door after the last pair of monks had proceeded toward the altar.

They sprinted out across the courtyard in the deepening twilight and entered the north wing. Down the hallway they ran, retracing their steps. It was difficult to keep track of their whereabouts in the near darkness and confusing maze of rooms.

"Now, if I make my guess, the room with the operating mechanism ought to be directly over the gate," Indy puffed.

Too late. As he spoke, the low, rolling death bell was replaced by a high, clanging alarm. The sound of rushing footsteps echoed down the hallway. Jake and Indy ducked into the nearest doorway and found themselves back in the laundry room where they had first entered.

"We'll never make it out the gate now," Indy said. "That's the first place they'll look."

"Then what can we do?" Rosen asked. "I don't think that the monks will agree with your argument that ours is the greater need and kindly turn the shield over to us."

"Nope," Indy agreed. "The worst thing that will happen is that they'll simply chuck us off the nearest cliff. The best is that they'll take their relic back and turn us over to the authorities."

"Indy, leaving here without the shield would be the same for me as dying," Jakob said quietly.

Jones felt under his robes for the pistol at his side. "We could fight our way out of here, but I'd… I'd rather not. I don't feel like adding murder on top of everything else. Or, we can do it another way." He went over to the window. "Down the rock, hand over hand."

Quickly, he stripped off his now useless disguise and hung the habit back up on the wall. "No use leaving any clues as to how we got in or where we've gone." He strode back to the window and peered out, barely able to make out detail by the last rays of the setting sun.

About ten feet down, he saw a narrow ledge where the smoothly chiseled wall of the abbey ended and the rough natural face of the rock began. "First, we need to find a way down to that ledge… From there, we'll have to feel for hand holds," Indy muttered half to himself.

"Indy, there's something I must tell you." Jake's voice, coming from over Indy's shoulder, sounded faint, almost embarrassed. "You know how you are about snakes?"

Preoccupied with his inspection of the outer wall, Jones grunted affirmatively.

"Well… with me, it's high places."

Indy turned and looked at his friend. Rosen's face was gray, not entirely from the effects of the twilight. "You're afraid of heights?" he said in disbelief.

"Yes, ever since I was a child. Even going up a ladder to clean the leaves out of a gutter terrifies me. At home, Rachel always used to complain because she had to do it."

"Jesus, Jake, how did you ever manage the ride up here?"

With a small, almost sheepish shrug, Rosen held out his right hand. The knuckles were bitten raw where he had jammed them into his mouth to keep from screaming.

"So, you see, Indy, I must go first." Jones made a noise of amazement and Jake continued, "I must, don't you see? If I panic and fall, I won't take you with me."

"Don't be an ass, Jake," Indy said grimly. "I'll go first and you can follow. I'll tell you where to put your feet. It's getting dark. We're going to have to do this by feel."

Rosen nodded his reluctant agreement. "I suppose you're right. But you must carry the shield. For the sake of Rachel and the children, in case I…" he left the rest unspoken.

Without another word, Indy took up the shield, carefully centering it on his back and adjusting the silver strap across his chest. He wrapped the tip of his bull whip around the leg of a heavy table and checked to make sure it was tight. This done, he threw the other end out the window, where it hung down to the ledge below.

"No time to waste," he said as he swung his leg over the sill. "The search'll be here any minute."

Jones let himself down hand over hand, trying not to think of the huge drop beneath him in the darkness. His breath was coming hard by the time his feet felt the welcome touch of the ledge.

forty was getting too damn old for these athletics, he decided.

Gingerly, still clinging to the whip for security, he felt below for foot holds and eased himself down until he was standing with the ledge at waist height and could lean an elbow upon it. From that slightly more secure position, he called up,

"Okay, Jake, it's your turn."

For a moment, Jones was afraid that his friend would freeze on the windowsill, but Rosen moved out, inching himself downward slowly, painfully, yet with a steadiness born of sheer determination. It had grown darker all the while, and as Jake's feet touched the ledge, the last of the sun's glow faded from the western sky. From the darkness above, Jones heard the sound of ragged breathing.

