“What’s at the bottom?”
She shrugged. “Beats me—that was about the whole conversation right there.”
“Well,” I gave in, “guess we better get to it.” I stretched out on my stomach, poked the powerful flashlight beam over the edge of the hole, and after a slight pause during which no bullet came flying up to blow my hand off, I cautiously stuck my head over. Sammie joined me.
Below us—indeed, beneath where we lay—was a seemingly bottomless, smooth-walled, misty pit, the dampness of which formed a slight fog, thick enough to defeat the flashlight’s ability to reach the bedrock. The ladder was fastened to one glistening side, zigzagging back and forth at sharp vertical angles from one narrow platform to the next, like some misplaced urban fire escape. It appeared almost puny in comparison to the void all around it. The whole thing gave me vertigo, a feeling enhanced by the realization that the thin metal flooring I was stretched out on was all that was saving me from a free-fall into the void.
“How the hell’re we going to make a safe approach into that?” Sammie asked softly. “Put down some covering fire and follow it in?”
I’d never been a big one for fireworks, especially if I had no idea where they were landing. “No. In the dark,” I countered, switching off the light and swinging one leg over the edge, “and in silence.”
Silence, however, was not my first priority. I wanted to enter the silo fast, before anyone could draw a bead on my silhouette against the highlighted entrance. I therefore descended the first stretch of ladder in a barely controlled free-fall, trusting my memory to judge the distance to the first platform. It was a graceless, noisy effort, compounded by Sammie following right behind me and virtually landing on my head, but it was worth it—no sooner had we collapsed in a heap than a muzzle flash spat at us from far below, and the walls around us exploded with the reverberations of a pistol shot.
Lying on my back, my feet still entangled in the rungs, and with Sammie lying on top of me, a second shot rang out, the bullet ringing harmlessly off metal somewhere above us. I felt Sammie’s small muscular body tense against mine.
“Don’t move,” I whispered in her ear, “give him a couple of minutes.”
We lay there, barely breathing, listening. Below us, mixing with the subtle sounds of dripping water, of vague and distant mechanical noises, we were both aware of someone moving, possibly seeking a better angle for another, more accurate shot. I was distinctly aware of how little of my body my Kevlar vest actually covered.
“Okay,” I murmured to Sammie after two very long minutes.
She got off me like a shadow, and I rose just as quietly, leading the way to the next ladder heading down.
Our environment now was radically different from what it had been moments earlier, when we’d been lying on the floor looking down. There, we’d been in the light, in the open, surrounded by the cool, dry air of a normal fall day. Here, all was dark, damp, and tomblike. The metal rungs of the ladder were slippery and wet, the cement to which it was attached smooth with the same calcium skin that coated cave walls. And despite our silence, I felt surrounded by sound—the rustling of clothes, our virtually suppressed breathing, the mere brushing of a hand across a hard surface. I felt I was locked in a huge, wet, very cold echo chamber, the only available warmth threatening to come from the end of an invisible gun barrel somewhere far below us.
Things did not improve as we progressed. The moisture increased along with the cold, tickling the hairs in my nose and reaching down my collar like a draft. What little light there’d been from the trapdoor became absorbed by the mist, reducing the entrance above to a hazy, pale rectangle with no radiance or effect. Reality became solely what I could feel beneath my hands. All sense of smell was suffused by the dampness and the cold, and hearing became clogged by a minute cacophony of drips, sighs, and subtle shiftings—the living sounds, I came to think, of the millions of tons of water all around us, held at bay by a few feet of seventy-year-old cement.
Several more flights and I stopped, letting Sammie come up next to me until her ear was inches from my mouth, a fact I could by now only determine by touch. “I’m going to go to the far end of the landing and turn my flashlight on to see what’s below. You stay here, ready to shoot anything that moves.”
Her hand touched my cheek, turning it, and her lips brushed my own ear. “Why take the risk?”
