The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3

by Christopher Cartwright

  Then, two hands broke through the rubble.

  A moment later, the bloodied hands pulled at the shards of fractured quartz. Bit by bit the impossible became a certainty. They were going to dig their way out through the pile of rubble.

  Sam swore.

  Tom said, “Go!”

  Sam started running down the escape tunnel. It was tall enough that he could move without fear of hitting his head on the roof, while so narrow his wide shoulders nearly scraped the walls. The tunnel continued for approximately a thousand feet, in a slight upward direction.

  The strange humming sound coming from their pursuers gradually increased, until he no longer needed to glance over his shoulder to know they were catching up very quickly.

  Sam reached the end, where a giant sandstone boulder rested perpendicular to the tunnel, blocking their exit. It was approximately eighty feet high and thirty or more wide. Between the stone and the escape passageway a narrow crevasse ran in both directions. Sunlight filtered in from both sides. It was a tight fit, but it looked like they could squeeze through it.

  The sound of a hundred or more Pirahã guards making their strange and identical war cry was enough to remove any doubt in his mind.

  “Which way?” Sam asked.

  Tom glanced left and right. “Has to be left.”

  “Why?”

  Tom shined his flashlight to the right. “The sandstone tapers inward here. I’d never fit through.”

  Sam nodded. “Okay, left it is.”

  Tom threw his last remaining smoke grenade down the passage behind them. “You go first. You’re smaller, and should be faster. I’m right behind you!”

  Sam didn’t argue.

  He slipped into the lateral crevasse. It was an awkward climb. Although he could see the light of the exit about thirty feet away, the entire gap dipped fifty or more feet below. The result was that he needed to climb and slide his way through it – with the constant risk of falling deep into the narrower section where he might never climb out.

  Shifting his weight from his back to his hands, and from his hands to his feet, Sam used opposing pressures – the way rock-climbers do to ascend the rock formations known as chimneys – to shuffle his way across the crevasse. About ten feet from the opening the opposing sandstone walls tapered, and he found the first section where he struggled to squeeze through. He adjusted his position and tried again. Same problem. He turned his head and tried exhaling to reduce the width of his chest. This time he got farther, but was still unable to completely get past the same spot.

  He exhaled the last of the air in his lungs, and gravity returned him to where he’d started. Sam shined his flashlight across the opposing walls, searching for any shadows that might indicate a slightly wider section.

  Behind him, gunshots fired.

  “We’ve got company, Sam!” Tom shouted. “Forget caution, just get through there!”

  Sam said, “I’m on it!”

  His glance stopped nearly eight feet above where he was trying to cross the crevasse. There, a small piece of black hair and not yet dried blood marked the way out. Sam shimmied upward and across.

  The area was still narrow, but definitely wider than down below.

  He glanced at Tom below. “Are you following?”

  Tom placed his MP5 strap over his shoulder and started to climb. “Keep going, I can see the route.”

  Squished between the two immovable rock walls, with his hands out above his head and his feet pressed against opposite ends, Sam felt his world close in on him. Here, panic could kill as quickly as a bullet. Every part of him wanted to breathe deeply and escape. Instead, salvation only came from exhaling deeply.

  He’d gotten past the section where he’d become stuck previously. With his head turned to the left, he could no longer see Tom behind him, but could hear Tom’s exerted breathing. In front of him, he could see the light of the opening. He was close. He just needed to get another couple of feet across and then descend until he could reach the opening.

  But instead he was stuck.

  Fear and claustrophobia, which had haunted him as a child, now reared its ugly head. He concentrated on small movements with his hands and feet to shift his weight, trying not to let the terror override his decisions.

  Even so, his fine movements were no longer getting him any closer to the edge of the crevasse. Claustrophobia, it turns out, was only irrational when you could breathe. In this case, so much pressure was being exerted on his chest wall, that inhaling was impossible.

