Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  Now up! They were accelerating, pressure squeaking in his ears. He prodded her sharply in the ribs, and heard the rush of bubbles as she released the expanding oxygen from her lungs.

  PeT "Clever girl." He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

  The ascent took so long that he began to fear he had lost his way, and taken a false branch of the tunnel, and then suddenly they broke out through the surface and he pumped for air.

  Gasping, he reached across and switched on her lamp.

  "You're not good," he panted. "You are simply bloody marvelous!" He towed her to the foot of the ladder and began stripping off her oxygen gear.

  "Get up the ladder, out of the water," he grunted. "Here, strap my leg to the rung. I'll be back soonest." He did not waste time on the difficult task of donning the gear while treading water, instead he tucked the canisters under his arm.

  He had no stone to weight himself down so he depressed the valve and emptied the oxygen bag. The set was now negatively buoyant starting to pull him under.

  He could not use oxygen so he would have to free-dive again. He hung onto a rung of the ladder work while he pumped his lungs with air, and then duck-dived.

  At the wall he slid backwards through the opening and pulled the empty set after him. With the bag deflated, it came through readily enough. At the entrance to the grand gallery, he opened the tap of the oxygen cylinder. Gas hissed into the bag, swelling it, and immediately it was buoyant again. It drew Craig rapidly up to the surface of the pool.

  Sarah was perched on the edge of the slab, but she had the canvas bags packed and ready.

  "Come on!" Craig gasped.

  Tupho, I cannot."

  "Get your little black arse down here! he rasped hoarsely.

  "Here, take the bags, I will stay."

  Craig reached up and caught her ankle. He yanked her off the slab, and she splashed into the water and clung to him.

  "Do you know what the Shana will do to you?" Roughly he pulled the yoke of the set over her head, and there was another burst of machine-gun fire above them, the ricochets wailing off the upper walls of the gallery.

  Craig pressed the mask over her face.

  "BreathePhe ordered. She sucked air through the mask.

  "Do you see how easy it is?" She nodded.

  "Here, hold the mask on your face with both hands.

  Breathe slowly and easily. I will carry you lie still. Do not move!" She nodded again. He strapped the canvas bags to his waist and picked up the weight stone. He began hyperventilating.

  From above them came the packing report of a grenade launcher something clattered down the gallery and the entire cavern was lit by the fierce blue glare of a phosphorus flare.

  With a rock tucked under one arm, and Sarah under the other, Craig ducked below the surface. Halfway down he felt Sarah try to breathe and immediately he knew they were in trouble. She took water, and began choking and wheezing into her mask. Her body convulsed against him, and she began writhing. and struggling. He held her with difficulty; she was surprisingly strong and her hard slim body twisted in his ms.

  They reached the entrance to the shaft, and as Craig let the weight fall, their buoyancy altered drastically. Sarah whirled on top of him, and drove her elbow into his face.

  The blow stunned him and for a moment he relaxed his grip. She broke away from him, starting to rise rapidly, kicking and windmilling.

  He reached up and just managed to grip her ankle.

  Anchoring himself on the sill of the entrance, he hauled her down again and in the lamp glow saw that she had torn the mask off her face.

  It was snaking wildly about her head on its hose.

  He dragged her bodily towards the wall, and she clawed at him and kicked him in the lower belly, but he raised his knees to protect his groin and swung her bodily around.

  Holding her from behind, he dragged her to the hole, and she fought him with the maniacal strength of terror and panic. He got her halfway through the wall before the hose caught in a crack in the rock, anchoring them.

  While he struggled to free it, Sarah began to weaken, her movements became spasmodic and uncoordinated. She was drowning.

  Craig got both his hands on the hose, and a foothold on the rock of the wall. He pulled with all the strength of his arms and his body and the hose ripped out of the oxygen bag. The gas escaped through the rent in a roar of silver bubbles, but Sarah was free.

  He pulled her out of the hole and started pedalling upwards, his one leg only just pushing them against the weight of the purged oxygen set and the drag of the canvas food-bags at his waist.

  Craig's struggles to subdue Sarah had burned up his own oxygen reserves. His lungs were on fire, and his chest spasmed violently. He kept on pedalling. Sarah was quiescent in his arms, and he felt that despite all his efforts they were no longer moving, that they were hanging in the black depths, both of them drowning slowly. Gradually the urge to breathe passed, and it all ceased to be worth further effort. It was much easier just to relax and let it happen.

  Slowly he became aware of a mild pain. Through his indifference he wondered vaguely about that, but it was only when his head broke surface that he realized that someone had him by the hair.