I ignored the doubtfulness I heard in her voice. “I want to speed this up if I can. He’s not worried about getting his ass shot off like we are, so he’s probably making good headway by now, especially if he knows about the way out.”
“You hope,” she whispered back. “You turn that light on, and that’s what he’s going to shoot at.”
I put my hand on her back. “Just do it, Sam,” and I gave her a small push.
I counted to five to give her time to position herself, during which I heard her gun being slipped from its holster. Then I held out my flashlight, pointed it down, as far from my body as possible, and leaned far over the low railing. I pushed the on button. There was a blinding, dazzling snowstorm of light—the halogen glare of the torch bouncing off a billion tiny particles of moisture, all suspended in the still air. In that paradoxically clear instant, as if frozen by a camera’s electronic strobe, I found myself hanging in midair, far beyond the comfort of the thin iron railing, between an invisible roof and a murkily distant, shiny-wet floor, still far, far below. In that moment, before I could orient myself, I felt I was being sucked into the abyss, drawn away from my precarious perch by the sheer immensity of the swirling emptiness, momentarily numbed by a surge of the pent-up exhaustion I’d been holding off for too long.
“Joe,” Sammie shouted, still standing in a classic shooter’s stance, aiming down, but with her eyes wide and staring at me in alarm.
I watched dumbfounded as the light slipped from my hand and spiraled down, and I grappled with the railing to regain my balance. Everything went dark as the big flashlight smashed to pieces below us.
“You okay?” she asked in alarm.
I fought a sudden impulse to sit down where I was and give up—let others finish the job. “Fine, fine—just lost my footing.”
Her own light came on and searched the bottom of the silo, revealing a catwalk crossing to the opposite wall, several huge pipes with calcium-encrusted valves, and the rough-hewn, solid-rock surface beneath it all. At the foot of the catwalk was another ladder, which slipped through a narrow opening between the bottom of the silo wall and the uneven floor, almost like an irregular drain.
There was no one in sight.
“Go,” I told Sammie, shrugging off my momentary inertia. “Fast as you can.”
She moved to the top of the next ladder, but paused there a moment to reach out and touch my arm. “You sure you’re feeling up to this.”
I nodded. “Go. I’m right behind you.”
Finally unleashed, she fairly flew down the remaining flights, at times taking controlled leaps from level to level, using the slippery handrails like guide wires to stabilize and slow herself. I followed as best I could, but she’d already thoroughly checked out the bottom of the silo and was crouching at the top of the ladder leading through the slit in the rock by the time I caught up to her. From our vantage point, all we could see was that a larger chamber opened up below us on the other side of the narrow opening. We could also see that in order to squeeze through the slit and get beyond it conventionally, we’d have to descend feet-first, hugging the ladder, and offer our backs to whoever might be waiting.
“What’d you think?” I asked her.
“Be a good place for an ambush. How ’bout a head-first recon?”
I nodded and stood at the top of the ladder. Sammie slithered onto her back between my legs, a flashlight in one hand, her pistol in the other, and began to slide down the ladder headfirst, her shoulder blades to the rungs. As her hips went by and the weight of her body threatened to pull her straight down the rest of the way, I caught
her and lowered her slowly as I might a rope, grabbing her thighs, then her knees, and finally her ankles. Using proper harnesses and climbing gear, it was the same way we trained to attack upper-story windows from the roof—showing the smallest target, and having our hands and weapons available for use. It looked funny, but it worked.
“Clear,” she finally said. She stored her light and gun, took hold of the rung just below her, and did a controlled flip to land right side up as soon as I released her ankles. I climbed down conventionally and joined her in a short, six-foot-diameter tunnel, hewn entirely out of the bedrock. Here, the cave effect was complete—the calcium leaching that had covered part of the cement walls in the silo, giving their rough, manmade surface the smoothness of polished stone, had taken over entirely down here. The rock ledge, long ago scarred by dynamite and pick, had been filled in and softened by decades of gentle, mineral-rich water drippings, until it now resembled the butter-colored grottoes of tourist attractions like the Mammoth and Carlsbad caves. There were even stubby stalactites and stalagmites reaching out for each other on both sides of the tunnel’s beaten path.
