A small beeping sound, coming from her computer, informed her that one of the background programs, searching for any changes in the frequency of news or comments on social media regarding General Ngige, had shown a sudden spike in information. She clicked on the program, and quickly scrolled through the notes.
This can’t be right.
Nearly fifteen thousand comments on social media confirmed the news. It was possible it could be fake, and artificially being proliferated by those who didn’t know the truth. But chances were, it was true.
Elise opened a new program. It was a DRC database for Births, Deaths, and Marriages. She quickly typed in the name, Adebowale. Followed by the string query, Known Siblings.
She looked at the results and swore. “What have we done?”
Next to her, the phone started to ring. It was a digitally encrypted satellite phone that used a combination of privately owned and proxy satellites to secure communications – and there was only one person who ever called it.
Elise picked up the phone. “Good evening, Madam Secretary.”
She listened carefully, without interrupting until the Secretary of Defense had finished. She jotted a few notes down.
Her face hardened. “Understood, Madam Secretary. I’ll do my best to let him know.”
She hung up the phone and ran up the stairs onto the bridge. Matthew, who had even less to do than she did, was sitting at his desk, tapping his fingers on the old teak.
Elise didn’t wait for him to greet her. “We need to abort the mission!”
Matthew’s face hardened. “We can’t abort the mission now. I just received confirmation from Genevieve that Sam, Tom and Adebowale have been dropped into the water, and have started their dive. There’s no way to get in contact with them until the mission’s complete. Why, what’s happened?”
She swore three times. It was loud, profane, and unusual for her. She placed the palm of her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. There had to be a way to get a message through to them. She opened them again. “It’s Adebowale.”
“What about him?”
“He’s working for General Ngige.”
Matthew said, “But he had the secret passwords used by the United Sovereign of Kongo, and was able to get information through their coded communications? What’s happened?”
“I just spoke to the Secretary of Defense. Her people in Intelligences just informed her that General Ngige was an only child. His parents were killed in the early nineties, and as an orphan he spent time in what was then The Lake Tumba Gold Mine. You know who also spent time in that same mine, and was his best friend growing up?”
Matthew shook his head. “Adebowale!”
She nodded. “There’s something else, too.”
“What?”
“I’m getting a number of pings right now on social media and traditional media inside the DRC. General Ngige died this morning. Apparently his right eye had been burned with a cigarette. Horrific but unlikely to have killed him. Somehow, there was a complication in the routine operation and he died on the table.”
Matthew turned to face her. “Then who was the twin who’s going to die?”
She said, “His name’s Dikembe and he’s Adebowale’s twin brother.”
“Christ! Adebowale has a twin! How did we not work this out earlier?”
Elise shook her head. “We took Adebowale at his word. We had no reason to doubt him. It wasn’t like it made any difference whether or not he was an only child or a twin – until the Nostradamus Equation told us a royal twin would need to die.”
Chapter One Hundred and Six
Sam reached the bottom of the sinkhole. It was eighty feet deep in total. The water was discolored and murky, with a visibility of less than five feet. The heads up display showed a vague outline of the dramatic sinkhole, based on the sonar’s impression. The quality was poor, but a darkened spot at the very bottom suggested it still penetrated the old Lake Tumba Gold Mine, Mine B. He waited for Tom and Adebowale to reach him, confirmed they were all right, and then opened up the throttle to the Sea Scooter and entered the mine.
The headlight positioned in front of the diver propulsion vehicle flicked light off the walls of the tunnel. It was as dark as any cave Sam had ever explored, and unlike the water in a cave which is clear, the mud and silt in the water here still blocked much of his visibility.
Sam said, “Keep close gentlemen. The vis is poor and doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon. Keep track of the person in front of you on your sonar screen. The last thing I want is to turn this into a rescue mission for the three of us.”
“Copy that,” Tom said. “See your slow ass, right ahead of me.”
“What about you, Adebowale? Have you got us on your sonar?”
