Clive Cussler - Plague Ship

Above the lump of stone, the ceiling was rife with cracks and fissures, as unstable as the area the Responsivists brought down with their grenade. Miners called such a ceiling a bunch of hanging grapes, and Juan knew that a chunk could dislodge without warning. He’d never felt the chilling effects of claustrophobia before, but he could feel the icy fingers of panic trying to worm their way into his mind.

“What’s the problem?” Linc panted behind him.

Juan had to work his tongue around his mouth to loosen his jaw enough to speak. “There’s a stone here I can’t move.”

“Let me at it.”

They laboriously swapped places, with Linc moving feet first into the tight space. He braced his boots against the rock and his back against Cabrillo’s outstretched legs and brought his strength to bear. In the gym, he was able to leg-press a thousand pounds. The boulder weighed half that, but it was wedged tightly, and Linc was in the beginning stages of dehydration. Cabrillo could feel the intense strain in every fiber and tendon of Linc’s body as he pushed. Linc let out a growl, and the rock slid up and out of its socket of loose stones and packed dirt like a rotten tooth.

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” he whooped.

“Nicely done, big man.”

Linc was able to wriggle forward, and as Juan followed him he realized he was gaining headroom. They had crossed the highest point of the debris pile and were making their way down the back side. Soon, he and Linc could crawl over the remaining stones on their hands and knees and then they could stand upright, so they walked down the last of the rubble and onto the cave floor. When Juan pointed the light back at the pile, the gap near the top seemed impossibly small.

He and Linc rested for a few minutes, with the flashlight off to conserve its batteries.

“Smell that?” Juan asked.

“If you’re talking about a mug of ice-cold beer, you and I are having the same hallucination.”

“No. I smell seawater.” Juan got to his feet and turned on the light again.

They proceeded down the tunnel for another hundred yards, until it opened into a natural sea cave. The grotto was at least fifty feet high and four times as broad. The Japanese had constructed a concrete pier on one side of the subterranean lagoon. There was a set of narrow-gauge iron train tracks embedded in the cement for a mobile crane that had once been on the dock for unloading supplies.

“They brought ships in here?” Linc said incredulously.

“I don’t think so,” Juan replied. “I noticed when the ferry docked that the tide had just crested. That was seven hours ago, which puts us near low tide.” He played the light along the side of the quay where a thick carpet of mussels clinging to the cement indicated that high tide almost swamped the dock. “I think they supplied the base using submarines.”

He killed the light, and, together, they peered into the dark waters for any indication of sunlight penetrating this far into the cavern. There was a spot opposite the pier that glowed so faintly that it looked as if the waters weren’t exactly blue, only less black.

“What do you think?” Juan asked when he turned on the light.

“Sun’s at its zenith. For it to be so dark in here, the tunnel has to be a quarter mile long or more.” He didn’t add that it was too far to swim on a single breath. Both men knew it.

“All right, let’s look around and see if there’s anything left down here we can use.” There was only a single side chamber off the main cavern. Inside, they discovered a trickle of freshwater that seeped from a tiny crevasse high up the wall. The water had eroded a small bowl in the floor before meandering to the ocean.

“It’s not cold beer,” Linc said, cupping his hands in the bowl, “but nothing’s ever looked so refreshing.” Juan, aiming the flashlight around the room, indicated that Linc should drink his fill. Propped against one wall was a row of strange stone tablets. All thoughts of thirst vanished as Juan studied the artifacts. They were roughly four feet tall and two wide, made of baked clay that was less than an inch thick. It wasn’t the stones themselves that held him rapt. It was the writing. An awl or stick had been used to etch the clay before it had been fired, and despite the tablets’ obvious antiquity there was absolutely no sign of weathering. It was as if they had spent their entire existence in a temperature-controlled museum.

Then he spotted the wires. Thin lines arced from the back of one tablet to the next. Juan shone the light in the gap between the tablets and the cave wall. Blocks of plastic explosives had been stuck to the backs of all four ancient texts and rigged to one another. He followed the wire and realized it went out toward the main tunnel. He figured it had been set to blow when they took down the ceiling, but the wire must have been cut before the signal reached this chamber. Judging by the amount of plastique, the Responsivists wanted to leave nothing of the tablets but dust.

“What have you got?” Linc asked. He had washed the grime from his face, and water had cut runnels through the dust on his neck.

“Cuneiform tablets rigged with enough SEMTEX to send them into orbit.” Linc studied the explosives and shrugged. They knew well enough not to touch it. If it had decided not to go off when it was supposed to, they weren’t going to give it any reason to do so now.

“It’s cuniflower?”

“Cuneiform. Perhaps the oldest written language on earth. It was used by the Sumerians, dating back five thousand years.”

“What the heck are they doing down here?” Linc asked.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Cabrillo replied, reaching for his camera phone so he could take pictures of the tablets. “I know later cuneiform script had a more abstract look to it, like a bunch of triangles and spikes. This looks more like pictographs.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning these date to the very earliest uses of the language.” He checked the images captured by his camera and reshot a few of them so they were clearer. “These could very well go back fifty-five hundred years or more, and they’re in pristine condition. Most examples of cuneiform have to be pieced together from fragments as small as stamps.”

“Listen, man, this is all well and good, but it isn’t exactly helping our situation. Get some water, and I’ll finish looking around.”

Cabrillo had drunk from thousand-dollar bottles of wine, but nothing could compare to that first sip of water from the spring. He drank palmful after palmful, and could almost feel fluid coursing through his body, recharging his muscles and clearing the fog of exhaustion that had been clouding his mind. His stomach was sloshing by the time Linc finished his reconnoiter.

“Looks like we stumbled into the Responsivists’ love shack,” Linc said. He held up a box of condoms with only two remaining, a wool blanket, and a trash bag with a half-dozen empty wine bottles.”

“I was hoping you’d find a scuba tank and a couple of dive masks.”

“No such luck. I think we’re just going to have to swim for it and hope like hell one of us makes it.”

“Let’s head back into the main chamber. I don’t do my best thinking around explosive charges.” Cabrillo considered inflating the trash bag with air and towing it behind them so they could each take a breath halfway down the tunnel, but its buoyancy would make it scrape along the roof of the submerged tunnel. The plastic would tear before they’d gone two feet. If they counterweighted it so it maintained neutral buoyancy, the drag would make their progress impossibly slow. There had to be a better way.

Linc handed him a protein bar, and for the next few minutes the men chewed silently, racking their brains to come up with a solution. Juan had shut off the light again. The faint glow coming from the far end of the cavern beckoned with both freedom and frustration. They were tantalizingly close, but the last obstacle seemed insurmountable. And then an idea hit him out of the blue that was so outlandishly simple, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it first.