She gritted her teeth and slid her hand back between the rocks, only to have to stifle another groan when she felt the obvious evidence that both Tel’s tibia and fibula were broken. At least she could feel that he still had circulation in his foot and his reflexes appeared to be intact. Added to that, it seemed as if the bones were only marginally displaced, so perhaps the bleeding was from the gash on his skin where the rock had impacted to cause the fractures.
Still, his pulse had become steadier and stronger since she’d set up the IV, and with the rocks moved away from his chest his breathing wasn’t being impeded any more, although there were definitely several cracked ribs to worry about when the time came to move him onto a stretcher. The last thing he needed was a punctured lung or, worse yet, damage to his heart.
For now, she’d done everything she could until he either regained consciousness or the rescue team was able to join her down here to shift the rest of the rocks.
‘Right, Jem,’ she said as she straightened up from checking the IV site and showed him how the new pile of rocks she’d been building as she took them away from Tel could just about be used as a temporary support for the second bag of saline. ‘It’s time I got the rest of you out of here. Let’s go.’
‘I’m not going,’ Jem announced with a stubborn expression on his pale face.
‘Jem…’ she began, but he shook his head.
‘I’m not leaving Tel down here all by himself,’ he said firmly. ‘If he wakes up and there’s no one here…no one to tell him that someone knows he’s here and that they’re just making the hole bigger so they can get him out…’
Maggie shuddered at the very thought of waking up to utter darkness with the weight of millions of tons of granite looming over her head, but she could see that there was going to be no changing the youngster’s mind.
It took her a moment to rearrange her thoughts. She wouldn’t dream of leaving Jem in the dark. It had been bad enough thinking about leaving Tel without any light, and he was unconscious.
‘Ok, if that’s what you want…’ She took the torch Adam had lent her and propped it carefully on the heap of stones still partially blocking the entrance to the tunnel. If she positioned it just right, it should light their way up the stope while she and the other three boys were climbing. ‘I’m leaving the torch here with you,’ she said, only just remembering boyish pride in time to add hastily, ‘It would get in my way while I’m helping Chris keep his balance—he can’t use his hand to hold on to anything. I’ll need you to be in charge of it to show me where I’m going on the way back down, too.’
‘I can do that,’ he said, his voice far steadier than her own as he moved forward a little bit so that he could keep an eye on the torch and the drip at the same time. ‘Just tell me where you want me to point it.’
‘I will,’ she agreed, before clambering over the rocks to join the lads waiting impatiently at the foot of the stope.
‘Maggie…?’ Adam’s voice echoed, the strange reverberations making it seem as if it was coming from several directions at once.
‘Coming,’ she called back, and gestured for the two able-bodied lads to start climbing. ‘Don’t go too fast,’ she cautioned when they began to race up the potentially deadly wall. ‘I might need your help with Chris.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ the injured youngster said bravely, but the expression on his face as he craned his neck to eye the climb he was going to have to make said something else entirely.
‘You probably will, but I’m worried about your hand. I don’t want you to do it any further damage before we can get an X-ray taken,’ she explained as she steadied his elbow for the first, relatively easy step.
By the time they reached the last climb—the step that nearly came up to her shoulder—Maggie was shaking with exhaustion and desperately glad that Jonno and Dwayne were there to help her get Chris up the last hurdle between them and freedom.
‘Don’t run on ahead,’ she warned when they were all on relatively level ground again. ‘There’s a big piece of wood hanging down from the roof and I don’t want any of you to knock yourselves out.’
She might as well have saved her breath as far as Dwayne and Jonno were concerned. They could see light at the end of the tunnel…literally…and all they could think of was to get there as soon as possible.
‘Hang on, lads. One at a time,’ said a firm masculine voice up ahead as she matched the slower pace that Chris was forced to adopt so that he didn’t jar his injured hand. ‘It’s taken us a long time to get this entrance shored up. We don’t want you spoiling all our good work in your rush to get out.’
‘Your turn, Chris,’ she said when they finally reached the mouth of the adit, surprised that so little seemed to have been achieved in the time she’d been down below with the boys. She’d been expecting to see the entrance nearly clear by now, with equipment being readied for getting Tel out. All that seemed to have been achieved was that the gorse bushes had been cleared away and a series of steel props had been set up to hold fresh pieces of timber up against the roof of the entrance.
‘Be careful of his hand,’ she called to the unseen helpers outside. ‘I’ve put a sling on him but he’s going to need X-rays of those metacarpals.’
‘Any more?’ asked the same deep voice, and she could see the silhouette of a head wearing a safety helmet against the bright lights that had been set up outside.
‘Just me this time,’ she said as she began to climb, only remembering as it caught against the roughness of the hewn rocks that she hadn’t been wearing her emergency pack when she’d come the other way—it had been passed through to her once she’d climbed through the hole.
It seemed as though a forest of hands was reaching towards her to help her to her feet and even though the lights were bright enough to sear her eyes after the pitch black of the mine, the first face she focused on was Adam’s.
‘Well done,’ she saw him say, although the sound of his praise was completely lost under the cacophony of a generator and voices that surrounded her, the area apparently filled with people in bulky, high-visibility gear.