“I can see you. Just keep going and I will follow.”
Sam said, “Good man.”
The navigation screen suddenly flashed green. It meant the relationship between the current outline of the mine, based on the sonar reading, had matched with a known section of the map. The two readings became superimposed, and the computer placed an asterisk, where it believed Sam was inside the mine. He grinned. It was a good start. He clicked the route button, and a red line followed a series of tunnels, like a giant maze, through to the seventy-ninth level.
Sam drove the sea scooter along the first tunnel for approximately two hundred and fifty feet, before turning to the left. He followed the directions given on the heads-up navigation display, as the tunnel opened to seven separate exploratory runs. Away from the giant sinkhole, and the disturbed water of the Tumba River, the visibility greatly improved. Sam made another turn around a corner, and the light from his sea scooter returned to him, greatly amplified.
He stopped. A large reef of quartz hung on the ceiling. Tiny specks of gold reflected the flashlight’s glow mysteriously. He smiled. The shaft would have been quite profitable if they hadn’t struck the river. The width of the mineshaft here increased to a total of forty feet, as the miners had once dug, following the gold-rich quartz reef.
At the end of the gold-rich section, the tunnel returned to a straight and horizontal profile for about a hundred feet, before turning to the right. On the map, the entire area looked like one giant game of snakes and ladders.
About an hour in, Sam reached the first vertical shaft. “You two still behind?”
“Sure am,” Tom said. “I’ve got Adebowale right on my tail. What’s taking you so long?”
Sam looked upwards. “I’ve reached the first of the vertical shafts. I’ll wait until I see your lights following before I keep going.”
He ascended thirty feet and stopped. It was a short shaft. There was no elevator. Only the wooden rungs of an old mining ladder. The miners must have reached a gold reef, or something which made them stop. There were two tunnels, leading in opposite directions away from the vertical shaft. Sam checked the map, and confirmed that he needed to take the one to the right.
As soon as he could see Tom and Adebowale below him in the vertical shaft, Sam followed the tunnel for a total of five hundred and thirty-eight feet. The tunnel meandered in a westerly direction, with a series of jagged dog legs and zig-zags. At that point, he stopped. Above him was the elevator shaft Number Four. Per the map, it ran all the way up to level ten. Not only would they be well and truly out of the water by then, but at that point, they could take the horizontal tunnel to reach any of the four mines. And more importantly, they could reach the three tunnels that run below Lake Tumba, and complete their mission.
Sam waited until he saw the lights of his two companions darting along the tunnel’s walls. “I’m starting on the vertical shaft, Number Four. I’ll see you guys on dry land.”
Tom said, “Good. See you at the top.”
Adebowale said, “Once you see how long that shaft travels vertically, you will wish it was filled with water all the way to the top.”
Sam grinned. He already knew they were going to have one hell
of a climb to reach the top. Sam positioned the sea scooter so its sonar transducer pointed straight up the shaft. Thirty seconds later, the heads-up display flashed green again. The map and the sonar images matched up.
He left the sea scooter in neutral and slowly adjusted his buoyancy, until he was ascending. Once he’d begun to move in a vertical direction, Sam concentrated on bleeding air from his buoyancy control device. As he ascended, he reduced the exertion of pressure, measured in atmospheres, which in turn caused air to expand. Without letting that air bleed off, his buoyancy control device would rapidly overfill and he would shoot to the surface – most likely killing himself with an embolism in the process.
After rising nearly forty feet, Sam stopped. He swore loudly to himself.
Tom asked, “What’s wrong?”
Sam said, “I don’t think we’re going to reach the surface tonight.”
“But we must!” Adebowale’s voice boomed over the underwater radio. “What’s happened?”
Sam shook his head. “The elevator’s permanently stopped at level twenty-nine. There’s no way we can get around it, and I’m doubting there’s any way we could coax it to ascend again.”
