Clive Cussler - Serpent

Her head slammed into a hard surface. She was sure she felt the plates in her skull shift. She cried out instinctively and lost more air.

Damn. She'd forgotten about the pile of rubble. She groped over the top of the debris and squeezed her way through the opening. She was past the halfway mark!

The wall became smooth again. Good. She was back in the manmade tunnel. Only a few dozen meters. Her lungs were on fire. She let out a small breath as if that would relieve the pressure and started making sounds like a pigeon. God, she didn't want to drown. Not here. She kicked desperately with no attempt to conserve energy.

The lack of oxygen made her dizzy. Next she'd start to black out and swallow water. A painful, excruciating death. Nina stubbornly resisted taking that first fatal breath. She groped for the wall. Nothing. Then felt for the ceiling. Again nothing. Wait! She was out of the tunnel! She arched her body upward, kicked frantically, and broke the surface, where she sucked in great gulps of air.

In time her breathing became almost normal again. She treaded water, looking toward shore, where lights moved like fireflies. Then she struck off around the tip of the promontory and swam parallel to the beach. When she could swim no more, she angled in toward land. Weeds brushed her feet and her toes felt the cool, mucky bottom. She crawled onto the sand but rested only a few minutes before she got to her feet and walked along the beach. She came to the old riverbed, followed the wadi inland a few hundred meters, then climbed the banking and walked across the dunes until she could go no farther. She crawled into a thicket of high grass and lay down.

The horror of the massacre began to play back in her mind. Dr. Knox. Fisel. Kassim. All dead. Why? Who were those men? Why were they after her? Bandits who thought the expedition had discovered treasure? No, the concentrated fury of the attack was too organized for bandits. It was meant to be a massacre.

Shivering with the cold, Nina removed her flannel nightie, wrungthe water from it, and put it back on over her camisole top and underwear: The wet fabric raised goosebumps the size of eggs. She broke off clumps of grass and stuffed them under the nightie until she looked like a scarecrow The primitive insulation was scratchy, but it helped keep the cold air out. The shivering subsided somewhat, and before long she fell asleep.

Near dawn she was awakened by a murmur of voices coming from the direction of the riverbed. Maybe help had arrived and they were searching for her. She held her breath and listened.

Spanish.

Without a second's delay she slithered into the tall beach grass like a frightened salamander.

5. THE SHARP. BRITTLE GRASS STEMS were like a fakir's bed of nails that ripped at Nina's nightgown and tore the skin on her bare arms and legs. Disregarding the pain, she dug her knees and elbows into the sand and kept moving. She had no other choice. If she stood up to run, she'd be dead.

The killers had found her too quickly, almost as if they had followed a map to her hiding place! She cursed in the native tongue of her grandmother. They did have a map. The harborworks diagram she had painstakingly drawn lay in plain sight on her work table. The tunnel had been rendered as two bold lines and dearly labeled. Once the killers discovered her underwater escape route, they had only to search the beach for footprints and follow them into the wadi.

The voices rose in pitch and volume, became more excited, coming from where she had climbed out of the riverbed. The killers must have found where she'd disturbed the banking. Nina made a sharp turn and crawled parallel to her original route, doubling back until she came to the riverbed. She peered from between blades of grass. No one was in the wadi. She slid down the banking and raced with head low toward the beach. The riverbed was churned up by footprints which indicated that a sizable party was tracking her down. Soon she glimpsed the bluegreen of the sea. The turquoise ship was still anchored off-shore. She paused where the waterway once emptied into the ocean. The empty beach beckoned like a highway in both directions.

Voices and the crunch of footsteps came from behind. Again the killers had spread out like hunters trying to flush a quail. She'd be seen whether she went to the right or the left. As on the previous. night, the watery route remained her only choice.

Nina peeled off her ripped and sandcaked nightgown, tossed it aside, and sprinted in camisole and underwear across the hard-packed gravelly delta washed out by centuries of river flow. She hoped the dune ridge would screen her until she reached the water's edge. Still no outcry as she splashed into the shallows. She was aware how vulnerable she was, completely out in the open with no darkness or tunnel to hide her. Any second the killers would crest the dunes, and she'd be an easy target for their bullets.

The kneedeep water covering the salt flats seemed to go on forever, slowing her progress but offering no protection. She pressed on, leaping with long strides, and eventually the water got to waist level. She dove under just as angry lead bees filled the air. The water behind her erupted in a patch of angry foam. Nina dove under and swam off at an angle for as long as she could, surfaced for air, and dove again, porpoisestyle. Once beyond the brownish water over the flats and into the deeper blue ocean, she glanced back and saw maybe a dozen figures on shore. Some had waded into the shallows. The gunfire seemed to have stopped.

Pivoting, Nina fixed her eye on the ship, concerned that it would weigh anchor and leave her between the devil and the deep blue sea. A swim to the Canary Islands wasn't in her plans. Rolling onto her back, she looked up at the puffy gilt-edged clouds and caught her breath. At least it was a good day for a swim. She rested only a minute. She had to get the blood moving in her body again.

Pace yourself, rest when necessary, and count your blessings. Calm sea and no wind or currents. No different from the swim phase of a triathlon, except for one thing: if she lost this race, she would die. Taking a bead on the ship's main mast, she threw one arm in front of the other.

Without her wristwatch, there was no telling how long she swam. The water grew colder the deeper it got, and she counted strokes to take her mind off the energy-sapping chill. Waving at the ship would be a waste of time. Her arm would look like tire neck of a floating seabird.

She tried singing sea chanteys. The old shipboard work songs helped keep the rhythm of strokes.

Her repertoire was slim, and after she'd sung "Blow the Man Down" for the fiftieth time she simply chopped away at the sea. She drew closer to the ship, but her strokes were becoming sloppy, and she stopped to rest more often. At one point she spun around and was pleased to see she was leaving the low brown shore far behind her. To give herself courage she imagined climbing aboard the ship and washing away the salty dryness of her mouth with a steaming mug of hot coffee.

The deep thrumming sound was so faint she didn't notice it at first. Even when she stopped to listen Nina thought it might be water pressure in her head, or maybe even the noise of a ship generator. She rolled one ear in the water and listened.

The droning was louder.

Nina slowly wheeled around. A dark object was racing in her direction from shore. She thought it was a boat at first, but as it grew quickly in size Nina made out a squat ugly black hull she recognized as that of a large hovercraft, an amphibious vehicle that moves across land and sea on a cushion of air.

It moved back and forth in a series of sharpangled turns, but Nina sensed this was no rescue boat executing a search pattern. Its course was too determined, too aggressive. All at once it stopped zigzagging and came straight at her like a bullet. She must have been spotted. Rapidly it closed the distance and was practically on top of her when she dove as deep as she could go.