  He tried to breathe out further, but there was no more air left in his lungs to exhale.

  Beyond the panic, he heard Tom’s voice.

  “Let go.”

  Let go of what? I’m stuck!

  Tom continued. “Just relax your entire body... and let gravity do its job.”

  Sam untensed his arms and legs.

  Nothing happened.

  Then he shifted slightly downward. A moment later, he slipped down into the large area. Several feet down, the narrow section suddenly appeared as wide as a house. He took a deep breath, and reveled in the open expanse.

  His gaze shifted upward toward Tom, who was already quickly working his way to the same spot in which he’d become stuck. Sam had learned long ago that caving was as much about technique as it was about size. In this case, despite Tom being physically larger, he was considerably more capable and adept at spelunking – the process of navigating through the narrow sections of a cave system.

  Sam focused his flashlight across the crevasse. A beam of light stopped at the entrance to the escape tunnel, through which they’d come. The first of their Pirahã guards came into sight. The man carried a blade of obsidian, slicing at the sandstone wall as though he could enlarge it.

  “You’ve got a very angry looking man with a very big sword on your tail, Tom.”

  “I see him!”

  Sam shifted backward, toward the exit of the crevasse. He braced himself against the two walls with his back and feet in opposing directions. Then, he removed his MP5 and removed the safety.

  He aimed the submachine gun at the guard. “Don’t come any farther!”

  It was a waste of his breath. The man couldn’t understand English, and if he had, Sam doubted very much that it would have made any difference. His attacker was following divine orders from a Master Builder, who had no intention of letting them escape.

  The guard hadn’t spotted Tom above yet. Instead he tried to come straight across the crevasse to attack him. Sam watched in horror as the Pirahã guard moved quickly, with such ease through the narrow section, that he thought the man might just squeeze through and reach him.

  He shuffled backward another foot.

  His attacker squeezed into the narrowest section of the crevasse directly opposite him, and became stuck. Every muscle in the man’s wiry body tensed and struggled to free himself, and when it became abundantly clear that his desire was impossible to achieve, the Pirahã warrior extended his arm and tried to strike with his obsidian sword.

  The attack was so swift and unexpected that Sam didn’t have time to react to it. The obsidian blade sliced downward, narrowly slipping past his face, so that Sam could feel the rush of wind as it scraped past his eyes.

  Sam snapped his head backward.

  The sword swung downward without connecting to anything. The momentum pulled the Pirahã forward, and he fell downward. He slid twenty or more feet until his chest became wedged in the vice-like section below.

  Sam watched in horror as the man tried to fight his entrapment. He scrambled with his arms and legs like an insect in a spider’s web. With each movement, he slid farther downward, until his chest became lodged tight between the two walls of stone. Aghast, Sam noticed the poor wretch was now incapable of moving and unable to breathe. He flailed his arms and legs, moving them faster and faster, until fatigue and hypoxia thankfully took over and suddenly everything went limp.

  Sam moved the beam of his flashlight upward, where more
Pirahã were now racing toward him. One of them threw a spear. It ricocheted across the sandstone, missing him by a couple of feet, before falling to the ground eighty or more feet below.

  Tom slipped down next to him. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”

  “You…” Sam said, exhaling a sigh of relief.

  He quickly shuffled to the end of the crevasse and out into the open – onto a half-a-foot wide precipice. His eyes swept his new environment. The ledge was a little over ten feet in length, and positioned approximately halfway up a fourteen-hundred-foot vertical wall of sandstone. The golden wall appeared to be floating in a sea of early morning mist. To the right, where the sun had penetrated the ancient valley earlier, there were speckled views of the jungle. Its dark green canopy appeared like little more than dark green grass. They were on the vertigo-inducing face of the Tepui Mountains.

  Sam turned to Tom. “Now where the hell do you suppose we go?”

  Chapter Nine

  Sam turned to meet Tom’s hard and steely gaze.