The most startling evolution, however—and a most uncomfortable one—was the moisture in the air. From dampness to mist, we had reached a subterranean level of perpetual drizzle. Water trickled down the walls and dripped from the low, vaulted ceiling in a steady, light rain, increasing the effects of the cold, getting into our eyes, and—worst of all—cumulatively creating enough noise to mask whatever slight sounds the man ahead of us might make.
Sammie, not surprisingly, paid no attention to these effects, nor did she give any indication of having noticed the change in weather. By now filthy, drenched, and with her shoulder-length hair plastered flat to her head, she moved quickly to the sharp turn at the far end of the chamber and crouched with her back to the wall. She took a quick look around and retreated, fast enough to draw fire but stay out of harm’s way; repeated the gesture a little more slowly, growing in confidence that there was no immediate threat; and then finally stuck her head out boldly and turned on her flashlight.
“Damn.”
Since the tunnel we were in was aimed in the direction of the spillway discharge tube, I’d been hoping that the bypass chamber and its newly cut link to the tube—would be readily available. But switching positions with Sam, I discovered the source of her disappointment. Around the corner was another tunnel, four feet in diameter, angled down well over forty-five degrees, and equipped with a metal ladder lining its bottom like the rails on the downside of a roller coaster. Making matters worse, the artificial rain was so intense here that visibility—even with Sam’s powerful light —didn’t exceed twenty feet. And the ladder seemed to stretch well beyond that.
“We’ll be fish in a barrel,” Sammie said. “One shot in our general direction and we’ll be hit, either straight on or by ricochet.”
I unclipped the radio from her belt and tried to raise the Dover policeman we’d left on the top of the silo.
“Go ahead,” he answered.
“What’s the word from the spillway outlet? Anyone there yet?”
“Negative. There was some sort of communications breakdown.”
Sammie had killed her flashlight, but I could feel her exasperated eyes on me. “Have they started out?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. A few minutes ago.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question. I handed the radio back without comment, the remnants of my exhausted mind now totally and vengefully set. My voice, as I heard it, was a calm and reasoned contrast to how I was feeling. “He could’ve killed you when you were hanging from your toes. The fact that he didn’t shows he’s headed out of here, fast. And now I guess we’re the only ones likely to stop him.”
I could feel Sammie’s practical hesitation. “It’s a shooting gallery, Joe,” she reminded me softly.
“Could be,” I answered brusquely, pulling the extinguished flashlight from her hand and heading down the ladder awkwardly, facing out so I could quickly answer any gunfire that might come up at me. After a moment’s pause, I heard Sammie coming after me.
It was dark beyond imagination. I remembered as a kid, closing my eyes, pretending I was blind, staggering into furniture until I hurt myself. Back then, despite my best attempts, there’d still been a hint of light that had filtered through my eyelids. But not now. The darkness here was surgically absolute. With my eyes wide open, stinging with the water that fell into them from the rocky ceiling just above, I could see no more than if I’d been dead.
The descent was longer than twenty feet—longer than fifty, before I gave up trying to guess. My shoulders aching from the unnatural position I’d chosen, my body soaked and freezing from the drizzle, and my head now pounding with the tension of not knowing what might be three feet in front of me, I was about to come to my senses and let Bob Vogel’s fate be dictated by somebody else when my foot slipped off the last rung of the ladder and I collapsed onto a wet, uneven, stone-strewn floor, dropping the second flashlight. Sammie, coming on strong right behind me, kicked the back of my head by accident.
“Jesus—you okay?” she whispered urgently, searching for and retrieving the light.
For the second time, like a pair of Keystone Kops, we disentangled ourselves and tried to take our bearings, murmuring like bomb-carrying conspirators even though I’d made enough noise to reach through three walls.
