by P J Skinner
‘Rhett?’ he said.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘It was a landslide.’
But why had the lights gone off before it and why had there been an explosion? She shut her eyes and tried to focus as the awful realisation began to crystalize in her head. Someone had sealed off the tunnel with them inside. Rhett’s odd demeanour suddenly made sense. Somehow, they had found out about her midnight trip to the laboratory. They wanted to prevent her spilling the beans before they got the investment.
But they wouldn’t leave them in there to die? Even as the thought crossed her mind, the reality became apparent. It could take them weeks to dig through the rock. They might starve to death before then. Rhett and Amanda might want her dead but she had allies. The geologists and Galo Martin would look for her, wouldn’t they?
Napoleon tried to say something but only gurgling escaped from his throat. Sam slid down the surround and sat beside him.
‘Are you hungry?’ she said. ‘I’ve a selection of snacks.’
He shook his head. ‘Sleep.’
He pushed his satchel under his head and curled up in a ball on the platform, wheezing like a pair of ancient bellows. Sam was torn between making him eat and drink from their limited supplies and the knowledge that he would die anyway. Should she keep the food for herself?
She drank a cup of lukewarm tea at the other side of the platform and sat in the dark reviewing the possible scenarios in her head. What if no-one realised that she had entered the mine that morning? Surely, they would work out where she was? But how would they rescue her? Amanda had to be stopped and she was the only one who could do it.
Her head ached and she took a couple of Panadol tablets from the small metal medical kit in her bag. She tried to clean the cut on her knee before she covered it with a sticking plaster. An overwhelming tiredness overcame her and she too curled up on the platform using her rucksack as a pillow. She lay in the dark plotting her revenge. Nobody tries to kill me and gets away it.
***
The grey morning drizzle added to the gloom enveloping Selma’s heart. She put the lid on the slops bucket and descended the steps out of the kitchen on her way to deliver the food to the pig she was fattening for slaughter later in the year. The moisture dripped from the eaves as she kept close to the wall of the house to avoid the rain.
Rhett and Javier were conversing in loud whispers in the canteen as she passed the window below their eyeline. Their clandestine chat attracted her attention and despite her fear of getting caught, she stopped for a minute to eavesdrop on them.
‘She’ll never get out of there. You did a great job.’
‘Thanks boss.’
‘Carry on as normal. There’s a bonus in this for you. Enough to buy a house for you and your wife. By the way, send Galo Martin home. I don’t want him poking around here and finding things he shouldn’t.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Tell him we need to wait until Sam comes back before we can proceed with the mapping of the geology.’
Selma crept past them and went to tip the bucket into the metal trough in the pig pen. She shook with indignation. What sort of man had she married? Distress made her weep as she leaned on the fence trying to recover from the shock of what she had heard. She gasped in big breaths of smelly air, making her feel nauseous.
They weren’t going to get away with this. She hurried towards the bunk house hoping to catch Galo Martin, but he had gone to the core shed for the afternoon. She would catch him later before he left for Arboleda.
She returned to the kitchen to make lunch but she couldn’t concentrate. Peeling the vegetables took twice as long as usual as they slipped out of her distracted hands. She burned the rice to the bottom of the pan when she forgot to add the rest of the water.
Finally, people started to turn up to eat, washing their hands in the freezing water provided by the outdoor tap. Selma hopped from foot to foot in her impatience to tell Galo what she knew. One by one, the workforce filed into the canteen but Galo did not appear.
‘Where is Galo?’ said Selma to her husband.
‘Oh, he left for home about an hour ago,’ said Javier.
‘He left? Oh!’
‘Did you need him for something?’
‘No, only some laundry I ironed for him. He can collect it when he returns.’
‘He won’t be returning. Maybe you should send it down with Rhett and the mules tomorrow. Pepe the mule driver can deliver it.’
‘Okay,’ said Selma.
She didn’t have a choice, but waiting an extra day worried her. She didn’t know how much food Sam had taken in to the mine with her but every day she remained trapped in the mine meant she would be closer to starvation.
She waited until everyone had left the canteen and then she sat down at one of the tables and wrote a note to Galo Martin. Outlining the perilous situation in which Sam and Napoleon had been trapped, she begged him to get help to the mine before it was too late.
Galo’s clothes had dried on the bread oven and she ironed and folded them with care. She placed the note into the pocket of a pair of trousers which she put in the middle of the bundle of clothes. Once she had finished, she put the clothes into a plastic bag and tied it at the top, ready for delivery by Pepe, the mule driver in the morning.
***
Sam woke cold and stiff. Her head still ached like hell. Napoleon’s ribs still rose and fell as he laboured over every breath. Every now and then, he stopped breathing for a few seconds before starting up again. Those bastards were going to kill him. Collateral damage in their campaign for riches.
She drank the dregs of the now cold tea and ate the rest of her cheese sandwich. Leaving her rucksack on the platform, she headed back to the blocked entrance of the adit to see if there had been any progress in clearing it. A false hope if there ever was one. She had not yet accepted that they had no intention of rescuing her.
