by Sean Ellis
“Watch what I do carefully. Pay attention to where I put my hands and feet. You will need to do exactly the same.” She sucked in a deep breath, painfully aware that anything she failed to tell DiLorenzo might cost him his life. “A basic rule is to always keep three points of contact. Always keep both hands and one foot, or both feet and one hand, in solid contact with the rock. Don’t move until you’re sure your new hold is secure.
“Once you start up the rock, two things will happen. You will get fatigued very quickly, and you will be overcome with an almost paralyzing fear. Under no circumstances are you to stop moving. It won’t get any easier if you cling to the rock, afraid to move.”
DiLorenzo nodded again, swallowing a dry lump in his throat. “Lead on.”
She turned briskly back to the cliff and scampered up the boulder pile. Without further preamble, she extended her hands to the rock, placing her left on a small protrusion about the size of her fist, situated at shoulder height. She lifted herself just a few centimeters, dividing the weight between her tiptoes and her left hand, then thrust her right arm up as far as she could reach to snag a horizontal crack with her fingertips. Remembering her own admonition to DiLorenzo, she resisted the urge to pull herself up, waiting until she found a step for her right foot. Only then did she loft herself upward.
Though the climb was easier than most, the challenge of keeping to the simplest possible route for DiLorenzo’s sake proved more involved than she had anticipated. She forced herself to pass up opportunities to make quick, dynamic advances in favor of handholds that were more pronounced and closer together. Within a few minutes she felt the familiar burn of lactic acid buildup in her forearms and thighs, a warning sign of approaching fatigue. Days of hard travel and combat were taking their toll; she needed this climb to be over quickly. She rested for a moment, breathing slowly as she shook the soreness out of first her right, then her left arm.
Her brief respite did little to alleviate the burn in her extremities. If anything, the sensation seemed to be increasing in intensity. She could feel warmth spreading through her fingertips, a virtual impossibility since there was no musculature in the digits to store lactic acid. She pondered this paradox as she reached up with her left hand, thankful that her muscles had not yet begun to quiver from the sustained exertion.
Her hand froze mere centimeters from the rock. Directly over her head a white plume was blossoming skyward. At first glance it seemed as if a cloud had reached down from the sky and taken root in the stone. “The geyser,” she murmured.
Almost unconsciously, she looked at her wristwatch—the antique dive chronometer that she had inherited from Muldoon—noting the time and the sweep of the second hand. The eruption continued to build silently above her, the water vapor, superheated by subterranean geothermal forces, refusing to dissipate quickly in the thin air.
She had known about the geyser, both from Mann’s writings and from her own observations of the rock face, but the eruption had nevertheless caught her off guard. She had not been expecting something so spectacular. The wisps of steam she had glimpsed upon approaching the cliff were merely a herald of the explosion to come.
The warmth in her arms and thighs, she now understood, was also attributable to this natural phenomenon, and not anaerobic fatigue. Heat rising from the earth’s mantle had saturated the rock surrounding the vent, making it warm enough to cause discomfort with prolonged contact.
The geyser continued to spew hot steam for nearly two minutes. When the eruption ceased, it was with an abrupt finality, as if an energy-conscious god had turned off Mother Nature’s hot water spigot.
Two minutes spent frozen in place, watching the spectacular column of vapor, had allowed a very real fatigue to creep into her muscles. There was no longer any time to waste in searching for an easy, if meandering, route up to the crevice. She quickly picked out a series of holds and articulated her way upward in a fluid ascent that lasted mere seconds.
Wisps of vapor continued to trickle from the vent, marking the location of the geyser. The horizontal slash was much larger than it had appeared from below, easily big enough for her to crawl inside the fissure and turn around. She leaned out and peered down at DiLorenzo, barely able to make out his expression.
“Made it,” she called. “Think you can do that?”
“Piece of cake,” he returned. Even with the intervening distance, there was no mistaking the quaver in his voice.
