by Rick Chesler
As forbidding as the place was, the fact that they could see the outside, albeit very far above, had an uplifting effect on their spirits. Lara even tried the satellite phone, although as expected, that did not work. Further adding to their positivity was the lack of dinosaurs, at least so far. As Skylar plodded along, it was almost as though she were on just another field hike in some remote location, doing science. The heavy weight of her pack, laden with diamonds, further buoyed her temperament while at the same time tormenting her muscles.
The natural path they followed into the fissure gradually sloped upward the deeper inside they trekked. At first, the change was almost imperceptible, but after a while, Ethan stood in one place and looked back toward the exit. It was no longer visible because they had risen in elevation and no longer had a direct line of sight with it. He turned back around and saw that the trail in front of them—as rocky and perilous as it may be—continued upward, and at an even steeper angle.
“Guys, I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think we may have found a winner with this cavern.”
“Long way to go.” Skylar didn’t bother turning around, she just kept marching up the fissure as though physically drawn to the light at the top.
The going up the trail was steady, but slow enough that even Richard had little trouble keeping up. Having to stop to walk around a boulder—they walked very carefully around boulders—or jump across a break in the ground where bright red lava bubbled below—meant that he was able to keep up, for it was long stretches of open ground where he would show his weakness, and of those there were none.
After a time the conversation dropped to a functional minimum (“watch out for that crack,” or “pass me the binoculars, will you?”), the sound of occasional falling rock punctuating the silence. Thoughts of rescue kept the group plodding onward, and they took the path further up into the fissure.
Skylar, still in the lead, saw a few hints of the diamond riches that lay just below the surface layer of rock, but of course, she could do nothing about it in such close proximity to the others and so turned her thoughts to other matters. Such as the stegosaurus. It wasn’t lost on her that, although the path was narrow, the dinosaur could still be in here somewhere. They hadn’t seen it leave, after all, although it could have exited the fissure while they were taking the boat back across the lake to pick up Richard and Ethan.
If it hadn’t exited, though… Skylar looked away from the sparkle of a particularly large stone high on the wall. If it hadn’t exited, that was both a good and a bad thing. Good, because it meant this passage actually led somewhere for quite a ways, but bad, obviously because it meant they could have to contend with the beast once again. By the time Skylar broke from these thoughts, she saw that the landscape was changing. The slope became very steep while at the same time curving off to the left.
Skylar followed the trail, warning the group that the ceiling was becoming lower. And then the passage they had been following since they entered the fissure came to an abrupt end. Well, not an end, exactly, Skylar thought as she stopped walking. But certainly a drastic change.
Tendrils of mist wafted up from below, shrouding the entrance to what appeared to be a tunnel set into the side of the volcano. She noted that she would have to duck to fit inside the tunnel, meaning there was no way the stegosaurus could have made it. She shrugged to herself while waiting for the others to catch up.
She looked down into the fissure to see if she could sight the stegosaurus, but there was only a lava river far below. If the dinosaur had fallen down this way, there would likely be no trace of it. Then, just as she was about to avert her gaze back to the tunnel, her peripheral vision caught a glittering fount of light off to her left. About two feet down over the ledge protruded a massive hunk of raw diamond so brilliant it almost looked as though it had already been polished. And perhaps it had been, she thought, polished by natural geological processes during the volcano’s formation.
But Skylar’s interest in geology at this point was not scientific. She heard Richard groan in pain while the others came to his assistance, still a little ways back on the path. Quickly, she shrugged off her already heavy pack and took from it her rock hammer. She lay down on the trail so that her arms dangled over the side where the gemstone was. Imagine if I can get this one…no more after this, I’ll be so set for life…
She tried to be as quiet as possible with the hammer, hoping that if it was heard it would be passed off as typical boots kicking rocks out of the way. Still, a certain amount of racket was inevitable, and to Skylar’s ears, the echoing of the tool’s blows seemed to announce to the entire island, “Diamond thief here!”
When the stone was loose, she gripped the base of it with one hand gave it a final blow with the hammer, which broke it loose. A small chunk of diamond, perhaps three karats’ worth, dropped away from the larger mass and plummeted to the lava below, while the rest of the glorious gem came free in her gloved hand, a fist-sized lump.
Skylar heard the footsteps of the others approaching and quickly dragged herself back onto the path. She pulled her pack to her and thrust the hand with the rock inside, as though she were looking for something.
“Something down there?” Richard’s gaze traveled over the edge of the path.
Skylar shook her head. “No, I was just taking a look to see if I could learn something more about the geology of this place, maybe see if there might be ways that the stegosaurus could have gone down there, too.”
“Because he didn’t fit through that tunnel, I guess?” This from Ethan, who shone his light beam into the confined passage.
Skylar got to her feet and dusted off her pants. “Exactly. So where did it go?”
Before anyone could answer, Ethan stepped into the tunnel, stooping to duck under the entrance lip. The others huddled at the entrance and waited until he had penetrated some distance inside, calling back that, “Looks like it leads somewhere.” At that, the rest of them entered the tunnel, Richard requiring assistance from the others to walk because it aggravated his injuries to bend over in order to fit beneath the ceiling.
