“Yes, sir.”
“Now we have—”
Jack’s words were cut short as a loud cracking sound rumbled through the flooring of the enclosure.
The shrapnel from the grenade had penetrated the water-soaked limestone of the underwater opening and had created several faults that had slowly expanded over the last few minutes to the breaking point, until the pressure from the outside lagoon was too much for the ancient engineering to bear. The wall and arched opening gave way as one, and a torrent of water rushed into the quickly overwhelmed canal.
“Jack, that opening was engineered by the Inca to hold the lagoon at bay by a precise measuring of the opening against the pressure of the outside depth. The system has failed and can no longer hold the water back. Judging by the walls’ thickness, we have about three minutes before there’s no way out of here,” Sarah said as she started to push everyone toward the same opening Farbeaux had vanished into.
Jack leaned inside the smaller enclosure after tossing Virginia his XM-8. Then he grabbed the master chief and threw him over his shoulder.
As Carl and Sarah started to run with the others toward the stairs just inside the small archway, a loud crack could be heard. They watched in horror while a long fissure opened at the center of the wall, right through the ancient drawings carved by the Sincaro, effectively cutting the images right in two. The crack widened as it hit the small arch and, in a split second, it collapsed. Large stones from the opening’s interior rolled and crashed into the main chamber, making their attempted escape impossible. They all came to a sudden stop when the water slammed into their legs as it breached the top of the canal.
“Jesus Christ, this doesn’t look good,” Jenks hissed as he and Jack saw what had just happened.
For an exclamation mark to his comment, the grotto erupted, as the floor beneath cracked open and a geyser of lagoon water shot straight up, adding its volume to that of the failed canal opening. The group led by Carl and Sarah backed into Jack, Jenks, and Virginia.
Jack was shocked to see Sarah throw down the two weapons she was carrying and run toward the back wall of the excavated cavern. He saw her start to slide her hands along the wall as if searching for something. The water was hitting Jack’s knees and was rising fast.
“You didn’t happen to bring scuba gear for everyone did you, Major?” Jenks said upside down from his position slumped over Jack’s shoulder.
“Carl, give me that torch!” Sarah called out as the others looked on in utter confusion. Between Sarah’s yelling, the unbearable roar of onrushing water, and their imminent death, the students stood frozen is terror.
Carl grabbed one of the wall torches and tossed it to Sarah, who caught it deftly in one hand and then turned back to continue feeling the wall. It had taken her only a moment to realize they only had one hope of escape, and she was praying she wasn’t wrong. It had been the memory of her last classroom discussion that had spurred her to action.
Jack felt helpless as he watched, the weight of Jenks across his shoulder growing heavier by the moment. “Robby, you and Kelly and the others get over there and help her do whatever she’s doing!” he ordered.
Robby and ten others, including Kelly, ran for the back wall. They only had to wait a moment for Sarah to explain. The water was now at waist level, and Jack had to adjust the position of Jenks as the master chief’s head was momentarily dunked under the swirling onslaught.
“A depression, a varying thickness of stone, something that looks out of place on the wall,” Sarah shouted to the students over the sound of rushing water.
All ten of Helen Zachary’s grad students, now joined by Virginia and Everett, started feeling the wall, working their way around, some even ducking beneath the surface of the swirling rise to feel the stones underneath. Their time was dwindling rapidly. The water was now at Jack’s lower chest. The master chief had maneuvered up and was bracing himself by holding onto the neoprene rubber of the major’s wetsuit.
“Oh, boy, someone needs to pull something out of their tight ass, or we’re going to spend a long time here!” Jenks yelled out to the students.
Jack was following the students’ search when his eyes fell on an iron torch. It was lit but that wasn’t what caught his attention. It was somewhat larger than the others surrounding the chamber, and it had deep etchings around the base. As his eyes adjusted to its intense light, Jack made out the image of an eagle, or was it a hawk? Clutched in this large bird’s talons was the carved image of a man.
“Sarah, the torch!” he called.
Sarah looked up, momentarily confused as she turned toward the torch she was holding next to the wall. Jack, his hands full of the master chief, nodded toward the larger torch on the wall. She located what he was pointing at immediately and went to it. The water was now at Sarah’s shoulders, as it was some of the smaller students, as well. She quickly examined the carvings. Without warning, she reached up and pulled down on the iron torch. Nothing.
“Carl, here! Pull down on the torch. I think it’s a fulcrum release!”
“A what?” he asked as he waded toward Sarah, quickly followed by Robby.
“Pull, damn it, pull!” Sarah yelled as she hopped to keep her head above the water.
Carl reached up and pulled. Still nothing. Robby added his weight to it and yet the torch didn’t budge. Sarah was beginning to think she was wrong when, in a second effort by Robby and Carl, the torch swung down, its lit head dipping into the water with a sizzle. Sarah saw the stone just to the right of the levered torch suddenly slide up about three feet into the wall. She quickly swam over and pulled herself up.
“Carl, there should be a stone handle in the cavity. It only moves one way—pull it!” she said as her head slipped under the water.
