The Kingdom

by Clive Cussler

  “I have the distinct feeling that we’re looking down the rabbit hole,” Remi murmured.

  “Come on,” Sam said. “It’s quaint.”

  “With you, I’ve come to equate that word with ‘hazardous.’”

  “I’m crushed.”

  “Can you see how far it goes?”

  “No. Keep ahold of the cliff side. If the span goes, the vines will probably hold.”

  “Another lovely word, ‘probably.’”

  Sam took a step forward, slowly shifting his weight onto the first plank. Aside from a slight creaking, the wood held firm. He took another cautious step, then another, and another, until he’d covered ten feet.

  “So far, so good,” he called over his shoulder.

  “On my way.”

  The bridge turned out to be a mere hundred feet long. On the other side the trail continued, spiraling first down the slope, then up. Ahead, the trees began thinning out.

  “Round two,” Sam said to Remi.

  “What?” she replied, then stopped short behind him. “Oh, no.”

  Another suspension bridge.

  “I sense a trend,” Remi said.

  She was right. On the other side of the second span they found another section of trail, followed by yet another bridge. For the next forty minutes the pattern continued: trail, bridge, trail, bridge. Finally, on the fifth section of trail, Sam called a halt and checked his map and compass. “We’re close,” he murmured. “The cave entrance is below us somewhere.”

  They spread out, searching up and down the trail for a way down. Remi found it. On the river side of the trail, a rusted cable ladder affixed to a tree trunk dangled in space. Sam dropped to his belly and, with both of Remi’s hands wrapped around his belt, scooted forward through the underbrush. He wriggled back.

  “There’s a rock shelf,” he said. “The ladder stops about six feet above it. We’ll have to drop.”

  “Of course we will,” Remi replied with a tight smile.

  “I’ll go first.”

  On her knees, Remi leaned forward and kissed Sam. “Bully King’s got nothing on you.”

  Sam smiled. “On either of us.”

  He shed his pack and handed it back to Remi, then crab-walked through the underbrush. He wrapped his arms around the tree trunk, then slowly lowered himself, legs dangling and feet probing, until he found the ladder’s top rung.

  “I’m on,” he told Remi. “Starting down.”

  He disappeared from view. Thirty seconds later he called, “I’m down. Drop the packs over the edge.” Remi crawled forward and dropped the first one.

  “Got it.”

  She dropped the second pack.

  “Got it. Come on down. I’ll talk you through it.”

  “On my way.”

  When she had reached the second-to-last rung and her lower body was hanging in space, Sam reached out and wrapped his arms around her thighs. “I’ve got you.”

  She let go, and Sam lowered her to the shelf. Remi adjusted her skewed headlamp, then looked around. The shelf on which they were standing was six feet wide and jutted several feet over the river. In the cliff face was a roughly oval-shaped cave entrance, closed off by hurricane fencing screwed into the rock. The bottom left corner of the fence had sprung free from the rock. A red-on-white sign written in both Nepali and English was affixed to the rock:

  DANGER

  NO TRESPASSING

  DO NOT ENTER

  Below the words was a crudely painted skull and crossbones.

  Remi smiled. “Look, Sam, it’s the universal symbol for ‘quaint.’”

  “Funny lady,” he replied. “Ready to spelunk?”

  “Have I ever said no to that question?”

  “Never, bless your heart.”

  “Lead on.”

  Their suspicion that the cave had been sealed off to keep curiosity seekers from getting lost or injured was confirmed seconds after they crawled through the gap in the fence. While pushing himself to his feet, Sam’s arm slipped into a fissure in the floor barely larger than his forearm. Had he been moving even at a modest pace, he would have broken a bone; had he been walking, it would have been his ankle.

  “Bad omen or fair warning?” he asked Remi with a half smile as she helped him to his feet.

  “I’m going with the latter.”

  “Reason 640 why I love you,” he replied. “Ever the optimist.”

