Night Probe!

by Clive Cussler

  Prime Minister Charles Sarveux remained in seclusion during the ordeal and had no comment.

  An early morning mist quilted the Hudson Valley, cutting visibility to fifty yards. On the opposite side of the hill from the covered entrance of the quarry, Pitt had set up a command post in a motor home borrowed from a nearby fruit farmer. Ironically, neither he nor Shaw was aware of the other's exact location, although they were separated by only a mile of heavily forested hillside.

  Pitt felt groggy from too much coffee and too little sleep. He longed for a healthy slug of brandy to clear the cobwebs, but he knew that would be a mistake. As inviting as it sounded, he was afraid it would cause a reverse reaction and slow his thinking, and that was the last thing he needed now.

  He stood in the doorway of the motor home and watched Nicholas Riley and the diving team from the De Soto unload their gear while Glen Chase and Al Giordino hovered over a heavy iron grating that was embedded in a rock-walled side of the hill. There was a popping sound when they lit an acetylene torch, followed by a spray of sparks as the blue flame attacked the rusted bars.

  "I won't guarantee that opening behind the grating is an escape shaft," said Jerry Lubin. "But I'd have to say it's a safe bet.

  Lubin had arrived a few hours earlier from Washington and was accompanied by Admiral Sandecker. A mining consultant with the Federal Resources Agency, Lubin was a small, humorous man with a pawnbroker nose and bloodhound eyes.

  Pitt turned and looked at him. "We found it where you said it'd be."

  "An educated guess," said Lubin. "If I had been mine superintendent, that's where I would have put it."

  "Somebody went to a lot of work to keep people out," said Sandecker.

  "The farmer who once owned the land." This from Heidi, who was perched on an overhead bunk.

  "Where did you come by that tidbit?" asked Lubin.

  "A kindly editor, a female I might add, got out of her boyfriend's bed to open local newspaper files for me. The story is that about thirty years ago, three scuba divers drowned inside the shaft. Two of their bodies were never found. The farmer sealed up the entrance to keep people from killing themselves on his property."

  "Did you find anything about the landslide?" Pitt asked her.

  "A dead end. All files prior to nineteen forty-six were destroyed by a fire."

  Sandecker pulled at his red beard thoughtfully. "I wonder how far those poor. bastards got before they drowned."

  "Probably made it to the main quarry and ran out of air on the return trip," Pitt speculated.

  Heidi spoke the same thought that suddenly crossed everyone's mind. "Then they must have seen whatever is in there."

  Sandecker gave Pitt a worried look. "I don't want you to make the same mistake."

  "The victims were undoubtedly weekend divers, untrained and under equipped "I'd feel better if there was an easier way."

  "The air vent is a possibility," said Lubin.

  "Of course!" Sandecker exclaimed. "Any underground mine needs air ventilation."

  "I didn't mention it before because it would take forever to find it in this fog. Besides, whenever a mine is closed, the air portal is filled in and covered over. There's always the hazard of a cow or a human, especially a child, falling in and vanishing."

  A knowing look crossed Pitt's face. "I have a feeling that's where we'll find our friend Brian Shaw."

  Lubin stared quizzically. "Who's he?"

  "A competitor," said Pitt. "He wants to get inside that hill as badly as we do."

  Lubin gave an offhand shrug. "Then I don't envy him. Digging through a portal shaft the width of a man's shoulders is a bitch of a job."

  Lubin would have got no argument from the British.

  One of Lieutenant Macklin's men had literally stumbled and fallen on the scar in the earth that hid the ventilator shaft. Since midnight the paratroops had been feverishly laboring to clear the rubble-filled passage.

  The work was backbreaking. Only one man at a time could dig in the narrow confines. Cave-in was a constant threat. Buckets hastily stolen from a neighboring orchard were filled and pulled to the surface by ropes. Then they were emptied and dropped for the next load. The mole dug as fast and as hard as he could. When he was ready to drop from exhaustion, he was quickly replaced. The excavation went on without pause. "What depth are we?" asked Shaw. "About forty feet," replied Caldweiler. "How much further?"

  The Welshman furrowed his brow thoughtfully. "I judge we should strike the main quarry in another hundred and twenty feet. How deep the ventilator was filled, I can't say. We could break through in the next foot or we might have to fight to the last inch."

  "I'll settle for the next foot," said Macklin. "This mist isn't going to shield us much longer."

  "Any sign of the Americans?"

  "Only the sound of vehicles somewhere behind the hill."

  Shaw lit another of his special cigarettes. It was his last one. "I should have thought they'd be swarming over the hillside before now."

  "They'll get a jolly hot reception when they show," said Macklin, almost cheerfully.

  "I hear American jails are overcrowded," Caldweiler muttered. "I don't relisly spending the rest of my life in one."

  Shaw grinned. "Should be a piece of cake for a man of your experience to tunnel out."

  Caldweiler knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "Nothing like looking at the fun side. Though in all seriousness, I can't help wondering what in bloody hell I'm doing here."

  "You volunteered like the rest of us," Macklin said.

  Shaw exhaled a lungful of smoke. "If you live long enough to return to England, the Prime Minister himself will pin a medal on you." All for tearing up a scrap of paper?"

