Soul Intent

by dennis batchelder

  One last push, but somehow he jerked free and swung his arm back. I tried to twist the pistol before he could shoot, and then I felt a third pair of hands grab at it. I pulled, but it slipped out of my grasp, leaving me holding the man’s empty hands.

  Another shot, and the body beneath me convulsed once, twice, and then went still. I swung my wrist light around. Its beam caught Val dropping the pistol.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me hard.

  “You saved me,” I said. “Again.” I squeezed her tightly, and we rocked back and forth on the pile of bodies.

  After a minute we helped each other stand up. I flicked on my wrist light and cringed when I saw the bullet hole in the man’s forehead.

  “How’d you know you weren’t shooting me?” I asked.

  “His hair,” she said. “It’s a buzz cut, and it’s much thicker than yours.” She picked up the pistol and stuck it in the waist of her jeans.

  I searched through the bodies and pulled out a knife and two more pistols. We walked back to George and Sue with our arms around each other.

  George looked up. “Val flew like a bat out of hell when that first shot was fired.”

  “She saved my life.” Then something hit me. “Wait a minute…did you say bat?”

  George gave me a blank look. Then he smiled. “Bats.” He let out a chuckle, then grimaced. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said.

  “What’s so funny?” Sue asked.

  He turned to her. “Where are the bats, Sue?”

  She shrugged. “Far away, I hope. I hate bats.”

  He smiled. “I’ll ask you again, my dear. Where are those lovely, beautiful, friendly Euro-bats?”

  Then Val snapped her fingers. “If we find the bats—”

  “Then we’ll find our way out,” Sue finished. “I guess I don’t hate Slovakian bats.”

  “The diving rentals guy told me they bricked up the end of the tunnel to keep the bats out of the gallery,” George said. “Right past the staircase.”

  “So we can break through that wall and fly out,” Sue said.

  “There’s only one problem,” Val said. “We have no tools.”

  “Let’s go and look,” I said as I got to my feet. “Maybe a brick is loose.”

  Val and I climbed the stairs, and instead of turning left and up the tunnel to the blockage, we turned right and faced a bricked-up wall.

  Val traced the edges with her light. “It looks pretty solid.”

  I ran my fingers over the wall, looking for either a loose stone or a crack in the mortar. The joints were tight. I planted my foot against the bottom center of the wall. “Let’s see how strong it is,” I said. I stepped back and kicked, but the wall didn’t budge. I kicked again and again, not stopping until pains shot up my leg.

  Then we tried slamming our bodies into the wall a few times, but when nothing happened, we slumped down and caught our breaths.

  “We’re so close,” Val said.

  I closed my eyes. “I wonder if this is how Old Ned felt when he was stuck in the chute.”

  She reached out and grabbed my hand. “You really connected with him, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” I said. “And I can’t wait to get the rest of his story into my soul line collection. He needs more than that letter.”

  “He had more than a letter—we read his story about the cave-in.”

  That triggered something, and I looked up and smiled. “We sure did—Ned told us how he and Raddy escaped!”

  Val straightened up. “They dug to another tunnel, didn’t they?” She banged on the wall with her fist. “Just like we need to do.”

  “But they had picks,” I pointed out.

  “And we don’t.”

  I smiled.

  She looked at me. “You have a pick?”

  I shook my head. “Ned only left me a hammer.”

  She stared at me as if she thought I had gone off the deep end. “You left it in your soul line collection, Scott.”

  “Not the hammer—he took his pick into the opal nest.”

  She slumped back. “You’re going to go there after all.”

  I nodded. “We need the pick, and we need to help everybody else.”

  “Nobody but Flora’s grandfather has survived that nest, Scott,” she said. She grabbed both of my hands. “We just have to wait the four hours until we’re rescued.”

  “George may not last four hours without medical assistance,” I said. “And from what we heard on the radio, Archie, Madame Flora, and the girls won’t either.”

  She sighed. “Is this your fight, Scott? Do you care enough for them that you would die to save them?”

  That brought me up short. “Of course I do—don’t you?”

  After staring at me for a long minute, she spoke with measured words. “I do. I’m over helping Flora save her damn gold, but certainly I would die trying to save Rose and Marie. It’s not our fight, but it’s not theirs, either.”

  That summed up exactly how I felt. “And they need our help,” I added.

  “They do,” she said. “I’ll come with you.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I’m sure.” She stood up and offered me her hand. “Besides, we both know you’ll never get down that chute without me.”

  fifty-seven

  Present Day

  Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

  Over George and Sue’s protests, Val and I suited up for yet another dive. Val used Marie’s suit and Rose’s rebreather.

  We checked and rechecked our equipment. I knew we needed to be quick—our tanks were almost empty and the rebreathers’ scrubbers were almost full, so we didn’t have enough oxygen for a long decompression. We walked through our dive sequence several times. Val and I agreed that if we didn’t find the picks right away, we’d return and sit with George and Sue and wait to be rescued by the Budapest team.

  And then, right after we filled our suits with the remaining argon, I froze as I remembered we had yanked out the headphones to make our balun. Val wasn’t going to be able to sing me through the tight spots. I turned to her and frowned. “The headphones are gone.”