Judging from the little we knew, this was the famous bypass chamber—a room carved out of the rock like some prehistoric beast’s fossilized burrow, and equipped, as far as our outstretched fingers could tell us, with several very-large-diameter pipes, all with massive in-line gate valves.
So where’s the famous door?” Sammie hissed after several minutes of groping around in the dark.
“I think I’ve got it.” What I’d found was a rectangular piece of plywood, standing on its narrow end and leaning against one of the rough walls. “Turn on the light.”
The effect of the light was again spectacular. Even with my eyes almost completely shut in anticipation, the power of the beam was like an electrical shock, leaving both of us momentarily rooted in place like stunned rabbits. Nevertheless, it revealed what I’d feared it would—a totally empty room through which I was now convinced our man had passed on his way to a clean getaway.
I’d also been right about the doorway. The plywood sheet half covered the jagged entrance to another small, short tunnel, the making of which had produced some of the rubble we’d been picking our way through carefully until now. The short tunnel was also empty.
“Turn the light off again,” I asked.
We both stood still, regaining our night vision, realizing that finally it might actually do us some good. As I’d sensed with the light on, there was a glimmer emanating from beyond the small tunnel ahead of us—that and the steady, gentle rush of flowing water.
It reminded me of the small inlet port at the mouth of the Glory Hole, where I’d been hanging from the rope by one hand. The water peacefully splashing through it and vanishing into the void had been equally at odds with the circumstances, which instinctively told me now they were one and the same. “The discharge tunnel’s up ahead.”
I squeezed by the plywood and was about to follow the dim light to its source, when we both heard our names being called out from far up the slanting shaft behind us.
I handed the flashlight to Sammie through the gap. “Find out what they want.”
She retreated to the foot of the ladder and shouted back, “Who is that?”
The sound of the rushing water muffled the response, but Sammie, turning on her light as a beacon and shouting back about the ladder’s length and condition, indicated friendly troops were on the way and confirmed my pessimism about our chances of catching Vogel. I turned away and continued on to the discharge tunnel.
The connecting passageway was low enough to require stooping to get through it, so its contrast to the twenty-by-twenty discharge tube at the other en
d brought me up short. I hadn’t expected a tunnel as high and as wide as a two-story building, several hundred feet underground.
The water ran down its middle, the dim light from the outlet some eight hundred feet downstream reflecting dully off the ripples. There was a slight mist in the air, which gave the small distant silhouettes of several approaching men a ghostly, almost dreamlike quality.
I was just beginning to ponder the chances that Vogel might still be hiding somewhere in the gloom between us when I heard Sammie step up behind me.
I turned to face her, a little surprised. “I didn’t hear you coming.”
“That’s the point, asshole.”
I smelled his breath in my face just as his right fist came up hard against my side. It wasn’t a punch, really—in fact, its lack of strength surprised me at first. I wondered why he’d bothered sneaking up behind me if all he was going to do was give me a weak shove.
I opened my mouth to call out to Sammie, and made to step into him, to throw my weight against him and throw him off balance while I brought my gun into play.
But nothing happened. No sound came out of me, no part of me moved. The gun stayed where it was, hanging from my right hand. All my instincts transformed into something more primeval, some basic force that told the rest of me that neither fight nor flight were appropriate any longer—that all was secondary to the primary task of keeping my heart from stopping.
I realized suddenly, as if overtaken by a riptide of unbearable sadness, that, for reasons I had yet to discern, I was dying.
That’s when I felt the knife blade slip slightly, somewhere deep inside me, like a chip of ice swallowed on a hot day—only harder, colder, and much more frightening. I remembered seeing myself as if in a movie, quickly slipping on the Kevlar vest and forgetting to fasten the two Velcro straps on the side.
Bob Vogel stepped away from me, and his breath was replaced by the pungency of the underground water whose sound now swelled up in a crescendo. He slipped from my vision like a bad dream. I heard shouts to my left—from the narrow passageway—but muted and far off. There might even have been a gunshot. I paid no attention to any of it.
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree Page 20