“Don’t worry about sorry. Get us back on track.”
“I — I’ve lost my sense of direction. It’s such a labyrinth. Once you lose your way —”
“You don’t have to stay lost. We can climb back up. Where d’you think you went wrong, Aurora?”
“I don’t know. I can only think … the tunnel, after the ledge. There was a place where the track diverged into four, remember? I wasn’t absolutely certain at the time, actually.”
“And you took the wrong exit from the roundabout, as many of us have done on the surface. All right, so we go back up and try again. It’s not the end of the world, you know.” Shard was in fact seething inside: time was short, time was vital, but this was no occasion to snap at and bite helpers who’d had no duty to come at all. He kept his voice level with a mighty effort. “Grab the rope, both of you, and use it to help you up. All right? I’m starting now.” He took a grip on the rope, thrust his knees upward and pushed with his rump against the curious slope of the tunnel. As his helmet contacted the outline of Aurora’s buttocks, tensed for her own thrust, there was a violent jerk: the rope snaked down around them and they heard the metallic sound of the holding spikes spinning down the shaft. Shard slid rapidly, his control gone. He began praying as he fought to stop his downward rush. Above him Aurora was holding steady, her experience coming to her aid. The gap between them widened, and still Shard slid on: the shaft had become much extended and by now his rump was not touching the side, was useless as a preventer. He heard a cry from above as the girl also lost her grip, and then he had hit bottom of some kind; the fall stopped very suddenly and his helmet went awry and he was struck on the unprotected side of the head by a fast descending boot — struck hard, so that he lost consciousness.
*
When he came round he was lying on a pile of rock debris and a light was being shone onto him. In the loom behind it he saw the girl’s anxious face, and he managed a grin.
She sounded relieved. “You all right, Simon?”
“I’ll live. You — and Harry?”
“Both okay, sir.” It was Kenwood’s voice.
Shard sat up, feeling himself for injuries: he’d been lucky, just a couple of bumps on his head that would soon look like eggs, some bruises, some grazing. “So what now? I suppose you still don’t know where we are?”
“No. I’m terribly sorry —”
“What’s that, over there?” Shard pointed: the back-glow from the torch had brought up a break in the rock. “A crevice?”
“It’s another passage.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know yet. We were waiting for you to come round.”
“I’m round. Let’s have a look. There’s nowhere else to go.” Shard got up and moved towards the exit from their current prison. When he took the lead there was no protest from Aurora: she seemed to have lost her confidence. Shard beamed his torch along the passage, found that it really was more a passage than a tunnel, and moved ahead with caution, taking it slow in case of more sudden holes in the floor. After a while the passage took a gentle downward slope and then, farther on again, decreased in height and width to tunneldom. Shard cursed; tunnels meant slower progress once again, but in any case they were lost now so maybe speed was no longer important. In this bloody rabbit-warren, he thought savagely, they might, probably would, never get back on track, would just wander like babes in the wood, getting deeper and deeper. But there was only the one way now, and that was onward … they bent, they went flat and crawled, the slope continued downward, but fortunately remained gentle. More time passed, and Shard began to hear sounds: he fancied it was water, and he called a warning to the others and stopped.
“Do you expect water, Aurora?” he asked.
“Could be. There’s been oceans of rain, and I told you —”
“It could fill fast — I remember. Underground waterfall, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“We may have struck it. We’ll go and see. If water can get in, maybe we can get out. Or follow its track to the main cave. Come on.” They started crawling again, with Shard keeping the way torchlit. The water sounds increased. Soon after, the tunnel levelled out. More crawling and then the beam of the torch seemed to lose the rock: blankness, not for the first time, lay ahead. Shard slowed. Inching forward, he came to the apparent end of the tunnel. Now the water noises were loud, though he could see no falls — but he could see other water, silent and black, swirling, surging, circling like a whirlpool and, he believed, deepening in a rise towards the aperture in which he lay. It had a dangerous, bottomless look; and it had something else, something moving in it like a whale with flailing arms.
