by Night Probe!
When their knees became submerged, Pitt stopped and held up a hand. "The water level will be over our heads before long," he said. "I think the safety team better set up operations here."
Riley nodded. "I agree."
The three divers, who were to remain behind in case of an emergency, began stacking the reserve air tanks and securing the end of an orange fluorescent cord that was wound around a large reel. As they arranged the gear, the dive lights danced spasmodically on the passage walls, and their voices seemed alien and magnified.
When Pitt and Riley had removed their hiking boots and replaced them with swim fins, they grabbed hold of the reel and continued on, unwinding the safety line as they went.
The water soon came to their waists. They halted to adjust their face masks and clamp their teeth on the mouthpieces of the air regulators. Then they dropped into the liquid void.
Below the surface it was cold and gloomy. Visibility was amazingly sharp, and Pitt felt a shiver of almost superstitious awe when he spied a tiny salamander whose eyes had degenerated to the point of total blindness. He marveled that any kind of life form could exist in such entombed isolation.
The quarry's escape shaft seemed to stretch downward like a great sloping, bottomless pit. There was something malignant about it, as though some cursed and unmentionable force lurked in the shadowy depths beyond the beams of the dive lights.
After ten minutes by Pitt's dive watch they stopped and took stock. Their depth gauges registered 105 feet. From beneath his face mask Pitt's eyes studied Riley. The dive master made a brief check of his air pressure gauge and then nodded an okay to keep going.
The shaft began to widen into a cavern and the sides turned a dirty gold color. They had finally passed into a gallery of the limestone quarry. The floor leveled out and Pitt noted that the depth had slowly risen to sixty feet. He aimed his light upward. The beam reflected on what looked like a blanket of quicksilver. He ascended like a ghost in flight and suddenly broke into air.
He had surfaced in an air pocket below the ceiling of a large domed chamber. A crowd of stalactites fell around him like icicles, their conical tips ending inches above the water. Too late, Pitt ducked under to warn Riley.
Unable to see because of the surface reflection, Riley rammed his face mask into the tip of a stalactite, shattering the glass. The bridge of his nose was gashed and his eyelids were sliced. He would not know until later that the lens of his left eye was gone.
Pitt threaded his way through the cone-shaped trunks and gripped Riley under the arms.
"What happened?" Riley mumbled. "Why are the lights out?"
"You met the wrong end of a stalactite," said Pitt. "Your dive light is broken. I lost mine."
Riley did not buy the lie. He removed a glove and felt his face. "I'm blind," he said matter-of-factly.
"Nothing of the sort." Pitt eased off Riley's mask and gently picked away the larger glass fragments. The dive master skin was so numb from the icy water that he felt no pain. "What rotten luck. Why me?"
"Stop complaining. A couple of stitches and your ugly mug will be as good as new."
"Sorry to screw things up. I guess this is as far as we go."
"You go."
"You're not heading back?"
"No, I'm pushing on."
"How's your air?"
"Ample."
"You can't kid an old pro, buddy. There's barely enough left to reach the backup team. You keep going and you forfeit your round-trip ticket to the surface."
Pitt tied the safety line around a stalactite. Then he clamped Riley's hand on it.
"Just follow the yellow brick road, and mind your head.
"A comedian you ain't. What do I tell the admiral? He'll castrate me when he learns I left you here."
"Tell him," Pitt said with a tight grin, "I had to catch a train."
Corporal Richard Willapa felt right at home stalking the damp woods of New York. A direct descendant of the Chinook Indians of the Pacific Northwest, he had spent much of his youth tracking game in the rain forests of Washington State, honing the skills that enabled him to approach within twenty feet of a wild deer before the animal sensed his presence and darted away.
His experience came in handy as he read the signs of recent human passage. The footprints had been made by a short man, he judged, wearing a size seven combat boot similar to his own. Moisture from the mist had not yet redampened the impressions, an indication to Willapa's trained eye that they were no more than half an hour old.