She straightened up and filled her lungs with sweet, fresh air, relishing the ever-present tang of salt and wondering how she was ever going to be able to force herself do go back down that dank hole again.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘No!’
One piercing shriek cut through everything else, silencing everything other than the steady all-pervading throb of the generator.
‘Where’s my son?’ the shrill voice demanded. ‘What’s happened to my boy?’
‘Kate…’ someone said, and Maggie blinked. Was that dishevelled figure really Kate Althorp?
As Maggie watched, the normally smart former practice manager flung aside the restraining hand that Nick Tremayne tried to put around her shoulders and pushed her way through the knot of helmeted rescuers at the entrance to the adit towards Maggie.
‘What have you done with my son?’ she demanded, glaring up at Maggie where she still stood on the heap of rocks. ‘They said there were only two boys hurt and—’
‘Kate,’ Nick began again, having caught up with her, and Maggie saw him wrap a supporting arm around her shoulders. ‘Take it easy. Give the girl a chance to catch her breath.’
‘What do you mean, give her a chance to catch her breath?’ Kate said, rounding on him furiously. ‘I want to know why she hasn’t brought my son up with the others. Is he the one that fell? Is he the one that’s badly injured? Nick, you know what it was like when I lost James. You were there with me. I can’t lose Jem, too. I couldn’t bear it…’
‘Kate!’ Maggie called over her tirade, easily able to empathise with her terror. ‘Jem isn’t hurt.’
‘He’s not…’ Relief warred with incomprehension, but it was anger that won. ‘If he’s not hurt, why didn’t you bring him up with the others?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Why did you leave my son down there?’
‘Because he refused to come up,’
Maggie said, knowing that the simple truth would give Kate pause. She reached out a hand towards the tormented woman, even though she was too far away for any physical contact. ‘Kate, Jem is the most amazing young lad I’ve ever met, and you should be proud of him. He didn’t want to leave his friend in case he woke up alone in the dark.’
‘Oh, God, help me…’ Kate sobbed, but when she turned towards Nick, obviously needing his support, he wasn’t there.
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’ he said, striding towards Maggie with an accusing glare. ‘He’s only eight years old, for heaven’s sake! I’m going down to bring him up,’ he announced, intent on pushing his way through the rescue team already working systematically to clear the mouth of the adit.
‘I can’t let you do that, Dr Tremayne,’ said a man with a similar air of authority, but he was wearing the appropriate safety gear and in spite of his youth was obviously the leader of the rescue team.
‘You can’t stop me,’ the GP said belligerently, trying to stare him down. ‘I’ve been on more rescue missions than you’ve had hot dinners.’
‘That may well be true, Doctor,’ the younger man conceded graciously, ‘but in this case we’re going to need special equipment appropriate to the situation, and we know you haven’t had training in that. When we’re ready to bring the lads out, it will have to be my team that does the job. No one else here has the authority to go down.’
Maggie could tell that the middle-aged GP was frustrated by his failure to get his own way. It had probably been years since anyone had gone against his authority, especially since he’d become the senior partner at the Penhally surgery.
Idly, she noted that while he was leaner than either Adam or Mike—almost thin enough to squirm through the narrow entrance to the adit. That was probably because he had lost muscle tone since his age had stopped him being an active member of a rescue team. Even so, it wouldn’t be easy for him to get into the adit until the entrance had been cleared, to say nothing of the problem he would have once he got to the bottom of the stope and had to clamber over the rockfall and squeeze his long legs into the narrow tunnel where Tel was trapped.
‘Well, I hope you don’t think you’re going to be stopping me going down again,’ Maggie interrupted before Nick could draw breath to argue, suddenly aware with every fibre of her body that Adam had come to stand behind her. She hadn’t seen him move but somehow she just knew that he was there, silently supporting her in her fight to do what she knew had to be done. ‘Until you get that entrance cleared, I’m the only one small enough to get through who’s got the training to take care of Tel.’
Not that she wanted to go back into the darkness again, feeling as if all that rock was pressing down on her and squeezing the breath out of her so that she had to fight for the oxygen her body needed to survive.
‘I’m afraid I will have to stop you,’ the team leader said firmly. ‘The last thing we need is amateurs bumbling about when everything is so unstable. Because time is of the essence, we’ve only done a makeshift job of shoring up the entrance to the adit. We’ve made a start on clearing the access and it won’t be long before the entrance is safely open again. Then we’ll be able to take our equipment down and—’
‘So while you’re running about up here doing everything by the book to satisfy health and safety requirements, you’re quite happy to leave an eight-year-old boy down there in the dark, taking care of his injured friend who’s bleeding heavily and in danger of developing crush syndrome?’ Maggie demanded, so disgusted that he was even considering the idea, let alone trying to insist on it, that she didn’t think twice about exaggerating Tel’s condition if it made her point. ‘I think not!’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you to go back down,’ he insisted. ‘I know you’re a qualified paramedic, but this is way beyond what you’re trained for…it could even lose you your job if you go down there again against my advice.’
