Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

I looked at my watch and the luminous dial swam ghostlike in the darkness. It was just about time to go and I said so. Katherine was practical about it. ‘I’ll get ready,’ she said.

My mouth was dry and I could hardly get the words out. ‘You’re not coming,’ I said.

There was a brief gasp in the darkness. ‘Why not?’

‘There’s only enough air to take one of us to the top. If we both go we’ll both die. You can’t go because God knows what you’d find up there. Even if Gatt has given up you’d still have to find the compressor parts which Rudetsky hid away and get the compressor going again. Could you do that?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘No, I couldn’t.’

‘Then I must do it. God knows I don’t like leaving you here, but it’s the best way.’

‘How long will you be?’

‘Nearly two hours going up and maybe another hour to get the compressor going. You won’t run out of air here, Katie; you should have enough for another seven or eight hours.’

‘Seven hours will be too late, won’t it? If it’s as much as seven hours you won’t be coming back at all. Isn’t that right, Jemmy?’

It was — and I knew it. ‘I’ll be back long before then,’ I said, but both of us knew the chances against it.

Her voice was pensive. ‘I’d rather drown than just run out of air slowly.’

‘For God’s sake!’ I burst out. ‘You’ll stay in this bloody cave until I get back, do you hear me? You’ll stay here — promise me!’

‘I’ll stay,’ she said softly, and then she was suddenly in my arms. ‘Kiss me, darling.’ Her lips were on mine and I held her tight, despite those damned clammy and unromantic rubber wet-suits we wore.

At last I pushed her away. ‘We can’t waste time,’ I said, and bent down, groping for the hose. My fingers encountered something metallic which clattered on the rock, and I grasped it, then found the hose with my other hand. I pulled down the mask and whatever I was holding was in my way so I thrust it impatiently under the harness straps. ‘I’ll be back,’ I promised, and slipped into the water, dragging the hose.

The last thing I heard before going under the water was Katie’s voice echoing desolately round the cave. ‘I love you — love you.’

I was holding the weight of about seventy feet of hose which tended to drag me down and I lost some height before I reached the shot line, but once there I was able to hold on to it while I hauled up more hose. When I felt resistance I stopped, and fastened the hose to the line with one of my fin-fasteners. I wouldn’t need the fins from now on and the hose needed to be fastened so as to take the weight off me. That done, I went up slowly to the thirty foot mark, letting the air bubble from my mouth as it expanded in my lungs due to the lessening pressure and holding down my speed to less than that of the rising bubbles.

At thirty feet I climbed into the slings on the shot line and plugged the air hose into the demand valve on the harness, thus taking air from the big bottles at the bottom of the cenote and leaving the smaller harness bottles as a reserve. Then I looked at my watch. I would have to wait fifteen minutes at thirty feet, thirty-five minutes at twenty feet, and fifty minutes at ten feet.

Decompression is a slow and wearisome business at the best of times but this time the uncertainty of what I was about to meet when out of the water made it much worse. At the ten-foot level the suspense was awful because I knew I would be perfectly visible to anyone standing on the edge of the cenote . To make matters more nerve-racking the air gave out after only ten minutes at ten feet and I had to switch on to reserve; there had not been as much in the big cylinders as I thought and I was cutting things damned fine. And Katherine had been a little wasteful with the air from her bottles because it ran out fifteen minutes before my time was up, and I was forced to the surface.

I came up under the raft and hoped it wouldn’t matter, pleased to be able to gulp in mouthfuls of sun-warmed air. I clung on to the underside of the raft with my head in the air space and listened intently. There was nothing to be heard apart from the soughing of the wind, which seemed to have dropped considerably in strength while we had been under water. I certainly heard no voices or anything human.

After a while I swam from under the raft and wearily climbed on board and shook off the scuba harness. Something clattered to the deck of the raft and I looked around in alarm for fear that it might have been heard before I bent to pick it up. It was a gold piece from the cave — the little statue of the Mayan maiden that Vivero had cast. I thrust it into my belt and then listened again and heard nothing of consequence.

I swam ashore to the rough dock that Rudetsky had made and trudged up the steps that had been hewn in the clifflike side of the cenote . At the top I stood in shaken amazement. The camp was a total wreck — most of the huts had disappeared completely, leaving only the foundations, and the whole area was a tangle of broken branches and even whole tree trunks from God knows where. And there was not a man in sight.

I looked towards the hut where we had made our stand and saw it was crushed and smashed under the weight of a big tree whose roots pointed skywards incongruously. Twigs cracked underfoot as I picked my way towards it and, as I got near, a brightly coloured bird flew out of the wreckage with a flutter of wings that momentarily alarmed me.

I prowled around, then stepped inside, climbing with difficulty over branches as thick as my own body. Somewhere among this lot were the spare scuba bottles I needed to bring Katherine to surface.

And somewhere among this lot was Fallon!

I found two machetes lying crossed as though someone had laid them down for sword dancing and took one to cut away at the smaller branches near where I would expect to find Fallon. After ten minutes of chopping I disclosed a hand and an arm outflung in death, but a few more cuts revealed the blood-smeared face of Smith. I tried again a little further along the line of the wall and this time I found him.

He was pinned to the ground by the branch that had struck him down, and when I put my hand on his arm I found, to my astonishment, that he was still warm. Quickly, I felt the pulse at his wrist and detected the faintest pulsation. Fallon was still alive! He had died neither by the hand of Gatt nor of the ancient enemy, but, incredibly, was still alive in spite of the violence of nature that had crashed a whole tree on to the hut.

I swung the machete and began to chop him free, which was not too difficult because he lay in the angle between floor and wall which had protected him from the tree in the first place, and I was soon able to drag him free and to put him in better comfort out of the sun. When I had done that he was still unconscious but his colour had improved and there didn’t seem much wrong with him apart from the dark bruise on the side of his head. I thought he would presently regain consciousness naturally, so I left him for more important work.

The compressor parts had been hidden in a hole near the hut and covered with earth, but the whole area was covered with torn tree branches and other debris, including whole tree trunks. I wondered momentarily where they had come from and looked across the cenote to the hillside behind, and the sight of it took my breath in sharply. The ridge had been wiped clean of vegetation as if Rudetsky’s gang had worked on it with power saw and flame-thrower.

There had been a wind — a big wind — that had assaulted the shallow-rooted forest trees and torn them clean out. I turned to look again at the hut and saw that the tree whose roots stuck up so ridiculously into the air must have been hurled from high on the hillside to strike downwards like some strange spear. And that was why the whole camp area, as far as I could see, was a wreck of timber and leafage.