‘Prioritise,’ he repeated firmly. ‘Most of all, we need to find out what we can do for the one who’s trapped. See if it’s possible to release him or will he just have to be stabilised as best you can until we can get some muscle or some serious machinery in there to free him and get him out?’
‘And in my spare time…’ she said ironically.
Adam gave a short huff of laughter and she caught a brief glimpse of that grin again. ‘In your spare time, Maggie, you could keep up a running commentary so that I can be certain that you’re all right.’
Then there was no more time to delay, not if that lad was bleeding as badly as Jem thought he was.
‘Coming through,’ she said to Mike as she threaded her way through the gorse. It wasn’t until she was almost at the dreaded black hole, framed now by the last remnants of the broken and rotted boards, that she realised that he’d spent his time while she and Adam had been speaking in ripping the jagged timber away so that she could see better to climb over the rubble blocking the entrance to the adit.
‘Maggie, just think about this for a minute,’ her colleague cautioned quietly when she reached out a shaky hand towards the rough rocks. ‘The first rule of rescue work is never to endanger yourself, and this definitely comes under the heading of—’
‘Don’t, Mike,’ she said with a single shake of her head, knowing he was right but also knowing that she had to be able to live with her own conscience.
‘Maggie, I know those lads need help,’ he tried again, holding onto her arm to prevent her moving any further forward. ‘But you could lose your job for going in there without the proper—’
‘Mike, you know how much I love my job, but I don’t think I’d want it any more if I let any of those kids die when I could have done something to prevent it,’ she said with an unexpected feeling of determination. ‘I’m not going in there because I want to but because I have to, and the best way you can help is to stand by with the bags of equipment ready to pass me the supplies I need when I get in there.’
‘Ready to go, Maggie?’ Adam prompted from close behind her, but she’d already known he was there, silently supporting her as she argued her case. ‘Take my torch,’ he offered as she nodded and took a deep breath. ‘It’s not as heavy-duty as yours but I think it gives out just as much light.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, gazing back for one last second into those shadowy midnight-blue eyes. Then she forced herself to begin squeezing though the awkward opening at the top of the rockfall that was blocking most of the entrance and preventing the two men from taking her place in there.
Once inside, she put her hand back out again to be passed her emergency pack of basic equipment and then it was time to crawl into the blackness.
For several paces she concentrated so hard on controlling her breathing and putting one hand and knee in front of the other that she didn’t pay much attention to her surroundings. It wasn’t until the heel of the hand holding Adam’s torch landed on a painfully sharp piece of rock that she paused for a second to rub it and caught sight of something that surprised her.
‘Hey! Adam…Mike, it’s not just a tiny tunnel in here!’ she exclaimed with a definite feeling of relief. ‘I can actually stand up in it once I’m past the rockfall at the entrance!’ She suited her actions to her words and swung briefly back towards the entrance, suddenly uneasily aware that if she hadn’t been looking directly at it, she wouldn’t have known where it was. It was now so dark outside that the only light visible was from her own torch and the one held by whoever was immediately outside the entrance. The rough pile of rocks that were blocking the entrance made that part of the mine look no different from any other part.
‘Can you pass the other equipment packs through?’ she suggested. ‘It looks as if there’ll be plenty of room, and I might be able to carry them all the way to where the boys are. That would save time.’
‘Stick to plan A,’ Adam advised, his voice sounding strangely hollow as it echoed around her. ‘Just take your lightweight emergency pack with the basics. It’s better to locate the boys and find out what you’re dealing with before you start loading yourself down unnecessarily. Then you can decide what’s the best way to proceed. You can always come back for more.’
‘Anyway,’ Mike’s disembodied voice added his twopenn’orth, ‘while you’re doing that, we’re going to be clearing as much of this rock away as we can, so we can get in there to help.’
‘OK,’ she agreed, and turned back to the tunnel with a shudder.
Adam was right, of course, but, then, he’d already worked as an emergency specialist in a big London hospital and had gained enough experience to be able to take over teaching the course she’d gone up to attend when the original lecturer had been taken ill.
She could feel herself smiling when she remembered her delight at seeing him walk into that lecture room. It had been so many years since the last time she’d seen him but one look at that lean athletic body and the familiar planes and angles of his face had been enough to know this really was the man who’d been haunting her dreams since she’d been an impressionable teenager.
The answering flash of recognition in those beautiful deep blue eyes had made her grateful that she’d been sitting down. The last thing she’d needed in front of a roomful of colleagues had been to make a fool of herself by falling at his feet.
‘Ouch!’ she yelped as her head hit an obstruction and she dropped to one knee to give it a rub.
‘What’s the matter?’ Adam demanded instantly. ‘Maggie, are you all right?’
‘I hit my head on something,’ she complained crossly, and shone her torch upwards to see if she could find the obstruction. Was the roof dropping that much lower already? How long would it be before she was reduced to crawling again?
When she saw the dangling balk of wood thicker than her thigh that should have been supporting the ceiling, she wished that she hadn’t bothered looking.
Suddenly she was overwhelmingly conscious of just how many tons of rock were sitting just inches above her head, and she found herself fighting to draw in enough air.