‘In that case, I’ll be looking for another job,’ she said with scarcely a pang for the potential loss of a job that meant so much to her. She straightened her shoulders and tried to stand tall, knowing it was a futile gesture when everyone around her was at least a head taller but still hoping he would recognise how seriously she took her decision. ‘There’s no way I can twiddle my thumbs up here while the last of that unit of saline runs out and Jem is left alone and terrified because he doesn’t know what to do for his friend if he develops an air embolus.’
She whirled back towards the entrance of the adit and there was Adam, exactly where she’d known he would be. ‘Adam, I need to take some more saline down with me, and a backboard in case I manage to get Tel free before you can get down there. Perhaps there’s some sort of crowbar I could borrow to shift the last couple of rocks. I’ll also need a blanket to keep Jem warm…oh, and something for him to eat. He didn’t make it home in time for his tea and must be starving.’
She paused to take stock, wondering what else she needed that she’d be able to negotiate down that treacherous stope single-handed, and saw Adam exchange glances with Mike who then nodded and hurried out of the circle of floodlights towards their ambulance to get the things she needed.
‘Maggie, are you sure about this?’ Adam asked softly when he turned back to her, careful to keep his voice below the sound of the generator so that it only carried as far as her ears. ‘I know how much you hate going into enclosed spaces and I virtually blackmailed you into going down in the first place, so don’t feel that you have to—What?’ he demanded when she winced as he took her hands in his and squeezed her fingers.
‘Dammit, Maggie! What’s happened to you?’ he exclaimed when he saw the ragged, blood-stained fingers of her protective gloves. ‘What have you done to your hands?’
‘It’s not my blood, Adam,’ Maggie reassured him as he stared down in horror at the state of her hands, and she knew that she was largely telling the truth.
Of course, there was no way she could have shifted all that granite without collecting a few scrapes and scratches, but she was touched that he should care that she might have been hurt. ‘It’s Tel’s blood. Because he’s trapped, I was having to use the Braille method of finding out where he was injured. I needed to find out where the blood was coming from…how serious the injury was.’
‘How badly is he injured?’ Adam asked as he helped her to strip off the shredded gloves, sidetracked into throwing her a furious glare when he saw just how many scrapes and bruises there were on her hands. She clenched her teeth in preparation for the pain as she doused them in antiseptic gel then struggled to pull on a fresh pair of gloves over the fierce stinging.
Silently, he handed her some more gloves to stuff into the appropriate pocket of her pack. ‘Did the lad fall a long way?’
‘He didn’t just fall—he brought down some rocks with him,’ she explained, strangely warmed by his anger on her behalf. It had been a while since anyone had really noticed when she was hurt and showed that they cared. Even Mike tended to shrug off work-related injuries as part and parcel of the job they did.
‘He’s got a goose egg from hitting his head and I’m hoping that’s the reason why he’s unconscious, because I couldn’t find any obvious evidence of cranial fractures. I’ve put a collar on him and he’s on his second unit of saline. So far, it doesn’t look as if he’s in danger of bleeding out. Several ribs were broken when the rocks landed on him. He was having difficulty breathing when I got to him, but once I shifted the weight off his chest, that improved, and there’s no evidence of pneumothorax or flail chest. The other lads would have cleared the rocks earlier if they’d had light to see what they were doing. He’s also broken the tib and fib in one leg but they don’t feel massively displaced, so I think the blood loss is probably from several smaller gashes rather than anything major like an artery. There’s moisture seeping down the walls of the tunnel, so it probably makes the blood loss look worse than it is.’
‘Miss?’ said a hesitant
voice behind her, and she turned to see a woman aged before her time, her face gaunt and white under the harsh lighting as she stood there with her hands knotted together. ‘They said you’ve been down the mine?’
‘Yes, I have. I’ll be going back down in a minute,’ she added, suddenly not needing to ask the question to know who the woman was. ‘You’re Tel’s mother, aren’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Amanda Lovelace. Mandy,’ she supplied, then bit her lip before blurting, ‘Please, tell me what’s happened to my boy. You brought his three mates out with you. Does…does that mean he’s—?’
‘He’s unconscious,’ Maggie interrupted hastily, sparing her that dreadful final word. If she’d realised Tel’s mother was here she would have made certain she hadn’t been left so long thinking the worst. ‘He fell and hit his head and he’s cracked a couple of bones. That’s why it’s taking a bit of time to get him out—we need to get a stretcher down to him to carry him out safely, so we don’t do him any more damage.’
‘But he is alive? You’re sure he’s alive?’ She grabbed for Maggie’s hand with frantic fingers and it was difficult to control the wince as she, too, pressed on the cuts and bruises that were starting to throb mercilessly.
‘He’s breathing and his heart is beating,’ Maggie reassured her with a smile, sticking to the basics. ‘He’s got a bump the size of a goose egg on his head and he’ll probably have a monster headache when he wakes up, but—’
‘Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!’ Mandy exclaimed tearfully. ‘He’s always getting into scrapes with those other lads—takes after his big brothers, unfortunately, and his dad’s never there when he’s needed—but Tel’s not a bad boy, not really.’
Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor Page 38