The only sound in the adit was the dripping of the water onto the floor from the faults in the roof. She held her breath but the only other noise that reached her was the beating of her heart in her chest, fast with adrenalin. No digging or blasting. No sign of an excavator or a bulldozer clearing the rocks away. Dead silence.
Napoleon had sat up when she got back to the platform. He was as white as snow in the torchlight but he appeared to have recovered some function in his lungs.
‘Are they coming?’ he said, wheezing.
‘Oh, yes, I expect so,’ said Sam. ‘Not long now. Can you please eat something?’
‘I ate my sandwich from yesterday.’
There was no way to dispute this without searching his satchel and pretending that everything would be fine seemed to be the only option.
‘Are you married?’ said Napoleon.
There was no point getting involved in a discussion about her single state with him. Sam had a pretty good idea what his reaction would be. A white lie would be more comforting.
‘Yes, my husband’s name is Simon, and I have a little boy.’
‘You will see them again,’ he said, coughing. He held on to his chest as if to help it push the lungs in and out.
She made the right decision, neglecting to elaborate on the fact that her boyfriend had married her sister and they had a baby instead. Why upset him with tales of a bygone era? The way it was looking there would be no one alive to dispute the facts anyway. The day dragged on. Sam returned twice more to the cave-in but no activity could be heard from where she stood.
In the evening Napoleon took a turn for the worse. He couldn’t talk anymore and struggled for every breath. Finally, he rolled over on his side and put his head on her lap. She didn’t know what to do, but her instinct took over and she stroked his head, humming a tune as if to a small child.
Sometime during the night, Napoleon slipped away. Sam laid him on one side of the platform and took her shirt back. She covered him in a piece of sodden tarpaulin she found under the platform. She put her own sh
irt under his, which was now dry, but the cold and damp got right into her core and she shivered. The last batteries for the Magnalite flickered and faded. From now on she would have to rely on the wind-up torch.
In Napoleon’s satchel, she found his stale sandwich and a packet of crisps as well as a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. How could someone with no lungs left still smoke? It made no sense. She lit one and took a deep drag on it. At that moment, another massive roar filled the tunnels as the cave-in spread nearer the platform. She put her hand over her mouth to stop the scream that threatened to come out. Was she going to die in there?
***
A string of mules trotted through the morning mist with Pepe, the mule driver running alongside. She uttered a quick prayer of thanks and ran after him shouting.
He spun around at the sound of her voice.
‘What’s up, Señora?
‘Galo Martin went home yesterday but he left some clothing here. Can you deliver it to him?’
‘Sure. Give it to me and I’ll go to his house later.’
‘It’s a matter of life or death.’
‘You can rely on me.’
Rhett watched the interchange from the window of the canteen. He had cleaned out his room, as he never intended to return. Riches beckoned if they could hold their nerve for another couple of weeks. This last batch of salted samples would be the clincher.
Kennedy and Marlon, the geologists, packed the samples into the hessian sacks at the core shed. They followed the protocol established by Sam for quality control.
‘It’s odd that she left without saying anything,’ said Kennedy.
‘Were you expecting a kiss?’ said Marlon who got a punch on his upper arm in reply.
‘But seriously, don’t you think it’s weird?’
‘Who knows how gringos behave?’
They loaded up the mules and sent them back past the bunk houses. Rhett, who waited at the canteen, bid farewell to Javier and the team and started off down the hill with Pepe and the mule train. They passed the halfway house without going in.
When they got to Arboleda, Rhett offered to take the parcel of clothes to Galo Martin while Pepe unloaded the mules and gave them something to drink. Pepe didn’t hesitate and handed over the package, pointing out Galo Martin’s house off the main street.
Rhett set out with the clothes under his arm. As soon as he was out of sight, he ripped open the plastic bag and shook the clothes out one by one. Just when he was about to give up, a piece of paper fluttered to the ground from a pocket in some trousers.
Rhett put the clothes back into the torn plastic bag and dropped it in the road. He flattened out the note on a fence post and read it with rising panic. Thank goodness Galo would never receive the note. That could have scuppered all our plans.
He knocked on the door and a small plump woman appeared and greeted him in Spanish. She had a funny accent that Rhett did not understand and shook his head. He thrust the package into her hands, nodded his head at her and left. She was not fazed by the rude gringo as her husband had told her all about Amanda Ballard. She opened the package and tutted when she noticed that there was mud on the clothes and they had not been folded properly.
She went back indoors and took the clothes out, separating out the muddy ones for washing. By the time Galo Martin got home, they were all ironed and back in his closet.
‘That rude gringo came here today,’ she said to her husband.
‘What did he want?’
‘Selma sent you some clothes but...’ she tailed off.
‘But what?’
‘I don’t know. They smell clean but some of them had mud on them and the bag was ripped.’
‘I guess they fell off the mule.’
‘You must be right. Anyway, I cleaned them up and put them away.’
‘Thank you, mi amor, where would I be without you?’