  "That scrap of paper is more important than you'll ever know."

  "For what it's going to cost us in blood and sweat, it'd damned well better be," groused Caldweiler.

  A small convoy of armored personnel carriers rolled to a stop. An officer in battle dress leaped from the lead vehicle and shouted an order. A stream of marines, clutching automatic weapons, poured to the ground and began assembling in squads.

  The officer, who had an eye for authority, walked straight up to the admiral.

  "Admiral Sandecker?"

  Sandecker fairly beamed at the recognition. "At your service."

  "Lieutenant Sanchez." The arm snapped in a salute. "Third Marine Force Reconnaissance."

  "Glad to see you." Sandecker returned the salute.

  "My orders were unclear as to our deployment."

  "How many men do you have?"

  "Three squads. Forty including myself."

  "All right, one squad to cordon off the immediate area, two to patrol the woods around the hill."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And Lieutenant. We don't know what to expect. Tell your men to tread with a light foot."

  Sandecker turned and walked to the escape shaft. The last bar of the grating had been cut away. The diving team stood ready to pierce the heart of the hill. A curious silence fell over everyone. They all stared at the black opening as though it was a sinister doorway to hell.

  Pitt had donned an exposure suit and was cinching the harness of his air tank. When he was satisfied everything was in order, he nodded to Riley and the dive team. "Okay. Let's make a night probe."

  Sandecker looked at him. "A night probe?"

  "An old diver's term for exploring the dark of underwater caves."

  Sandecker looked grim. "Take no chances and stay healthy . . ."

  "Keep your fingers crossed I hope you find the treaty in there."

  "Both hands. The other is in case Shaw gets in before you do."

  "Yes," said Pitt wryly. "There is always that."

  Then he entered the beckoning portal and was swallowed up in blackness.

  The old escape route from the main quarry sloped downward into the bowels of the hill. The walls were seven feet high and showed the scars from the miners' picks. The air was moist with the faint b
ut ominous smell of a mausoleum. After about twenty yards, the passageway curved and all light was lost from the outside.

  The dive lights were switched on, and Pitt, followed by Riley and three men, continued on, their footsteps echoing into the eternal darkness ahead.

  They passed an empty ore car, its small iron wheels joined in rusting bond to narrow rails. Several picks and shovels stood neatly stacked in a chiseled niche as though waiting for calloused hands to grasp their handles again. Nearby were other artifacts: a broken miner's lamp, a sledgehammer and the faded, stuck-together pages of a Montgomery Ward catalog. The pages were frozen open on advertisements displaying upright player pianos.

  Ajumble of fallen rocks blocked their way for twenty minutes until they cleared a path. Everyone kept a suspicious eye trained on the rotting timbers that sagged under the weight of the crumbling roof No word was spoken while they worked. The un communicated fear of being crushed by a cave-in chilled their minds. Finally they wormed their way past the barrier and found the tunnel floor covered by several inches of water.

  When their knees became submerged, Pitt stopped and held up a hand. "The water level will be over our heads before long," he said. "I think the safety team better set up operations here."

  Riley nodded. "I agree."

  The three divers, who were to remain behind in case of an emergency, began stacking the reserve air tanks and securing the end of an orange fluorescent cord that was wound around a large reel. As they arranged the gear, the dive lights danced spasmodically on the passage walls, and their voices seemed alien and magnified.

  When Pitt and Riley had removed their hiking boots and replaced them with swim fins, they grabbed hold of the reel and continued on, unwinding the safety line as they went.

  The water soon came to their waists. They halted to adjust their face masks and clamp their teeth on the mouthpieces of the air regulators. Then they dropped into the liquid void.

  Below the surface it was cold and gloomy. Visibility was amazingly sharp, and Pitt felt a shiver of almost superstitious awe when he spied a tiny salamander whose eyes had degenerated to the point of total blindness. He marveled that any kind of life form could exist in such entombed isolation.

  The quarry's escape shaft seemed to stretch downward like a great sloping, bottomless pit. There was something malignant about it, as though some cursed and unmentionable force lurked in the shadowy depths beyond the beams of the dive lights.

  After ten minutes by Pitt's dive watch they stopped and took stock. Their depth gauges registered 105

  feet. From beneath his face mask Pitt's eyes studied Riley. The dive master made a brief check of his air pressure gauge and then nodded an okay to keep going.

  The shaft began to widen into a cavern and the sides turned a dirty gold color. They had finally passed into a gallery of the limestone quarry. The floor leveled out and Pitt noted that the depth had slowly risen to sixty feet. He aimed his light upward. The beam reflected on what looked like a blanket of quicksilver.

  He ascended like a ghost in flight and suddenly broke into air.

  He had surfaced in an air pocket below the ceiling of a large domed chamber. A crowd of stalactites fell around him like icicles, their conical tips ending inches above the water. Too late, Pitt ducked under to warn Riley.

  Unable to see because of the surface reflection, Riley rammed his face mask into the tip of a stalactite, shattering the glass. The bridge of his nose was gashed and his eyelids were sliced. He would not know until later that the lens of his left eye was gone.

