“I’ll tell the scorekeeper.”
“How’s our strategy— Oh, my,” she said, looking over Sam’s side of the wall.
Sam looked too. The sky seemed to be lightening. He took the shotgun and stood up to get a better look, then ducked down as the next volley of shots hit.
The torches had started some brush on fire, and the flames were growing, beginning to eat their way into a large thicket where Sam had hidden, crackling and raising sparks. As the gunfire died down, Sam heard men shouting in Spanish. Sam ran downstairs, picked up three still-burning brands, climbed back up, and threw them over the wall on the other side of the enclosure near Remi.
“What are you doing? They’re all on that side.”
“I’m giving us light and space,” he said.
“For what?”
“We’ll deprive those guys of hiding places and put them in the light of the fire.”
She patted his shoulder and smiled, then pointed at the other side of the enclosure. She and Sam crouched, went to that side, and got ready. Then they popped up at the same time, ready to fire. The men were not visible. In the light of the growing fires, Sam stared but saw nobody.
Remi tugged on the back of his belt. “Don’t give them time to aim at you.”
Sam ducked. “Listen,” he said. “We’ve driven them back.”
“For a while,” she said. “As soon as the fire burns that brush away, they’ll be back.”
Sam shrugged. “It bought us a little time.”
“Thanks, Sam. I’ll still love you for at least two more hours.”
“After that, what?”
“We’ll see,” she said. “It depends on their marksmanship.”
They sat on the walkway, holding hands. Every few minutes, one of them would go along the walk, pick a spot, and pop up to look. The fires flamed along the strip, taking brush and trees but not going any farther because of the pyramids on each side.
As the moon set, Sam looked down the strip. “I think they’ll be coming soon,” he said. “And it looks as though more of them have arrived. It makes you wonder who they can be.”
“This is starting to get depressing,” she said.
He went through his pockets. “How much ammo have you got left?”
“Twenty rounds. Eight in each pistol, and one spare magazine with only four in it.”
“I’ve got fifteen. And five shells in the shotgun.” He hugged her. “I’m sorry to say, we’re about done.” They sat leaning their backs on the wall, silent.
Remi sat up straight. “Sam!”
“What?”
“The pool. It’s not a cenote, like a well.”
“No?”
“It has a current. You could barely feel it, but all the artifacts we found were off to the side, and it moved us in the same direction. It’s a sinkhole over an underground river.”
He looked into her eyes. “Are you saying that’s the gamble you’d like to take?”
She nodded. “If we stay here, we run out of bullets, and we’ll be at their mercy. I don’t want to go that way. I’d rather drown.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll give it our best try.”
She glanced out over the wall. “The fires are about to the end. I can see the men moving down there. We don’t have much time.”
Sam and Remi hurried down the steps and got their dive equipment ready and changed into their wet suits. Sam brought the waterproof bag of artifacts out of his pack. “Put the guns, phones, and ammo in here.”
While Remi gathered them into the bag and sealed it, Sam put a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and shoes in the net bag for each of them and lowered their pack into the water.
“That’s everything,” he said. “Maybe they’ll think we got out through the fires.”
Remi shook the bag. “Are you able to carry this?”
“It’ll make a good weight.” He removed the lead weights from his belt and attached the bag to it.
Sam and Remi put on the rest of their dive equipment, held their flashlights, and sat on the edge of the pool. He said, “I’m sorry it comes down to a long shot.”
She leaned over to bump him with her shoulder. “It’s not such a long shot. If there’s one sinkhole, there are probably others. We just have to conserve our air to give us more time to find one. We should have about twenty-five minutes.”
He nodded. As he did, there was a ferocious barrage of gunfire that ran along the top of the wall on three sides, knocking chips and mortar into the air. Sam and Remi turned their heads to kiss. Then they put on their masks, inserted their mouthpieces, and slid into the water. They swam downward for ten or twelve feet and then felt the slow current catch them and begin to push them gently away.
Chapter 12
GUATEMALA
Sam and Remi swam cautiously in the deepening darkness, just going with the current for about a hundred feet to make sure that no one standing above the cenote could see them turn on their flashlights, and they increased their speed to move along the stone corridor of the underground river. The water rose all the way to the ceiling of the cavern, leaving no airspace above the surface. At first, the walls were about twenty feet apart but thirty or forty feet deep. Each time the space between the walls narrowed, Sam and Remi would feel a growing dread. When the space opened up a little, their relief was intense.
They kicked their fins steadily to keep their speed up, and the current helped them along. They held their flashlights ahead of them, but what they saw was always the same — more curving tunnel. When the tunnel narrowed, Sam would wonder whether it was merely a fissure in the rock opened up by one of the frequent earthquakes in the region. If it was, it could narrow at some point from twenty feet down to six inches, and they would be trapped and drown.
