"Perish the thought. If I don't hold these kids by the collar, they'll jerk you out of there so fast you'll feel like you were fired from a cannonball."
"Try to keep it civilized."
Giordino held up his hand as a signal for the students to begin pulling. "Here we go."
"Bring on the jugglers and the clowns," Pitt answered in good humor.
The safety line became taut and the long, slow haul began. The rush of the surge through the shaft was matched by the gurgling of their exhaust bubbles from the air regulators. With nothing to do now but grip the line, Pitt relaxed and went limp, allowing his body to be drawn against the flow of the underground current that gushed through the narrow slot like air through a venturi tube. The lighter silt-clouded water in the pool at the end of the passage seemed miles away. Time had no meaning, and he felt as if he'd been immersed for an age. Only Giordino's steady voice helped Pitt keep his grip on reality.
"Cry out if we haul too fast," ordered Giordino.
"Looking good," Pitt replied, hearing his air tanks grinding against the ceiling of the shaft.
What is your estimate of the current's rate of speed?"
"Close to eight knots."
Small wonder your bodies are causing severe resistance. I've got ten kids up here, pulling their hearts out."
"Six more meters and we're out of here," Pitt informed him.
And then a minute, probably a minute and a half, struggling to hold on to the safety line as they were buffeted by the diminishing force of the torrent, and they broke free of the shaft into the cloud of silt swirling around the floor of the sacrificial pool. Another minute and they were pulled upward and clear from the drag of the current and into transparent, unclouded water. Pitt looked up, saw the light filtering through the green slime, and felt a wondrous sense of relief.
Giordino knew they were free of the suction when the tension on the safety line suddenly diminished. He ordered a halt to the ascent operation as he rechecked his decompression data on a laptop computer. One stop of eight minutes would take Pitt out of any danger of decompression sickness, but the archaeology project divers would need stops of far longer duration. They had been down over two hours at depths ranging from 17 to 37 meters (67 to 122 feet). They would require at least two stops lasting over an hour. How much air was left in Pitt's tanks to sustain them? That was the life-or-death dilemma. Enough for ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty?
At sea level, or one atmosphere, the normal human body contains about one liter of dissolved nitrogen. Breathing larger quantities of air under the pressure of water depth increases the absorption of nitrogen to two liters at two atmospheres (10 meters, or 30 feet of water depth), three liters at three atmospheres (30 meters, or 90 feet), and so on. During diving the excess nitrogen is rapidly dissolved in the blood, carried throughout the body, and stored in the tissues. When a diver begins to ascend, the situation is reversed, only this time far more slowly. As the water pressure decreases, the overabundance of nitrogen travels to the lungs and is eliminated by respiration. If the diver rises too quickly, normal breathing can't cope and bubbles of nitrogen form in the blood, body tissue, and joints, causing decompression sickness, better known as the bends, a condition that has crippled or killed thousands of divers over the past century.
Finally, Giordino set aside the computer and called Pitt. "Dirk?"
"I hear you."
"Bad news. There isn't enough air left in your tanks for the lady and her friend to make the necessary decompression stops."
"Tell me something I don't know," Pitt came back. "What about backup tanks in the chopper?"
"No such luck," moaned Giordino. "In our rush to leave the ship the crew threw on an air compressor but forgot to load extra air tanks."
Pitt stared through his face mask at Rodgers, still clutching his camera and shooting pictures. The photographer gave him a thumbs up sign as though he'd just cleared the pool table at the neighborhood saloon. Pitt's gaze moved to Shannon. Her hazel eyes stared back at him through her face mask, wide and content as if she thought the nightmare was over and her hero was going to sweep her off to his castle. She had not realized the worst was far from over. For the first time he noticed that she had blond hair, and Pitt found himself wondering what she looked like in only her swim suit without the diving equipment.
The daydream was over almost as soon as it was begun. His mind came back on an even keel and he spoke into his face mask receiver. "Al, you said the compressor is on board the chopper."
"I did."