  Pitt threaded his way through the cone-shaped trunks and gripped Riley under the arms.

  "What happened?" Riley mumbled. "Why are the lights out?"

  "You met the wrong end of a stalactite," said Pitt. "Your dive light is broken. I lost mine."

  Riley did not buy the lie. He removed a glove and felt his face. "I'm blind," he said matter-of-factly.

  "Nothing of the sort." Pitt eased off Riley's mask and gently picked away the larger glass fragments. The dive master skin was so numb from the icy water that he felt no pain. "What rotten luck. Why me?"

  "Stop complaining. A couple of stitches and your ugly mug will be as good as new."

  "Sorry to screw things up. I guess this is as far as we go."

  "You go."

  "You're not heading back?"

  "No, I'm pushing on."

  "How's your air?"

  "Ample."

  "You can't kid an old pro, buddy. There's barely enough left to reach the backup team. You keep going and you forfeit your round-trip ticket to the surface."

  Pitt tied the safety line around a stalactite. Then he clamped Riley's hand on it.

  "Just follow the yellow brick road, and mind your head.

  "A comedian you ain't. What do I tell the admiral? He'll castrate me when he learns I left you here."

  "Tell him," Pitt said with a tight grin, "I had to catch a train."

  Corporal Richard Willapa felt right at home stalking the damp woods of New York. A direct descendant of the Chinook Indians of the Pacific Northwest, he had spent much of his youth tracking game in the rain forests of Washington State, honing the skills that enabled him to approach within twenty feet of a wild deer before the animal sensed his presence and darted away.

  His experience came in handy as he read the signs of recent human passage. The footprints had been made by a short man, he judged, wearing a size seven combat boot similar to his own. Moisture from the mist had not yet redampened the impressions, an indication to Willapa's trained eye that they were no more than half an hour old.

  The tracks came from the direction of a thicket and stopped at a tree, then they returned. Willapa noted with amusement the thin wisp of vapor that rose from the tree trunk. Someone had walked from the thicket, relieved himself and walked back again.

  He looked around at his flanks, but none of his squad was visible. His sergeant had sent him out to scout ahead and the rest had not caught up yet.

  Willapa stealthily climbed into the crotch of a tree and peered into the thicket. From his vantage point in height he could see the outline of a head and shoulders hunched over a fallen log.

  "All right," he shouted, "I know you're in there. Come out with your hands up."

  Willapa's answer was a hail of bullets that flayed the bark off the tree below him.

  "Christ almighty!" he muttered in astonishment. No one had told him he might be shot at.

  He aimed his weapon, pulled the trigger and sprayed the thicket.

  The firing on the hill intensified and echoed through the valley. Lieutenant Sanchez snatched up a field radio. "Sergeant Ryan, do you read?"

  Ryan answered almost immediately. "Ryan here, go ahead, sir."

  "What in hell is going on up there?"

  "We stumbled on a hornet's nest," Ryan replied jerkily. "It's like the Battle of the Bulge. I've already taken three casualties."

  Sanchez was stunned by the appalling news. "Who's firing on you?"

  "They ain't no farmers with pitchforks. We're up against an elite outfit."

  "Explain."

  "We're being hit with assault rifles by guys who damn well know how to use them."

  "We're in for it now," Shaw shouted, ducking his head as a continuous burst of fire raked the leaves above. "They're coming at us from the rear."

  "No amateurs, those Yanks," Macklin yelled back. "They're biding their time and whittling us down."

  "The longer they wait, the better." Shaw crawled over to the pit where Caldweiler and three others were still frantically digging, oblivious to the battle going on around them. "Any chance of breaking through?"

  "You'll be the first to know when we do," the Welshman grunted. The sweat was pouring down his face as he hauled up a bucket containing a large boulder. "We're near seventy feet down. I can't tell you any more than that."

  Shaw ducked suddenly as a bullet ricocheted off the rock in Caldweiler's hands and took away the left heel of his boot.
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  "You better lay low till I call you," Caldweiler said calmly, as though remarking about the weather.

  Shaw got the message. He dropped down into the shelter of a shallow depression beside Burton-Angus, who looked to be enjoying himself returning the fire that blasted out of the surrounding woods.

  "Hit anything?" asked Shaw.

  "Sneaky bastards never show themselves," said Burton Angus "They learned their lessons in Vietnam."

  He rose to his knees and fired a long leisurely burst into a dense undergrowth. His answer was a rain of bullets that hammered into the ground around him. He abruptly jerked upright and fell back without a sound.

  Shaw crouched over him. Blood was beginning to seep from three evenly spaced holes across his chest.

  He looked up at Shaw, the brown eyes beginning to dull, the face already turning pale.

  "Bloomin' queer," he rasped. "Getting shot on American soil. Who would have believed it." The eyes went unseeing and he was gone.

  Sergeant Bentley slipped through the brush and looked down, his expression granite. "Too many good men are dying today," he said slowly. Then his face hardened and he cautiously peered over the top of the embankment. The fire that killed Burton Angus he judged, came from an elevation. He spotted a perceptible movement high in the leaves. He set his rifle on semiautomatic fire, took careful aim and ripped off six shots.