  They shone their flashlights around the tunnel. It was wide enough that Sam could almost spread his arms to their full breadth but only a few inches taller than Remi, forcing Sam to stand stoop-shouldered. The floor was rough, like stucco magnified a hundred times.

  Sam turned his head, sniffing. “Smells dry.”

  Remi ran her palm over the ceiling and wall. “Feels dry.”

  With luck, moisture was out of the equation, or almost. Spelunking in a dry cave was dicey enough; water made it hazardous, with floors, ceiling, and walls that could collapse at the slightest disturbance. Even so, they knew that unseen tributaries of the Bagmati River could be running beneath their feet, so the cave’s composition could change with little or no warning.

  With Sam in the lead, they started forward. The tunnel veered sharply left, then right, then suddenly they found themselves standing before their first obstacle, this one also man-made: a set of vertical iron bars running from wall to wall, drilled into the floor and ceiling.

  “They’re not kidding around,” Sam said, shining his flashlight over the rusted steel. How many curiosity seekers had triumphantly squeezed through the hurricane fence at the entrance only to find themselves thwarted here? Sam wondered.

  Remi knelt before the bars. One by one, she gave each a shake. On the fourth try, the metal let out a grating sound. She smiled over her shoulder at Sam. “The beauty of oxidation. Give me a hand.”

  Together they began working the bar back and fourth until slowly it began to loosen in its socket. Stone chips and dust rained down from the ceiling. After two minutes’ work the bar fell free, striking the floor with a clang that echoed through the tunnel. Sam grabbed the bar and dragged it back through the gap. He examined the ends.

  “It’s been cut,” he murmured, then showed it to Remi.

  “Acetylene torch?”

  “No scorch marks. Hacksaw, would be my guess.”

  He shone his flashlight into the bar’s empty floor socket and could see, a few inches down, a stub of metal.

  Sam looked at Remi. “The plot thickens. Somebody’s been here before.”

  “And didn’t want anyone to know about it,” she added.

  After taking a moment so Sam could get a bearing on his compass and sketch a rough map in his moleskin notebook, they squeezed through the gap, refitted the bar in its upright position, and continued on. The tunnel began zigzagging and narrowing, and soon the ceiling was at four feet, and Sam’s and Remi’s elbows were bumping along the walls. The floor began sloping downward. They put away their flashlights and turned on their headlamps. The floor steepened until they were sidestepping their way down a thirty-degree grade, using rock protrusions as hand- and footholds.

  “Stop,” Remi said suddenly. “Listen.”

  From somewhere nearby came the gurgling of water.

  Sam said, “The river.”

  They descended another twenty feet, and the tunnel flattened out into a short corridor. Sam shimmied ahead to where the floor began sloping upward again.

  “It’s nearly vertical,” he called back. “I think if we’re careful, we can free-climb—”

  “Sam, take a look at this.”

  He turned around and made his way back to where Remi was standing, her neck craned back as she stared at the wall. In the beam of her headlamp, an object about the size of a half-dollar bulged from the rock.

  “It looks metallic,” Sam said. “Here, climb aboard.”

  Sam knelt down, and Remi climbed on his shoulders. He slowly stood up, allowing Remi time to steady herself against the wall. After a few
seconds she said, “It’s a railroad spike.”

  “Say again?”

  Remi repeated herself. “It’s buried in the rock up to the cap. Hold on . . . I think I can . . . There! It’s tight, but I managed to slide it out a few inches. There’s another one, Sam, about two feet up. And another one. I’m going to stand up. Ready?”

  “Go.”

  She rose to her full height. “There’s a line of them,” she said. “They go up about twenty feet to what looks like a shelf.”

  Sam thought for a moment. “Can you slide out the second one?”

  “Hold on . . . Done.”

  “Okay, climb back down,” said Sam. Once she was back on the ground, he said, “Good show.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I can think of only one reason they’d be that high off the ground.”

  “So they’d go unnoticed.”

  She nodded. “They look fairly old.”

  “Circa 1973?” Sam wondered aloud, referring to the year Lewis King disappeared.