"Send down the tool kit. You'll find it in the storage locker of the chopper."
"Make sense," Giordino urged.
"The manifold valves on my air tanks," Pitt explained hastily. "They're the new prototypes NUMA is testing. I can shut off one independently of the other and then remove it from the manifold without expelling air from the opposite tank."
"I read you, pal," said an enlightened Giordino. "You disconnect one of your twin tanks and breathe off the other. I pull up the empty and refill it with the compressor. Then we repeat the process until we satisfy the decompression schedule."
"A glittering concept, don't you think?" asked Pitt with dark sarcasm.
"Fundamental at best," grunted Giordino, artfully concealing his elation. "Hang at six-point-five meters for seventeen minutes. I'll send the tool kit down to you on the safety line. I just hope your plan works."
"Never a doubt." Pitt's confidence seemed genuine. "When I step onto firm ground again, I'll expect a Dixieland band playing `Waiting for the Robert E. Lee'."
"Spare me," Giordino groaned.
As he ran toward the helicopter, he was confronted by Miller.
"Why did you stop?" the anthropologist demanded. "Good God, man, what are you waiting for? Pull them up!"
Giordino fixed the anthropologist with an icy stare. "Pull them to the surface now and they die."
Miller looked blank. "Die?"
"The bends, Doc, ever hear of it?"
A look of understanding crossed Miller's face, and he slowly nodded. "I'm sorry. Please forgive an excitable old bone monger. I won't trouble you again."
Giordino smiled sympathetically. He continued to the helicopter and climbed inside, never suspecting that Miller's words were as prophetic as a lead dime.
The tool kit, consisting of several metric wrenches, a pair of pliers, two screwdrivers, and a geologist's hammer with a small pick on one end, was tied loosely to the safety line by a bowline knot and lowered by a small cord. Once the tools were in Pitt's hands he gripped the air tank pack between his knees. Next he adroitly shut off one valve and unthreaded it from the manifold with a wrench. When one air tank came free, he attached it to the cord.
"Cargo up," Pitt announced.
In less than four minutes, the tank was raised by willing hands on the secondary cord, connected to the throbbing gas-engine compressor and taking on purified air. Giordino was cursing, sweet talking, and begging the compressor to pump 3500 pounds of air per square inch into the 100-cubic-foot steel tank in record time. The needle on the pressure gauge was just shy of 1800 pounds when Pitt warned him that Shannon's pony bottle was dry and his lone tank had only 400 pounds left. With three of them sucking on one tank, that did not leave a comfortable safety margin. Giordino cut off the compressor when the pressure reached 2500 and wasted no time in sending the tank back down into the sinkhole. The process was repeated three more times after Pitt and the other divers moved to their next decompression stop at three meters, which meant they had to endure several minutes in the slime. The whole procedure went off without a hitch.
Giordino allowed an ample safety margin. He let nearly forty minutes pass before he pronounced it safe for Shannon and Rodgers to surface and be lifted to the brink of the sacrificial pool. It was a measure of his complete confidence in his friend that Pitt didn't even bother to question the accuracy of Giordino's calculations. Ladies went first as Pitt encircled Shannon's waist with the strap and buckle that w
as attached to the safety and communications line. He waved to the faces peering over the edge and Shannon was on her way to dry land.
Rodgers was next. His utter exhaustion after his narrow brush with death was forgotten at the sheer exhilaration of being lifted out of the godforsaken pool of death and slime, never, he swore, to return. A gnawing hunger and a great thirst mushroomed inside him. He remembered a bottle of vodka that he kept in his tent and he began to think of reaching for it as though it were the holy grail. He was high enough now to see the faces of Dr. Miller and the Peruvian archaeology students. He had never been as happy to see anyone in his life. He was too overjoyed to notice that none of them was smiling.
Then, as he was hoisted over the edge of the sinkhole, he saw to his astonishment and horror a sight that was completely unexpected.
