by Bob Finley
"Do you think he knows?" Frank murmured.
"What?"
Janese Cramerton was still staring after the retreating figure of Sergeant Major Banner...Mister Banner to his troops. A chill swept over her and she shivered. When she finally looked at Frank Sheppard he was staring at her oddly.
"That man scares me," she said lamely. "Whenever he looks at me I have the creepy feeling I'm being watched by some feral animal."
Frank glanced in the direction of the vanished figure. "Yeah, he's a cold one, alright. Probably kills for fun."
Janese shivered again. "Did you notice how everybody took off when he came in?" she remembered.
"Oh, yeah, they're afraid of him, for sure. And I doubt if that bunch scares easily."
Janese suddenly stood and pushed her chair back. "Let's get out of here," she said, an edge to her voice. Surprised by her reaction, Frank got up quickly and followed. He noticed she had wrapped her arms about herself as she walked, as if she were cold.
"Or scared, like she said," Frank thought to himself.
"I haven't seen Kim or Cy this morning," Janese said when Frank caught up to her.
"Well, we're early. Maybe they decided to sleep in. I could have used another hour or two, myself," he observed.
"Do you think we should still go ahead with what we talked about last night?" Janese asked tentatively as they reached the main tunnel.
Frank looked quickly about, then at Janese. Unobtrusively he put one finger to his lips, touched an ear lobe, and barely shook his head. Then he inclined his head slightly to one side, took her lightly by her left elbow, and guided her to the right, in the direction of Dodge City. He set a deliberately casual pace that wouldn't attract attention, and she slowed, without thinking, to match it. On the way they passed two of the resident crew, one armed. They both stared at her, but passed without a comment. Word travels fast.
They reached the cutoff to their quarters. Frank stopped at the intersection, making small talk while he surreptitiously surveyed the tunnel in both directions. Janese, caught up in her own thoughts, finally realized that he had stopped talking altogether. Startled, she realized he was waiting for something.
"What? What's the matter?" she dragged herself back to the present.
Frank smiled gently. "I said, ‘if you'd rather not do this, you don't have to’".
"Do what?"
Frank just looked at her.
"Oh. Oh!" she said, finally. She shook her head distractedly. "I'm sorry, I guess I'm just not thinking straight. I'm not used to this spy stuff. No, let's go ahead with what we talked about." She took a deep breath and sighed. "We don't really have any choice. Do we?" The last was added wistfully.
Frank gave a little shake of his head. "No," he said. Simply.
They both took one more careful look around and, hearing nothing in either direction, slowly walked away down the tunnel, away from the illusion of safety and into the unknown.
Three-and-a-half hours later they came to the end of the world. They had eluded detection twice by Banner's men who were apparently on routine maintenance errands deep in the tunnels. Some fifty to seventy-five yards beyond the crew's quarters they had managed, like timid little mice, to peek into a large cave that Frank readily identified as the facility's physical plant and source of electricity and breathable air. Natural crevices and caves were scattered along the lava tubes and were obviously used as small warehouses. Somewhere about the quarter-mile mark, where the tunnel had narrowed to a seven-foot diameter passageway they had come to a wall. It was built of roughly framed wood. A sturdy but primitive wooden door was secured with nothing more than a three-inch metal bolt dropped through the eye of a hasp. Frank put his hand on the bolt and stopped.
"What's wrong?" Janese whispered with alarm. She looked over her shoulder back down the tunnel. She was doing a lot of that.
"I just had a thought."
"What?"
"Suppose whatever's the other side of this wall is off-limits?"
She looked at him but he didn't see the light come on.
"Leo?" he prompted.
"Oh." The light came on. "Oh."
"It wouldn't hurt to just...open the door, probably," he said. "I don't see any alarm wires, or anything like that." He looked at her. She could only shrug.
He lifted the bolt. Slowly. Nothing happened.
He laid the bolt noiselessly on the floor beside the door and gently moved the hinged tongue away. Nothing happened.
He held his breath and slowly opened the door. It creaked and he jumped. Beyond was darkness.