  She grabbed my hand. “You’ll have to remember what I sound like when you need it.”

  I nodded. I already knew how bad the panic attacks got. I’d make it.

  Our facemasks felt a little funny with the earphones cut out, but the fit seemed tight, and we slid underwater.

  This final dive was no scenic trip. We descended quickly down the shaft. Val’s gloved hand gripped mine as we passed the body of the drowned soldier in a gruesome embrace with the winch cables.

  Then we reached the tunnel. We swam into the alcove where the gold had lain. Val grabbed the light we had left, and we swam over the stonework strewn on the floor from where we had pulled down the wall.

  We reached the second alcove, and I grabbed the other light from the ceiling. Val helped me open the trap door, and we pulled ourselves hand over hand down the fifty foot ladder.

  I wrestled out the wooden plug at the bottom of the shaft. Then I looked at Val. She gave me a thumbs-up, tethered me to her with a nylon leash, and followed me into the chute.

  Once again it was tight and full of silt. I scrunched my eyes shut and gritted my teeth and rode my way through the panic. I scraped myself against the sides, but after the first twenty feet, the chute widened out and the silt settled down. I could see both Val behind me and the walls for a few feet in front of me.

  We followed the chute a hundred yards or so. My dive computer said we had descended to 150 feet. We had only another two minutes to find the picks.

  The chute ended in a gaping hole on the wall of another gallery. The water was crystal clear, undisturbed for sixty-four years. From the entrance we could peer into the opal nest that first Raddy and then Ned and Dieter had found. It was a beauty: twenty feet high and twice as deep. The opals embedded in the walls caught our light’s beams and threw back shimmeri
ng greens, blues, and reds. I could see what had driven the men crazy.

  But this was no time for opal hunting. Val and I pointed our lights at the floor. We were hesitant to descend the twenty feet to the bottom, so we floated around close to the ceiling and searched below us.

  Val grabbed my arm and pointed with her light. I added my own beam, and we saw a skeleton crumpled in the corner. That would be Dieter, I guessed: the flood he had caused would have scattered the older bones of Raddy’s fellow miners.

  We descended to the skeleton. I brushed back some decayed clothing, and there it was: the pick-axe. The handle had snapped and come loose, but the metal head seemed solid. Mission accomplished—I grabbed the head and pointed Val toward the surface.

  She shook her head and pointed to the far wall, where the largest opals shone. Some of them were set neatly in a pile.

  Was she crazy? We had neither the time nor the oxygen to retrieve the opals. I pointed to the tube and pumped my arm for emphasis.

  She unleashed herself and swam to the corner. But she brushed the opals aside and picked up a hammer that must have been lying there for a century. Then she grabbed two golf ball-sized opals and pointed upward.

  We ascended through the dive computer’s beeps. I re-plugged the hole to the chute, followed the ladder up, folded down the trap door, and swam up the tunnel, past the stonework, around the drowned neo-Nazi, and up the shaft to fifteen feet.

  We had ten minutes of decompression time remaining when we checked the rebreathers. Val’s was fine, but when she saw mine she spun me around and ripped loose the bail-out bottle strapped to her leg.

  My tank must have been empty. I plugged the hose into the bypass and switched over. After ten more minutes we ascended to the surface.

  We climbed out of the water and helped each other remove the rebreathers.

  Val started to unzip her suit, but then she stopped. “I’m just about worn out,” she said. “Can you help with this?”

  I knew how she felt. My muscles ached, and my knees and hips felt like somebody had pounded knitting needles through them. “We’re almost done,” I said as I tugged on her zipper.

  We peeled off our suits and got dressed. Val put the two opals in her pocket. I gathered up the pick-axe head and the hammer, and we headed over to George and Sue.

  Sue looked up. “Any luck?”

  I nodded. “We found the old tools. How’s George?”

  “He’s out again.” She stared at me and bit her lip. “He needs help soon, or else…”

  Val reached out to her, and the two shared a quick hug. “We’ll make it, Sue,” she said, “Just hang on.”

  fifty-eight

  Present Day

  Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

  Val wedged the blade of the pick-axe into a hairline crack she had found in the wall. I swung the hammer at the pick, but instead of widening the crack, the blade turned, and Val yelped as her fingers smashed into the wall for the eighth or ninth time.

  This was supposed to be the easy part. We were tired and making stupid mistakes.

  Val repositioned the pick-axe head, I swung the hammer, and again the axe head bounced out of the crack and twisted.

  I dropped the hammer and took the pick-axe head from her. Something wasn’t right, and we weren’t getting it. I let the axe head drop, and I slid down the wall to the ground.

  Val joined me. We slumped together in silence.

  Then she looked up. “We busted down the alcove wall yesterday. What’s different about this?”

  “Our tools,” I said. “We had George’s hooks.”

  “But at least they went into the wall when you hammered on them.” She picked up the pick-axe head. “This just bounces right out.”

  I watched as she hefted it. The way the metal was arced between the pick and the blade wasn’t helping; most of the force of my swings was deflected downward into Val’s hands.