Mira nodded grimly then unlimbered the rope. With no means of fastening the line into the rock, she was forced to improvise. Tying a large knot in one end of the hemp cord, she proceeded to wedge it into the seam where the fissure began. When her fingers could press it no further, she jammed the toe of her boot into the crack and continued forcing it in. Satisfied that the rope would not quickly become dislodged, she wrapped a length of it around her hips, then cast the remainder out into space.
“Tie it around your waist,” she shouted. “Then bring it up between your legs and out to the sides. You remember what my climbing harness looked like, right?”
She saw the nod of his head as he reluctantly complied, and she talked him through the steps to tie a Swiss-Seat harness. She had no idea if his makeshift knot-work would save him in the event of a fall. The hemp rope was considerably stiffer than the nylon lines used by professional climbers and lacked the necessary elasticity. There was a good chance that, if DiLorenzo did fall, the shock of hitting the end of the safety line might prove as damaging as a fall to the rocky ground below. The purpose of the rope was primarily a psychological crutch to help the detective overcome his fears. He looked up again when he had finished, waiting for the next cue.
“Come on up. And whatever you do, don’t fall.”
After two false starts, DiLorenzo committed to the climb, rising completely out of the horizontal world. He quickly grasped the concept of finding the subtle protrusions of stone, and was soon climbing with the same confidence he might display ascending a vertical ladder. As he gained elevation, Mira pulled in the slack, spooling it around her lower body. It was a dangerous belay. If DiLorenzo fell, his mass might pull her out of her perch and catapult her from the vent. Or, it might work exactly as she intended. It was impossible to predict what would happen, and therefore was a scenario she hoped would never be tested.
DiLorenzo’s initial enthusiasm quickly paled as the ground shrank away. The fear that he had managed to suppress reasserted its grip, causing him to hesitate before each movement, sometimes pondering a handhold for several seconds before reaching out to it with quivering fingers.
“It will only get harder if you take too long,” she chided, trying to motivate without pushing him to make a foolish mistake. “You’ve got to keep moving, or you’ll exhaust yourself.”
DiLorenzo wisely saved the breath that might have been wasted in an empty retort. Mira checked the face of her watch again. The detective had already spent twice as much time on the rock face as she had, and was only about halfway up. It seemed doubtful that he could endure the strain of such a slow ascent.
An abrupt change in the air distracted her from these concerns. It took a moment for her to isolate the change, a fractional rise in the temperature and a gentle wind brushing at her back, accompanied by a pungent odor of sulfur and freshly turned earth. But in the instant that she divined the significance of these clues everything changed.
“Hang on!”
Mira dove forward, twisting as her body slipped past the edge of the fissure, and snared the stone lip with her fingertips. As her full weight succumbed to the lure of gravity, the loop around her waist pulled tight against the makeshift belay, burning painfully into her abdomen. If DiLorenzo fell now, the rope would cut her in two, but this dark thought was eclipsed by a something far more immediate.
A belch of superheated steam erupted without further warning from the ragged frown of rock where Mira had been perched only an instant before. Though the hot vapor rose up and away from the desperately clinging fig
ure, she nevertheless felt the skin of her knuckles and fingertips blistering from the sudden exposure. Gritting her teeth, she did the only thing she could: she endured.
As the initial shock of the moment passed, she became aware of DiLorenzo, motionless against the rock face, no more than six feet from her dangling boots. He had heeded the frantic warning and held his position without panicking, though she could not begin to guess at the toll such an exertion was taking on his already fatigued muscles.
Almost unconsciously, she remembered that she had been looking at her watch a few seconds before the eruption. The second release from the geyser had followed the first by an interval of about twenty minutes. The implications of that fact stunned her like a physical blow.
Though most geyser eruptions were random and unpredictable, some, like the renowned Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, kept a constant schedule. The subterranean chambers fed by invisible rivers and springs filled up at a constant rate, reaching the boiling point like an enormous underground tea kettle every few hours, sometimes so reliably that one could set a clock by them.
