The outsiders gambit, p.1
The Outsiders Gambit, page 1
THE OUTSIDERS GAMBIT
A HISTORIC CRIMES CROSSOVER
KEVIN TUMLINSON
Copyright © 2022 by Kevin Tumlinson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
A Note at the End
Here’s how to help me reach more readers
About the Author
Also by Kevin Tumlinson
Keep the Adventure Going!
CHAPTER
ONE
HUASHAN CAVES | HUANGSHAN MOUNTAIN, ANHUI, CHINA
Dangling and slowly spinning from a rope more than 20 meters over the hewn but still rough floor below, and a good thirty feet from the cavern’s closest wall, Dan Kotler was starting to question his life choices.
“Doctor Kotler?” Jerry Bennet’s voice echoed from up top. “We’re just working out the kinks up here. Should have you moving again in a couple of minutes.”
“Take your time,” Kotler said, gripping the rope in two gloved hands. He was pulling up gently, trying to take some of the weight off of the harness, which was pinching him in some pretty awful and private places. “I’m just hanging out.”
“Good one!” Bennet called down.
Kotler smiled but wasn’t entirely dismissing the idea of strangling Bennet when he had the chance. Though the guy was so affable, and so boyishly intelligent and charming, Kotler knew he could never go through with it.
Maybe if he dangled here for another half hour…
Part of the challenge here was the severe slope of the ceiling of the cavern. Like the rest of the Huashan caves, the ceiling here tilted at an exact parallel to the slope of the hill outside. A phenomenon that geologists and archaeologists alike considered unlikely as a natural occurrence. Among those was Jerry Bennet—a young, exuberant geologist turned archaeologist who had become fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the Huashan Caves.
Discovered only around 2002, the caves were already on track to disrupt long-held assumptions about Chinese cultural and technological development. They appeared to be hand-carved and used as living spaces, as much as 1,700 years ago. Which was fascinating all on its own, but was particularly intriguing because the technology to do such a thing simply didn’t exist at that time. Anywhere. But particularly not in rural China.
Not according to the currently accepted history, at least. Which made the Huashan Caves a genuine historical anomaly.
That was how Bennet had persuaded Kotler to get involved in this in the first place. It was kind of a well-known thing—Kotler’s love for “out-of-place history.” He’d become just a little famous for it over the past six years.
Discover one Viking city buried under a mountain in Colorado and suddenly you’re “that guy,” Kotler thought. That guy, in this case, being the one invited to dangle by a rope, trying to keep one’s personal bits from becoming hashed, while waiting to be lowered to the floor of a cavern with a dubious history.
Of course, this was hardly the worst predicament Kotler had ever found himself in. It was just that it was the predicament he was in right now.
There was a jolt and a bounce, and suddenly Kotler found himself spiraling slowly downward again. After a few moments, he touched the floor with his feet and hurriedly removed the harness.
Freed from the torturous web of ropes and straps, he high-stepped like a palace guard, attempting to encourage circulation to return and the pinching feeling to subside. It was starting to work.
There was still the ride back up to deal with, of course. Later. Hopefully much later.
Kotler tilted his head upward, looking toward the ceiling of the cavern, where he could see the circle of light from the outside world. It was at the very peak of the slope, the highest point above him. The hole had already been there, but Jerry and his team had removed a cap stone to unearth it from the surface, and to give them an entryway into this network of caverns.
There had to be another way in and out down here, somewhere. If, as Jerry told him, there was solid evidence of an actual village in these caverns, the people living here certainly did not enter and exit through that hole in the ceiling. And so part of the team’s exploration here was to find the main entrance. So far, they hadn’t had much luck.
There was much left to be explored, Jerry had told him. But whatever it was that had the team so excited—enough so that they had gone to the trouble and expense to get Kotler here on such short notice—it was already intriguing.
“I’m down, Jerry!” Kotler called up, giving the rope a couple of solid tugs.
“I’ll join you in a minute,” Jerry called back.
Kotler nodded and unclipped a flashlight from his vest. He was wearing a climbing helmet, which was a bit too snug against his ears, but he was loath to remove it. This cavern had only been discovered in the past month, and the verdict was still out on how stable it was. There had been one cave-in already, as Bennet and team had explored some of the narrow passages that jutted at unnatural angles under the counters of the mountain’s surface.
Kotler clipped the flashlight to his helmet and went about the task of scanning the walls, ceiling, and floors of the place. Everywhere he looked, the cone of light tracked with the turn of his head, and the details of this place stood out, telling a remarkable story.
The larger collection of apparently human-altered spaces had been discovered by a Chinese farmer, possibly better described as a medicinal herb collector, who lived and worked in the region. He had stumbled onto first one set of caves, which led to teams of researchers mapping and searching an ever-expanding network of caverns. Eventually, teams like the one organized and run by Jerry Bennet expanded their search to the rest of the mountain, so far with little luck. Until a few months ago, at least.