Chapter XXI
After reviewing the state of the entrance following the second cave in, Sam had to find a new route to escape from the tunnels. The cave ins could spread further into the tunnel and she had no desire to end up squashed and fossilised. Neither did she hold out much hope of rescue. Sitting on the platform with a dead body, waiting to die too, was not an option.
She packed all the remaining supplies into her rucksack and put Napoleon’s satchel with his identity card inside it under his head. His face had sunk even further into his skull making it look like he had been dead a lot longer than twenty-four hours. Sam shuddered. Maybe they would find her like that too.
Her path illuminated by the light of the wind-up torch, she started off up the tunnel. Galo Martin had not mapped the upper reaches of the tunnel yet but there were several possibilities for heading further up into the mountain and looking for a way out. Her only hope of survival rested in access to the Inca workings and some ancient tunnel to the surface.
She would have to find a pre-excavated tunnel as her geological hammer could help her dislodge loose rocks but as a tunnelling tool it was worse than useless. A feeling of hopelessness gnawed at her but she refused to be down hearted. While she lived, she would keep fighting.
The lower set of adits and crosscuts were seared into her memory from the number of times she had rotated the model and imagined the continuity of the geology between them. She traversed each working looking for signs of Inca excavations. The tunnels pinched out and she had to return several times to intersections to take another crosscut.
Slowly she worked her way up to the upper adit mapped by Galo Martin. Getting to the top level cost her a lot of effort due to the fact the explosions had collapsed the connecting raise and dislodged the crude wooden ladder, breaking it in half. She used the broken ladder to get half way up the raise and then braced herself against one wall, walking her way up to the next level.
Cold sweat broke out of her pores as she struggled up the raise. The fear of falling and breaking a leg made her strong and pushed her past any normal boundaries. She had always been physically fit and prided herself on her strength despite the fashion for twig-like women incapable of lifting anything heavier than a cigarette. She had hung the torch around her neck and it swung around, directing light in all directions without ever being useful.
As she crawled out onto the floor of the top adit, the torch hit the lip of the raise quite hard. She held her breath but it did not break. The torch is my lifeline. If it breaks, I’m stuffed. Wiping it clean, she sat on the floor and took out some nuts and raisins to eat. She had divided them into small packets containing a dozen pieces. The small boost she got from these snacks kept her going but her hunger was now constant.
She put back her head and let the water from the fractures drip into her mouth, swallowing the small mouthfuls with desperation. Dehydration would be dangerous and drinking the mine water was the lesser of two evils. Her stomach should hold up but if it didn’t, she would have to grin and bear it.
The lack of food had made her feel light headed so she decided to rest for a while. She moved to a dry place further up the adit and curled up on the floor. The cold rocks gave no comfort but she refused to notice. She did not sleep for long. A rumbling sound woke her after an hour. She made herself inspect the raise to the lower lever.
To her horror the level below had collapsed and she could no longer use the raise to reach it without a dangerous jump. The ladder swung into an empty space. She was trapped in the upper level and it could collapse any minute too. She stared at the hole in the floor trying not to cry. Then she started to shout and scream in frustration, doubling over with effort. A pointless act. Even if they wanted to rescue her, it now looked impossible.
She went back to the dry place where she had left her rucksack and lay down again. If she was going to find a way out, she had to conserve her energy and she couldn’t function without sleep. Talk your way out of this one, Sam.
***
Rhett arrived at Calderon and took a taxi to the office. He tried to avoid thinking about Sam trapped und
erground, but he kept seeing her face when he blanked her in the canteen. That expression of disappointment when he wouldn’t join in with her chat or wish her a good day. She had wormed her way into his affections in a way he hadn’t felt possible but he loved money more.
‘Have you solved our little problem?’ said Amanda.
‘Of course. And I have more samples for the laboratory in case the investor wants to analyse them himself.’
‘Excellent. I knew I could rely on you? Fancy a snort of some Peruvian marching dust?’
Rhett followed her into the bathroom and she shut the door. She put some cocaine on her breasts which were exposed by a low-cut t-shirt.
‘Have a sniff of that,’ she said.
Despite his mood, Rhett did not dare refuse Amanda’s request. He could only imagine the scene she would make. He winked at her and lowered his head to her breasts, blocking one nostril and sniffing hard with the other. The drug shot into his bloodstream and made him feel like superman. With Amanda’s encouragement, he started to undress her, hoping that the coke would replace his desire when the time came.
***
Alfredo looked up from his studies to see Gloria standing in the doorway looking at him with a soft smile on her face. She went over to him and sat in his lap in the big leather armchair, offering her lips for a kiss. He duly accepted this request and the rapture of being back in love enveloped them both with passion which lasted for several torrid minutes.
Finally, Gloria pulled away and pushed his hair out of his eyes.
‘How’s the work going, darling?’ said Gloria.
‘Pretty good, mi vida. That hammerstone that Sam brought me is unique. I can’t wait to see some of the other implements she discovered. A visit to Cerro Calvo would be just the ticket. Would you come with me?’
‘Do you think I’d let you go without me? It’s high time we had an adventure together. We can leave David with my father.’
‘Or we could bring him with us?’
Gloria smiled. ‘Well, adventures should be in his blood.’