"I'll go first," Frank volunteered. "If anything happens to me, you can tell the others." He noticed she didn't say no. He stepped through, carefully putting his foot down on the other side of the door, pausing, then all the way through. He waited. They looked at each other. He realized she was holding her breath, too. He breathed.
"It's okay," he said shakily. He leaned closer and looked on either side of the wall next to the door, found what he was looking for, and flipped a switch. A crudely-strung row of forty-watt light bulbs hung loosely suspended from the ceiling. Frank motioned Janese in and pulled the door closed behind her. They moved as one, unconsciously huddled together, along the tunnel to where it curved to the left twenty feet from the door. Stacks of crates and boxes lined the right wall. This space obviously doubled as a small warehouse. They made the turn and stopped in their tracks. The tunnel became narrower and turned into a ramp. A downhill ramp. It dropped at a fifteen-degree gradient away from them. But that wasn't all. Fifty feet downhill the string of lights stopped. There was nothing beyond but blackness. Narrowing, harrowing blackness.
"Ohhh, I don't like this," Janese pronounced in a low moan.
"Yeah," said Frank quietly.
"What are we going to do?" Janese asked fearfully.
Frank shook his head slowly and sighed. "What we came here to do," he said in resignation and, reaching under his shirt, pulled out a flashlight.
"Where'd you get that?" Janese asked.
"I found it in the bunkhouse, in a closet. Thought we might need it, so I brought it along."
Janese looked down the darkened tunnel. "I wish you hadn't,".
"Sorry. Do you want to go back?"
"No," she lied.
"Then you want to go on?"
"No." The truth was never easier to tell.
Frank laughed shortly. "Neither do I. Ready?"
"No."
He laughed again. "Good. If you were, I'd wonder about your sanity." He moved off, carefully planting his feet on the downward-slanting tunnel.
The tunnel was rough and convoluted and pockmarked by cul-de-sac crevasses where hot lava had eaten into less-dense strata. By Frank's dead-reckoning, it was gradually doubling back to the left, toward the interior of the mountain. If that were so, they should be beneath some of the secondary caves they'd passed earlier up on the main level. A couple of hundred yards in they were surprised to discover a rough ladder made of rusted re-bar anchored into the left wall. It disappeared into a symmetrical shaft that bored into the tunnel ceiling. Beside the ladder was a vertical four-inch PVC pipe. It disappeared up the shaft beside the ladder, too, but it also continued into a much smaller opening in the ground at their feet. They could feel a draft rising toward the dark maw overhead but, pressed as they were for time, they bypassed it and hurried on. Twice the lava tube angled upward briefly, but mostly it dropped ever lower into the bowels of this mountain under the sea. Several times they had to lean into the wall and squeeze through narrow cracks. They had just climbed down over a patch of boulders when Frank abruptly stopped moving.
"What's wrong?" Janese asked anxiously. The flashlight was in Frank's other hand, which left Janese trailing in near darkness with just a glimmer of light silhouetting him.
"Frank! What's wrong?! What's going on?" His reply was short and muffled. She grabbed his arm and shook it. "Frank! What are you doing?"
He did a little bow-legged squat
so he had enough room to turn his head toward her. "I said, ‘What do you smell?’" He shined the light back toward her as much as the close quarters allowed.
"Smell? What should I smell? I can't even see, much less smell anything."
Frank shuffled forward. The ceiling dropped even lower. Janese stopped moving.
"Frank. I think we should go back."
Frank squeezed down into a squatting position, braced one hand up on the wall in front of him, ducked his head... and disappeared.
For a moment Janese thought that his body was blocking the feeble light from the flashlight, and waited. Then, with a jolt, she realized that Frank wasn't there anymore. Her sharp intake of breath at the realization sounded flat in the claustrophobic crawlspace.
"Frank!" she said, in a small, I-don't-believe-you'd-do-this-to-me voice. She listened.
"Frank! Frank!" she yelled. Her voice rang in her ears. She felt the rock walls begin to close in on her. A primal scream was welling up in her throat when she saw a flash of light at her feet...weakly, but she was sure she'd seen it. There! There it was again, and brighter! She heard Frank's voice from far off.
