Night Probe!

by Clive Cussler

  He watched with grim satisfaction as a body slipped slowly out of a tree and crumpled to the moist ground.

  Corporal Richard Willapa would never again stalk the deer of his native rain forest.

  Soon after the shooting had broken out, Admiral San decker put in an emergency radio call for doctors and ambulances from the local hospitals. The response was almost immediate. Sirens were soon heard approaching in the distance as the first of the walking wounded began filtering down from the hillside.

  Heidi limped from man to man applying temporary first aid, offering words of comfort while fighting back the tears. The worst thing was their incredible youth. None of them looked as if they had seen their twentieth birthdays. Their faces were pale with shock. They had never expected to bleed or even die on their home ground, fighting an enemy they had yet to even see.

  She happened to look up as Riley came out of the escape portal, led by two members of the diving team, his face masked in blood. A sickening fear rose within her when she saw no sign of Pitt.

  Dear God, she thought wildly, he's dead.

  Sandecker and Giordino noticed them at the same time and rushed over.

  "Where's Pitt?" Sandecker asked, fearful of the answer.

  "Still in there somewhere," Riley mumbled. "He refused to turn back. I tried, Admiral. Honest to God, I tried to talk him out of going on, but he wouldn't listen."

  "I would have expected no less of him," Sandecker said lifelessly.

  "Pitt is not the kind of man to die." Giordino's expression was set, his tone resolute.

  "He had a message for you, Admiral."

  "What message?"

  "He said to tell you he had a train to catch."

  "Maybe he made it into the main quarry," Giordino said, suddenly hopeful.

  "Not a chance," said Riley, putting a dampener on any optimism. "His air must be gone by now. He's surely drowned.

  Death in the stygian blackness of a cavern deep inside the earth is something nobody cares to think about. The idea is too foreign, too horrible to dwell on. Lost and trapped divers have been known to have literally shredded their fingertips to the bone, trying to claw their way through a mile of rock. Others simply gave up, believing they had reentered the womb.

  The last thing on Pitt's mind was dying. The mere thought was enough to instill panic. He concentrated on conserving his air and fighting against disorientation, the ever-present specter of cave divers.

  The needle on his air pressure gauge quivered on the final mark before EMPTY. How much time did he have? One minute, two, perhaps three before he inhaled on a dry tank?

  His fin accidentally kicked up a blinding cloud of silt that effectively smothered the beam of his light. He hung motionless, barely making out the direction of his air bubbles past the face mask. He followed them upward until he emerged into clear water again, and then began fly-walking across the ceiling of the cavern, pulling himself along with his fingertips. It was a strange sensation, almost as if gravity didn't exist.

  A fork in the passage loomed out of the darkness. He could not afford the luxury of a time-consuming decision. He rolled over and kicked into the one on the left. Suddenly the light ray fell on a torn and rotting wet suit lying in the silt. He moved toward it cautiously. At first glance it appeared wrinkled and collapsed, as if its owner had discarded it. The light traveled up the legs and across the sunken chest area and stopped at the face mask, still strapped around the hood. A pair of empty eye sockets in a skull stared back at Pitt.

  Startled, he began pedaling backward from the gruesome sight. The body of one of the lost divers had saved his life, or at least extended it for a brief space in time. The passage had to be a dead end. The bones of the second diver were probably somewhere deep within the gloom.

  At the fork again, Pitt rechecked his compass. It was a wasted gesture. There was no place to go but to his right. He had already dropped the cumbersome safety reel. His air time was long past the point of no return.

  He tried to contain his breathing, conserving his air, but already he could sense the lessening pressure.

  There were only a few precious breaths left now.

  His mouth was very dry. He found he could not swallow, and he became very cold. He had been in the frigid water a long time and he recognized the initial symptoms of hypothermia. A strange calm settled over him as he swam deeper into the beckoning gloom.

  Pitt accepted the last intake of air as inevitable and shrugged off the useless air bottles, letting them drop into the silt. He did not feel the pain when he bashed his knee on a pile of rock. A minute was all that was left to him. That was as far as the air in his lungs would take him. An abhorrence of ending up like the divers in the other passage flooded his mind. A vision of the empty skull loomed ahead, taunting him.

  His lungs ached savagely, his head began to feel as if a fire was raging inside. He swam on, not daring to stop until his brain ceased to function.

  Something glinted up the passage in the light. It seemed miles away. Darkness crept into the fringes of his vision. His heart pounded in his ears and his chest felt as though it was being crushed. Every atom of oxygen in his lungs was gone.

  The final desperate moments closed in on him. His night probe had ended.

  Slowly but relentlessly the net tightened as Macklin's dwindling force fought on. The bodies of the dead and wounded lay amid a sea of spent cartridge casings.

  The sun had burned away the mist. They could see their targets better now, but so could the men surrounding them. There was no fear. They knew their chances of escape were impossible from the start.

  Fighting far from the shores of their island fortress was nothing new to British fighting men.

  Macklin hobbled over to Shaw. The lieutenant had his left arm in a bloodstained sling and a foot wrapped in an equally bloody bandage. "I'm afraid we've run our course, old man. We can't keep them back much longer."