He was torn between getting Sarah to the surface and doing what he was told. He reached for the opening in the wall just as water started entering the cavity. He felt around and his fingers hit on a slab that was sticking up. It was about ten inches in height and about six wide, and was made of stone, as Sarah had said.
“What in the hell … ?” he said as Sarah came up from behind and held onto his shoulder.
“Pull!”
Carl pulled and the ancient fulcrum release handle moved easily, as if it had been greased only yesterday.
A tremendous rumbling was heard even over the roar of water as a tenby-eight-foot section of wall opened to their left. It was immediately filled with water. Sarah shouted for everyone to enter the new, larger cavity. Carl helped the students inside, while Jack and Virginia struggled with Jenks as they slowly moved toward the wall. As they did, an eruption shattered the flooring as one of the caldera vents, ruptured by the cold water, exploded with a crushing thunder. Another vent farther away popped when the elements of fire and water could no longer tolerate each other.
Jack struggled and finally entered the opening just as Sarah started smashing a small stone to the opening’s right side. It was smaller than its surrounding neighbors, and Sarah hoped beyond prayer it was the right one.
Carl was telling the students to brace themselves against the far wall of the twenty-by-twenty-foot dead end they were now trapped in, and to rise with the water, just as Sarah screamed in frustration and stopped using her small hand. She pulled the Beretta Carl had given her.
“Hold your ears!” she shouted as she fired into the stone. The bullet struck and cracked it, and it fell into the swirling water. She dropped the gun and braced herself against the small opening she had created. “Thank God!” she yelled as she reached in. She quickly found the second fulcrum release and said a silent prayer that the Inca were as efficient at their engineering as she had always heard. She pulled the release.
Suddenly to the shock of all inside, they were hurled into blackness as the wall above the door frame slid down with crushing weight. The parting waters of the impact sent a torrent of water rushing at everyone, smashing them against walls and floor. Some, Jack and Jenks included, lost th
eir hold and went under. In a split second, the world became quiet as they came to the surface sputtering and spitting. The waters inside the chamber soon settled and they were all left in the dark.
“Disneyland would love this little ride,” Carl said as he helped one of the smaller girls stay afloat.
“Everyone all right?” Jack called out.
There were yes and no answers but the major figured, if they could talk, they were alive.
“The ride’s not over, people. Let’s hope everything still works, or we just went from drowning to being entombed forever.”
As they listened the floor beneath their submerged feet began to rumble. Then a soft green glow started to illuminate the interior of the room. Chunks of tritium touched off by the brightness of the torchlight before the door slammed down had started the reaction it needed to gather its internal energy and start to brighten. Jack quickly found Sarah as the rumbling below grew to a fever pitch.
“This isn’t going to be pleasant,” she said as she locked eyes with him.
“What’s happening?” Virginia asked. She started to feel that the floor and the water around her were heating up. “What is this thing?”
“It’s what the ancient Inca used as an escape route in case of collapse. The mine must be sprinkled with them.”
“I don’t like the sound of this,” the badly injured Jenks said.
“Sprinkled with what?” Carl asked as he took the floating Sarah and held onto her.
“I think we’re in an elevator.”
“A what?” several people asked at once.
“An elevator!” Sarah shouted.
At just that moment the rumbling stopped and suddenly they heard a great hissing as the water around them became almost unbearable with heat. Then in an instant, an explosion rocked the chamber and all inside were pressed underwater as centrifugal force sent them all to the bottom.
Five thousand years ago, the Inca had feared being trapped in cave-ins far more than they dreaded any other possible disaster. Consequently, they had engineered the most ingenious escape platform the ancient world had ever devised. They had taken a naturally formed shaft that ran up and outward to the top of their excavated pyramid and had drilled a shaft beneath the flooring of the lowest cavern. Once reaching the boiling lava flow two thousand feet below, the Inca had capped the well at the cost of over a thousand slaves’ lives. The chamber had been fitted to precise specifications inside the naturally formed shaft, which had been smoothed to a finish that would have made any future stonemason proud. The seal formed a natural tube that was as close to airtight as humanly possible at the time. Sarah had heard a rumor of the technology advanced by the University of Southern California, following a large dig inside the ruins of the northern Yucatán site of Chichén Itzá. She had remembered the specifications—and now had prayed the Inca had gotten it right. They had.
The chamber was propelled up through the interior of the giant pyramid at eighty miles an hour, and was gradually building speed. The pressure buildup under the chamber had been unleashed when Sarah had activated the fulcrum release, and that in turn had brought down ten tons of iron weight onto the stone caps that had been sealed five thousand years before by the elevators’ original designers. The immediate release of so much pressure and steam just beneath the designed escape apparatus had no difficulty in forcing the stone chamber up and into the smoothed shaft. The only problem the Inca had failed to see was that of stopping. Even Sarah, the professor who taught her, and many others who had studied the system in classrooms across the globe were unable to figure out the problem. It was assumed that since the shaft and the chamber itself weren’t perfect, the pressure would eventually bleed off. But there was controversy in that lone theory. No one had been able to see any logical explanation as to how this could be controlled. In essence, they could be traveling in an express train with no brakes.
