Corsair

They climbed into the tight cave. Headroom wasn’t a problem, but the tu

It was a thin filament of copper that stretched across the tu

The sharply ascending tu

“We should trigger it,” Mark said, mostly because the kid in him wanted to watch the stone hurtle down the tu

“Leave it,” Alana said. The archaeologist in her hated the idea of disturbing what was the find of her career.

“We’ll compromise,” Linda said. She plucked a stone from the ground and wedged it under the boulder. Even if someone hit the trip wire and the lever were released, the rock would prevent it from moving.

There were a few other man-made items in the room—a battered wooden chest missing its lid, an empty sword scabbard for one of the Barbary pirate’s wicked scimitars made of beaten brass, a couple lengths of rope, and a half dozen thin metal shafts Mark identified as ramrods. They took the opportunity to change out their flashlight batteries, and started exploring further.

Three different tu

Just under the surface of the sandy passage, a wooden board had been buried and cleverly concealed. Her weight rasped a piece of steel against flint under the plank to produce enough sparks to ignite a fuse. The cask of gunpowder was secreted farther in the hole, and contained enough explosive to kill all four of them.

Linda jumped back instantly and, in a tackle that would have done a pro football player proud, pushed her three companions back until the whole pile of them went down. But the blast never came. Instead, the powder ignited and burned unevenly, a flaring, sputtering cauldron of fire that filled the tu

“Everybody all right?” Linda asked when the last of the powder had burned itself out.

“I think so,” Alana answered, stifling a cough.

“I feel like I just went three rounds with Eddie in his dojo,” Eric replied, rubbing his ribs where Linda’s shoulder had hit him. “I never knew someone so small could hit so hard.”

“Amazing what a little adrenaline can do.” She stood and brushed herself off. “The fact that this tu

They kept going, and the tu

There was more evidence that people had spent a greater amount of time in this part of the cavern. There were marks in the sand coating the ground where men had walked, men who had constructed the elaborate traps they had already passed. Twice more, Linda stopped the party to check the ground, but they found no additional hidden bombs.

The tu

Linda dropped to one knee to dig through her pack.

Mark moved until he was directly in front of the door, spread his arms wide in a theatrical pose. “Open sesame,” he intoned. The door didn’t budge. He glanced over at Alana. “You know, I kind of thought that would work.”

“This will.” Linda straightened, holding a block of plastic explosives.

She used a piece of cardboard torn from a box in her first-aid kit to slip between the door and jamb to determine which side it hinged from and set her charges over the hinges. She selected a pair of two-minute timing pencils and rammed them home.

“Coming?” she called sweetly, and the four of them retreated fifty yards back down the tu

When they returned, the door had been blown from its hinges and tossed ten feet into the next section of the tu

Unlike the claustrophobic nature of much of the cave, the chamber they found themselves standing in was vast. It was longer than the reach of their flashlights and equally broad. The ceiling lofted forty or more feet over their heads. Much of the cave was limestone like they’d been seeing since entering the earth, but the wall to their right was a vast mound of rubble, the debris blasted over the cave’s entrance when Henry Lafayette started his long journey home.

On the left side of the cavern ran an elevated platform that looked like it had once served as Suleiman Al-Jama’s pier. And tied to it, canted slightly because its keel rested on the ground and wasn’t floating as it should, was the infamous pirate’s ship, the Saqr.

Her mast had been lowered and her rigging stowed in order to enter the cave, but otherwise she looked fully capable of sailing once again. The dry air had perfectly preserved her wooden hull. She was facing away from them, so the mouths of her stern long guns looked like enormous black holes.

On closer inspection, as they peered down on her from the quay, they could see where she had sustained damage during her ru

Chunks of her bulwarks had been blown apart by ca

“This is absolutely amazing,” Alana said breathlessly. “It’s a piece of living history.”

“I can almost hear the battle,” Mark agreed.

There was so much more to explore, but for several minutes the four of them stared down on the corsair.

A flicker of movement to his right caught Eric’s attention and broke him from his reverie. He cast the beam of his light back to the remnants of the mangled doorframe just as a figure slipped through. He was about to shout a challenge when an assault rifle opened up ten feet from the first man’s position, its juddering flame winking in the darkness.

In the half second before he reacted, he saw several more gunmen in the uneven light. Bullets filled the air around them when more weapons opened up.

The four had no idea how Al-Jama’s people had found them so quickly, but the fact was clear. They had arrived with almost three-to-one superiority, and more ammunition because they were prepared for a fight, and now they controlled the only way out of the cave.