‘Maggie?’ Adam called. ‘You’re supposed to be talking to me, remember?’
She was so panic-stricken that she could barely remember her own name, and as for breathing…
‘Maggie!’ he called again with worry clear in his voice. ‘Can you hear me? Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she croaked, and had to clear her throat, but his concern had helped her to regain control. ‘Yes, Adam, I can hear you.’
‘What’s happening, then? I heard you cry out. Did you injure yourself?’
‘I hit my head,’ she said shortly, giving the spot another rub once she’d made certain that she hadn’t done enough damage to make it bleed.
‘What did you hit your head on? Does the roof slope down that sharply?’
‘It wasn’t the roof,’ she said, forcing herself to say the words without thinking about the significance of them. ‘It was one of those wood thingies that holds up the roof. It’s come off the upright one and was hanging down low enough for me to walk into it.’
She thought she heard Adam swear but his voice when he spoke was calmness personified. ‘Mike says he thinks those are called sprags or gibs, depending where you are,’ he told her…as if she was interested in the name of the thing she’d hit. All she was worried about was whether the fact that only one end of the wretched thing was where it was supposed to be meant that the roof wasn’t being held up properly.
No! She wasn’t going to think about that. There were five young lads waiting for her to get to them…relying on her to sort out their injuries before they could be helped out of the mine.
‘Jem!’ she called when her next few careful steps brought her to an apparent choice of directions. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here, straight ahead of you,’ said a boyish voice, so unexpectedly close that he made her jump. His face was nearly at floor level a dozen or more yard
s ahead of her and, apart from smears of dirt, was almost totally devoid of colour when she caught him in her torchlight.
There was no mistaking that he was Kate’s son, she thought with an internal grin, not with that dark hair and brown eyes set off in that bone structure.
She began to hurry forward, wondering if he was lying there because he was injured or trapped, but he quickly called out, ‘Don’t come too close. I’m on the top of a stope.’
Maggie paused uncertainly, her need to check that he wasn’t too badly injured barely kept in check. ‘What’s a stope?’ she asked.
‘It’s where the miners were following a vein of ore and the excavation leaves steps in the rock. I found out all about it on the internet for a school project.’
‘Steps? But that’s great!’ Maggie exclaimed as she started forward again, more cautiously this time. ‘That’ll make it much easier to get you all out.’ Much easier than if the boys had fallen down a narrow shaft, for example.
‘No. You don’t understand,’ he said urgently, clearly wanting her to stop. ‘They’re not solid steps. They’re all broken and crumbly in places. That’s how Tel fell.’
‘Tell me what happened,’ she prompted as she slowly crept forward on hands and knees again, to peer over the edge and down the precipitous stepped slope. Was this the moment when she was going to discover that she had a fear of heights, too?
‘He didn’t fall very far but some rocks came down and landed on him. The rest of us climbed down the rest of the way to help him get out again,’ he continued, the words pouring out in an urgent, jerky stream. ‘We were trying to move the rocks and Chris got hurt, then we dropped the torch and the bulb broke and we couldn’t see what we were doing any more, and then I said I’d come back up to get help but I couldn’t get up this last bit because I’m not tall enough, and the signal was too weak on my mobile so I couldn’t tell Mum where we were. Then it got too dark and I didn’t dare climb down again, so I was stuck here till you came.’
‘So, where is Tel now?’ she asked when she’d finally eased forward enough to see down the stope and beyond, shining the torchlight against the jumble of rocks at the bottom of the jagged steps and shuddering at the size of them. If something that size had landed on one of the boys, there would be little likelihood that they’d survived. ‘Your message said that one of the boys is bleeding. That’s Tel, is it?’
‘Uh-huh.’ He nodded. ‘And he’s unconscious.’
‘Can you see where the blood is coming from? His head, his body…?’
‘I think it’s his leg,’ he said with a frown, ‘but there’s a load of rocks in the way so I can’t see properly. And I can’t move them either—they’re too heavy.’
‘Well, it won’t be too long before we can get some big strong men down here to get them shifted,’ she reassured him, even as her fears about crush syndrome increased, then took a deep breath to bolster herself for what she knew she had to do next. It might still be within the so-called golden hour for his young friend and she needed to start minimising the trauma he’d suffered as soon as possible.
‘Jem, I need you to help me. I need you to show me how to get down the…the stope…to have a look at Tel.’
‘But…but you’re a girl,’ he said, screwing up his face in disbelief, and Maggie made a mental note to have a word with Kate about her son’s gender stereotyping once this was all over.
‘Yes, I am, but I’m a girl who used to do climbing ropes and gymnastics at school, and climbing over the rocks under the lighthouse every holiday.’
He still didn’t look as if he believed her and she was aware of his reluctance as he guided her through every shaky step she took as she lowered herself feet first over that first enormous drop then edged backwards down the rest of the ragged steps of the stope.
‘They’re behind here,’ he said, hurrying forward towards another pile of rock that looked as if it had been there for centuries…the pile of boulders she’d been looking at from the top just a few minutes ago looking even more enormous now she was close to them. ‘Tel fell down the last bit of the stope, then some of the rocks started to fall and he tried to get out of the way so he was running into this other tunnel, but there were too many rocks coming and they were falling too fast and he couldn’t get out of the way in time and they hit him and knocked him down. Some of them landed on him.’