Sam kept checking his watch as they swam. He and Remi had made a dive yesterday morning that had lasted about fifteen minutes. Each of their aluminum tanks still held about twenty-five minutes of air. That meant that for the first twelve minutes, if they reached an obstacle, they might still be able to swim back to the cenote and surface. Maybe if they did, they’d find that the men who had been after them had already stormed the enclosure, seen they were gone, and left to search for them. Sam knew this thought was part fantasy and part nightmare: the possibility that betting their lives on this underground river might be a dead end.
And then it was thirteen minutes, and he knew that if they tried to swim back, they probably wouldn’t make it before their air was gone. After five more minutes, they certainly wouldn’t.
When twenty minutes had passed, they could count on only five more minutes of air. Even that might be optimistic. They had been swimming steadily, so they had used air at an accelerated rate. He thought about their chances as rationally as he could. There was no reason to believe that they would reach another opening in the ground above them in the next five minutes. Remi was smaller and lighter and used less air than he did. If she had both tanks, she would have twice as much time to find an escape.
Sam shifted his tank to the side so he could turn off the valve, but Remi saw what he was doing. She grasped his wrist with surprising strength and shook her head violently. Sam realized that she must have been thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same fears, and known that Sam would try to give her his tank.
When Remi had grasped Sam’s wrist, his flashlight had swept the space above them, and something had looked different. Now he looked back and upward. He had gotten used to the sight of the bubbles they exhaled rising to the ceiling of the cavern, sliding into a depression, and staying there as a single, gelatinous bubble. Now his bubbles disappeared. He swam upward, with Remi still holding his wrist.
They broke the surface together and aimed their flashlights upward. They were in a dome, with the limestone ceiling about ten feet above their heads. Sam removed his mouthpiece and cautiously took a shallow breath. “The air is good,” he announced.
Remi took out her mouthpiece. They raised their masks and loo
ked around. “I was afraid it would be carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide or something from a volcano,” she said.
“Nope. Just air.”
“It’s sweet, clean air,” she said. “How is it getting in?”
“Let’s turn off the flashlights and see if light is coming in.”
They tried the experiment, but there was no light. They waited for their eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they still detected nothing. They switched on their flashlights again. “At least we can swim on the surface for a bit,” said Sam. They closed the valves on their tanks and began to move.
The space remained above them, and they breathed the air and swam steadily along with the current.
Sam paused. “I think I know what this is.”
“You do?” she said.
“Rainwater that flows into cenotes or seeps in through cracks feeds the river. The water level must be very high after a rain — maybe even through the rainy season — and then gets lower as time passes.”
“Sounds right,” she said. “It would explain why the Mayans built those big stone strips like gutters, to catch the rain and direct it to the pool.”
“When there’s no rain for a while, much of the underground river probably gets low, and air flows in above it. When the river rises again, air gets trapped in places like this,” Sam said. “We’ve got to try to stay on the surface as long as we can to save our air.”
“And by the way,” said Remi, “don’t make any more moves like trying to give me your air tank. I’m already aware that chivalry isn’t dead.”
“I was just being rational,” he said. “You use less air than I do, so you could make it last longer and get farther.”
“All that would accomplish is that we’d both die alone. I plan to die in front of an audience and I picked mine years ago. You’re it.”
“Saves you having to send out a lot of invitations,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said. “This is hard enough with you alive. Just stick with me and curb your generosity.”
They swam on along the curving tunnel for an hour until they came to a spot where the wall ahead reached all the way down under the water. They stopped and held on to the wall long enough for an awkward kiss. Then they lowered their masks over their faces and turned on the valves of their tanks. Remi said, “Remember, it’s both of us or neither,” and put her mouthpiece in.
They sank, and found themselves in a long passage that looked exactly like the stretches they had first passed through. As they swam, Remi wished she had looked at her watch before they had submerged. She had timed their arrival at the air pocket at sixteen minutes, but how much time had gone by? And did their tanks actually hold nine more minutes of air? She and Sam had never tested the limits before. Letting their air get this low would have been risky and stupid on any day when they could have simply surfaced and gotten fresh tanks from the dive boat.
There was nothing she could do but swim. As the minutes ticked away, the passage opened into another, wider space. The bottom of the river was oddly uneven, with loose chunks of rock instead of the smooth-worn riverbed they’d seen before. Then she realized she was seeing these things outside the perimeter of their flashlight beams — real light was filtering down from above. They swam upward. As the light grew brighter, Remi laughed and heard herself make a squeaky noise like a dolphin. She saw Sam huff out a big flurry of bubbles in an answering laugh, and they broke the surface smiling.
But Remi’s laugh caught in her throat. There was light in this dome, directly above their heads, coming from a circular hole that opened to the starry sky. But the hole was at the center of the dome, beyond their reach, at least six feet above the surface of the river.
“Now, there’s a problem,” Sam said.
“What can we do?”
“I’m going down to take a look around. Stay here for a minute.” He lowered his mask again and submerged. Remi waited until he surfaced again.
“Well?” she said.