Chapter One Hundred and Seven
Sam studied the electronic map in front of him until Tom and Adebowale caught up with him. There were a series of lateral tunnels with some vertical shafts all over the place, like a giant rabbit’s warren, but every time he followed any of them he reached the same conclusion – he would need to return to the main elevator shaft to reach the top.
Tom slowed his ascent and came to a stop next to him. His eyes glanced at the stuck elevator and back to Sam. “That’s not good.”
“No, and we’ve already reached the point of no return,” Sam agreed. “The batteries are already getting low on the sea scooters, and it would be impossible for our air supplies to last that long if we swam back the way we came.”
Tom studied the elevator. “How much C4 do you think it would take to bring that thing down?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. We do that and the guards above are going to be on us in a flash. The whole mission will be blown.”
“If we don’t do that, we’ll never get out of here alive.”
Adebowale slowed his ascent, just a little higher than either Sam or Tom. He fumbled with his buoyancy control device to release air, and make himself neutrally buoyant again. It wasn’t enough, and he started to struggle to keep from being sent straight up.
Sam released air from his own buoyancy control device, making him neutrally buoyant and then held the back of Adebowale’s tank to stabilize him.
“Thanks,” Adebowale said, and then glanced up at the elevator stuck between levels. “Have you got any ideas to fix that?”
Sam said, “Tom and I were just discussing the pros and cons of using C4 to send it to the bottom of the shaft.”
“You can’t do it,” Adebowale said, forcefully. “General Ngige’s men would suspect a prison break, and if we’re lucky would come down here and kill all three of us.”
Sam asked, “And if we’re not lucky?”
Adebowale bit on the regulator. “They’ll suspect what we were going to try and do, and blow the tunnels immediately – sending the entire content of Lake Tumba into the mine, drowning everyone.”
It was the first time Sam had considered the consequences of destroying the elevator. He thought the worst case scenario was that their mission would be compromised and they would have to regroup and make another attempt in a few days.
Sam expanded the computer projection of the entire B mine. “All right, forget about detonating the elevator. Do you have any other plans how we can get out of here?”
Adebowale stared at the map, and Tom moved closer so he, too, could get a better idea. Adebowale spoke with his usual level of calmness and confidence. More like a boy scout planning a walk in a park, than a man preparing a final ditch chance of avoiding the terror of running out of air hundreds of feet below ground, he pointed toward a horizontal shaft nearly all the way to the bottom. “We’ll descend to this level here. From there we’ll follow this tunnel until we reach a vertical shaft.”
Sam mentally followed the directions given and stopped. “This map doesn’t show any vertical shaft in that area, and certainly none that reach high enough to pass the immovable elevator.”
“Even so, it’s there,” Adebowale confirmed.
Tom asked, “Why wasn’t it noted on the map?”
Adebowale said, “Because there isn’t a second elevator shaft in this mine.”
Sam studied the markings on the map. There was nothing to even hint that a second vertical shaft would one day be built in that section of the mine. “Then what the hell is it?”
Adebowale adjusted the angle of his sea scooter so it faced downward again. “It’s the ventilation shaft.”
Of course, the ventilation shaft would be placed at the opposite end of the mine to the elevator shaft, allowing for a natural circulation of air. Sam saw Adebowale accelerate with his sea scooter, and descend toward the bottom of the elevator shaft.
Sam didn’t wait to discuss the options with Tom. He switched the sea scooter up to its third, and fastest speed setting, and the electric machine whirred into life. No longer following the map, Sam raced to keep up with Adebowale.
Sam asked, “You still there, Tom?”
Tom said, “Right behind you.”
At the bottom of the elevator shaft, Sam turned left to follow Adebowale along a horizontal tunnel. At the end of the short tunnel he watched Adebowale dip his scooter downward and descend another level.
“You certain you know where you’re going Adebowale?” Sam asked.
Silence.
Sam continued to follow. “Adebowale, can you hear me? Why are you descending when we need to ascend?”