"Are you coming?" it said.
She scrambled forward, banging her head, then remembered that Frank had been squatting. She did likewise and crabbed, crawled toward the light. Finally she squeezed past the small opening and realized she could stand. The relief that washed over her abruptly gave way to fury.
"Do you realize you left me back there in the dark, alone?! I thought something had happened to you! And I couldn't see! And I didn't know where I was, or how to get back, or even if I could..."
He was holding her. Gently. Soothingly.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to leave you back there. I just got so excited that I had to...I mean...I shouldn't have run off and left you like that."
He did sound sorry. And...
"What do you mean, ‘excited’? Excited about what?"
"Here." He took her by the hand and pulled, shining the light down at their feet to guide her along. "Come here...don't trip over the pipe. Look at this!"
They were in a large, vertical shaft. The flashlight wouldn't even illuminate the ceiling, wherever up there it was. The cave wall opposite them seemed to be about fifty feet away. The cave seemed roughly circular and, strangely, they were standing on what seemed to be a balcony surrounding a fifteen-to-twenty foot deep pit. In the weak light from the flash, the bottom of the pit was dark. A powerful stench rose from it. She wrinkled her nose in disgust and turned away from the edge.
"Is it my imagination, or does it seem hot in here?" she asked, realizing that her blouse was beginning to stick to her.
"You couldn't be righter," Frank agreed, "and that's the good news."
"What do you mean?"
"Now, do you smell anything?" he asked.
"Yes, it stinks! What is that awful smell?" she coughed slightly.
"Well, if what's in that pipe we keep seeing is what I think it is, we're standing at the receiving end of all the toilets up above, but..."
"What?! "
"...but that isn't the smell I meant. Don't you smell the sulfur?" He scrambled lightly over the rough surface to a nearby vertical wall and turned to motion her to follow him.
"Put your hand there," he ordered.
"Put it where? Why? I'm not touching anything down here!" She looked around as if something horrible might come crawling up out of the pit.
He took her firmly by the wrist and guided her hand to the rock wall, flattening her palm against it. In just two seconds she jerked her hand away.
"Ow!" she exclaimed. "That's hot!"
"Yes, it is," he agreed. "Now, watch this." He turned the flashlight off.
"Frank!"
"Wait," he said reassuringly from the darkness. "Give it a minute. Trust me."
She stood there in the dark bowels...bad choice of words...of the earth/sea with a man she'd only known for a couple of days, who asked her to ‘trust him’. And waited. She felt a rivulet of sweat run down the small of her back and remembered Mrs. Glosson. Mrs. Glosson from Chahlston, South Cahlina. Mrs. Glosson, with every one of her white hairs in place and straight out of 'Gone With The Wind', who admonished that ‘Proper ladies don't sweat...they glisten’.
"Frank."
"Just another minute," came his quiet reply.
She could see him! Vaguely, dimly, but she could see him! Without the flashlight!
"What's going on, Frank?" she asked with quiet dread. "Why can I see you with the flashlight off?" She didn't think she really wanted to know.
"The heat. The smell. The slight glow. Can't you guess?"
"I don't want to guess. I just want to go."
"I told you that the ‘good’ news is that it's hot in here, right?"
"Yeah..."
"Well, the bad news is that it's going to get a lot worse. A lot worse! And it's going to be very, very soon."
Janese Cramerton swallowed. "I hope you're not saying what I..."
Frank nodded. "We're standing just feet...feet...from active lava. Can you imagine?" He paced a few feet away and raised his arms, looking up as if in supplication. "I doubt if anybody in the history of the world has ever done this...been to the very guts of a volcano...and it buried beneath the sea! What a coup! It's fantastic! I'm gonna love tellin' it! Just wait!"
"Frank...Frank!!" He looked at her through the dim glow of heated rocks.
"I really hate to interrupt your reverie, but do you mind if I ask a question?"
Still smiling, he shrugged. "Of course not."
"Are we going to live to tell about this?"
He stopped smiling. "Of course. We have to. This is too great a discovery, an experience, not to share with the scientific community."
"And," she observed wryly, "it wouldn't hurt your standing in that ‘scientific community’ either, would it?"