  “Maybe we took a wrong turn?” Tom said.

  Sam swallowed. “You think we were supposed to go right back there?”

  “No. But it is looking more like a possibility.” Tom shrugged, as though he was indifferent to having to fight his way back through hundreds of attackers.

  Sam faced the precipice, searching for another option. Something that didn’t involve killing more than a hundred Pirahã guards who were most likely being used as slave-workers by the Master Builders.

  His eyes focused on the sandstone ledge. It narrowed as it reached the end, before disappearing completely. Above and below, the vertical cliff was smooth with no indents carved into it to form hand holds, or metal climbing rungs, like those he’d seen along the Via Ferrata in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy. Heck, there were so few natural cracks in the rock that he doubted many professional rock-climbers could scale the wall.

  Then he stopped. Because something silver flickered in the early sunlight. It was so small his eyes had skimmed past it multiple times before.

  Sam grinned. “Would you look at that!”

  Tom asked, “What?”

  “At the end of the ledge, about five feet high – there’s the eye of a climbing bolt.”

  “So there is… too bad we didn’t bring about eight hundred feet of rope.”

  Sam put vertigo aside and carefully walked along the narrow ledge until he reached the end of the sandstone precipice. He touched the climbing bolt. It was hot. A certain sign that someone had only very recently run a lot of rope through it very quickly.

  He leaned over the ledge.

  A hundred feet below, someone was pulling the excess rope into a separate tunnel. The man glanced up at him. Despite the distance, Sam met his eyes. There was something sinister and evil about the stranger’s look.

  He could just make out the man’s smile.

  Sam withdrew his MP5 from his shoulder. With reckless abandon, he aimed the weapon, as though he might still get to kill his attacker before he most certainly became overrun by the Pirahã guards. He aimed the submachine gun and squeezed the trigger.

  The small burst of bullets fell harmlessly several feet short of his intended target. The stranger smiled, amused by Sam’s audacity, and then disappeared inside the separate tunnel.

  Sam swore.

  Tom said, “At least now we’re only a hundred feet short.”

  Sam looked down at the small opening in the cliff far below. “It may as well be a mile.”

  A strange humming sound resonating from the crevasse behind them changed its pitch. Both of them swung around with their weapons aimed at the hidden entrance. Something had changed. Despite the difficult and narrow climb, they had no doubt the army of temple guards would eventually overcome the unique route.

  With the distant rumble of the combined war cry in the background, a new, higher pitched wail suddenly shot out of the opening. The obsidian blade was the first thing Sam saw. It jabbed forward toward the ledge, before its owner ran out at full speed – and over the cliff.

  The warrior continued to scream his strange war cry as he fell. His voice became distant until they could no longer hear him, and he eventually disappeared into the canopy of the jungle far below.

  Tom said, “That poor man simply ran to his own death. He didn’t even stop his war cry after he’d gone over the edge!”

  Sam’s heart pounded in his chest. He swallowed hard. “What a horrible waste of life.”

  There was no time to discuss a plan, or the morals of killing innocent people from the Pirahã tribe who’d been enslaved by the Master Builders using a combination of hallucinogenic drugs and extremely high-frequency radio waves to persuade the Pirahã to follow their every order. Instead, another attacker came through.

  This one had a spear in his hand.

  Tom grabbed the weapon as the guard approached the opening. He pulled on the shaft with such sudden ferocity that it slid out of its owner’s hand.

  “Stop! Stop!” Tom shouted, as though he might be able to somehow get through to the man, and protect him from blindly following the orders of the Master Builders.

  The man looked at him, his eyes fixing upon Tom’s.

  Sam shouted. “That’s it! You don’t have to do this. You don’t want to fight us…”

  “Look at me!” Tom continued. “We don’t want to fight you…”

  The warrior focused on Tom’s face and ran forward. Tom lowered the spear – and the Pirahã guard impaled himself on his own weapon.