The tracks came from the direction of a thicket and stopped at a tree, then they returned. Willapa noted with amusement the thin wisp of vapor that rose from the tree trunk. Someone had walked from the thicket, relieved himself and walked back again.
He looked around at his flanks, but none of his squad was visible. His sergeant had sent him out to scout ahead and the rest had not caught up yet.
Willapa stealthily climbed into the crotch of a tree and peered into the thicket. From his vantage point in height he could see the outline of a head and shoulders hunched over a fallen log.
"All right," he shouted, "I know you're in there. Come out with your hands up."
Willapa's answer was a hail of bullets that flayed the bark off the tree below him.
"Christ almighty!" he muttered in astonishment. No one had told him he might be shot at.
He aimed his weapon, pulled the trigger and sprayed the thicket.
The firing on the hill intensified and echoed through the valley. Lieutenant Sanchez snatched up a field radio. "Sergeant Ryan, do you read?"
Ryan answered almost immediately. "Ryan here, go ahead, sir."
"What in hell is going on up there?"
"We stumbled on a hornet's nest," Ryan replied jerkily. "It's like the Battle of the Bulge. I've already taken three casualties."
Sanchez was stunned by the appalling news. "Who's firing on you?"
"They ain't no farmers with pitchforks. We're up against an elite outfit."
"Explain."
"We're being hit with assault rifles by guys who damn well know how to use them."
"We're in for it now," Shaw shouted, ducking his head as a continuous burst of fire raked the leaves above. "They're coming at us from the rear."
"No amateurs, those Yanks," Macklin yelled back. "They're biding their time and whittling us down."
"The longer they wait, the better." Shaw crawled over to the pit where Caldweiler and three others were still frantically digging, oblivious to the battle going on around them. "Any chance of breaking through?"
"You'll be the first to know when we do," the Welshman grunted. The sweat was pouring down his face as he hauled up a bucket containing a large boulder. "We're near seventy feet down. I can't tell you any more than that."
Shaw ducked suddenly as a bullet ricocheted off the rock in Caldweiler's hands and took away the left heel of his boot.
"You better lay low till I call you," Caldweiler said calmly, as though remarking about the weather.
Shaw got the message. He dropped down into the shelter of a shallow depression beside Burton-Angus, who looked to be enjoying himself returning the fire that blasted out of the surrounding woods.
"Hit anything?" asked Shaw.
"Sneaky bastards never show themselves," said Burton Angus "They learned their lessons in Vietnam."
He rose to his knees and fired a long leisurely burst into a dense undergrowth. His answer was a rain of bullets that hammered into the ground around him. He abruptly jerked upright and fell back without a sound.
Shaw crouched over him. Blood was beginning to seep from three evenly spaced holes across his chest. He looked up at Shaw, the brown eyes beginning to dull, the face already turning pale.
"Bloomin' queer," he rasped. "Getting shot on American soil. Who would have believed it." The eyes went unseeing and he was gone.
Sergeant Bentley slipped through the brush and looked down, his expression granite. "Too many good men are dying today," he
said slowly. Then his face hardened and he cautiously peered over the top of the embankment. The fire that killed Burton Angus he judged, came from an elevation. He spotted a perceptible movement high in the leaves. He set his rifle on semiautomatic fire, took careful aim and ripped off six shots.
He watched with grim satisfaction as a body slipped slowly out of a tree and crumpled to the moist ground.
Corporal Richard Willapa would never again stalk the deer of his native rain forest.
Soon after the shooting had broken out, Admiral San decker put in an emergency radio call for doctors and ambulances from the local hospitals. The response was almost immediate. Sirens were soon heard approaching in the distance as the first of the walking wounded began filtering down from the hillside.
Heidi limped from man to man applying temporary first aid, offering words of comfort while fighting back the tears. The worst thing was their incredible youth. None of them looked as if they had seen their twentieth birthdays. Their faces were pale with shock. They had never expected to bleed or even die on their home ground, fighting an enemy they had yet to even see.