Dr. Miller, Shannon, and the Peruvian university students stepped back once Rodgers was on solid ground. As soon as he had unbuckled the safety line he saw that they all stood somberly with their hands clasped behind their necks.
There were six in all, Chinese-manufactured Type 56-1 assault rifles gripped ominously by six pairs of steady hands. The six men were strung out in a rough semicircle around the archaeologists, small, blank-faced, silent men dressed in wool ponchos, sandals, and felt hats. Their furtive dark eyes darted from the captured group to Rodgers.
To Shannon, these men were not simple hill-folk bandits supplementing their meager incomes by robbing visitors of food and material goods that could be hawked in public markets, they had to be hardened killers of the Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"), a Maoist revolutionary group that had terrorized Peru since 1981 by murdering thousands of innocent victims, including political leaders, policemen, and army soldiers. She was suddenly gripped by terror. The Shining Path killers were notorious for attaching explosives to their victims and blasting them to pieces.
After their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured in September 1992, the guerrilla movement had split into unorganized splinter groups that carried out haphazard car bombings and assassinations by bloodcrazed death squads that achieved nothing for the people of Peru but tragedy and grief. The guerrillas stood around their captives, alert and watchful, with sadistic anticipation in their eyes.
One of them, an older man with an immense sweeping moustache, motioned for Rodgers to join the other captives. "Are there more people down there?" he asked in English with the barest trace of a Spanish accent.
Miller hesitated and cast a side glance at Giordino.
Giordino nodded at Rodgers. "That man is the last," he snapped in a tone filled with defiance. "He and the lady were the only divers."
The rebel guerrilla gazed at Giordino through lifeless, carbon black eyes. Then he stepped to the sheer drop of the sacrificial pool and peered downward. He saw a head floating in the middle of green slime. "That is good," he said in a sinister tone.
He picked up the safety line that descended into the water, took a machete from his belt and brought it down in a deft swing, severing the line from the reel. Then the expressionless face smiled a morbid smile as he casually held the end of the line over the edge for a moment before dropping it into the unescapable sinkhole.
Pitt felt like the chump in a Laurel and Hardy movie who yells to be saved from drowning and is thrown both ends of a rope. Holding up the severed end of the safety and communications line, he stared at it, incredulous. Besides having his means of escape dropped around his head, he had lost all contact with Giordino. He floated in the slime in total ignorance of the hostile events occurring above the sinkhole. He unbuckled the head straps holding the full face mask securely around his head, pulled it off, and stared up at the rim expectantly. Nobody stared back.
Pitt was half a second away from shouting for help when a roaring blast of gunfire reverberated around the limestone walls of the sinkhole for a solid sixty seconds. The acoustics of the stone amplified the sound deafeningly. Then, as abruptly as the automatic weapons' fire cut the quiet jungle, the harsh clatter faded and all went strangely silent. Pitt's thoughts were hurtling around in an unbreakable circle. To say he was mystified was a vast understatement. What was happening up there? Who was doing the shooting, and at whom? He became increasingly apprehensive with each passing moment. He had to get out of this death pit. But how? He didn't need a manual on mountain climbing to tell him it was impossible to climb the sheer ninety-degree walls without proper equipment or help from above.
Giordino would never have deserted him, he thought bleakly. Never-unless his friend was injured or unconscious. He didn't allow himself to dwell on the unthinkable possibility that Giordino was dead. Heartsick and mad from the desperation welling up inside him, Pitt shouted to the open sky, his voice echoing in the deep chamber. His only answer was a deathly stillness. He couldn't conceive why any of this was happening. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he would have to climb out alone. He looked up at the sky. There was less than two hours of daylight left. If he was to save himself, he had to start now. But what of the unseen intruders with guns? The nagging question was would they wait until he was as exposed as a fly on a windowpane before they blew him away? Or did they figure he was as good as dead? He decided not to wait to find out. Nothing short of the threat of being thrown in molten lava could keep him in that hot, scummy-layered water through the night.