If this geyser was as dependable, there would be precious little time to complete the ascent and find the hidden entrance to the Nazi fortress.
The eruption ceased as abruptly as it had begun, with the last gasp of boiling hot steam dissipating into nothingness. Despite the adrenaline in her veins and the time dilation of unending agony, Mira reckoned that no more than two minutes had passed since the beginning of the eruption. The two geothermal events had lasted for an equivalent span, suggesting that the interval until the next would be similarly measured. There was no time to lose.
Bracing her toes against the rock, she pulled herself once more into the fissure, sighing aloud with relief as the noose around her waist loosened. Her fingers flared with the pain of a severe scalding, but the skin was not as badly traumatized as she had expected, which was fortunate, as she had neither the time nor the resources to treat the injury.
Before she could regain her earlier position within the seam, DiLorenzo, in a last-ditch, heroic effort, ascended the remaining section. As his fingertips grazed the lip of the fissure, Mira reached out and helped him up onto the horizontal surface.
Her scalded fingers unriddled the knot he had tied around his waist. The detective obviously had never been a Boy Scout. His belay would certainly have failed had he fallen against it. As he struggled to prop himself up on his arms left weak with fatigue, Mira hastily drew in the rope, coiling it in a butterfly pattern with an urgency that barely allowed her the time to keep it from tangling.
“Let’s go,” she stated in a tone that brooked no argument. “We don’t have much time.”
By her best estimation, in fact, they had about eighteen minutes before the fissure filled with boiling steam. If they had not located the entrance to the Nazi fortress by then, the geyser would cook them alive.
For Rachel Aimes, the failure to retrieve the Trinity from Muldoon’s U-boat had proven to be a blessing in disguise. Though both physically and emotionally battered by the defeat, the intervening days had afforded an opportunity for rest that she had postponed for too long. In the palatial surroundings of Montero’s villa, it was easy to almost forget about the quest that had consumed her life for too many years to remember.
Following Tarrant’s wishes, she had relented from combing the Argentine streets for their enemy, filling her days instead with exercise and relaxation. Though it had been difficult at first to sit idly by and wait, she soon found enough pleasant distractions to pass the time. This day, for example, had begun with a strenuous swim in Montero’s Olympic-distance pool, followed by an hour-long massage, after which she had stretched out her invigorated limbs on a chaise lounge beside the pool, wearing only sunglasses and a bikini brief that would have made a stripper blush. She knew that Montero’s house servants were probably watching her, and the thought of being on display was strangely tantalizing.
Indulging her exhibitionist fantasies had awakened her to emotions kept dormant for too long. Though she was conscious of her beauty, aware of her raw sexuality, she rarely took any pleasure from her natural gifts. Sex was a tool she used to gain control of, or favor with, men. It was a talent that had served her from the time of her earliest memories as she moved through a succession of foster homes until, at age twelve, a benevolent man named Walter Aimes had drawn her out of that personal hell, showing more interest in her mind than in her body.
The thought made her chuckle. “A pity we had to kill him,” she mumbled.
“Perdón, señorita?”
Behind the mask of her sunglasses, her eyelids flashed open. The response startled her, but she did not flinch. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, revealing the familiar face of the steward that had attended her earlier. She remembered the subtle tremble of his fingertips as he had oiled her skin with suntan lotion.Had he now worked up the impertinence to approach her? A coy smile touched her lips.
“Disculpe,” continued the young man. “Señor Tarrant has called for you.”
Her smile fell by a degree, but her mind quickly switched gears, squelching her flirtatious impulses. Without speaking she swiveled into a sitting position, then rose gracefully to her feet. She stood nearly a head taller than the pool boy, her bared nipples thrusting forward just below the level of his chin, but she was now oblivious to the fact that his stare was transfixed on her breasts; the moment was gone.
