Clive Cussler - The Kingdom

“It’s been cut,” he murmured, then showed it to Remi.

“Acetylene torch?”

“No scorch marks. Hacksaw, would be my guess.”

He shone his flashlight into the bar’s empty floor socket and could see, a few inches down, a stub of metal.

Sam looked at Remi. “The plot thickens. Somebody’s been here before.”

“And didn’t want anyone to know about it,” she added.

After taking a moment so Sam could get a bearing on his compass and sketch a rough map in his moleskin notebook, they squeezed through the gap, refitted the bar in its upright position, and continued on. The tunnel began zigzagging and narrowing, and soon the ceiling was at four feet, and Sam’s and Remi’s elbows were bumping along the walls. The floor began sloping downward. They put away their flashlights and turned on their headlamps. The floor steepened until they were sidestepping their way down a thirty-degree grade, using rock protrusions as hand- and footholds.

“Stop,” Remi said suddenly. “Listen.”

From somewhere nearby came the gurgling of water.

Sam said, “The river.”

They descended another twenty feet, and the tunnel flattened out into a short corridor. Sam shimmied ahead to where the floor began sloping upward again.

“It’s nearly vertical,” he called back. “I think if we’re careful, we can free-climb-”

“Sam, take a look at this.”

He turned around and made his way back to where Remi was standing, her neck craned back as she stared at the wall. In the beam of her headlamp, an object about the size of a half-dollar bulged from the rock.

“It looks metallic,” Sam said. “Here, climb aboard.”

Sam knelt down, and Remi climbed on his shoulders. He slowly stood up, allowing Remi time to steady herself against the wall. After a few seconds she said, “It’s a railroad spike.”

“Say again?”

Remi repeated herself. “It’s buried in the rock up to the cap. Hold on . . . I think I can . . . There! It’s tight, but I managed to slide it out a few inches. There’s another one, Sam, about two feet up. And another one. I’m going to stand up. Ready?”

“Go.”

She rose to her full height. “There’s a line of them,” she said. “They go up about twenty feet to what looks like a shelf.”

Sam thought for a moment. “Can you slide out the second one?”

“Hold on . . . Done.”

“Okay, climb back down,” said Sam. Once she was back on the ground, he said, “Good show.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I can think of only one reason they’d be that high off the ground.”

“So they’d go unnoticed.”

She nodded. “They look fairly old.”

“Circa 1973?” Sam wondered aloud, referring to the year Lewis King disappeared.

“Could be.”

“Unless I miss my guess, it looks like Bully, or some other phantom spelunker, built himself a ladder. But to where?”

As Sam’s words trailed off they panned the beams of their headlamps up the wall.

“One way to find out,” Remi replied.

CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL

As a ladder, the vertical alignment of the spikes would make Sam’s ascent awkward-if, in fact, he was able to reach the first rung. To that end, he uncoiled his rope, tied a slipknot in one end, and spent two minutes trying to lasso the second spike. Once done, he used a bit of parachute chord to secure a stirrup-like prusik knot to the rope to climb-and-slide his way up the wall.

With one foot perched on the lowermost rung and his left hand wrapped around the second rung, he untied the slipknot and clipped it to his harness. He then reached up, slid out the third spike, and started upward. After five minutes of this he reached the top.

“Not that I’d care to try it,” Sam called down, “but there are just enough handholds to make the ascent without the spikes.”

“It would have taken some skill to set them, then.”

“And strength.”

“What do you see?” Remi called.

Sam craned his neck around until his beam shone over the rock shelf. “Crawl space. Not much wider than my shoulders. Hang on, I’ll drop you a line.”

He withdrew the second-to-last rail spike and replaced it with a SLCD (spring-loaded camming device), which locked itself into the hole. To this he attached first a carabiner, then the rope. He dropped the coil down to Remi.

“Got it,” she said.

“Wait there. I’m going to scout ahead. There’s no sense in both of us being up here if it’s a dead end.”

“Two minutes, then I’m coming after you.”

“Or if you hear a scream and a thud, whichever comes first.”

“No screaming or thudding allowed,” Remi warned.

“Be back in a flash.”

Sam adjusted his position until both his feet were perched on the uppermost spike and his arms were braced against the rock ledge. He took a breath, coiled his legs, and pushed off while levering with his arms, launching his torso onto the ledge. He inchwormed forward until his legs were no longer dangling in air.

Ahead, Sam’s headlamp penetrated only ten to twelve feet. Beyond that, blackness. He licked his index finger and held it upright. The air was perfectly still, not a welcome sign. Getting into caves was usually the easy part, getting out often harder, which was why any spelunker worth his salt was always on the lookout for secondary exits. This was especially true of unmapped systems like this one.

Sam brought his watch to his face and started the chronometer. Remi had given him two minutes, and knowing his wife as he did, at two minutes and one second she’d be on her way up the rope.

He started crawling forward. His gear clanked and rasped over the rock floor, sounding impossibly loud in the cramped space. “Tons.” The word appeared, unbidden, in his mind. There were countless tons of rock hanging over his body at this very moment. He forced the thought from his mind and kept going, this time more slowly, the primal part of his brain telling him: Tread carefully, lest the world collapse around you .

He passed the twenty-foot mark and stopped to check his watch. One minute gone. He kept crawling. The tunnel curved left, then right, then began angling upward, gently at first, then more steadily, until he had to use a modified chimney crawl to keep moving. Thirty feet gone. Another time check. Thirty seconds to go. He crossed over a hump in the floor and found himself in a wider, flat area. Ahead, his headlamp swept over an opening almost twice as wide as the crawl space.

He craned his neck and called over his shoulder, “Remi, are you there?”

“I’m here!” came the faint reply.

“I think I’ve got something!”

“On my way.”

He heard her crawling up behind him as her headlamp washed over the walls and ceiling. She gripped his calf and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “How’re you doing?”

While Sam wasn’t clinically claustrophobic, there were moments in particularly tight spaces when he had to exert strict control over his mind. This was such a time. It was, Remi had told him, the downside of having a fertile imagination. Possibilities became probabilities, and an otherwise stable cave became a death trap ready to collapse into the bowels of the earth at the slightest bump.

“Sam, are you there?” Remi asked.

“Yep. I was mentally practicing Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour.’”

Sam was a fair hand at the piano, and Remi at the violin. Occasionally, when time permitted, they practiced duets. While composer Pickett’s music didn’t readily lend itself to classical instruments, as lovers of vintage American soul, they enjoyed the challenge.

“What’ve you found?” Remi asked.

“That it’s going to take a lot more practice. And my blues voice needs more-”