Ник Картер - War from the Clouds

The spearchuckers themselves weren’t any too happy about the arrangement. Once they comprehended the situation, they went into another whispered consultation with Purano. He frowned, then turned to me.

“They fear the curse,” he said. “They refuse to go into the cave.”

I had expected this, but had hoped against it. There was no way I could go into that cave and up that chimney alone. Even if I could, what possible chance would I have at the top, if I, indeed, ever reached the top? And there was no way Purano and Pico could accompany us, with their wounds. I looked at the four warriors, peering into each face in turn.

“If you don’t go,” I said as brutally as I could, “you’ll have more than a curse to fear. Eight of your brothers died on this slope. If we remain here much longer, the red-shirted guerillas will kill the rest of you. And if they don’t, I’ll kill you before I go back into the water.”

I meant what I had said. I had already swung a Russian rifle around toward them as I spoke. They looked to Purano for help.

“Go, or I will kill you before he has the chance.”

It wasn’t the sweetest of conditions, but the warriors gave grudging nods. I took the minimal amount of time to show them how to use the automatic rifles, then we were as ready as we ever would be.

“I’ll go first,” I said. “This time, I won’t do anything to slow my descent. I’ll drop as fast as the rock will take me. I’ll find the opening again and swim through. If I find safe, dry land, I’ll tug three times on the rope. If I don’t signal within the allotted sixty seconds, pull me back up. If you pull and nothing happens, you’ll know I’ve had it. Nobody should follow.”

It would have been a safer plan for me to swim down, investigate the opening and come back to describe it in detail. But time was running out so fast that I decided on the far more dangerous aspect. It didn’t matter, really. If this failed, we would all be dead within hours anyway. Or, with the elite corps in the area, within minutes.

This time, I cradled a much larger rock in my arms. As I hurtled down through the water, my ears kept popping from the sudden change in pressure. I was going so fast that I could barely see the steps flitting past.

When I reached the point where the steps ended, I tugged once on the nylon rope and immediately dropped the heavy stone. I swam upward a few feet and reached into the blackness. It was a hole. I flipped the trailing rope out of the way and swam into the hole.

The darkness was so total that I was certain I’d swum through into open space, into the mysterious Black Hole of Space. But there was nothing but blackness.

The fifty-second point passed and I felt the pain start up again in my lungs. I swam on and on. Sixty seconds. Sixty one. I felt the rope drawing tight around my armpits and knew that Pico was up there pulling, his strong arms bristling with muscles on the rope.

I was about to turn and swim with the tug of the rope when I saw a patch of light ahead and above. A lake? Impossible. I was well below the surface of the mountain. There couldn’t be open water up there.

But it was something bright, something worth investigating. I pulled three times on the rope, then waited until it went slack. Our signals were working perfectly, but now I was totally on my own. If that patch of light turned out to be something other than open water, or at least a surface where I could breathe, I had no time left to swim back through the opening and up through the well.

My air was already exhausted and the pain that had begun to sear my lungs was now attacking all my joints. Everything in my body was crying out for oxygen.

My arms felt numb and tingly, almost refusing to work for me. I kept swimming, taking an upward angle toward the patch of light. The light grew in size and intensity, but it never became nearly as bright as the light at the top of the well.

And it seemed to be slipping away into the distance the farther and the harder I swam. The pain in my lungs and joints grew to a constant throbbing. I felt dizzy and disoriented, the way I had felt in special diving classes and on other assignments when I had had to swim to deep parts of the ocean. I recognized the sensation as what divers call “Raptures of the Deep.” I was getting giddy and it seemed to me that it might be great fun to play with that patch of light above. I would swim almost to the surface, then dive deep again, teasing that light as though it were some benevolent animal.

Fortunately, I didn’t dive. If I had, I would have instantly drowned. I broke the surface just as air came exploding from my lungs. It was an automatic spasm and the sucking in of air was just as automatic, just as involuntary. If it had happened underwater, I would have filled my lungs with water instead of air.

The light was indeed dimmer than the light outside. I was in the middle of a pool of water and there were dark rocks all around me. Above was a huge dome of a cavern. Off to one side, around an outcropping of rock, was a beam of light.

I swam to the rocks and crawled out onto what had to be the bottom of the sacrificial cave. I lay panting for several minutes and was just starting to investigate the huge cavern when something broke the water in the pond and I saw Elicia floundering near the rocky bank. She was too weak to swim any longer. I leaped back into the water and nudged her to shore.

One after another, the warriors popped up into the pond like corks from bottles. One after another, I jumped in and brought them to shore.

I waited five minutes after the last warrior was through and then began to pull on the rope, steadily but firmly.

Sure enough, Pico and Purano had tied six automatic rifles to the end of the rope. We were all armed, but we were also cut off from escape. It would have been impossible to swim back to the well without the rope to guide us.

After checking to make certain that Wilhelmina and the rifles weren’t waterlogged, we began to move about the cavern. The light, we discovered, came from a wide fissure high up in the rocks. There was no way up to the fissure, so we concentrated on the center of the domed chamber. There was a raised section, like an immense stage. We climbed onto it.

As we stumbled across the stage, through the half-light of the cavern, we began to shuffle through ashes and bits of burned debris. Elicia picked up a charred object, screamed and immediately flung it down.

It was the remains of a human thigh bone.

Somewhere in this debris, I thought, were the ashes and charred bones of Pico’s eleven-year-old daughter. In a way, I was glad that the giant had been wounded and wasn’t along. It would have been painful for him to walk through these ashes. It was painful to me.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the ashes as we walked through them. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, or if I would recognize it when I saw it. And then the toe of my boot struck something that clattered.

I looked down and there it was, charred and blackened, but recognizable as a necklace made of seashells. I turned my head so that the warriors and Elicia wouldn’t see the tears.

When we had reached what we determined to be the center of the immense platform, we stopped and gazed at the high dome of a ceiling. There were black smudges here and there. One of the warriors suddenly began to jabber. He was pointing to a small outcropping of rock at the center of the dome.

We moved around on the platform, looking at the outcropping from different angles. From one side we could see that a narrow opening went up through the dome. From below, it looked too small to accommodate a man, but the smoke around it clearly identified it as the start of the chimney up through the mountain.