  Val sighed. “Too bad old Ned didn’t leave you more detailed instructions.”

  “Too bad he left his hammer and not his mining genes,” I said.

  Then I thought about that hammer. “If we had a handle on the pick,” I said, “we could swing it at the wall instead of making puny little whacks on it with the hammer.”

  “Maybe you can just swing the hammer into the wall.”

  I picked up the hammer. Its head was too broad and its handle too short to cause any damage.

  But maybe we could do something else. I cleared out the hole in the pick-axe head with my finger. Then I slid the bottom of the hammer’s slender handle through the top of the hole, all the way down until the hammer’s head sat snug against the top of the axe head.

  “Now I can swing the pick-axe,” I said.

  Val smiled, and we stood up. I held the hammer like it was a tiny baseball bat, and I took a practice swing.

  “Hit with the pick side, and not with the axe,” she said.

  That made sense. I spun the handle around and aimed at a brick at my shoulder height. The pick hit the center of the brick and made a piercing ringing tone, and my hands stung from the handle’s vibration. But the brick cracked, and Val and I let out a whoop.

  After two more solid strikes, the first wedge of the brick came loose. Val teased it out by wiggling it back and forth, and the next hit sent the rest of the brick’s fragments flying.

  In only ten minutes we cleared an opening big enough for us to enter. I pulled the hammer and pick apart, shoved the pieces into my belt, and stuck my arm with its wrist light into the hole.

  We both peered inside. The tunnel ran straight ahead at a slight incline, and our lights petered out before reaching the end.

  “Let’s get going,” Val said.

  “You have the pistols?”

  She handed one to me, and I stuck it in my waistband. Then we climbed through the opening and headed up the tunnel.

  After fifty yards I stopped. I could hear the bats.

  The chirping sounded like a flock of baby birds. We followed it around a corner where the tunnel forked. We took the branch sloping up, toward the chirping.

  We climbed a flight of stairs and stood at an opening to a large gallery. Here the bats were much louder. The floor was covered with bat guano.

  I aimed my light up toward the roof, and we both cringed when it bounced off hundreds of tiny red eyes. “Let’s find the exit,” I said.

  We walked into the gallery. Our boots sunk through at least six inches of guano and slid along the floor, and I caught Val from falling into the muck. The stench slammed into us, and we both breathed through our mouths. Every now and then a bat would whir around the gallery, and we’d instinctively duck.

  We reached a wall at the far end of the gallery. We searched, but we couldn’t find an opening.

  “There’s got to be a way out,” I said.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Let’s get the bats to help us.” I pulled out the pistol.

  She screwed up her face. “What are they going to do when you fire?”

  “Hopefully fly away, so we can follow them.”

  She shivered. “What if they attack us?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  She shook her head and stared at me wide-eyed.

  I flipped the safety and glanced at her. She scrunched her eyes closed. Then I fired, and we were engulfed in a maelstrom of flying hairy bodies, leathery wings, and harsh screeches.

  fifty-nine

  Present Day

  Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

  Val screamed and clutched at her hair as the bats whirled around us. My light caught little snapshots of them flying by, their tiny mouths snarling at us, their red eyes turning them into demons. I pulled Val into my arms and shielded her with my body. I ducked my head down next to hers and shouted, “Maybe shooting that pistol was a mistake.”

  “Can you see the exit?”

  I flashed my light around and saw bats disappearing into a hole in the wall, maybe ten feet in front of us and three feet up. A
place we had missed. I led Val forward and stopped just to the side of the gap. I marked the edges with my light. The hole was round and three feet wide.

  I gave Val a boost and followed her up the tube. The floor was slick with guano, and we crawled up as fast as we could, all the time with the bats screeching and bumping into us in their frenzied dash to exit the gallery.

  I felt a warm breeze after a hundred feet, and the beam from my wrist light caught the fog in the air. Another minute later we tumbled out of the tube and onto the side of a hill.

  We collapsed on the ground and lay on our backs and gasped for fresh air. We stared up at the black sky. The almost-full moon and some bright stars shone through gaps in the trees above us, and the bats continued to stream out of the hole, screeching as they flew away into the night.

  Val turned to me. “Do we go back and get George and Sue first?” she asked.

  Good question. If something happened to us as we tried to rescue Archie, Madame Flora, and the twins, the Budapest team would never find their way into the cave in time. George and Sue would die in the gallery.

  But spending time rescuing them could give the Nazis a chance to kill their four hostages.

  George and Sue were too weak to help us, and getting them first would tire us out and make it even harder to rescue the other four. This meant that our only chance of saving all six was to stop the Nazis on the surface first.

  We had to try to save everybody. “First we get the Nazis, and if we survive that, we go back for George and Sue,” I said.

  She looked at me for a minute before nodding. “I think George and Sue would agree,” she said slowly. “They’d insist that we rescue Mr. Morgan before we worry about them.”

  I felt every muscle ache as we got to our feet.

  “Where’s the camp?” Val asked.

  I pointed up the hill. “Hopefully on the other side of this ridge.”

  We scrambled up a couple hundred feet to the top. Sticks and leaves stuck to our guano-covered clothes and shoes.