"You're doing fine, Jake," he said evenly. "Now, keep hold of the whip and let your foot down carefully… There's a notch about three feet below. Great, now the other one… You'll be standing right beside me. Fine, Now let go of the whip and hold on to the ledge. See - it's a piece of cake," he said, projecting a confidence he didn't entirely feel.

"Gevalt," Jake muttered. "I'm stuck on this verdammt rock with an optimist!"

One thing remained to be done. Jones took hold of the handle of the whip. With a flick of the wrist he sent a ripple of slack traveling upward. Twice more he repeated the maneuver, then tugged gently. The whip came loose and fell neatly into his hands.

As he was coiling the whip at his waist, a window banged open somewhere above and there came a babble of excited voices. The two archaeologists flattened themselves tightly against the wall, doing their best to muffle the sound of their nervous breathing until the noise died away.

Just in the nick of time, Jones thought. No clue had remained to betray their method of escape. But with the whip detached, their fate was sealed. There was nowhere to go but down.

It was a slow nightmare of a journey with Indy groping for foot and hand holds in the inky blackness, creeping downward inch by inch and relaying the instructions up to Jake, all the while striving to keep his voice calm. One hint of the fear that he actually felt would be all that was needed to shatter Jake's fragile self-control. The desert night drew cold, numbing fingers and toes, and one by one the stars came out - tiny unfriendly points in the dark sky. By and by, Jones began to feel a curious sense of disorientation, as if he were a traveler in the void of space, the stars above, total blackness below; or a fly crawling down the side of an immense, flat black monolith…

He shook his head to rid it of the almost trance-like state he had fallen into. One moment of inattention here could mean death. He welcomed his fear as it came flooding back; it kept him alert.

He had told Jake hopefully that they would be down by daybreak, but the first glimmer of light in the eastern sky found them still on the rock. Gradually, Indy began to be able to make out big shapes, and he turned his head to look down. The base of the cliff still lay shrouded in gloom, but he guessed that they had perhaps another fifty feet to descend. He was eager to be down by full sunrise. In the light, he and Jake were sitting ducks for discovery.

To his chagrin, Jones came to a difficult passage, with seemingly no hand or footholds within reach. Carefully, he stretched out his right foot to its furthermost limit, finding only smooth rock. Next, he reached out his right arm with an equal lack of success.

Okay. he told himself, so we try to the left.

Here, he met with a little more luck, finding what seemed to be a wide ledge at shoulder height three feet to the left. His groping left front foot found a tiny outcropping, barely more than a dimple in the rock, but with the good handhold the ledge afforded, it would be enough. It was a long stretch and a tricky change of balance, but Indy felt he could make it.

He tensed, and in one fluid motion, shifted his weight to the left and let go with his right. Only at the last moment, when it was too late to reverse direction, did he realize that his hand had encountered something sinuous and yielding to the touch. In the dim light, Indy saw a long thin shape. It felt cold and it writhed nauseatingly between beneath his hand. It hissed.

"Jake…" Indy's voice came out in a hoarse croak, his vocal cords seized up with terror. As luck would have it, Indy had placed his hand directly behind the snake's head, effectively pinning it. Nevertheless, only the fact that the morning cold had made the reptile sluggish had saved him from being bitten outright. Not liking such treatment at all, the snake squirmed angrily under Indy's grasp. It was all he could do to keep from yanking his hand away from the hateful thing.

"Jake!" he repeated more loudly.

This time his partner heard him. "What is it, Indy?" The voice from above sounded faint.

"I need your help - quick. I've put my hand on a snake, I think it's an asp, and if I move it'll bite me."

"Hold on, Indy. I'm coming."

Jones closed his eyes and tried not to think. The snake, drawing warmth from Indy's hand, was becoming more lively, lashing its tail and hissing in reptilian outrage. Indy's arms, which were taking the full brunt of his weight, had begun to ache, and the heavy shield on his back dragged him downward.

At long last, he felt Jake's presence beside him. "Bash it with something," he said desperately. "Can you reach my gun? I can't move either arm or I'll fall."



"No need - I see a loose rock."