  Even in his half-drowned state, he realized that Sally Anne must have seen the lamp glow below the surface and recognized their predicament. She had dived down to them, seized Craig by the hair and dragged him up to the surface.

  As he struggled for breath, he realized also that he still had his grip on Sarah's arm. The black girl was floating face-down on the surface beside him.

  "Help mePhe choked on his own breath. "Get her out! Between them, they stripped the damaged oxygen set off her and lifted the unconscious girl onto the first rung of the ladder work above the water, where Sally-Anne cradled her face-down over her lap. Sarah hung there likea drowned black kitten.

  Craig put his finger into her mouth, making sure that her tongue was clear, and then pressed the finger down into her throat to trigger the retching reflex. Sarah spewed up a mixture of water and vomit, and began to make small uncoordinated twitching movements.

  Hanging in the water beside her, Craig splashed the vomit off her lips and then covered her mouth with his own, forcing his breath down into her lungs while Sally Anne cradled the limp body as best she could on the awkward perch.

  "She's breathing again." Craig lifted his mouth off Sarah's. He felt sick and dizzy and weak from his own near-drowning.

  "The diving set is buggered," he whispered, "the hose is torn out." He groped or6bnd for it, but it had sunk into the shaft.

  (Sam," he whispered. "I've got to go back for Sam." enough. You'll kill "Darling, you can't you've done e yourself."

  "Sam," he repeated. "Got to get Sam." Clumsily he untied the straps of the canvas food-bags and hung them beside his leg on the ladder. He clung to the ladder, breathing as deeply as his aching lungs would allow. Sarah was coughing and wheezing, but trying to sit up. Sally-Anne lifted her and held her on her lap likea child.

  "Craig, darling, come back safely," she pleaded.

  "Too right," he agreed, allowing himself the indulgence Of another half-dozen breaths of air, before he pushed himself off the ladder and the cold waters closed around his head again.

  The underwater section of the grand gallery, even down as deep as the mouth of the shaft, was lit by the phosphorus flares, and as Craig ascended, so the intensity of the light increased to a crackling electric blue like the glare of brute arc-lamps.

  As he broke through the surface of the pool, he found that the upper gallery was filled with the swirling smoke of the burning flares.

  He gasped for air and immediately pain shot down his throat into his chest and his eyes burned and smarted so that he could barely see.

  "Tear gas," he realized. The Shana were gassing the cavern.

  Craig saw Tungata was in the water, crouched waistdeep behind the slab of rock. He had torn a strip from his shirt, wet it and bound it
over his mouth and nose, but his eyes were red and running with tears.

  "The whole cavern is swarming with troopers," he told Craig, his voice muffled by the wet cloth, and he stopped as a stentorian disembodied voice echoed down the gallery, its English distorted by an electronic megaphone.

  "If you surrender immediately, you will not be harmed." As if to punctuate this announcement, there was the "Pock" of a grenade-launcher and another tear-gas canister came flying down the gallery, bouncing off the limestone floor likea football, belching out white clouds of the irritant gas.

  "They are down the staircase already, I couldn't stop them." Tungata bobbed up from behind the edge of the slab and fired a short burst up the gallery. His bullets cracked and whined from the rock, and then the AK went silent and he ducked down.

  "The last magazine," he grunted and dropped the empty rifle into the water. He groped for the pistol on his belt.

  "Come on, Sam," Craig gasped. "There is a way through beyond this pool."

  "I can't swim." Tungata was checking the pistol, slapping the magazine into the butt and jerking back the slide to load.

  "I got Sarah through." Craig was trying to breathe through the searing clouds of gas. "I'll get you through." Tungata looked up at him.

  "Trust me, Sam."

  "Sarah is safe?"

  "I promise you, she is." Tungata hesitated, fighting his fear of the waters.

  "You can't let them take you," Craig told him. "You owe it to Sarah and to your people." Perhaps Craig had discovered the only appeal that would move him. Tungata pushed the pistol back into his belt.

  "Tell me what to do," he said.

  it was impossible to hyperventilate in the gas-laden atmosphere.

  "Get what air you can, and hold it. Hold it, force yourself not to breathe again," Craig wheezed. The tear gas was ripping his lungs all he could feel the cold and deadly spread of lethargy like liquid in his veins. It was going to be a long, hard road home.

  down. "Fresh air!" There was "Here!" Tungata pulled him still a pocket of clean air trapped below the angle of the slab. Craig drank it in greedily.