  “Could be.”

  “Unless I miss my guess, it looks like Bully, or some other phantom spelunker, built himself a ladder. But to where?”

  As Sam’s words trailed off they panned the beams of their headlamps up the wall.

  “One way to find out,” Remi replied.

  8

  CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL

  As a ladder, the vertical alignment of the spikes would make Sam’s ascent awkward—if, in fact, he was able to reach the first rung. To that end, he uncoiled his rope, tied a slipknot in one end, and spent two minutes trying to lasso the second spike. Once done, he used a bit of parachute chord to secure a stirrup-like prusik knot to the rope to climb-and-slide his way up the wall.

  With one foot perched on the lowermost rung and his left hand wrapped around the second rung, he untied the slipknot and clipped it to his harness. He then reached up, slid out the third spike, and started upward. After five minutes of this he reached the top.

  “Not that I’d care to try it,” Sam called down, “but there are just enough handholds to make the ascent without the spikes.”

  “It would have taken some skill to set them, then.”

  “And strength.”

  “What do you see?” Remi called.

  Sam craned his neck around until his beam shone over the rock shelf. “Crawl space. Not much wider than my shoulders. Hang on, I’ll drop you a line.”

  He withdrew the second-to-last rail spike and replaced it with a SLCD (spring-loaded camming device), which locked itself into the hole. To this he attached first a carabiner, then the rope. He dropped the coil down to Remi.

  “Got it,” she said.

  “Wait there. I’m going to scout ahead. There’s no sense in both of us being up here if it’s a dead end.”

  “Two minutes, then I’m coming after you.”

  “Or if you hear a scream and a thud, whichever comes first.”

  “No screaming or thudding allowed,” Remi warned.

  “Be back in a flash.”

  Sam adjusted his position until both his feet were perched on the uppermost spike and his arms were braced against the rock ledge. He took a breath, coiled his legs, and pushed off while levering with his arms, launching his torso onto the ledge. He inchwormed forward until his legs were no longer dangling in air.

  Ahead, Sam’s headlamp penetrated only ten to twelve feet. Beyond that, blackness. He licked his index finger and held it upright. The air was perfectly still, not a welcome sign. Getting into caves was usually the easy part, getting out often harder, which was why any spelunker worth his salt was always on the lookout for secondary exits. This was especially true of unmapped systems like this one.

  Sam brought his watch to his face and started the chronometer. Remi had given him two minutes, and knowing his wife as he did, at two minutes and one second she’d be on her way up the rope.

  He started crawling forward. His gear clanked and rasped over the rock floor, sounding impossibly loud in the cramped space. “Tons.” The word appeared, unbidden, in his mind. There were countless tons of rock hanging over his body at this very moment. He forced the thought from his mind and kept going, this time more slowly, the primal part of his brain telling him: Tread carefully, lest the world collapse around you.

  He passed the twenty-foot mark and stopped to check his watch. One minute gone. He kept crawling. The tunnel curved left, then right, then began angling upward, gently at first, then more steadily, until he had to use a modified chimney crawl to keep moving. Thirty feet gone. Another time check. Thirty seconds to go. He crossed over a hump in the floor and found himself in a wider, flat area. Ahead, his headlamp swept over an opening almost twice as wide as the crawl space.

  He craned his neck and called over his shoulder, “Remi, are you there?”

  “I’m here!” came the faint reply.

  “I think I’ve got something!”

  “On my way.”

  He heard her crawling up behind him as her headlamp washed over the walls and ceiling. She gripped his calf and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “How’re you doing?”

  While Sam wasn’t clinically claustrophobic, there were moments in particularly tight spaces when he had to exert strict control over his mind. This was such a time. It was, Remi had told him, the downside of having a fertile imagination. Possibilities became probabilities, and an otherwise stable cave became a death trap ready to collapse into the bowels of the earth at the slightest bump.

  “Sam, are you there?” Remi asked.

  “Yep. I was mentally practicing Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour.’”