  The man looked up at them, his eyes filled with confusion, as though whatever magic spell he’d been under had now passed.

  Tom said, “I’m sorry.”

  And the man fell forward into the jungle eight hundred feet below.

  Tom fired a few short bursts into the cavern, trying to stop the next set of attackers from following. His eyes glanced at Sam. “Why don’t they stop?”

  “They never will. It’s not that they don’t want to. They simply can’t. They have no more free-will than a puppet.”

  Tom checked his last magazine. “I’m nearly out!”

  Sam removed the magazine from his MP5 and glanced at the bullets housed inside. “I have four shots left.”

  “Great. So, we have about ten shots between us. We’d better make them count. How many Pirahã do you think there are?”

  “Billie said there were around four hundred in the Maici River of the Amazon when she was there. Inside the temple earlier, she thought the entire tribe must have been moved here recently to guard the temple.”

  “Okay. Now that’s ten shots for about three hundred eighty Pirahã warriors, taking into account the twenty or so who might have gotten stuck or killed trying to reach us. What are our odds?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Exactly.”

  Another warrior slipped through the narrow gap, and Tom shot him in the head. He turned to Sam. “Have you got any other ideas?”

  “None that come to mind, presently.” Sam continued to search the sandstone rock face for any cracks or openings through which they could somehow escape. “You hold them off… and I’ll see what I can find.”

  Tom laughed. “All right. You want me just to hold the army here while you do your thing?”

  “That would be good.”

  Fifty seconds later, the best solution Sam could work out was that they might have a better chance at defending themselves at the narrowest section of the ledge. It was then that he heard the distinct sound of the tiny hammer inside Tom’s MP5 clicking as it struck an empty cartridge.

  Tom said, “I’m out.”

  Sam removed his own magazine and threw it. “Take this.”

  Tom inserted the magazine into his weapon. A moment later, Sam heard the sporadic shots get fired, until the last round was finally released.

  Sam raced to help Tom.

  Tom and a Pirahã warrior became entangled in a death struggle. The warrior gripped Tom by the throat.
r />   The loud report of a sniper rifle filled the ancient valley.

  And a red mist defiled the sandstone face of the Tepui Mountains. The strong and wiry frame of the Pirahã warrior spasmed, and then relaxed, before the entire body slumped to the ledge. Tom stepped back, quickly, and teetered briefly at the edge.

  Sam turned to the open expanse, where a dark experimental stealth helicopter silently approached.

  Chapter Ten

  The shadow of the Black Hawk shrouded the golden wall of sandstone.

  Sam looked up. With its long rotor blades turning overhead, the Black Hawk couldn’t get close enough to the vertical wall to throw them a rope. Instead it circled overhead and fired a short burst of several hundred rounds via its Gatling style heavy machinegun into the opening through which the Pirahã were now swarming out. A few moments later, the helicopter banked away from the cliff and increased its altitude, before finally landing on the sandstone tabletop high above.

  Two ropes were then dropped right next to them.

  Sam smiled. “I told you something would turn up!”

  Tom matched his grin as he tested that the rope was secure. “So you did.”

  Neither of them had to be told to hurry up. The next group of attackers would swarm out through the crevasse any minute, and by that stage they both needed to be out of the range of even the best spear thrower.

  Sam looped his pre-tied harness prusik around the static rope and then through his harness with one hand and hauled himself upward to rest on it while he drew his knees upward. He secured his foot prusik to the rope and slipped his feet into the loops at the bottom, then stood upright close to the static rope while moving the harness and foot prusiks up. He repeated the move, inching up the static rope like a caterpillar.

  Tom looped onto the second rope and started to climb quickly. Despite his weight, Tom was able to ascend remarkably quickly.

  Fifteen feet above the ledge, Sam spotted a single Pirahã warrior climbing out of the crevasse. The warrior ran his eyes along the ledge, down and then up. An instant later, he threw his spear.