  He took Tungata's hands and placed them on the canvas belt. "Hold on! I he ordered, and when Tungata nodded, he pulled one last long breath, and they ducked under together. They went down fast.

  When they reached the wall there was no bulky oxygen set to encumber them, and Craig pulled Tungata through with what remained of his strength. But he was slowing and weakening drastically, once again losing the urge to breathe, a symptom of anoxia, of oxygen starvation.

  They were through the wall, but he could not think what to do next. He was confused and disorientated, his brain playing tricks with him. He found he was iggling weakly, precious air bubbling out between his lips. The glow of the lamp turned a marvelous emerald green, and then split into prisms of rainbow light. It was beautiful, and he examined it drunkenly, starting to roll onto his back. It was so peaceful and beautiful, just like that fall into oblivion after an injection of pentathol. The air trickled out of his mouth and the bubbles were bright as precious stones. He watched them rise upwards.

  "Upwards!" he thought groggily. "Got to go up!" and he kicked lazily, pushing weakly upwards.

  Immediately there was a powerful heave on his waist belt and he saw Tungata's legs driving like the pistons of a steam locomotive in the lamplight. He watched them with the weighty concentration of a drunkard, but slowly they faded out into blackness. His last thought was, "If this is dying, then it's better than its publicity," and he let himself go into it with a weary fatalism.

  He woke to pain, and he tried to force himself back into that comforting womb darkness of death, but there were hands bullying and pommelling him, and the rough barked timber rungs of the ladder cutting into his flesh.

  Then he was aware that his lungs burned and his eyes felt as though they were swimming in concentrated acid. His nerve ends flared up, so that he could feel every aching muscle and the sting of every scratch and abrasion on his skin.

  Then he heard the voice. He tried to shut it out.

  "Craig! Craig darling, wake upP And the painful slap of a wet hand against his cheek. He rolled his head away from it.

  "He's coming round!" hey were like drowning rats at the bottom of a well, clinging half-submerged to the rickety ladder work all of them shivering with the cold.

  The two girls were perched on the lower rung, Craig was strapped to the main upright with a loop of canvas under his armpits, and Tungata, in the water beside him, was holding his head, preventing it from flopping forward.

  With an effort Craig peered around at their anxious faces and then he grinned weakly at Tungata. "Sam, you said you couldn't swim well, you could have footed me!"

  "We can't stay here." Sally' Anne teeth chattered in her head.

  "There is only one way" they all looked up the gloomy shaft above them.

  Craig's head still felt wobbly on his neck, but he pushed Tungata's hand away, and forced himself to begin examining the condition of the timberwork.

  It had been built sixty years ago. The bark rope that had been used by the old witch, doctors to bind the joints together had rotted, and now hung in brittle strings like the shavings from the floor of a carpentry shop. The entire structure seemed to0 have sagged to one side, unless the original builder's eye had not been straight enough to erect a plumb-line.

  "Do you think it will hold us all?" Sarah voiced the question.

  Craig found it difficult to think, he saw it all through a fine mesh of nausea and bone, weariness

  "One at a time," he mumbled, "lightest ones first. You Sally-Anne, then Sarah--2 he reached up and untied his leg from the rung. "Take the rope up with you. When you get to the top, pull up the bags and the lamps." Obediently Sally-Anne coiled the rope over her shoulder, and began to climb up the ladder.

  She went swiftly, lightly, but the ladder work creaked and swayed under her. As she went upwards, her lamp chased the shadows ahead of her up the shaft. She drew away until only the lamp glow marked her position, then even that disappeared abruptly.

  "Sally-Anne!"

  "All right!" Her voice came echoing down the shaft.

  "There is a platform here."

  "How big?"

  "Big enough I'm sending down the rope." It came snaking down to them, and Tungata secured the bags to the end.

  "Haul away!" The bundle went jerkily up the shaft, swinging on the rope.

  "Okay, send Sarah." Sarah climbed out of sight, and they heard the whisper of the girls" voices high above. Then, "Okay next!"

  "Go, SamP "You are lighter than I am."

  "Oh for Chrissake, just do it! Tungata climbed powerfully, but the timberwork shook under his weight. One of the rungs broke free, and fell away beneath his feet.

  "Look out below!" Craig ducked under the surface, and the pole hit the water above him with a heavy splash.

  Tungata clambered out of sight, and his voice came "Carefully, Pupho! The ladder is breaking up! back, Craig pulled himself out of the water, and sitting on the bottom rung strapped on his leg.

  OW

  God, that feels good." He patted it affectionately, and gave a few trial kicks.

  "I'm coming up," he called.