More silence.
Sam and Tom both raced to keep up. The vertical drop brought them to a depth of a hundred and thirty feet. They would run out of air quickly at that depth, not to mention what it was doing for their residual nitrogen levels. SCUBA diving 101 implores divers to plan their dive so they start at the lowest depth first and then slowly ascend. By descending to a hundred feet, then ascending to forty feet, only to now drop to a hundred and thirty feet, was comparative to shaking up a can of soda to make it fizz – only in this case it wasn’t a soda drink, it was the nitrogen bubbling in their bloodstreams.
At the bottom of the shaft, Sam turned left again and then stopped. There at the end of the short tunnel rested Adebowale’s sea scooter. Neutrally buoyant, it floated mysteriously in the middle of the tunnel, without a rider.
Sam glanced around the small tunnel, but Adebowale had disappeared.
Chapter One Hundred and Eight
The ventilation shaft had three massive turbo-fans. The one on the surface hundreds of feet above was the largest and most powerful, whereas the two inside the vertical tunnel were smaller. All three were used to drive fresh air to the bottom of the shaft, then out into the lowest tunnel to create a circulation of air through the tunnels and back up the elevator shaft. Adebowale recalled hearing somewhere, that the reason the ventilation shaft always reached the lowest point of any mine was because it needed to flush out any residual toxins from the air that would otherwise bundle together and form dead zone. Of course, all of that was academic. What mattered now, was how to get through the second massive turbo-fan that blocked his ascent.
He’d slipped through the first turbo-fan easily enough. It had amazed him. At ten feet in diameter, the massive blades were larger than him and were able to be feathered. This meant the blades changed their angle and pitch as they spun. It also allowed the mine operators to change the direction of the airflow if they needed to extract a poisonous or flammable gas, instead of pumping oxygen rich, fresh air into the mine. When he first looked up at it, all the blades were completely folded, and years of debris and mold made the turbo-fan look no different than the rest of the tunnel’s ceilings
. Of course, it was easy to get through because he could simply move the angle of the blades and slip through. There was no choice of whether or not to bring the sea scooter, so he had to abandon it.
He ascended rapidly, without any fear of an acute decompression sickness. He didn’t have time to ascend slowly, taking the necessary decompression stops. Adebowale didn’t even wonder what would happen to Sam and Tom. What did it concern him whether they lived or died? They had served their purpose. He felt no guilt or happiness in leaving them. He didn’t have time to explain what needed to happen. Besides, what he was about to do was bigger than them, bigger than him – it was the most important single thing a human being could do for the world. He was going to categorically change the future of the human race.
He stopped after ascending approximately eighty feet. His movement was stopped again by an obstruction in the shaft – this time, by the second turbo-fan. This one was almost identical to the first, but there had been so much corrosion to the blades that they no longer feathered.
Adebowale pulled on the first blade, the same as he had done with the first, but nothing happened. He swam to the furthermost edge of the propeller, trying to use the increased leverage to move it. With his legs pressed against the metal sides, he pushed hard with his legs and pulled with his arms. The massive muscles of his arms strained, but nothing happened.
He tried each of the other blades and found none of them could be coerced to move. Adebowale removed his dive knife and used it to chip away at the rust where the fan-blade normally swiveled. He tried to move the fan again, but it was rusted solid.
Frustrated, Adebowale jammed the knife into the rusted section and then removed his dive tank. The aluminum tank moved quickly through the water. With the regulator still in his mouth he rammed the heavy dive tank into the knife. On the first attempt, the knife split just past the handle. Adebowale felt the rush of adrenalin sending him berserk. This wasn’t how he was going to die – trapped in an old ventilation shaft, stuck beneath a rusty propeller blade. He pulled back on the tank and rammed it into the same section again, and again. He lost track of how many times he struck the damned blade, but eventually he rammed the dive tank into the weakened edge of the fan-blade and it simply drove right through.
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 2 Page 85