The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 2

by Christopher Cartwright

  Christ! She’s dead!

  He didn’t wait to check her vital signs. He grabbed Zara by her shoulders and pulled her backwards, and clockwise up the stairway. Sam moved with the speed afforded by his adrenaline, but it was much slower than when he swam down on his own. It felt like it had taken forever by the time his foot stepped on the dry stone and he pulled her out of the water.

  Her body appeared lifeless. She wasn’t breathing. Her normally dark skin appeared pale and waxy. Sam placed her on her side and with her head downwards inside the narrow stairway so her head was draining.

  Her mouth was open and the water gushed out.

  Sam watched as it continued to drain. One of the hardest things to do in an emergency is nothing. Sometimes you have to wait. No reason to try and help her breathe if her lungs are still full of water. It might have only taken seconds. Then again, it might have been minutes. Sam had no way to tell. All he knew was the water must have filled her lungs completely.

  She must have taken a deep breath in while she was still under? Sam thought, morbidly. It would have been a conscious decision. An acceptance of her death.

  Tom took one glance at her. His mouth set hard. “Does she have a pulse?”

  Sam placed two fingers on Zara’s neck, next to her windpipe. He waited for a moment. “She’s got a pulse. It’s bounding, but it’s there!”

  A moment later, the water stopped draining.

  Zara coughed multiple times and stopped. And then started breathing on her own. Her eyes were still shut and she looked like she was sleeping. There was no way to immediately know how much damage had been done to her brain.

  Tom asked, “Now what do we do?”

  Sam breathed in and then sighed. “Nothing. Now we wait.”

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  The warmth and euphoric dreams were over. In their place, nightmares filled her mind. There was a burning sensation in her chest. It felt like she’d swallowed fire and no matter how much she exhaled, the flame remained. She coughed a few more times and felt her lungs struggle to expand. It felt like they were being held by a big piece of elastic, which prevented them from fully opening. She felt something change. The gooey and fiery liquid drained from her mouth. When there was no more to exhale, she tried to inhale.

  Nothing happened. The muscles of her diaphragm had lost interest. She tried again. Nothing.

  Am I already dead?

  The elastic over her chest snapped and now she was finally allowed to inhale. The air felt icy cold, and sweet on her burnt lungs. She coughed twice more. It seemed to take longer than she thought was normal to take a second breath. It was like her diaphragm was still debating what it wanted to do. She breathed again. And again. By the fifth time, the process seemed more natural. Definitely far from normal. Her muscles of respiration were no longer working on autonomic reflexes. Instead, she was having to consciously coerce them into keeping her alive. But at least now, she seemed to have some control over the process.

  No. Not dead.

  Zara tried to move her arms. Nothing happened. She tried to speak. She wanted to speak. And wanted to say that everything was all right. Whatever happened. Whatever went wrong. It was okay now. She was okay.

  She couldn’t remember what she’d been trying to do, or what went wrong. But somehow, it all felt okay. There was a picture of an island. The surrounding shallow waters were turquoise. The island was shaped like a perfect figure eight, lying on its side. One side of the island was completely flat, while at the center of the other side, a small mountain of sand rose a hundred or more feet into the air.

  That’s right! She thought. I was on my way to an island.

  It seemed incredibly important to her all of a sudden that she reach the island. That it held the answers to every question that was so important to her. Although, at the present, she had no idea what she wanted to ask. Heck, if she was honest, she didn’t even know the name of the island, or how it was going to answer her questions.

  Two voices were arguing.

  One said, “We should have planned the ascent better.” It was terse. Like a reprimand.

  “What could we have done?” the second one asked.

  “I don’t know, prepared her better? She’d have had a different outcome. Now we don’t know what’s going to happen. You were in such a rush. You just told me to bring her up. And said she’d be all right.”

  “And she will be all right,” the second voice replied. It was abrupt and full of authority.

  “How can you be so certain?”

  The voice paused. Like its owner was struggling to even consider answering in such a way. It sighed. The voice, succumbing to reveal the truth, even though it didn’t want to. “Because Nostradamus didn’t mention anything about her drowning!”

  Nostradamus. She repeated the name, silently in her mind. What does he have to do with her future?

  She opened her eyes. They weren’t quite in focus. Everything around her appeared blue. She was lying on a series of stone steps. They were hurting her back. The steps were narrow and on each side was a masonry wall.

  Two men started asking her questions. She didn’t hear any of them. They both glowed with a blue haze, like a spectral or ghostly apparition. She would have been frightened if it wasn’t for the fact that both men appeared excited, like her arrival was the best news they’d received all day. They looked kind. Concerned. And supportive.

  She opened her mouth to speak. Her voice was soft, not yet capable of producing any great resonance. Her eyes, deep-set and intense, stared wide.

  “What is it?” the first voice asked.

  “Go on. We couldn’t hear you,” the second said.

  Zara grinned. “I know exactly where we have to go!”