He started climbing round the edge of the enormous pile of loose rocks and she suddenly caught sight of another tunnel entrance that had been almost completely hidden from view. Her heart began to pound with renewed panic when she saw how small it was. It was narrower than the one at the top of the stope. Much narrower and not nearly as high.
I can’t do this, said a panicky voice in her head, and her feet froze to the dank, gritty ground. I won’t be able to breathe in there; there won’t be enough air, especially if I have to share it with all these other people.
CHAPTER THREE
‘MAGGIE?’ Jem turned back to her before he joined his friends in the second tunnel, his eyes very dark in the gloom, and she had the feeling that he was deliberately keeping his voice low so that they couldn’t hear him. ‘I’m…I’m really glad you came to find us. It was scary being down here all by ourselves…without any light.’
Suddenly she was ashamed of herself. She had a light—Adam’s torch—and the certainty that, by now, there were probably dozens of people arriving in the field around the entrance to the adit, and all of them would be working out the best way to get them all out safely. All she had to do was the job she was trained for…to assess the injuries this group of lads had sustained and to stabilise them as far as possible until further help arrived.
The fact that she would rather be a million miles away was her problem, not theirs, and she couldn’t let it affect the care she gave them.
‘Hey! It’s a girl! I thought you said it was someone coming to help us!’ said another disgusted young voice, dragging her back to the whole reason she was putting herself through this misery. Maggie added a fresh mental note to suggest a visit to their school to tell them all about the wide variety of job possibilities for girls in the twenty-first century.
‘I’m a paramedic,’ she corrected him gently as she caught him in the bright light of Adam’s torch, ‘and I need to know what injuries you’ve all got.’
‘Dwayne, me and Jonno haven’t got any injuries,’ Jem said swiftly, acting as spokesman. ‘Chris got his hand hurt when it was squished by a rock, but Tel’s the one who’s hurt the worst.’
While he’d been giving her the details, he’d been pointing to the other lads and she quickly threaded her way through rocks and boys to bend over the silent youngster trapped by the fallen rocks.
‘Is he still alive?’ Jem demanded uncertainly as her gloved fingertips probed for the carotid artery in the dust-caked neck. ‘I thought he was when I tried before, but I wasn’t sure I was looking in the right place…’
‘Yes. He’s still alive. His heart’s still beating, Jem,’ she confirmed, remembering to smile her reassurance in spite of the fact that the pulse was weaker and faster than she would have wanted. And it was hardly any wonder that his breathing was laboured with that amount of rock inhibiting the movement of his ribcage.
He was obviously going to need fluids and a far more detailed examination, but there just wasn’t room in these cramped conditions, not with so many heads leaning over her shoulder to see what she was doing.
There was only one alternative so, much as everything in her was telling her that she needed to attend to the most seriously injured child first, she beckoned forward the one that Jem had called Chris.
‘Come here, Chris. Show me your hand,’ she said, a quick flash of her torch across his face reassuring her that his pupils were equal and reactive. The fact that it had also revealed the tell-tale tracks of hastily smeared tears was something she wouldn’t be mentioning to anyone.
‘You won’t hurt it, will you?’ he asked, as he held his other hand
protectively over it.
‘I promise I’ll be gentle, but I need to know what sort of injury you’ve got or I can’t do anything for it,’ she explained, and hid a smile at his reluctant acquiescence.
‘Ouch!’ she said in sympathy when she saw his bruised and swollen hand. ‘It looks like the rock caught you right on the back of your hand. Can you move your fingers?’
‘Don’t know. It’ll hurt too much if I do.’
‘Can you try…just once?’ she appealed, then realised she might be missing out on the youngster’s need for drama. ‘I need to see if your tendons, muscles and nerves are still working.’
His eyes widened, so obviously she’d made her request seem important enough to impress. ‘OK,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But I only have to do it once, right?’
‘Right,’ she agreed, then held her hand out flat towards him. ‘And if you put your hand on mine, you’ll only need to move your fingers a tiny bit and I’ll be able to feel it.’
He gingerly lowered the purple swollen mass onto her palm, drawing a sharp hiss of breath in through his teeth at one point before looking up at her.
‘Ready?’ she prompted gently, wishing there was such a thing as a miniature portable X-ray to help her make a diagnosis. As it was, she didn’t even dare to give him any analgesia in case his only way out was to climb up that deadly stope.
‘Brilliant!’ she praised when she felt him carefully move each finger one by one, his face screwed up against the pain. ‘I felt each of them move,’ she confirmed, and when she saw the relief on his face she was glad he didn’t know that it wasn’t the whole story. His nerves and tendons might have escaped major injury, but she’d definitely detected the crepitation of at least one broken metacarpal and wouldn’t be surprised if there was more than one.
‘Right, Chris,’ she said briskly as she reached into her backpack and drew out a folded square of fabric. She was all too aware that time was passing and she still had to see Tel. ‘I need to immobilise your hand so that you don’t do it any further damage.’
Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor Page 36