As the centrifugal force increased, all inside sputtered to the surface of the rapidly shallowing water as it was forced out of the minute cracks in the chamber. They could feel the speed gathering as the elevator roared upward into the unknown parts of the pyramid.
“Oh, shit,” Kelly said as she hugged Robby.
“I hate this!” the master chief announced.
Suddenly the chamber tilted, as the elevator started to climb the steep, inverted slope of the inside of the great pyramid. Everyone screamed as the angle changed and they lost their footing. Jenks screamed in agony as Jack lost his balance and fell, crashing them both to the floor. The angle of ascent finally stabilized as the enclosure made its way up toward the uppermost reaches of El Dorado.
“We’re slowing!” Sarah shouted.
Beneath the flooring of the chamber, the pressure was bleeding off the higher they climbed. The Incan engineers had calculated the length of the escape against the distance the pressurized wave could travel through the shaft, a simple formula that most would have considered impossible. And it would have been, even by the Inca, if several hundred Sincaro hadn’t been used as guinea pigs in its weight-to-pressure-ratio experimental development.
Without warning, a tremendous hissing exploded with ear-hurting sound through the stone walls of the chamber. Outside, as the elevator passed the third level from the top, another fulcrum release was ripped that opened a series of stone valves in the shaft. Steam and pressure was rapidly bled off in a calculated feat of engineering that was designed to evacuate the shaft of pressure that was left over after the push to the top. At the same time as the bone-crushing stop on the upper level slammed everyone once again to the floor, the passing chamber tripped a series of stone nubs that broke away and allowed spring-loaded logs, hewn and covered with amber thousands of years before as a preservative, to pop free of the shaft through drilled holes. Six of these shot out under the chamber and arrested it just as it rebounded off the stone ceiling.
The wall that had closed to seal them in broke free and crashed into a large chamber where the elevator had come to rest. Dust swirled about as coughing and crying could be heard. From somewhere high above, natural light filtered into the highest chamber of the pyramid as Jack quickly stood and pulled Jenks out.
“Quick, Carl, get everyone out!” the major shouted.
Now the others heard what he had, the splintering of wood coming from the shaft. There was a general panic as the students rushed, were pulled, or crawled out of the elevator as the popping and cracking became louder. Just as Sarah cleared the doorway, the elevator gave a huge lurch and then it quickly vanished back down the shaft in the swirl and vacuum of the air.
As they all looked at one another in turn, most still in shock at their double narrow escape, the silence seemed to be a blessing.
“I guess the brakes gave out,” Sarah said weakly as she turned over and lay on her back to stare upward at the intricately carved pyramid top two hundred feet up.
But of course it was the gruffness of the man in the most pain who broke the ice of terror that shrouded the company. Jenks sat up on one elbow and looked around.
“Goddamned Incans can’t design worth a shit!”
23
The dim light at the top of the pyramid had faded to nothing as Jack gathered torches and relit them and passed them around.
The new level they were in was fresher than anything they had come across since their arrival inside El Dorado. Jack had surveyed the extreme topmost of the apex and found the main vents that gravity fed the canal system throughout the mine. The point of the pyramid must have protruded from the river above, as its windows were above the surface. The torrent of water came down inside a culvert from the falls above and emptied into another large grotto at the center of the floor. The speed of the current was adjustable, he could see, by a system of floodgates controlled from this room. A large handle was set into one stone wall, and that in turn was attached to a dam door. The flow of water into the grotto was smooth and even, creating a current of a gentle five or six miles an hour down the gravity-fed can
al system.
“There must be close to three hundred miles of interior canals inside the mine. The structure is unlike anything uncovered in history. A team could spend a lifetime in here and never uncover anything,” said a woman’s voice.
Jack turned and saw Sarah as she came up behind him. She was also admiring the dam engineering inside the wall.
“Well, you discovered enough to save our asses down there,” he said as he turned back to the wall and held a hand to it.
“Lucky guess,” she said as she, too, placed a hand on the dam. “There must be thousands and thousands of gallons of water inside that wall. In its heyday, the Inca may have had several hundred treasure boats traversing this system.”
“There’s eight of them right there,” Jack said, moving his torch so Sarah could see the strangely crafted boats near the canal. “More over there, although they don’t look in as good a shape.”
Sarah observed that several of the boats had been laid along the far wall, and had been damaged severely.
“But I think with a little luck, these may hold up,” Jack continued.
“Are you thinking of using the canals to get back down to Teacher?”
“You and the others are, but Carl and I have some searching to do.”
“The bomb?”
“Yeah,” was all he said as he made his way back to the group.
The interior was now well lit by at least thirty torches that were either in the hands of people or arrayed in their holders around the room.
“I think this room was nothing more than a way to control the water in the canals. We have to get down. The only way is to use what we have,” Jack announced. “It may take hours, or maybe days, to get out on foot. But with the canals we can be assured of going one way, and that’s down. Teacher is down there and the way out is also. We haven’t a choice.”
The students looked at one another. They nodded their agreement that it might be the only way.
Legend: An Event Group Thriller Page 42