He floated on his back and examined the walls that seemed to reach to a passing cloud, and tried to recall what he'd read about limestone in what seemed a centuries-old geology course in college. Limestone: a sedimentary rock composed of calcium carbonate, a sort of blend of crystalline calcite and carbonate mud, produced by lime-secreting organisms from ancient coral reefs. Limestones vary in texture and color. Not bad, Pitt thought, for a student who pulled a B - in the course. His old teacher would be proud of him.
He was lucky he wasn't facing granite or basalt. The limestone was pockmarked with small hollow cavities and lined with tiny edges. He swam around the circular walls until he was under a small outcropping that protruded from the side about halfway to the top. He removed his air tank pack and the rest of his diving gear, except for the accessory belt, and let it drop to the floor of the sinkhole. All he kept were the pliers and the geologist's pick hammer from the tool kit. If for some unfathomable reason his best friend and the archaeologists above the ledge had been killed or wounded, and Pitt had been left to die in the sacrificial pool with only the ghosts of previous victims for company, he was damned well going to find out why.
First, he pulled a dive knife from a sheath strapped to his leg and cut off two lengths of safety line. He tied one section of the line tightly to the narrow section of the pick hammer's handle close to the head so it wouldn't slip over the wider base. Then he tied a step-in loop at the free end of the line.
Next he rigged a hook from the buckle of his accessory belt, bending it with the pliers until it resembled a C. He then fastened the second section of line to the hook with another step-in loop. When he was finished, he had functional, though rudimentary, climbing tools.
Now came the tough part.
Pitt's climbing technique was not exactly that of a veteran mountaineer. The sad truth was that he had never climbed any mountain except on a beaten trail by foot. What little he'd seen of experts scaling vertical rock walls came from public service television or magazine articles. Water was his element. His only contact with mountains was an occasional ski trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. He didn't know a piton (a metal spike with a ring in one end) from a carabiner (an oblong metal ring with a springloaded closing latch that hooks the climbing rope to the piton). He vaguely knew rappelling had something to do with descending a rope that wrapped under a thigh, across the body, and over the opposite shoulder.
There wasn't an expert climber in the business who would have given five hundred to one odds Pitt could make it to the top. The problem with the odds was that Pitt was too stubborn to even consider them. The old diehard Pitt came back on balance. His mind
felt clear and sharp as a needle. He knew his life, and perhaps the lives of the others, hung on an unraveling thread. Cold, self-possessed inner resolve took hold as it had so many times in the past.
With a commitment bred of desperation, he reached up and stuck the belt hook into a small protruding edge of limestone. He then stepped into the loop, grasped the upper end of the line and pulled himself out of the water.
Now he lifted the hammer as high as he could reach, slightly off to one side, and rapped the pick end of the hammer into a limestone pocket. Then he placed his free foot in the loop and pulled himself to a higher stance up the limestone wall.
Crude by professional standards, Pitt mused, but it worked. He repeated the process, first with the C hook, then with the pick hammer, moving up the steep wall with his arms and legs articulating like a spider. It was exhausting effort even for a man in good physical condition. The sun had vanished below the tops of the trees as if jerked to the west by a string when Pitt finally climbed onto the small outcropping halfway up the steep wall. Still no sign from anyone above.
He clung there, thankful for the resting place, even though it was barely large enough to sit one of his buttocks on. Breathing heavily, he rested until his aching muscles stopped protesting. He could not believe the climb had taken so much out of him. An expert who knew all the tricks, he presumed, wouldn't even be breathing hard. He sat there hugging the sheer side of the sinkhole wall for almost ten minutes. He felt like sitting there for another hour, but time was passing. The surrounding jungle was quickly turning dark once the sun was gone.
Pitt studied the crude climbing tool that had taken him this far. The hammer was as good as new, but the C hook was beginning to straighten from the constant strain of supporting the dead weight of a human body. He took a minute to recurl the hook by beating it against the limestone with his pick hammer.
He had expected the darkness to shroud his vision, forcing him to scale the limestone by feel only. But a strange light was forming below him. He turned and stared down into the water.
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