Jones tensed as Jake's arm descended. He heard a sickening splat, and tiny bits of blood and brains spattered against his face and shirt front. The snake twitched a few times and lay still.

Indy leaned his face against the cold rock wall and waited for his ragged breathing to return to normal. Trembling with relief, he felt quite unable to move or speak.

Jake, his voice filled with concern, broke the long silence. "Come, Indy, we must hurry. It's getting lighter."

Indy raised his head slowly, ashamed to have his friend see him in such a weakened state. Jake didn't look much better himself. His face was ashen in the pale morning light and, in spite of the desert chill, his dark hair was plastered to his forehead with streams of perspiration.

"I'm sorry, Jake," Indy said quietly. "I was so wrapped up in that damn snake that I forgot you had to find your own way down without any help from me."

Rosen merely shrugged. "What was ten more feet after I'd come all that way? I just kept telling myself how good a sign the snake was."

"A good sign?!" Indy spluttered.

Rosen nodded. "Yes - don't you see? Finding it means we can't be very far from the bottom now. And, if it crawled up here, the going must get easier, too."

Indy let out a shaky laugh. "Gevalt - an optimist!"

True to Jake's theory, the ledge they clung to widened out a few feet to their left and led to another one that sloped downward. The two men had to pick their way over jagged rocks and rubble, no easy task in the dim morning light, but surely preferable to inching their way down a sheer cliff. Within twenty minutes, they had reached the desert floor.

They found their car, a battered old open-bodied Willys-Knight safari vehicle, undisturbed far back in the gully where they had hidden it two days earlier. After slipping off the shield and handing it over to Rosen, Indy slid in behind the wheel. He gunned the car's engine into life, edging slowly out of the ravine's mouth, alert for any sign of pursuit from the monastery. High on the rock, glowing pink in the light of dawn, the abbey seemed as quiet and serene as it had the morning before. Without a backward glance, they sped off into the east.

They drove for several hours, purposely avoiding any towns and settlements, until the sun was high overhead. In spite of the bone-jarring roughness of the roads, Rosen fell into an exhausted sleep, his arms wrapped tightly around the shield in his lap. Stifling a yawn himself - these all night adventures seemed to affect him more than they used to five years ago - Jones smiled as he spotted up ahead the distinctive haze on the horizon that indicated the seacoast was near. Home free, he thought with satisfaction.

His happy mood was short-lived, however, as in the rear view mirror he caught a sight of a cloud of dust coming up behind them from the southwest. It appeared to be a column of vehicles in hot pursuit.

He reached over and shook his partner awake. "Jake, see if you can make out what that is."

Rosen craned his head around, shading his eyes against the bright sky with one cupped hand. "It's difficult to make out, but… Yes! It seems to be a group of Italian Army regulars."

"Shit! That's what I was afraid of."

"Do you suppose that the monks of Saint Athanasius could have contacted the authorities?"

"Seems unlikely. The Ethiopians, especially the Copts, have no love for the Italians," Indy said grimly. "They may just be checking up on us. One thing's for certain, though - they're catching up to us, and I'm not sticking around to find out."

He stomped the accelerator pedal for all it was worth. Rosen braced himself stiffly between the windscreen and the back of his seat as the car bucked and heaved. The terrain they traversed made the road from Tanis to Cairo seem as smooth as a boulevard in comparison.

"If we can just beat 'em to the coast…" Jones muttered. Minutes and miles passed, but a gradually their pursuers succeeded in narrowing the gap. Then, one of the Italian trucks split off from the group and began to veer ever so slightly to the south while another moved to the north.

"They're trying to outflank us," Rosen said. "Will we make it, Indy?"

Jones, too caught up in his driving to answer, could only shake his head helplessly. The coastal cliffs that made up the line of demarcation between the desert and the Red Sea were still a quarter of a mile away. Abruptly, Jones left the road, which was curving slowly to the south, and headed straight for the sea.