  "You and your men have done a glorious job," said Shaw. "Far more than anyone expected."

  "They're good boys, they did their best," Macklin said wearily. "Any chance of breaking through that bloody hole?"

  "If I ask Caldweiler one more time how he's doing, he'll probably bash my brains out with a shovel."

  "Might as well toss a charge down there and forget it."

  Shaw stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then suddenly he scrambled over to the edge of the pit.

  The men hauling up the buckets looked as if they were ready to drop from exhaustion. They were drenched in sweat and their breath came in great heaves.

  "Where's Caldweiler?" asked Shaw.

  "He went down himself. Said no one could dig faster than him."

  Shaw leaned over the edge. The air shaft had curved and the Welshman was out of sight. Shaw yelled his name. A lump of dirt shaped like a man came into view far below. "What now, damn it?"

  "Our time has run out," Shaw's voice reverberated down the shaft. "Any chance of blowing through with explosives?"

  "No good," Caldweiler shouted up. "The walls will cave in."

  "We've got to risk it."

  Caldweiler sank to his knees in total exhaustion. "All right," he said hoarsely. "Throw down a charge. I'll give it a try."

  A minute later, Sergeant Bentley lowered a satchel containing plastic explosives. Caldweiler gently tapped the pliable charges into deep probe holes, set the fuses and signaled to be pulled to the surface.

  When he came into reach, Shaw took him under the arms and dragged him free of the pit entrance.

  Caldweiler was appalled by the scene of carnage around him. Out of Macklin's original force, only four men were unwounded, yet they still kept up a vicious fire into the woods.

  The ground suddenly rumbled beneath them and a cloud of dust spewed from the air shaft. Caldweiler immediately went back in. Shaw could hear him coughing, but his eyes could not penetrate the swirling haze.

  "Did the walls hold?" Shaw yelled.

  There was no answer. Then he felt a
tug on the rope and he began pulling like a madman. His arms felt as if they were about to drop off when Caldweiler's dust-encrusted head popped up.

  He sputtered incoherently for a moment and finally cleared his throat. "We're in," he gasped. "We've broken through. Hurry, man, before you get yourself shot."

  Macklin was there now. He shook Shaw's hand. "If we don't see each other again, all the best."

  "Same to you."

  Sergeant Bentley handed him a flashlight. "You'll need this, sir."

  Caldweiler had knotted three ropes together, increasing the length. "This should see you to the floor of the quarry," he said. "Now, in you go."

  Shaw dropped into the pit and began his descent. He paused briefly and looked up.

  The dust from the explosion had not settled, and all view of the anxious faces above was obscured.

  On the perimeter's rim, Lieutenant Sanchez' men still crouched behind trees and rocks, maintaining an intense rate of fire into the thicket-covered gully. Since the first shots he had lost one dead and eight wounded. He also had been hit, a bullet passing through his thigh and out again. He tore off his battle jacket and wrapped the entry and exit holes with his undershirt.

  "Their fire has slackened," commented Sergeant Hooper, between spits of tobacco.

  "It's a miracle any of them are still alive in there," Sanchez said.

  "Nobody fights that hard but fanatical terrorists."

  "They're well trained. I have to hand them that." He hesitated, listening. Then he scratched an ear and peered between two large boulders that shielded him. "Listen!"

  Hooper's brow furrowed. "Sir?"

  "They've stopped firing."

  "Could be a trick to sucker us in."

  "I don't think so," said Sanchez. "Pass the word to cease fire."

  Soon a strange silence settled over the battle-scarred woods. Then slowly a man rose out of the thicket, his rifle held high over his head.

  "Son of a bitch," Hooper muttered. "He's wearing full battle dress."

  "Probably bought it at war surplus."

  "Smug-looking bastard."

  Sanchez rose to his feet and casually lit a cigarette. "I'm going in. If he so much as picks his nose, cut him in two."

  "Stay off to the side, sir, so we have a direct line of fire."

  Sanchez nodded and walked forward. He stopped a yard or two away from Sergeant Bentley and looked him over. He noted the blackened face, the netted helmet with the twigs sticking out of it and the enlisted man's insignia. There was no trace of fear in the face. In fact, there was a spreading smile. "Good morning to you, sir," greeted Bentley. "You in charge here?"

  "No, sir. If you will please follow me, I'll take you to him."

  "Are you surrendering?"

  Bentley nodded. "Yes, sir."

  Sanchez leveled his rifle. "Okay, after you."

  They stepped through the bushes djefoliated by bullets and into the gully. Sanchez' eyes took in the scattered bodies, the gore-sopped earth. The wounded stared back at him with indifferent interest. Three men who looked unscathed snapped to attention.

  "Straighten up the line, lads," said Bentley sternly.

  Sanchez was at a loss. These men didn't fit the picture of terrorists, not any he'd seen or heard about.

  They appeared to be uniformed soldiers, highly disciplined and trained for combat. Bentley led him up to two men resting beside an excavated hole in the ground. The one who looked like he'd been rolling in dirt for a detergent commercial was bent over the other, cutting away a boot that was filled with blood. The man stretched beside him on the ground gazed up at Sanchez' approach and threw ajaunty salute.