Sam swam over to the side of the stone riverbed. It seemed to rise in the water, then rose partway out of it, so he was only up to his waist. “I’m standing on a pile of rock. At some point, a pretty big chunk of wall came down right here. There’s also a pile in the center, right below where the roof collapsed.”
“Very dramatic,” she said. “Does this mean we’re not going to the great beyond?”
Sam looked up at the hole in the dome. “I think it does, but we’ll have to work pretty hard to get out. Get ready to move some stones.”
They dove to the bottom, where Sam had been standing, and began to move chunks of stone from the pile along the wall to the spot just below the opening. Sam moved the largest chunks he could, rolling them end over end, to add to the pile in the center. Soon he took off his fins and worked in his booties. It was clear that at some point part of the wall had collapsed to make the pile, and stones gradually falling from the ceiling formed the cenote, with even more stones coming down as it enlarged. Sam and Remi both were free diving and they had to stop occasionally to catch their breaths.
When they had moved the whole pile of stone from the place where it had fallen to the place they wanted it, they stopped at the surface. “We’re running out of stones,” said Remi.
“I think we’ve got to bet the rest of our air on finding more and building higher.”
“I’m for risking it,” she said. “This is the only chance we’re likely to get.”
They put on their tanks again, swam in a wider radius around the pile they’d built, and brought back chunks of limestone that must have been left by other collapses. They didn’t bother to pile the rocks high, just brought them and then went back for more, knowing the air in their tanks must be nearly gone. After a few more minutes, Sam surfaced and took off his tank. Within a short time, Remi surfaced too and took off hers.
“All out?” asked Sam.
She nodded.
“All right. Let me arrange what we’ve got as well as I can.” Sam ducked under the water and moved a large stone and added it to the pile. Remi went under and did the same. Each time they submerged, they held their breath and moved one stone before they came up for air. It was a slow and exhausting process, and their rest periods grew longer, but, little by little, the pile rose nearly to the surface. Sam even built their empty tanks into the pile to add height.
Finally, after hours of work, Sam sat down for a moment. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I’ll lift you up. You’ll stand on my shoulders. You should be able to get your hands up on the rim of the cenote.”
“I’ll certainly try.”
Sam bent his knees. Remi took his hands, stepped lightly on his knees, then stepped up to his shoulders. He straightened his legs, and Remi rose. He could feel her clawing and scrabbling with her hands, trying to pull herself upward on the uncertain surface and failing.
“Step on my hands,” he said. He held them, palms upward, just above his shoulders. Remi looked down, placed a foot on one hand and then a foot on the other.
“Try again,” he said, and she pushed down with her arms while Sam pushed up to straighten his elbows. And then her upper body was on the ground above. She clutched at clumps of plants and dragged herself forward onto the surface.
She looked down at Sam. “I’m up, Sam. I’m out.”
“That’s good news, of course,” Sam said. “I look forward to your weekly visits when you come to drop sandwiches down to me.”
“Very funny,” she said. “What can we use as rope?”
“I’ll use my wet suit,” he said. “I’ll cut it into strips while you look for something solid we can tie it to.”
“All right.”
He couldn’t hear her anymore and knew she had moved off a few feet. He took off the top of his wet suit, took the dive knife from his belt, and began to cut. When he reached the sleeves, he cut each into several strips and tied them together, then tied these each to the long corkscrew shape he had cut fro
m the torso. He took off the bottom of the wet suit, cut it into strips, and added it to the corkscrew.
Remi looked down over the rim of the cenote. “Throw me the rope when it’s ready,” she said. “I’ve got a tree up here.”
“Take this first,” he said. He removed the waterproof pack from his dive belt, held it in both hands, and performed something like a basketball jump shot to sail it up through the opening to the surface. He tied his neoprene rope to his belt with its one remaining weight, then called, “Ready?”
“Ready,” she said.
He swung the rope back and forth a couple of times, then swung it up toward Remi.
“Got it.” Then she disappeared again, pulling the rope with her. After thirty seconds, she came back to the edge. He could see she had her dive knife in her hand. “We need some more. This will take a minute.”
Several minutes later, Sam could see Remi’s face, looking down at him again. “It’s tied on. Time to do it.”
Sam climbed the rubber rope upward. Initially, it stretched as it took his weight, so the first two or three feet of climbing got him nowhere, but then the stretched rubber remained taut. He climbed it to the cenote, then used it as a handhold to drag himself up onto the ground. He rolled on his back, looked up at the sky, and then at Remi. His eyes widened. “Nice to see you used your wet suit too.”
“Stop staring, naked boy,” she said. “At least blink once in a while.” She opened the waterproof bag and tossed a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt on his chest, took out her own clothes, stepped into her shorts and pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Put on some clothes so we can start hunting for civilization.”
He sat up and looked around him. “I think we’re in it.”
She turned, stepped in a little circle, and noticed for the first time the rows and rows of tall, bright green leafy plants that surrounded them and extended in all directions, as far as she could see, under the starlit night.
Sam said, “I think we’re in the middle of the biggest marijuana field in the world.”
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