They slogged on until they caught up with Ethan, who was grinning ear to ear, his flashlight off. “Turn your lights off.” One by one, the flashlights were doused until they stood bathed in what he wanted them to see: natural light flooding in from above.
“I think it’s safe to say this lets out to the outside.” He finished by flicking his light back on in preparation for the remaining trek out of the tunnel. The optimism was infectious and the group experienced renewed energy as they hunched their way toward the sunlight. The incline became steeper the further they went, until when they were very near the tunnel’s exit, they had to crawl the final few feet.
Ethan and Skylar belly-crawled to the edge of the tunnel first, scrambling for their sunglasses as their eyes were met with tropical sunshine and bright blue sky after the dim confines of caves and tunnels. Ethan stuck his head out into the air and looked around.
“Oh my God, will you look at this!”
Chapter 20
“How can we look at anything but your two asses with you blocking the view like that?” Richard grumbled.
But nothing could spoil Ethan’s good mood. “I certainly hope it’s not my ass you’re looking at as long as this lovely lady is lying here next to me.”
The group laughed, for the first time in a long time, while Ethan and Skylar crawled out of the tunnel onto a cramped platform cut into the volcano’s outer slope.
“We’re a little more than halfway up, from the looks of things.” Ethan stood up fully for the first time since entering the tunnel. He stretched, taking in the magnificent view of the empty Pacific Ocean and the brown volcano dropping precariously to meet it.
Skylar looked higher, at where there was to go from here. “Doesn’t look easy to get to, but I see what looks like a small plateau maybe forty feet above us, where we could set up a staging area and probably make that sat-phone call.”
Skylar looked past Ethan to the rest of the group. “Lara, can you get a signal from the edge here?”
The others parted to make way for the communications tech to move to the opening in the volcano’s face. Skylar stepped back into the tunnel, and Lara took her place at the window to the sky. She activated the sat-phone and stared at its screen while waiting to see if it would acquire a signal. A minute passed. and she shook her head.
“It still says ‘need clear view of sky’.”
Ethan shrugged. “We’ll have to make the climb, then. Even if we did make contact from here, there’s no way a heli could pick us up from this tunnel, anyway. So we might as well get on with it.”
Each of them set up their climbing gear. Richard was the most experienced climber of them, but due to his injuries, they decided Ethan should be the lead climber. The lead was the riskiest job, since he was the one who had to place the first safety lines, which the others would make use of as they followed in his vertical footsteps. It was crucial, therefore, that this person be extremely skilled, and Ethan’s experience climbing in the Alps to photograph eagles’ nests had earned him worldwide recognition as a wildlife photographer.
Ethan finished setting up his gear and asked Anita to belay him. She was also a somewhat experienced climber, and used to working with ropes and knots as a sailor. Furthermore, she was physically stronger than Lara and Skylar, and Ethan wanted someone with strength if he had to depend on them to catch him in a fall.
He moved to the edge and hammered a piton—a metal spike used to hold a rope—into the rock. The blows from his piton hammer echoed off the volcanic slope as Ethan drove the spike home. He clipped a rope to his climbing harness and ran it through the piton. Anita held the other end of the rope, ready to tighten it down should Ethan fall, but letting out slack as he climbed.
He began his ascent by placing a foot on an obvious hold, then reaching with his right arm for another one seven feet up. He found there to be sufficient holds, and the porous lava rock, although rough on his hands, even with climbing gloves on, made for a good grip. It could still crumble, though, and this was a constant concern as he made his ascent. When he had gone about fifteen feet up, Ethan rigged another piton with a safety rope so that, should he fall, he would be caught from this point instead of fifteen feet below at the tunnel.
He continued his ascent through the most vertical section of the wall, placing each foot and hand with great care. He drove home one more piton on the way up the face, then was able to climb the rest of the way, throwing an arm over the edge of the plateau and lifting himself up and over onto the flat piece of hard ground.
“Made it! Plenty of room up here for everybody.” He hammered in a piton at the edge of the platform and then dropped a rope down to the group. “Who’s up next?”
“Have Lara go next,” Richard called up. “She’s got the sat-phone and we need to place that call.”
“Feel up to it, Lara?” Ethan called down.
She tightened down the straps on her backpack and stepped up to the rope while Anita assisted her with the climbing harness. “Here goes nothing.”
Lara put a foot in the same hold Ethan had used, and started up the wall.
“You go, girl, you can do it!” Anita cheered.
The others also gave shouts of encouragement, the mood lightening somewhat as they anticipated help being summoned within minutes. Lara climbed with efficiency and grace, reaching the halfway point of the face only a little after Ethan had done it. Her right foot slipped when she pushed off a micro-ledge in the wall, and she fell. Fortunately, she was only a few feet higher than the nearest safety line and so she didn’t have far to drop. A scraped wrist and a bruised knee later, she was back on the upward move, scaling the wall as if nothing had happened.
When Lara was about two-thirds of the way up, Skylar heard a noise in the air, somewhere outside the tunnel. She told the others to hush and stared out at the sky over the ocean, listening over Lara’s climbing efforts.