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Zara felt a man lean in and help her to sit. There was barely any room and no way that either of the men could have sat next to her. Both of her shoulders rested on opposite sides of the masonry walls, which formed the vault of her captivity. She felt one of the men rest his hands on her back to stop her from falling over.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’ve had better days.” She looked at the man who spoke, and recognized him. His voice was familiar, but it took her a moment to remember his name. “Sam Reilly.”

  “At your service, Ma’am.”

  She asked, “Where’s Tom?”

  “I’m up here, Zara. There’s no room for the three of us.”

  She nodded. The place felt cramped and confining as it was. “What happened?”

  Sam said, “You were following Tom into the vaulted stairway, between the subterranean Duomo. It was a long swim, and you ran out of air. You almost made it. About twenty feet off, you must have lost consciousness. We dragged you up to the dry stairs and laid you with your head down, gallons of water drained from your lungs.”

  “I followed you into a submerged, subterranean and narrow stairwell, vaulted between two masonry domes?”

  “Afraid so,” he confirmed.

  She smiled. “That doesn’t really sound like something I’d willingly do.”

  “It wasn’t. We were kind of stuck. We’re in the process of finding a way out. Do you remember what we were doing here?”

  Zara thought about it for a moment. “The Nostradamus Equation.”

  “That’s right, you kicked over a real hornets nest, and an army of General Ngige’s men are topside in the Saharan desert searching for you. You said you knew where we have to go. Do you still remember?”

  “Yes. But I can’t for the life of me recall what it means.”

  “Where?”

  “A place called Infinity Island.” She glanced up at Sam. “Does that make any sense to you?”

  He nodded. “You had a medallion. Something your father gave to you. He said it would make sense and be important to you one day. There’s an island depicted on one side of it. The island is shaped like a lemniscate, the mathematical symbol for infinity.”

  “Then we
’d better go find that island. I had a lot of dreams while I was out. Most of them nightmares, but some were all right. One I am certain was real.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. But I woke up with the one thought fixed in my mind – we need to reach Infinity Island if we want it to be okay.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Can you walk?”

  She asked, “Can you carry me up this narrow stairway?”

  He shook his head.

  Zara smiled. “Then I guess I’d better start walking.”

  “Take your time.”

  Zara carefully stood up. She felt a slight rush of blood to her head, like she was going to pass out. She paused. Took in a deep breath and then slowly exhaled until the feeling passed. She took a step forward and felt Sam take her hand for support.

  She squeezed it, and then let go. “I’m okay.”

  It took nearly forty minutes to reach the top of the Duomo. The stone stairs continued in a clockwise direction around the inner dome, gradually gaining height. The spacing between the internal and external dome curved inward the higher she went, meaning that as she approached the oculus she needed to lean toward the inner dome to continue. She lost track of how many times she must have traveled around the circumference of the massive dome before she crept into the main opening where the oculus opened to the cavern below.

  The narrow stairway continued as a tunnel around the oculus, before looping back on itself and returning down the way they’d come. A separate tunnel turned to the left and allowed them to climb up to the top of the second dome. She followed Sam through the upward tunnel. The stone stairs now appeared more like a ladder, as the gradient increased to a near vertical position.

  She climbed through and glanced around. They were now inside a horizontal tunnel, similar in size and shape to the one they’d found earlier, which had been blocked by a cave-in and flooded. In one direction, it traveled such a long way that she couldn’t see where the tunnel ended. In the opposite direction she saw a polished piece of brass on the edge of the ceiling. It was angled at forty-five degrees so that if she shined a flashlight on it, the light would reflect down the open oculus.

  Zara asked, “Do you know how far this tunnel goes?”

  Sam shook his head. “No. But I think it’s time we find out.”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Sam led the party down the tunnel. It continued for about a mile in a perfectly straight line before reaching a second tunnel, which ran perpendicular to theirs. Water ran down the tunnel. It was shallow and moved quickly. A crude dugout canoe floated in the middle of the aqueduct. A solid piece of stone, the length of the tunnel prohibited the boat from being carried away, down the tunnel. The term boat was used loosely. It was formed out of the trunk of a single acacia tree. The inside of which, had been carved out to make a small boat. It was similar to the hollow-log canoes of peoples all over the world. It was long enough to fit four or five people and the width was almost exactly equal to that of the aqueduct.

  He recalled that Zara had told him the acacia raddiana was once prolific within the Sahara, and survived upwards of five hundred years. The hard wood must have been capable of surviving years in the water, but even so, it was impossible to imagine that such a structure would have survived since the time of the Garamantes, as much as fourteen hundred years ago.

  Sam looked at Tom and asked, “What do you make of that?”

  “Looks like an emergency boat,” Tom said. “Like the ancient Garamantes left it there so that a scout could quickly climb in and return to the main city.”

  Zara stared at the boat. “I don’t know, but can you imagine any way for them to even bring their boats back up the tunnels after traveling down the aqueduct?”