  "Good morning."

  A cheerful lot, thought Sanchez. "Are you in command here?"

  "Yes indeed," replied Macklin. "May I have the honor of your name, sir?"

  "Lieutenant Richard Sanchez, United States Marine Corps."

  "Then it's diamond cut diamond. I'm Lieutenant Digby Macklin of Her Majesty's Royal Marines."

  Sanchez stood there open-mouthed. All he could think of to mumble was "Well, I'll be damned."

  The first thing Shaw noticed as he eased himself down the ventilator shaft was the dank and musty stench that welled up to meet him. After about twenty yards he could no longer reach out with his feet and touch the encircling earth walls. He clutched the rope in a near death grip and beamed his light into the dark.

  Shaw had dropped into a vast cavern, at least forty feet from floor to ceiling. It was empty except for a large pile of debris in one corner. The rope ended twelve feet from the ground. He shoved the flashlight under his armpit, took a deep breath and released his grip.

  He fell like a pebble falling down a well through the blackness, a frightening experience he would never care to repeat.

  A gasp was squeezed from his lungs when he landed. He should have struck clean, his legs taking most of the impact. But when he fell to one side, his outflung wrist smashed against something hard, and he heard the sickening crack as it fractured.

  Shaw sat there for two or three minutes, lips tightened in agony, feeling sorry for himself. Finally, he snapped abruptly to his senses, realizing it was only a question of minutes before the Americans would be coming down the air shaft and struggled to a sitting position.

  Groping in his waist for the flashlight, he pushed the switch. Thank God, it still worked.

  He found himself next to railroad tracks of a narrow gauge that ran from the cavern into a tunnel carved at one end.

  Awkwardly he one-handedly slipped off his belt and made a crude sling, then rose to his feet and struck out along the track into the tunnel.

  He walked between the rails, careful not to trip on the raised ties. The tracks ran level for fifty yards and then started to slant up a slight incline. After a while he stopped and played the beam into the darkness ahead.

  What seemed like two monstrous red eyes reflected back at him.

  Cautiously he moved forward, stubbed his toe against something solid, looked down and saw another set of rails. They were spiked at a much wider gauge, even wider than the ones British trains ran on, Shaw judged. He came out of the tunnel into another cavern.

  But this was not an ordinary cavern. This was an immense crypt filled with dead.

  The red eyes were two lanterns mounted on the rear of a railroad car. On the observation platform were two bodies, mummies really, still fully clothed, their blackened skulls staring into the eternal dark.

  The hair on the back of Shaw's head raised and he forgot about the stabbing ache in his wrist. Pitt had been right. The underground quarry had yielded the secret of the Manhattan Limited.

  He glanced around, half expecting to see a shrouded figure holding a scythe, beckoning with a bony finger, beckoning for Shaw. He passed alongside the coach, noting that it was surprisingly free of rust. At the boarding steps, where the next car was coupled, another grotesque bundle lay, its head propped against the six-wheeled truck. Out of morbid curiosity, Shaw stopped and studied it.

  Under the flashlight the skin showed a dark brownish-gray color and had the consistency of leather. As the months and years passed, the body had desiccated and hardened and become naturally mummified by the dry air of the quarry. The round visored cap still resting on the head indicated that this map had been the conductor.

  There were others, scores of them, scattered around the train, frozen in the final posture of death. Most had died sitting up; a few were lying outstretched. Their clothing was in a remarkable state of preservation and Shaw had no trouble telling the men from the women.

  Several of the dead were stiffened in warped positions below the open door to the baggage car. In front of them a jumbled stack of wooden crates sat partly loaded into an ore car. One of the mummies had pried open a crate and was holding a rectangular-shaped block against his chest. Shaw rubbed away the grime on the object and was stunned to see the smear turn the color of gold.

  My God, he thought. By today's prices there must be
over three hundred million dollars' worth of the stuff lying about.

  Tempting as it was to linger and contemplate the riches, Shaw forced himself to push on. Sweat was soaking his clothes, yet he felt as if he were in a refrigerator.

  The engineer had chosen to die in the cab of his locomotive. The great iron monster was blanketed under a century of dust, but Shaw could still decipher the fancy gold numerals "88" and the red stripe that ran down the side.

  Thirty feet in front of the cowcatcher there was a massive fall of rock that had buried the main entrance of the quarry. More dead were strewn about here; having dug frantically with their final breath, their gnarled hands still clutched around picks and shovels. They had actually moved several tons of stone, but it had been only an exercise in futility. A hundred men couldn't have dug through that mountain of rubble in a month.

  How did it all happen? Shaw trembled unconsciously. There was an undeniable horror about the place.

  Helplessly trapped in a cold and dark underground prison, what tortures of the mind had they all endured before death ended their sufferings.

  He continued around the locomotive and coal tender, then mounted the steps of the first Pullman car and walked down the aisle. The first sight he saw there was a woman lying in a berth, her arms embracing two small children. Shaw turned away and kept moving.