  Sam was a fair hand at the piano, and Remi at the violin. Occasionally, when time permitted, they practiced duets. While composer Pickett’s music didn’t readily lend itself to classical instruments, as lovers of vintage American soul, they enjoyed the challenge.

  “What’ve you found?” Remi asked.

  “That it’s going to take a lot more practice. And my blues voice needs more—”

  “I mean, ahead?”

  “Oh. An opening.”

  “Lead on. This crawl space is too tight for my liking.”

  Unseen by Remi, Sam smiled. His wife was being kind. While Sam’s male ego wasn’t a fragile thing, Remi also knew that offering a little face-saving was a woman’s prerogative.

  “Here we go,” Sam replied, and started crawling forward.

  It took only thirty seconds to reach the opening. Sam inched forward until his head was through. He looked around, then said over his shoulder, “A circular pit about ten feet across. I can’t see the bottom, but I can hear water gurgling—probably a subterranean offshoot of the Bagmati. Directly across from us is another opening, but about twelve feet higher.”

  “Oh, joy. How are the walls?”

  “Diagonal stalagmites, the biggest about as thick as a baseball bat, the rest about half that.”

  “No conveniently placed spike ladders?”

  Sam took another look, panning his headlamp along the pit’s walls. “No,” he called back, his voice echoing, “but dangling directly over my head is a spear.”

  “Pardon me? Did you say—”

  “Yes. It’s affixed to the wall by what looks like a leather cord. There’s a piece of cord hanging below the spear with a shard of wood attached.”

  “Trip wire,” Remi commented.

  “My guess as well.”

  They’d seen similar traps—designed to foil intruders—in tombs, fortresses, and primitive bunkers. However old this spear trap was, it had likely been contrived to plunge into the neck of an unsuspecting interloper. The question, Sam and Remi knew, was what had the booby trap been intended to protect?

  “Describe the spear,” Remi said.

  “I’ll do you one better.” Sam rolled over on his back, braced his feet against the ceiling, and wriggled forward until his upper torso was jutting through the opening.

  “Careful . . .” Remi warned.

  “. . . is my
middle name,” Sam finished. “Well, this is interesting. There’s only one spear but two more attachment points. Either the other two spears fell away or they found victims.”

  He reached up, grasped the spear’s shaft above the point, and pulled. Despite its half-rotted appearance, the leather was surprisingly strong. Only after Sam wriggled the shaft back and forth did the cordage give way. He maneuvered the spear around, twirling it like a baton, then slid it back along his body toward Remi.

  “Got it,” she said. A few seconds later: “This doesn’t look familiar. I’m no weapons expert, mind you, but I’ve never seen a design like this before. It’s very old—at least six hundred years, I imagine. I’ll get some pictures in case we can’t come back for it.”

  Remi retrieved her camera from her pack and took a dozen shots. While she was doing this, Sam took a closer look around the pit. “I don’t see any more booby traps. I’m trying to imagine what it must have looked like by torchlight.”

  “‘Terrifying,’ is the word,” Remi replied. “Think of it. At least one of your friends had just taken a spear to the back of the neck and plummeted into a seemingly bottomless pit, and all you’ve got is a flickering torch to see by.”

  “Enough to turn away even the bravest of explorers,” Sam agreed.

  “But not us,” Remi replied with a smile Sam could hear in her voice. “What’s the plan?”

  “Everything depends on those stalagmites. Did you bring up the rope we left behind?”

  “Here.”

  Sam reached back until he felt Remi’s outstretched hand, grabbed the carabiner, and pulled the coil up to him. He tied first a slipknot into the loose end, followed by a stopper knot; to this, for weight, he clipped the carabiner. He maneuvered his body until his arms were free of the opening, then tossed the line across the pit, aiming for one of the larger stalagmites a few feet below the opposite tunnel opening. He missed, retrieved the rope, tried again, this time laying the slipknot over the tip of the protrusion. He jiggled the line until the knot slid down to the base of the stalagmite, then cinched the knot tight.