He steadied the beam of his torch on the object in the water: terrified eyes looked back from a flabby face of loose white flesh. Shard spoke over his shoulder. “We haven’t found ourselves, Harry, but we do seem to have found Hedge.”
Sixteen
“DID YOU SAY Shard?” The voice from the water was unbelieving and tremulous.
“Yes,” Shard called down, and reversed his torch to show his face. Like the whale he resembled, Hedge wallowed and blew spume, his mouth opening and shutting.
“Get me out.”
“All in good time, Hedge. I believe you’re rising. Soon you’ll float up into range.”
“For God’s sake,” Hedge said pathetically. Shard remembered the rope: Harry Kenwood had brought it from the foot of the last shaft, where it had fallen in a heap. He called to Hedge to wait, and asked Kenwood to pass the rope forward. With all three backing it up, he threw the end towards Hedge, who floundered after it, sending up spray that glistened in the light of Shard’s torch. Hedge looped the rope several times round his right arm, cack-handedly, and clung like a leech as he was fished out, feet scrabbling on the rock sides. Landed, he collapsed in a wet heap in the tunnel, gasping.
“Let’s have it all,” Shard said when Hedge had recovered a little. “That broadcast. Why?”
“Force majeur, my dear fellow.” Hedge looked around in the torchlight. “Who is this woman? Not Mackintosh’s wife, by any chance?”
“No. Why d’you ask?”
Hedge squelched and sniffed. “I thought you might have intercepted her. Uthman told me he was having her brought in. Mackintosh would be more amenable if …” He paused, sniffing again as though a filthy cold was on its way. “Who is she, then?”
Shard told him, and added, “Fiona Mackintosh won’t be coming, Hedge, which may help to throw Uthman a little. I’m sorry to say she’s dead. As for Miss Lindeman, it’s thanks to her we’re here. Where’s Mackintosh?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you came on the air, you said —”
“Yes, I’m aware of what I said, but I don’t know where he is now. Except that he may have gone through the hole.”
“Hole?”
“The entry down below. There’s a narrow tunnel from the main cave system.” Hedge gestured towards the deepening swirl of floodwater. “The water absolutely burst in … not from the tunnel, from somewhere else. It was too much to be drained a way through the entry, it just got deeper and deeper.” He explained his and Mackintosh’s earlier situation in full, his voice shaking as he did so. “I didn’t see him — he may have found the exit in time, he may have been near it when the water started to flow. Or he may have been swept through on the flood.” He sucked in a long breath. “I was just lifted. I hadn’t a chance.”
Shard nodded. “An underground waterfall? And it has access to the main cave system — which we can take it is now being flooded?”
“Probably, yes.” Hedge ground his teeth. “I hope they’re all being drowned like rats.” He looked up, his eyes haunted. “But what about us, Shard? What about us?”
“We have to get out. If Uthman and his mob get washed away on the flood waters, they’re due to meet the army — I hope! When they do, I aim to be there.”
“Do you know the way out? I imagine you do, since you got in.�
�
Shard said, “While we didn’t exactly drop in on the off-chance, I have to admit we’ve gone and lost ourselves since. The prognosis is not good and we have to face it, Hedge.”
“Oh, God!”
“But without despair.” Shard waved towards the water beyond the tunnel’s rim. “That has to go down sometime. When it does, we go down too — on the rope, right to the bottom. From there, you confirm access to the main system.”
“It may not go down for days. You wanted to make the arrest.”
“I may have to forego the pleasure after all, Hedge.”
Hedge said frantically, “But the damn water’s rising still! Any minute now, it could reach this tunnel!”
“If it does, we back up and away. I said we were lost — that’s not strictly true. It’s just that one of the shafts is too wide in its bottom section to get a climbing grip.”
“Oh, God,” Hedge said again, his face as white as death in the torch beam. “If we can’t climb it —”
“We may be able to float it. Get a lift from the water. Water finds its own level, doesn’t it?” Shard caught Aurora’s eye. “Where is the waterfall, Aurora, what’s its height?”
“From here, in a relative sense,” she said, “I just don’t know. I don’t know where we are, you see. But it starts underground, fed by channels on the surface.”
