David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Sophia reached him, and they embraced. He held her tight, taking the torch and holding it away from them, the flame flickering in the breeze. All grim thoughts left him, and he experienced a supreme contentment. Their children were waiting. He felt a burst of the familiar adrenalin. Tomorrow he and Sophia would be here again, in the tunnel, at the crack of dawn, alone in secret with their trowels and shovels, just as they had been so many times before, knowing they were on the cusp of another discovery that they would one day reveal to an astonished world. What they found here could change history. He could hardly wait. There was no time to lose.

A t first all Jack could see underwater was a green haze, obscuring the forms of Costas and the other three divers in front of him. He sank to the bottom of the pool, only a few metres below the surface, and angled the headlamps on either side of his helmet, locking them in place once they had reached a convergence point about five metres in front of him. He had never seen water of this hue before. Green usually meant organic matter, algae, that would reflect the light from underwater torches, like using full-beam car headlights in a snowstorm. But here there was no reflection, just haze. He remembered what Wladislaw had said about the copper inclusions that caused the colour, evidently particles of very small size.

He could hear the suck and exhaust of the three Russians, all of them breathing hard on their regulators. The rebreathers he and Costas were wearing only needed to be vented of excess gas build-up every ten minutes or so, so were effectively closed systems most of the time that produced no exhaust. Through the intercom he could hear Costas’ breathing, calm, slow, reassuring. He knew his own breathing would conform to the same rate, a sign of a good buddy pairing. Only he and Costas would be able to talk to each other. Ben had not mentioned this to the phone contact when the arrangements had been made. The three Russians had been too concerned with understanding their own equipment, and they had evidently been briefed that he and Costas would have specialized gear. And each of them had just drunk a third of a litre of neat vodka. They were probably too drunk to care.

He feathered his buoyancy control, injecting air into his e-suit, then looked around and saw a dark smudge where the tunnel descended. He looked at Costas. ‘You read me?’

‘Loud and clear.’

‘Let’s move. They can follow, if they’re able.’

‘One of them’s breathing like a steam engine. No way he’ll last.’

‘Shouldn’t drink and dive.’

‘You getting the map on your screen?’

‘Roger that.’ Jack peered at the lattice of red lines visible in three dimensions inside his helmet, to the left of his visor. ‘Looks like we’ve got about fifty metres ahead where the railway track continues to a vertical shaft. The shaft drops way down, about eighty metres. Then at the bottom there’s another stretch of tunnel angling down at about thirty degrees, evidently the line of the natural fissure. Looks like our target area’s going to be a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty metres below water level.’

‘My computer gives us about twenty-five minutes no-stop time. If the Russians stick to plan, they’ll go no deeper than eighty metres. That means part-way up that shaft.’

‘You ready?’ Jack said.

‘We’re heading into a sump, completely submerged for a bit and then surfacing again near the head of that shaft. The railway tunnel must have collapsed at some point. I’ll go first.’

‘I’m behind you.’

They ignored the other three and swam down into the gloom, their headlamps reflecting off the walls of green halite, which had been hacked away to widen the tunnel. After about ten metres the salt gave way to bare rock, cracked and jumbled in front of them. ‘Looks like someone got a little ambitious with the pick,’ Costas murmured. ‘Remember what Wlady said, that the miners tried not to dig out all the halite to keep the walls from collapsing.’ He swam down, pulling himself along the rusted metal rails of the track. Jack could see a way ahead, with only a metre or so of clearance below the collapsed rock. He followed Costas, inching along. He heard the three Russians close behind, scraping and clanging their tanks as they hauled themselves along the passage, the exhaust from their breathing cascading along the cracks and fissures above Jack. He swore under his breath. If they caused another rock fall, nobody would be coming out of here alive. He concentrated on looking ahead, and saw that Costas had reached the end of the sump and had knelt up out of the water. Jack came alongside, and broke surface. They had come nearly to the end of the rockfall, and could see the end of the tunnel about ten metres ahead, half submerged.

‘This must be where the vertical shaft begins,’ Costas said. ‘I’m looking at my atmospheric sensor. There’s still oxygen here, but methane as well in pockets against the ceiling. Probably breathable, just.’

‘Won’t be like that below,’ Jack said. ‘From what Wlady said, we’ll have to assume any gas pockets are methane.’

They crawled and waded forward, past a ledge that had once been some kind of loading platform. A massive rusted pulley mechanism hung down from the ceiling where the track ended. It was a winch for a lift, but the metal cable was missing, evidently cut off or rusted away and dropped down the shaft with the lift platform. He looked back and saw the first of the Russians haul himself out of the water, spit out his mouthpiece and wheeze heavily, his hands on his knees. Jack turned back, and saw Costas’ fins sticking up. He pulled himself along, below the winch. The view over the edge was astonishing. Costas was hanging upside down, his headlamps aimed down a vertical shaft lined with timbers. The coppery green had gone, and the water was extraordinarily clear. Jack could see down a phenomenal depth, but still not make out the bottom. It was an awesome sight, spine-tingling, as if he were looking down a shaft into the centre of the earth. Costas craned his head up, looked at him. ‘You good with this?’

‘Good to go.’ They had been in a mineshaft before, just like this, when Jack had run out of air and nearly died. But now was not the time for flashbacks. Survival instinct overrode that. He remembered Rebecca, why they were here, and steeled himself. He watched Costas drop head first down the shaft, and then followed him. The water was so clear that it was as if he were jumping into air, and he instinctively put out his hands and feet to catch himself on the wooden beams, to stop himself from falling headlong. He made himself straighten his legs and hold his hands ahead like an arrow, spiralling down behind Costas. They dropped quickly, twenty metres, thirty, forty. He was grateful for the automated buoyancy control, the computer that sensed their speed of descent and kept it in check. He tilted his head so that he could see directly ahead. Far below them, thirty or forty metres perhaps, he could now see the glimmerings of the base of the shaft, a mass of collapsed metal machinery lit up by their headlamp beams. Two minutes later they were nearly there. ‘Let’s go neutral,’ Costas said. Jack pressed the manual buoyancy override and injected air into his suit, then tucked into a ball and rolled upright so that he came down feet first like a parachutist. He injected more air to stop just short of the coiled pulley cable and iron platform, coming to a halt alongside Costas. They both looked up. A confused mass of bubbles and light beams moving to and fro was visible far above, where the Russians were coming down.

Jack looked at his depth gauge. Ninety-five metres. He turned and aimed his beam horizontally into the passageway they were about to enter, the level that would drop at a thirty-degree slope towards their target area about a hundred metres ahead. Costas came alongside and did the same. An extraordinary vista opened up before them. It was clear that they were following a natural fissure in the rock, just as Wladislaw had predicted, with outcrops of halite crystals visible. The crystals shimmered and sparkled as they panned their headlights over them. The fissure had once formed a series of interconnected caverns, but the narrower spaces between the caverns had been hacked away to create a continuous tunnel wide enough for a narrow-gauge track to be laid, identical to the one they had followed at the higher level. Jack could see the track continuing for about thirty metres and then ending at a point where the rock had been left untouched, a much narrower gap. They swam slowly forward. On either side the indentations formed deep chambers, some crudely hacked into a rectilinear shape, one of them with a half-built wooden door and wall enclosing it. Tools lay strewn around, whitened by salt precipitate growing over them. At the end of the track they saw the railway car, a standard narrow-gauge hopper small enough to be pushed by miners, containing a wooden cradle as if some substantial piece of equipment had been carried in it to this point.