Richard looked at her with a well, what? expression. But suddenly, an explanation was no longer required, because at that moment, the screeching noise became louder, much louder. Looking down and to their left, they could see something, too.
“There! It’s coming! Pterodactyl!” The group hadn’t heard Skylar panic before, but after what she had seen happen to Joystna, she became more than a little uneasy at the sight of another winged reptile coming to torment them.
Lara froze on the wall like the proverbial deer in headlights. This time, though, she was the deer, and she knew it.
“Move, Lara! Go!” Ethan yelled down to her as he spotted the ptero slanting up toward Lara’s rock wall from below. “Up!” He added that, because for all he knew, she might think it was faster to slide down the safety line to the tunnel exit on the side of the volcano.
She climbed, up and to the right, connecting with solid hand- and foot-holds on her way to Ethan.
But the airborne mega-predator suddenly shifted direction with a squawk. It came now straight on for the tunnel. Skylar stumbled backwards, knocking into Richard, who howled like a banshee, clutching at his bandaged mid-section as he rolled back into the tunnel. Pain aside, Skylar’s move probably saved his life. The massive pterodactyl—Skylar swore it was twice as large as the one that took Joystna—dove into the tunnel. Richard and Skylar, tangled up on the floor of the tunnel, were low enough to be safe. The organic spear of the ptero’s closed beak jabbed through the air above their heads.
Anita barely missed the weapon by staying on her feet and running away from the exit as fast as her stooped position would permit. The ptero needed its wings at least partway unfurled to maintain balance, and its wingspan was too great to allow it to penetrate any deeper into the tunnel. The animal backed out of the cave, wildly hissing and tossing its head. When it reached the opening, it pushed off in what looked like an awkward move, but like a cat that manages to land on its feet, the ptero rolled until it unfurled its wings and it flew in a graceful arc.
This new flight path took it back toward the wall, where Lara was one handhold away from being able to grab Ethan’s strong, outstretched arm. Ethan locked eyes with her and tried to keep the fear out of his voice. “Come to me, Lara. Just one more hold. You can do it…”
Ethan lay flat on the plateau, leaning over, but even so, he risked being attacked by the flying marauder by exposing himself like that rather than taking cover behind a group of rocks further back on the plateau.
Lara didn’t turn around to look, but she could hear the hideous shrieking the thing made as it neared. She swore, whether imagined or not, that she could feel a rush of air as the ptero approached. Felt the panic envelop her senses, preventing her from thinking so that all she wanted to do was act. The communications specialist jumped for that next hold, the one that would allow her to connect with Ethan…
Her left foot landed on the tiny outcropping of rock. The move was not one of her best, that was for sure. It was reckless, ungainly, and born of desperation, but it had worked and she would take it.
And then the pterodactyl took her, swiping her entire body from the cliff face with beak agape. Ethan almost threw himself over the edge of the plateau trying to grab Lara, whose fingertip brushed against his—it was that close. The terrifying reality that was the rest of Lara Cantrel’s life unfolded with blinding speed as the ptero wheeled about in a circle. It passed close to the volcano’s outer wall before swerving away at the last second.
This maneuver allowed the ptero to miss the wall, but its prey was not so lucky. Lara’s head was smashed into the rock with alarming force, the sound of her skull cracking echoing off the lava facade. Ethan watched as the lizard-bird flew past him, its wing just out of reach as though taunting him. He saw Lara’s broken face, mouth moving as if she
tried to speak but no sound came out, only blood.
Then she was gone, carried by the volcanic monster out over the ocean.
The others had moved back to the tunnel exit, and now they watched in stupefied horror as their expedition-mate was dropped headlong into the Pacific, at least a hundred feet below. The pterodactyl hovered in the air, wings fully outstretched as it rode the updrafts. Then it dive-bombed, like a pelican knifing into the water after a fish. Only the fish was Lara.
Ethan watched her body float far below. It looked motionless but was far enough away that he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t give her good odds of surviving that ten-story fall, though, especially after the gruesome head injury. He was sure she was dead by now.
He hoped so, anyway, because next the ptero plunged into Lara, the beak opening around the human’s neck and closing around it as it shot into the depths like a high diver into a pool. It took about thirty seconds for the ptero to emerge from the ocean. When it did, Ethan and the others were mortified to see that it had snapped off their associate’s head while underwater.
The ptero now carried only the human head in its mouth as it skimmed low over the waves around the volcano’s base.
Chapter 21
Ethan watched the pterodactyl fly out of sight somewhere around the curve of the volcano. He turned to the rest of the team—Skylar, Richard, and Anita, gawking at the departing predator from the hole in the side of the volcano.
“Make the climb now!”
Understandably, the trio of explorers were hesitant to leave the shelter of the tunnel. But with a little more goading, Ethan convinced them to make the move. With Anita and Skylar assisting Richard where necessary, and Ethan helping by pulling them up with a rope, the three of them managed to ascend to the plateau without incident, although the climb was fraught with tension as they constantly looked over their shoulders. Would the pterodactyl return? How many more of the winged beasts lurked around the island?