“We’ll never get out,” Hedge said in a panic. “We’ll remain and rot. We’ll —”
“Shut up, Hedge.” There was a slop of water from the darkness, and sudden icy wet spread around Shard’s body. He moved his torch and saw the black tide welling up over the rim of the tunnel. Out in the main chamber the surge was slow, deliberate, lapping the rock walls, menacing, undefiable as it rose in response to the pressure from the invisible falls that kept it supplied. “Out,” Shard ordered. “All of you — back along the tunnel, fast as you can make it!”
“I can’t crawl any more,” Hedge said.
“Come on, Hedge, best gut forward or you’ve had it. Hurry now. It’s urgent.” Hedge gave a sound of sheer despair but got on the move. They wormed back in reverse order: Harry Kenwood in the lead, then Aurora, then Hedge, then Shard. Shard felt the water deepening around him, threatening to submerge him totally until, as they reached the greater height and width where the tunnel merged into the passage, they were able to stand up and move fast. They could hear the slop of floodwater behind them as they went on; but they kept ahead of it as they came once again to the chamber at the foot of the upward-leading shaft down which they had fallen earlier. Shard shone his torch up: the shaft was no more propitious than it had been earlier. Never mind the urgency of exit, to climb it was impossible, period. It was much too wide to be treated as a chimney. The one hope was Shard’s earlier expressed suggestion of a float; and as the water, surging out of the passage, began to deepen to waist level, he expressed it again.
“No trouble,” he said, looking at Hedge. “The water does the work. All of you get under the shaft — and wait for the lift. While we wait, maybe you’ll put me in the picture, Hedge.”
“What about?” Hedge was casting scared glances at the swirling, deepening water. “Frankly, I didn’t learn a thing, except that Uthman means to —” He broke off and nodded towards the girl, “Is it all right?”
“It’s all right.”
“We’re still supposed to preserve some sort of security, aren’t we?”
“I said, she’s all right. I told you — she’s Sheila Branscombe’s sister. The one you —”
“Yes, yes, that’ll do, Shard. Well, as I was saying, all I learned was that Uthman’s in earnest, I’ve no doubt about that at all. I dare say you can tell me more than I can tell you. I mean about the counter-measure, any changes in the Cabinet’s approach, that sort of thing. Can you?”
Shard was about to answer when Hedge teetered sideways. The water, reaching now to his armpits, had lifted him and canted him. He gave a cry of alarm and steadied himself against the rock: the shaft, gaping above his head, began to close around him, around all of them, as the water-level rose implacably. Soon they were all off their feet and fending themselves away from the sides as Shard’s torch flickered overhead, beaming into the deep, blank darkness that yawned down as though it might have been a shut-off furnace of hell. Slowly they went up, up … not so far off the sector where the shaft began to narrow. Not enough yet: Shard stared along his torch beam, willing the gap to close, feeling the tremble in his body brought about by the ice-cold water and by his frustration and sense of time passing: his watch said they had been underground for almost an hour and a half, and beyond the presumably important fact of the rescue — so far — of Hedge, nothing at all had been achieved. The sense of failure was back again at full strength; and it increased when his watching eye, its message confirmed a moment later by a word from Harry Kenwood, told him that the water’s advance had stopped.
“It bloody would, sir!” Kenwood said bitterly. They were still well out of reach, had no hope whatsoever of heaving their bodies up to where knees and rumps could get a grip. Shard swore: it was unlikely the water-level would start increasing again.
“What’s done it, Aurora?” he asked. “There’ll still be water coming over those falls of yours, won’t there?”
She nodded. “I’d say so, yes. It could have found another exit, enough to cream off the rise. Like an overflow pipe in a basin.”
“Now what do we do?” Hedge asked in a high voice.
Shard said. “There’s nothing we can do except wait.”
“But we can’t!”