"Well...that, too." He had the good grace to at least seem somewhat abashed.
"Could we get back to basics?" she reminded him.
"What? Oh! You mean, getting out of here."
"Now we're getting somewhere...I hope," she chided. They made their way back to the small crawlspace they'd exited. Frank turned to look back.
"I just wish I'd had a camera," he sighed.
"Don't worry, Frank. I'll be your camera. There's no way I could forget this."
The climb out took just over an hour, and was exhausting. The flashlight was down to a feeble glow when they reached the wooden door.
"What happened to the lights? I thought I left them on," Frank panted.
"You did."
"Well, they aren't on now."
He put his ear against the rough wood and listened. He shook his head slightly at Janese to indicate that he'd heard nothing.
He pushed ever so gently against the door in order to peek out. It didn't move. He pushed harder. That was when he heard the sound of the metal bolt rattling in the hasp.
The one he'd laid on the floor beside the door when they'd entered. He fumbled for the switch and cut the row of naked light bulbs back on.
"We seem to have a bit of a problem," he said to Janese.
"What is it? Is there someone out there?" she whispered.
"Not exactly.
"Well, what then?"
"We're locked in."
Chapter 35
MARS III broke surface at 3:57 p.m., to the rush of cascading water and a burst of sunlight through the acriliglass spheres that, though it was late afternoon, was a shock after the total darkness of two miles down. Ben Masters staggered slightly as the clumsy craft wallowed in the mid-Atlantic swells. It looked, for all the world, like a sci-fi flick ‘flying saucer’ down at sea. He shut down the external water-cooled lights so if one dipped into the air in between waves it wouldn't self-destruct from the sudden heat overload. Then he raised a thirty-foot telescopic mast topped with a radar transponder so he didn't get run over by a stray ship. He cranked her engines and turned her h
ead...not that she really had a bow or a stern...into the wind and ran up enough headway to minimize drift and hold station. Finally, he followed Marc's instructions, holding down the shift key and simultaneously pressing three other keys. The computer monitor beeped and words flowed onto the screen: EMERGENCY RESCUE MESSAGE TRANSMITTED. STAND BY FOR REPLY.
The encrypted signal transmitted by MARS III was received by a DSCS-12 satellite in geostationary orbit at 41 degrees west longitude 19,313 miles overhead, and relayed to the Maspalomas ground station in the Canary Islands. The DSCS series, built by Martin Marietta Astro Space was designed to provide secure voice and high-data-rate, super-high frequency communications to U. S. national security personnel throughout the world. Originally built as a tracking station during the Apollo moon program, Maspalomas was now operated jointly by the European Space Agency and the Spanish government to track Nimbus, Seasat, NOAA, Landsat, SPOT, and MOS satellites. Maspalomas rerouted the signal to another DSCS bird that downlinked to the Greenbelt, Maryland receiving station a dozen miles northeast of downtown Washington, D. C. The duty NCO there unlocked a drawer and flipped the pages of the Shift Logbook of Standing Codes. Finding the entry he was looking for, he held a finger there and picked up a telephone with the other hand. Cradling the phone against his right ear, he dialed an eleven-digit number. There was no ring, only a series of hollow clicks as the line finally opened. He ran his finger along beneath the message he was to read. Accuracy was imperative.
"Wakeup call for Mr. Hemingway."
"Say again," said a male voice.
"Wakeup call for Mr. Hemingway," the duty officer repeated.
"Thank you." There was another click and the line went dead. The non-com hung up the phone. He neither knew the source of the message he'd received...it had simply appeared on his computer screen as an alphanumeric code...nor the meaning of the words he'd read into the telephone. He'd never read Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea". He didn't even know who or where he'd called. Scuttlebutt was that the calls he made were routed through several automated sequential dead-drop relays to avoid tracing, sometimes crossing the country several times before arriving at their intended destination. It didn't matter. His initial curiosity at his posting here had long since atrophied. It no longer mattered. Weekends mattered. He picked up his cup of coffee, leaned back, and glanced at the clock. Three-and-a-half more hours. He sighed.