Ник Картер - War from the Clouds

While Pico and Purano rallied the four surviving spearchuckers to go look for the three guerillas who had got away, I went down the slope to check on Antonio. Elicia was hovering over him, hugging his head to her bosom, crying softly. I could see from ten paces away that he was dead.

He was. His body was full of holes from the rain of bullets. I shuddered to think that, if I hadn’t plunged into the forest wall when I did, my body would look much like his.

“We’ll come back for him,” I said gently to Elicia. “When it is over, we’ll take him to the Indian camp for a proper burial.”

She got up and went into the jungle. I waited, watching the minutes flip past on my digital watch. It was twenty minutes past four. We had just ten minutes to find the caves and begin our climb up that chimney.

But death has a way of stalling time, of making it stand still. I could do nothing but wait for Elicia’s grief to run its course.

To make matters worse, the four warriors returned and told Purano in stilted whispers that they had lost the three guerillas they had been sent to dispatch. I calculated the distance to the nearest guerilla camp and figured we had plenty of time to be out of here before the alarm went out in any effective manner. Of course, there were the red-shirted guerillas of Don Carlos Italla’s elite corps parading about and they could be here in minutes, but I decided not to let that worry me. Not much, anyway.

After five minutes, Elicia came back into the clearing, her eyes dry. In her hands was a cluster of wild roses she had found in the thicket.

She crossed her dead brother’s hands over his chest and lay the roses on his hands. Then, she looked up at me.

“We will go now and kill the beast on the mountain.”

The three guerillas who had escaped death in the battle in the clearing were still nowhere to be seen. Pico and I led the way to the rocks and then all of us began tossing the stones aside. Even Purano worked with his one good arm and rolled huge boulders down the slope and into the jungle.

It took ten minutes to clear away enough rocks so that we could see the top of the well. A very precious ten minutes.

The well was covered with a cut stone slab about the size of the top of a pool table. It took all of us to nudge it aside, inch by inch, until there was a big enough opening for one of us to slip inside. Pico took a small rock and dropped it into the well.

Less than a second later, we heard the splash. Pico shook his head.

“No good,” he said. “The map was right, although I’m certain there was no water here thirty years ago. There must be a system for draining and filling it at will, but it would take us days to learn the key to that system. The cave entrance, the tunnel I recall crawling through after going down many steps, is filled with water. Perhaps even the cave itself is full of water.”

We stood there on that pile of stones and peered into the darkness of the water-filled well, and thought of so many deaths that had come for nothing.

And of all the deaths to come.

It was 4:30. In four hours, more or less, Don Carlos Italla would fire his flare gun from the top of Alto Arete and the war masterminded from the clouds would commence. The only hope of stopping that signal was through the cave and up through the chimney. Even if we had had a military escort up the regular trail to the mountaintop, we still couldn’t have made it on time.

We were at one end of the shortest distance between two points. And there was water in the way.

All right, I thought. Water certainly isn’t impenetrable.

“Let’s move the slab all the way off the well,” I said, “and get some light into the damned thing. I’m going down.”

“It is hopeless,” Pico said. “We should spend our energies in returning to the tribal camp, in convincing Chief Botussin that we must move the camp farther into the hills, in...”

“Let Senor Carter go down,” Purano said.

We all turned to look at him. He hadn’t spoken five words during the whole of the afternoon, not even when the guerillas had attacked. When he had been shot in the arm and thigh, he hadn’t uttered a sound.

I stared at his dark eyes and wondered if he wanted me to go down to a certain death, or if he really held out hope. I couldn’t read a thing in those eyes, in that deadpan face.

Five minutes later, we had the slab removed from the well and I was tying the thin, strong rope around my chest, just under my armpits.

“How far down did you climb before you came to the entrance?” I asked Pico.

“I don’t remember how far,” he said. “There were steps, but I don’t remember it being an ordeal.”

“Okay,” I said, picking up a heavy rock to use as a weight. “Let me down as fast as I can sink. Play out no more than a hundred feet of rope, though. If I’m not up in sixty seconds from the time my head goes under water, pull me up, fast.”

I gave my digital watch to Elicia so she could serve as timekeeper. I passed the luger and the automatic rifle over to Purano, wondering why in hell I put so much trust in him. But I wanted Pico’s strong arms on that rope and I was glad to see that he took it up without being asked.

The water was cold and clear. I dropped swiftly for a few feet, then put one hand on the slippery side of the well to slow the descent. I peered around and around at the sides as I dropped with the stone in my hand. There were no breaks, no holes, no steps.

About twenty five feet down, I encountered the stone steps and could see that the steps above that point had been chiseled away. Don Carlos had planned well when he had taken to the clouds.

I had been counting in my head as I dropped through the water and searched for a break in the sides of the well. I was up to forty and still counting. I let go of the side and dropped more swiftly, wondering how far it was to the bottom and if the entrance was there.

When I hit the count of sixty, I felt the rope go taut. My eyes strained downward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the opening to the cave. I saw only the deep gloom that exists in the bottoms of all wells. But there was something different about that gloom.

As the rope began hauling me up out of the water, and as my lungs began to sear from the pain of foul air, I realized what was different below me.

There were no more steps.

The steps ended at a point about sixty feet down. As I was being hauled past the point where the steps left off, I saw a dark spot on the wall to my left, on the downhill side of the well. It was the opening.

I almost did something foolish then. I slid my stiletto into my hand and was about to cut the rope, to swim through that opening, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find it again. My lungs won out over my foolishness and I was soon breaking the surface of the water and sucking in air like a landed fish.

“Did you find the opening?” Pico asked as he helped me over the rim of the well.

“I think so. It’s about sixty feet down, on the left side here. Can all of you swim?”

It was a kind of stupid question to ask people who had lived their entire lives on an island. But I had to make certain. We didn’t have room for anymore foul-ups. I described the location of the opening, just below where the steps ended.

It was decided that Pico and Purano would remain behind and stack rocks around the opening to make it look as though no one had found and entered the well. Then, they would return to the village and help the others move to the ancient campsite, just in case. Although I feared insulting the Indians and their craftsmanship, I chose the nylon rope over the hemp. It was lighter and much stronger. I taped Wilhelmina in a waterproof pouch to my back and checked to make certain Pierre and Hugo were in place. I wasn’t wild about the idea of Elicia going into this impossible situation with me and the surviving four spear-chuckers, but there was no other way.