Up ahead, a shallow gully, perhaps ten feet wide and three or four feet deep, cut across their path. Seeing it, Jones grinned wickedly and drove hell for leather straight at it. The Willys-Knight flew into the air when it left the near bank and cleared the gap with room to spare, but the force of the landing blew both the front tires. The car slewed out of control and rolled over three times, throwing both men clear.

Jones picked himself up, spitting out sand. Something felt painfully awry in his left ankle, but he would worry about that later. He hobbled a few feet to his friend. Jake lay under the shield, pale and very still.

"Jake… Are you all right?" Indy said. He put out a hand to brush his friend's dust covered cheek.

Rosen's eyes flickered open and he sat up slowly, still clutching the shield. "Yes… Just a little stunned, I think."

Indy looked back the way they had come. The heavier Italian troop truck had not been so rash as to try jumping the gully and had stopped on the other side. Soldiers were beginning to pour out of the back. To the north and south, the other two vehicles drove back and forth, searching for shallow places to ford the gullies.

Jones looked back at his friend. "Only one way out for us now, Jake. Can you swim?"

"No."

"Shit," Indy said with a look of dismay.

"So what? I'll learn on the way down." Rosen set his jaw firmly and wrapped the shield strap securely around his left forearm.

The two men linked arms and ran at the cliffs full tilt. Indy leaned heavily on his friend and ignored the shooting pain in his ankle. Speed was what counted now. At the last moment, they jumped.

Out, out they flew over the sea-blue void, their momentum carrying them in a long, arcing fall to the water below. They hit the surface with a bone-wrenching slap and plunged down into the azure depths. The force of the landing nearly tore Rosen's arm from Indy's grasp, but he held on fiercely. Jones began to kick with his legs and stroke upward with his free arm, until at last their downward motion halted and they began to move slowly toward the surface. Below, Indy could feel Jake doing his best to help, but both men were severely hampered by the dead weight of the shield.

It seemed to Indy that they had been underwater for an eternity. His lungs felt ready to burst and still the light of the surface seemed so faint and far away. To his horror, he felt Jake stop kicking and go limp. With a desperate burst of energy, he kicked upward and felt his hand break out into the warm air, but doing so used the last of his strength. He could do no more, and he felt the water closing over his fingertips as he slipped helplessly back into the depths.

We tried, Jake; we did our best: he thought sadly as he prepared to capitulate to the burning in his tortured lungs and take the final breath of water that would end all awareness.

At that moment, a strange hand closed around Indy's wrist and he felt himself being hauled to the surface. Other hands reached out to take Rosen, and both exhausted men were dragged over the sides of a small boat. Spent, soaked and bedraggled, Jones opened his eyes and found himself staring up into an ebony black face topped by a white seaman's cap.

"What took you so long?" The captain of the tramp freighter Bantu Wind paused to brush a stray bead of water from his otherwise Immaculate white sweater. "We thought you'd never get here."

Jones mopped weakly at a strand of hair that was streaming water into his eyes. "It's been a tough night, Katanga, and an even rougher day, and it isn't even over yet - we've got friends on our tail."

"I had surmised something of the sort. Your little, ah, 'shortcut' down to the water quite overshadowed even your well-known penchant for spectacular entrances." Katanga glanced up at the cliffs, where a line of Italian soldiers were already massing. Nearby, a bullet screamed into the water, kicking up a spray of foam. "Ah, well, in that case… Best pull for the ship, men." The crewmen set their oars and began to row toward

the protection of the Bantu Wind, which was bobbing gently up and down in the waves.

Suddenly remembering, Indy struggled to a sitting position. "Jake … how's Jake?"

As if in reply to Indy's question, a sputtering noise began at the other end of the boat: Rosen, coughing and spitting out water.

A large black man - Indy recognized him as the First Mate - made his way aft and sat down on a thwart next to Katanga. "We're getting the water out of him, Captain. He won't feel too well for a while, but he'll be alright. We tried to get the shield away from him for safe keeping, but we can't pry his fingers loose.

Indy almost laughed. The goddamn shield! Indy had almost forgotten it in his worry over Jake, but Rosen had clung to it, even to the point of death.

"Let him have it; it'll be safe with him," Jones said. " God knows - he deserves it!"