The summons from Tarrant was ominous, but there was no way of knowing if it boded good or bad. Knotting a short silk robe around her waist, she left the young steward in her wake, racing into the villa to find the old grave robber in the shadowy recesses of Montero’s library.
Despite her long acquaintance with the man, Rachel could not help but feel intimidated in his presence. This sensation was certainly amplified by recent events; Tarrant’s possession of the Atlantean artifact had fundamentally changed him. It was, she imagined, something like having an audience with God.
It took a few moments for her to locate him. Though he had made no effort to conceal himself, his lack of motion caused him to blend into the staid surroundings. His hooded coat, almost like a priest’s cassock, added to the mystery that had surrounded him since his acquisition of the Trinity.
“You summoned me?” The words sounded strange on her lips. They were not a part of her ordinary vocabulary.
“She is close.”
“Raiden?”
Tarrant nodded imperceptibly. “If she survives the journey, she will find the prize today.”
“Does Montero know?”
Her breathless statement elicited a cryptic chuckle from the hooded figure. “He is nearly there as well.”
Rachel was dumbfounded. “You sent him without telling me?”
“Perish the thought, my dear. Our radical young friend is operating quite independently of my direction.”
The second revelation was nearly as disturbing as the first. “He double-crossed us?”
“It is his nature. He is drawn to treachery as a dog is to its vomit. He could not have done otherwise.”
“But if he gets the Trinity before—”
Tarrant waved dismissively. “I doubt that he will survive his next encounter with Mira Raiden. It is also in his nature to underestimate her, and that will prove his undoing. However, even if he should survive long enough to claim the prize, it will avail him naught. He barely grasps its potential. No, it is not Montero’s treachery that concerns me. It is Mira. She understands.”
Tarrant turned to face her, rising with an uncharacteristic abruptness. “That is why we must hasten there as well. Our time is nearly at hand.”
Beyond the fissure, the seam in the rock face opened into a broad cavity, almost high enough to allow Mira to walk upright. That was the good news. The bad news was that the passage turned almost immediately downward at a forty-five degree angle, plunging into the dark heart of the mountain.
Hunched over to avoid striking her
head on hanging protuberances, Mira led the way at a brisk trot. In a matter of seconds, the light from the opening in the rock face was swallowed up by the angle of descent, but she deftly plucked a flare from her backpack, striking it on the run. The twenty-foot sphere of pink-orange illumination revealed nothing about their destination, however. The distant end of the passage remained secret in the darkness.
Running was almost impossible. Her stance, bent forward because of the low ceiling, added to the difficulty of maintaining her balance, while every step seemed to promise a headlong plunge.The shaft was thick with heat and humidity, the air permeated with acrid fumes of brimstone. The surreal light from Mira’s flare cast a laval glow upon the rough walls, like a web of magma and shadow that presented the illusion of a descent into hell. The real inferno, however, would begin in less than sixteen minutes.
She didn’t know whether DiLorenzo was keeping pace and did not pause to look back. Her concern for his safety seemed to express itself best as rage. An eruption of ire to rival the geyser seemed to be building within her abdomen and she had to bite her lip in order to stay focused on the immediate problem.
It was impossible to measure their progress in meaningful terms. Even the passage of time seemed distorted by the proximity of instantaneous death. Mira’s mental clock, fueled by adrenaline, seemed to be running twice as fast as the watch ticking on her wrist. How far had they gone in five short minutes? The stifling heat made the journey all the more taxing, further impairing her perceptions. The awkward gait required to make the descent was like nothing she had ever experienced. She could not even begin to guess at the distance they had covered. A quarter of a mile, at best, she thought. We’ve barely scratched the surface.
The unremarkable tunnel continued straight as the thrust of a knife into the heart of the mountain, maintaining a more or less uniform diameter. The glow of the flare exposed the origin of the tunnel, black streaks of shadow outlining the tool marks of its original excavation. This, Mira reasoned, was a good sign. The tunnel’s architect would have chosen the shortest possible distance for the vent.