“I don’t like it,” Shard snapped, “any more than you do. If you have an alternative, just let me know. If not, shut up.” Hedge’s face contorted and he gave a tremendous sneeze; his nose began to run and he looked more than ever like death. Shard cast about for ideas and found none. Even if he were to attempt to organise a kind of pyramid to get at least one person — Aurora Lindeman — out, the bottom man would sink before she could gain a rump-hold. It looked, this time, as though they were stuck until the waters subsided; a premise which was vindicated considerably faster than Shard had visualised as possible: from somewhere far off, and well below them he fancied, there came a rumble and a shaking of walls and foundations, followed by a dull booming sound and more trembles of the solid rock. Almost at once, and just as though Aurora’s mythical basin had had its main plug withdrawn, the water began to fall away, drawing all of them down with it to deposit them within minutes at the bottom, back in the small chamber. As they scrambled to their feet Shard gave the order to move out down the off-leading passage.
“What for?” Hedge asked.
“We have to get back to that chamber you were in, fast.”
“Why?”
Shard took him and pushed him through the passage entry. “Because we know it’s a way out to the main cave system and because we can jump in safety — that’s if there’s enough water still left. The rope may not be long enough for all I know. Now, move for your life!”
Hedge seemed to take the point; he shot along the passage nimbly enough, padding through the receding water which was now no more than knee-high. By the time they reached the narrow confines of the tunnel there was only about an inch of water remaining: the outflow was fast. Shard, immediately astern of Hedge, kept the gross body on the move by reminding him of the long drop that would be left if the water had all gone. As they neared the end of the tunnel they could hear a suck and a gurgle, a sound rather like a whirlpool might have made. It was fairly obvious in Shard’s mind that something had been blown, a fracture made in the chamber wall below: but who had done it? Uthman, or the soldiers? If Uthman was responsible, then why? And Shard would not have expected the army to move in just yet; his given deadline of three hours had not expired. Maybe they’d come into possession of more information and they’d jumped the gun … Ahead of him, very suddenly, Hedge stopped dead, blocking the way with solid fat.
“On you go, Hedge.”
&nb
sp; “No. We’re there. At the edge.”
“How’s the water?”
“At a guess, twenty feet down.”
“Right. Down you go, Hedge.”
“No!”
“Quick, Hedge, Before the level goes lower. I’ve got the end of the rope now. I’ll chuck the free end down to help you and we’ll be backing it up.”
“I — I can’t. I can’t do it.” Hedge gave another violent sneeze, managing to make it sound propagandic. “I’m not a field man, you know that. None of this is my job.”
“Don’t be bloody stupid.” Shard’s tone was pure ice. “You’re blocking the way and likely to finish us all off. I have a gun, Hedge. Drop down or I’ll fire right up your bloody backside.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that!”
Shard reached behind and pulled out his Chief’s Special. He rammed the barrel hard in Hedge’s buttocks. “I’ll count three.” He was bluffing — his scaled ammunition would ensure the firing of his wet gun, but there was too much risk in even a small explosion in their current position. Hedge, however, was in too great a state of terror to wonder about all that, Shard felt. “When they find you, Hedge, you’ll be written off as an obstruction to duty and national security, a dead liability. Now — get moving!”
The bluff worked. Giving a sound of sheer terror, Hedge moved forward with Shard close behind keeping up the gun pressure. Down went the rope, its end held fast in the tunnel. Whinnying, Hedge teetered over and his weight came on the rope. A few moments later there was a cry followed by a heavy splosh: Shard beamed his torch down, saw a glint of spray. Hedge was in and gasping. Shard turned his head and called to the others. “Aurora next, on the rope. Then you, Harry. You and I — we’ll have to jump for it.” The girl went down followed by Kenwood. Then Shard dropped over the edge. Taking the water he went deep, came up with his torch, sealed like his ammunition, still intact, and found Hedge floundering close by. A moment later there came a jar on his shoulder as he was flung against the side of the chamber: the water was whirling and twisting in a strong bath-plug reaction, sucking them all down to the floor of the cave system. Within minutes they were on the bottom, in some two feet of rushing water still flowing in from the invisible waterfall, water that swirled towards a big break in the wall of the chamber just as Shard had expected. Keeping his torch on the break he grabbed hold of Hedge.
Blackmail North Page 16