She happened to look up as Riley came out of the escape portal, led by two members of the diving team, his face masked in blood. A sickening fear rose within her when she saw no sign of Pitt.
Dear God, she thought wildly, he's dead.
Sandecker and Giordino noticed them at the same time and rushed over.
"Where's Pitt?" Sandecker asked, fearful of the answer.
"Still in there somewhere," Riley mumbled. "He refused to turn back. I tried, Admiral. Honest to God, I tried to talk him out of going on, but he wouldn't listen."
"I would have expected no less of him," Sandecker said lifelessly.
"Pitt is not the kind of man to die." Giordino's expression was set, his tone resolute.
"He had a message for you, Admiral."
"What message?"
"He said to tell you he had a train to catch."
"Maybe he made it into the main quarry," Giordino said, suddenly hopeful.
"Not a chance," said Riley, putting a dampener on any optimism. "His air must be gone by now. He's surely drowned.
Death in the stygian blackness of a cavern deep inside the earth is something nobody cares to think about. The idea is too foreign, too horrible to dwell on. Lost and trapped divers have been known to have literally shredded their fingertips to the bone, trying to claw their way through a mile of rock. Others simply gave up, believing they had re-entered the womb.
The last thing on Pitt's mind was dying. The mere thought was enough to instill panic. He concentrated on conserving his air and fighting against disorientation, the ever-present specter of cave divers.
The needle on his air pressure gauge quivered on the final mark before EMPTY. How much time did he have? One minute, two, perhaps three before he inhaled on a dry tank?
His fin accidentally kicked up a blinding cloud of silt that effectively smothered the beam of his light. He hung motionless, barely making out the direction of his air bubbles past the face mask. He followed them upward until he emerged into clear water again, and then began fly-walking across the ceiling of the cavern, pulling himself along with his fingertips. It was a strange sensation, almost as if gravity didn't exist.
A fork in the passage loomed out of the darkness. He could not afford the luxury of a time-consuming decision. He rolled over and kicked into the one on the left. Suddenly the light ray fell on a torn and rotting wet suit lying in the silt. He moved toward it cautiously. At first glance it appeared wrinkled and collapsed, as if its owner had discarded it. The light traveled up the legs and across the sunken chest area and stopped at the face mask, still strapped around the hood. A pair of empty eye sockets in a skull stared back at Pitt.
Startled, he began pedaling backward from the gruesome sight. The body of one of the lost divers had saved his life, or at least extended it for a brief space in time. The passage had to be a dead end. The bones of the second diver were probably somewhere deep within the gloom.
At the fork again, Pitt rechecked his compass. It was a wasted gesture. There was no place to go but to his right. He had already dropped the cumbersome safety reel. His air time was long past the point of no return.
He tried to contain his breathing, conserving his air, but already he could sense the lessening pressure. There were only a few precious breaths left now.
His mouth was very dry. He found he could not swallow, and he became very cold. He had been in the frigid water a long time and he recognized the initial symptoms of hypothermia. A strange calm settled over him as he swam deeper into the beckoning gloom.
Pitt accepted the last intake of air as inevitable and shrugged off the useless air bottles, letting them drop into the silt. He did not feel the pain when he bashed his knee on a pile of rock. A minute was all that was left to him. That was as far as the air in his lungs would take him. An abhorrence of ending up like the divers in the other passage flooded his mind. A vision of the empty skull loomed ahead, taunting him.
His lungs ached savagely, his head began to feel as if a fire was raging inside. He swam on, not daring to stop until his brain ceased to function.
Something glinted up the passage in the light. It seemed miles away. Darkness crept into the fringes of his vision. His heart pounded in his ears and his chest felt as though it was being crushed. Every atom of oxygen in his lungs was gone.
The final desperate moments closed in on him. His night probe had ended.