Nestled into the Huangshan Mountains, in a crescent created by the Xin’an River, these caves had been labeled the “Huashan Mountain Mystery Caves” by the locals. And they were, indeed, a mystery.
The sharp angles of hewn rock forming the floors, walls, and ceilings were notable all on their own. This, along with a smattering of artifacts found within the network, marked the place as clearly having been carved by someone in the past. The trouble was, there wasn’t a single record of the place to be found anywhere. No writing, no paintings… the locals didn’t even have legends about it.
Clearly someone had been here, lived here, and spent a tremendous effort in making the space habitable. But no one could say who the former residents were or when they departed. Best estimates were that the departed tenants carved this space out of the stone 1,700 years ago, give or take, and then at some point they’d simply left.
The trouble with the timeframe, however, was that the technology to do this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to have existed at that time in Chinese history.
Stone carving wasn’t unheard of. And the Chinese, in particular, were actually quite adept at it, even at a grand scale. But these caverns were an order of magnitude higher than anything in the current historical record. Even the Great Wall was rudimentary by comparison, though it was massively larger in scale. These caverns were shaped with such precision, it was nearly incomprehensible.
Even by modern standards, and with modern technology, creating this space would be a challenge. They had some advantage in that they clearly were following the natural lines of existing fissures and caverns, but it was still a seemingly impossible feat.
Kotler kicked at a bit of debris, sending a rounded stone rolling off in to the darkness. It echoed as it bounced down the slope of the floor in this section of the cavern, indicating that another large, open space was below. Given that the space he now stood in was more than 20 meters high, it was intriguing to consider that this was just the top-most level—that there was more beneath his feet, deeper in the mountain.
There was a sound from above, and Kotler turned to see Jerry Bennet descending like a spider on a thread. Clearly, they had resolved the technical issues that had snagged Kotler and forced him to dangle mid-air.
Bennet settled to the ground and unclipped from the harness in a smooth process that revealed just how frequently he did this sort of thing. He looked up at Kotler, grinning. “Ready to leave the Inferno and cut through Purgatory?”
Kotler laughed lightly, shaking his head at the joke—a reference to Dante’s Divina Commedia, in which a fictionalized version of the author descends through the levels of the afterlife, accompanied by three guides. “The only way to reach Paradise,” Kotler smiled.
“It’s going to be worth the journey,” Bennet assured him, as he pushed past Kotler and began picking his way down a path in the stone.
Kotler followed.
“Is anyone else coming down?” Kotler asked, glancing back up at the opening in the ceiling—the sole source of natural light in this place.
“We’ve put a lockdown on the site,” Bennet replied, glancing over his shoulder. His helmet-mounted light briefly blinded Kotler. “You’ll understand why once we get there.”
“And I suppose I’ll also understand why you ne eded me to fly to China on basically no notice?”
Bennet nodded. “That, too.”
They made a slow but steady trek down a time-worn passage. There was rubble and debris here and there, but it struck Kotler as profound to see just how well-kept the place was. Whoever had lived in these caverns had known how to work stone in an astonishingly advanced way. The lines of the place were so unnatural they were creating a sort of “uncanny valley” for Kotler, who was very experienced with natural caverns and caves.
As he moved along behind Bennet, Kotler passed his light over the walls and ceiling of the passage they were exploring. There were no tool marks. At least, nothing Kotler recognized. And though there were indications that the passage followed a naturally occurring fissure, there were plenty of signs that it diverged from that geologically dictated line in places. The walls were smoother in those spots. The stone had clearly been worked, but Kotler couldn’t think of how. It was almost as if someone had come along and simply cut the stone, like a saw cutting through wood. But smoother. More finished.
Like a knife through butter is more like it, Kotler thought, and that thought sent a thrill through him.
Though the downward slope was gentle and the path was mostly clear and easy to navigate, the descent was nonetheless challenging. What little rubble had fallen on it wasn’t much of a problem, but there was a tendency to start moving a bit too fast, to let the momentum be dictated by the slope of the floor.
Kotler felt the pull of gravity encouraging him to pick up the pace, which would be a very bad idea. If Bennet was moving with caution, despite clearly having intimate knowledge of this place, that was a good enough warning to Kotler to keep his eyes open for any signs of danger and to keep putting one foot meticulously in front of the other.
It took the better part of an hour to make the descent to the lower level, but it was immediately obvious when they had arrived. The close-pressing walls and ceiling of the sloping corridor suddenly gave way to another impressively large cavern. Kotler estimated it was at least 20 meters from floor to ceiling, just as with the cavern above. Unlike the above space, however, the ceiling here was curved, and seemed to be more of a natural line, contouring above them. The stone was uneven and naturally textured.