  “No,” Sam said. “Come to think of it. How did they bring the boat back up here?”

  Zara said, “Maybe it’s because they were never built to go all the way to the bottom?”

  Tom said, “Or perhaps it was an emergency trip?”

  “A what?” she asked.

  “An emergency boat trip. Think for instance, the ancient Garamantes posted scouts throughout the desert. One notices an advancing Roman army. He would be able to descend down the well, get on a boat and race back to their main citadel to warn of the impending battle.”

  Sam said, “If that’s true, then where the hell is this citadel we’re apparently going to?”

  Zara put her hand on the boat. The wood was dry and rigid. “It still floats.”

  Sam nodded. “None of this makes sense to me. If the Garamantes died out in the sixth century, this boat would have rotted away to dust by now. Which means the boat was either of a much better construction than anything our shipwrights could construct today, or the boat’s a lot younger than we imagine.”

  Zara asked, “You think someone else has been down here more recently than the sixth century?”

  Sam said, “Either this boat was brought down by someone in the past hundred years, such as a smuggler, or…”

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “Or, the Garamantes are still alive!”

  Tom shrugged, as though he didn’t care, either way. “The boat floats. The water runs in that direction. Let’s take it!”

  Zara glanced at Sam. “Is that wise?”

  Sam sat in the front section of the boat. It took his weight easily, and appeared sturdy in the water. He smiled. “Probably not. But I can’t see a better way of getting to the end of this aqueduct, so we may as well try.”

  He waited until Zara and Tom climbed aboard. The boat appeared stable with all three of them aboard. Sam turned around. “Are we all ready?”

  Zara swallowed hard. “Ready as we’re ever going to be.”

  Tom nodded. He was grinning like a kid at a theme park.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  Sam removed the stone block and the boat, free from its confines, leaped forward eagerly. The shallow water ran quickly, even though the angle of the tunnel appeared closer to horizontal than descending.

  The weak glow from their DARPA suits barely allowed them to see what was ahead. They ran for nearly a hundred feet before the water began to speed up, even faster. It was like they were approaching a waterfall.

  Tom grinned. “You get the feeling we’re approaching the fun part of the ride?”

  Zara gripped the sides of the boat until her knuckles shined white. “Yeah, it’s great. Just like Disneyland, with the added benefit of not knowing whether or not you’re about to drown or just crash onto the rocks at the bottom.”

  Sam said, “The Garamantes were obviously very good engineers. Do you really think they would have built a boat here to service the aqueduct if the tunnels were impassable?”

  No one heard his words. Instead, the roar of the rapids ahead drowned out all sounds. Sam looked at the darkness ahead. The aqueduct looked like it was about to collide with a solid wall of stone. A reflective brass mirror, like the one seen at the top of the Duomo shined back at him.

  He made a vicious oath and the boat dipped and dropped down a steep decline. The boat rushed downwards, falling thirty or more feet, before the slope balanced out and the boat shot out the bottom.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  The water settled to a more natural flow and Sam turned to face his companions.

  Tom’s eyes were wide and his mouth open. He said, “Who wants to help me pull the boat back up and do that again?”

  “Not me,” Zara said. “If we ever make it out of this damned place alive, I never want to see either of you again.”

  Sam shrugged. “Some people are never appreciative.”

  The flow of the water settled into a comfortable meander.

  Zara said, “Everything we know about the Garamantes suggest their success was based on their subterranean water-extraction system, a network of tunnels known as foggaras in Berber. It not only allowed their part of the Sahara to bloom again, it also triggered a political and social process that led to populat
ion expansion, urbanism, and conquest. But in order to retain and extend their newfound prosperity, they needed above all to maintain and expand the water-extraction tunnel systems – and that necessitated the acquisition of many slaves.”

  Sam smiled. “Luckily for the Garamantes, but less so for their neighbors, the Garamantian population growth gave the new Saharan power a demographic and military advantage over other peoples in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, enabling them to expand their territory, conquer other peoples, and acquire vast numbers of slaves.”

  “Thanks to their aggressive mentality and the slaves and water it produced, the Garamantes lived in planned towns and lived well.” Zara said, “Archeological digs, have shown they feasted on locally grown grapes, figs, sorghum, barley, and wheat, as well as imported luxuries such as wine and olive oil.” Zara looked at the perfectly formed tunnel, still working as intended nearly a thousand years after the demise of the Garamantes. “The combination of their slave-acquisition activities and their mastery of foggara irrigation technology enabled the Garamantes to enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of any other ancient Saharan society. Without slaves, they would not have had a kingdom, let alone even a whiff of the good life. They would have survived in conditions of relative poverty, as most desert dwellers have done before and since.”

  Sam said, “In the end, depletion of easily mined fossil water sounded the death knell of the Garamantian kingdom. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the Garamantes discovered that the water was literally running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. For that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability. Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced.”