Slowly but relentlessly the net tightened as Macklin's dwindling force fought on. The bodies of the dead and wounded lay amid a sea of spent cartridge casings.
The sun had burned away the mist. They could see their targets better now, but so could the men surrounding them. There was no fear. They knew their chances of escape were impossible from the start. Fighting far from the shores of their island fortress was nothing new to British fighting men.
Macklin hobbled over to Shaw. The lieutenant had his left arm in a bloodstained sling and a foot wrapped in an equally bloody bandage. "I'm afraid we've run our course, old man. We can't keep them back much longer."
"You and your men have done a glorious job," said Shaw. "Far more than anyone expected."
"They're good boys, they did their best," Macklin said wearily. "Any chance of breaking through that bloody hole?"
"If I ask Caldweiler one more time how he's doing, he'll probably bash my brains out with a shovel."
"Might as well toss a charge down there and forget it."
Shaw stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then suddenly he scrambled over to the edge of the pit. The men hauling up the buckets looked as if they were ready to drop from exhaustion. They were drenched in sweat and their breath came in great heaves.
"Where's Caldweiler?" asked Shaw.
"He went down himself. Said no one could dig faster than him."
Shaw leaned over the edge. The air shaft had curved and the Welshman was out of sight. Shaw yelled his name. A lump of dirt shaped like a man came into view far below. "What now, damn it?"
"Our time has run out," Shaw's voice reverberated down the shaft. "Any chance of blowing through with explosives?"
"No good," Caldweiler shouted up. "The walls will cave in."
"We've got to risk it."
Caldweiler sank to his knees in total exhaustion. "All right," he said hoarsely. "Throw down a charge. I'll give it a try."
A minute later, Sergeant Bentley lowered a satchel containing plastic explosives. Caldweiler gently tapped the pliable charges into deep probe holes, set the fuses and signaled to be pulled to the surface. When he came into reach, Shaw took him under the arms and dragged him free of the pit entrance.
Caldweiler was appalled by the scene of carnage around him. Out of Macklin's original force, only four men were unwounded, yet they still kept up a vicious fire into the woods.
The ground suddenly rumbled beneath them and a cloud of dust spewed from the air shaft. Cal
dweiler immediately went back in. Shaw could hear him coughing, but his eyes could not penetrate the swirling haze.
"Did the walls hold?" Shaw yelled.
There was no answer. Then he felt a tug on the rope and he began pulling like a madman. His arms felt as if they were about to drop off when Caldweiler's dust-encrusted head popped up.
He sputtered incoherently for a moment and finally cleared his throat. "We're in," he gasped. "We've broken through. Hurry, man, before you get yourself shot."
Macklin was there now. He shook Shaw's hand. "If we don't see each other again, all the best."
"Same to you."
Sergeant Bentley handed him a flashlight. "You'll need this, sir."
Caldweiler had knotted three ropes together, increasing the length. "This should see you to the floor of the quarry," he said. "Now, in you go."
Shaw dropped into the pit and began his descent. He paused briefly and looked up.
The dust from the explosion had not settled, and all view of the anxious faces above was obscured.
On the perimeter's rim, Lieutenant Sanchez' men still crouched behind trees and rocks, maintaining an intense rate of fire into the thicket-covered gully. Since the first shots he had lost one dead and eight wounded. He also had been hit, a bullet passing through his thigh and out again. He tore off his battle jacket and wrapped the entry and exit holes with his undershirt.
"Their fire has slackened," commented Sergeant Hooper, between spits of tobacco.
"It's a miracle any of them are still alive in there," Sanchez said.
"Nobody fights that hard but fanatical terrorists."
"They're well trained. I have to hand them that." He hesitated, listening. Then he scratched an ear and peered between two large boulders that shielded him. "Listen!"
Hooper's brow furrowed. "Sir?"
"They've stopped firing."
"Could be a trick to sucker us in."