Bennet barely stopped once they’d reached level ground, plodding ahead and navigating through a series of what appeared to be low walls, about knee height.
Kotler stopped and stooped to inspect one.
Unlike the rest of the space, these walls were much more recognizable as something built by humans. Each wall consisted of hewn stone, cut and fitted, with mortar between. There were post holes in each wall, indicating that these were likely a foundation for wooden structures that might have rested on top of them.
“Have you found any of the wooden beams or supports that used to be here?” Kotler asked, his voice echoing in the stone chamber.
Bennet was already well across the space, and he turned, reaching to tilt his light upward to keep it out of Kotler’s eyes. “Some,” he said, his voice echoing from the distance. “Most were badly deteriorated. But there were a lot fewer than we had expected. They didn’t wear down or rot away. It’s pretty clear they were removed.”
“Oh?” Kotler asked, surprised.
It was one thing for there to be a structure like this underground to begin with. But going through the trouble of removing it was almost unheard of. The effort to bring materials down here would have been tough enough—not to mention all the effort of carving a living space out of this stone. But going to the effort of removing those materials was something wholly unusual. No culture Kotler could think of would have bothered. Most, in fact, would have simply abandoned the place as it stood. Traces of the civilization that had once stood here would typically still be visible. Structures would be left to ruin with the people leaving or dying out over time.
What would prompt these people—whatever culture had built and occupied these caverns—to go to such effort, to clean up after themselves when they left? And why bother?
It hinted at something.
Reverence, perhaps?
Did these people respect these caverns enough that they wanted to remove what traces of human interference they could?
That didn’t feel right. If that was the case, why leave these stone foundations? And they could hardly restore this space to its natural condition, considering all the carved stone walls and ceilings and floors.
That was just one of many questions this place evoked, by its mere existence. But the longer Kotler spent here, the more questions bubbled into his consciousness.
Why would the builders need to use these stone foundations, for example? This sort of construction was usually reserved for raising a living space above the potential for flooding or other ground-level troubles. Was that what these were for?
The Xin’an River did run through this region, so it was entirely possible that there could be some sort of seasonal flooding in this space. They were deep underground, after all. And something formed the natural arch of caverns at this depth. Typically, that would be magma and volcanic gasses, but water also played a role in carving out the natural wonders of the underworld.
Plus, Kotler had seen something like this before.
About six years earlier, Kotler had occasion to explore a Viking village located on an island in an underground river, beneath Cheyenne Mountain. That village had been destroyed when the waters of the river rose to fill the cavern, crushing and drowning the occupants and leaving only traces of their culture behind.
Could the occupants of these caverns have met a similar fate?
Kotler hurried to catch up to Bennet, who was waiting ahead of him, leaning against one of the stone walls.
“Thanks for waiting,” Kotler smiled.
Bennet shook his head and grinned. “No, it’s no problem. We have time. And I would be asking the same questions. I did ask them. I can see them tumbling in your brain.” He looked up at the arch of the ceiling above. “You’re wondering about the flooding.”
“It occurred to me,” Kotler nodded.
“There’s water, deeper in. Actually, a pretty powerful flow. It had to be their primary source, down here. And it’s where we’re headed.”
Kotler nodded, and the two of them started their trek once again.
They passed many more of the foundation structures as they went, and after a time, Kotler began to get a sense of the layout of what he’d come to think of as “the village.”
Rather than a square grid, this place was organized as a series of concentric circles. Rings of foundations spread from an as-yet unseen epicenter. Bennet’s path through them was keeping them from getting to the middle, but Kotler thought he could make a few assumptions about what might be there.
Cultures rarely built in circles. But when they did, the center was nearly always some form of temple or ritualistic site. A place of reverence, and the literal center of life in the community.
This suggested some tantalizing ideas about this place. If the center of the village really was the site of some form of religious worship, that could make this a monastery of some sort. Kotler could certainly see this as a place occupied by monks, living an austere lifestyle devoid of sunlight or open air. Only darkness and cold stone surrounding them.
It would take discipline to live here. A dedication to something higher than the self. Among the ancient Chinese, there were Buddhist monks who might have seen the darkness of these depths as a path to enlightenment.
Kotler wondered briefly how his friend and FBI partner, Roland Denzel, would feel, being in this space. Denzel was claustrophobic, though he’d been improving with therapy and meditation. Still, at times like this, the close quarters could have a pretty severe impact on him.
Kotler was not immune to the effect, either. The deeper they went into these caverns, the more he became aware of the immense weight of stone pressing down from above them. One unfortunately timed seismic event could trap them here, possibly for the rest of their lives. Which might turn out to be a great deal shorter than Kotler preferred.
