"Well, at least whoever he was did us a favor," said Hidalgo.
Maderas looked at him. "Oh, and what was that?"
Hidalgo grinned unfeelingly. "He wasn't in the water long enough to smell."
Three hours later, the patrol vessel entered the breakwater of San Felipe and tied up alongside the Alhambra.
As Pitt had suspected, after reaching shore in the life raft, Gordo Padilla and his crew had gone home to their wives and girlfriends and celebrated their narrow escape by taking a three-day siesta. Then, under the watchful eye of Cortina's police, Padilla rounded everyone up and hitched a ride on a fishing boat back to the ferry. Once on board they raised steam in the engines and pumped out the water taken on when Amaru opened the seacocks. When her keel was unlocked by the silt and her engines were fired to life, Padilla and his crew sailed the Alhambra back to San Felipe and tied her to the dock.
To Maderas and Hidalgo, looking down from their bridge, the forward car deck of the ferry looked like the accident ward of a hospital.
Loren Smith was comfortably dressed in shorts and halter top and exhibited her bruises and a liberal assortment of small bandages over her bare shoulders, midriff, and legs. Giordino sat in a wheelchair with both legs propped ahead of him in plaster casts.
Missing was Rudi Gunn, who was in stable condition in the El Centro Regional Medical Center just north of Calexico, after having survived a badly bruised stomach, six broken fingers, and a hairline fracture of the skull.
Admiral Sandecker and Peter Duncan, the hydrologist, also stood on the deck of the ferryboat, along with Shannon Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, and a contingent of local police and the Baja California Norte state coroner. Their faces were grim as the crew of the navy patrol ship lowered the stretcher containing the body onto the Alhambra's deck.
Before the coroner and his assistant could lift the body bag onto a gurney, Giordino pushed his wheelchair up to the stretcher. "I would like to see the body," he said grimly.
"He is not a pretty sight, senor," Hidalgo warned him from the deck of his ship.
The coroner hesitated, not sure if under the law he could permit foreigners to view a dead body.
Giordino stared coldly at the coroner. "Do you want an identification or not?"
The coroner, a little man with bleary eyes and a great bush of gray hair, barely knew enough English to understand Giordino, but he nodded silently to his assistant who pulled down the zipper.
Loren paled and turned away, but Sandecker moved close beside Giordino.
"Is it. . ."
Giordino shook his head. "No, it's not Dirk. It's that psycho creep, Tupac Amaru."
"Good Lord, he looks as if he was churned through an empty cement mixer."
"Almost as bad," said Duncan, shuddering at the ghastly sight. "The rapids must have beat him against every rock between here and Cerro el Capirote."
"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," Giordino muttered acidly.
"Somewhere between the treasure cavern and the Gulf," said Duncan, "the river must erupt into a rampage."
"No sign of another body?" Sandecker asked Hidalgo.
"Nothing, senor. This is the only one we found, but we have orders to continue the search for the second man."
Sandecker turned away from Amaru. "If Dirk hasn't been cast out into the Gulf by now, he must still be underground."
"Maybe he was washed up on a beach or a sandbank," offered Shannon hopefully. "He might still be alive."
"Can't you launch an expedition down the subterranean river to find him?" Rodgers asked the admiral.
Sandecker shook his head slowly. "I won't send a team of men to certain death."
"The admiral is right," said Giordino. "There could be a dozen cascades like the one Pitt and I went over. Even with a Hovercraft like the Wallowing Windbag, it's extremely doubtful anyone can gain safe passage through a hundred kilometers of water peppered with rapids and rocks."
"If that isn't enough," added Duncan, "there's the submerged caverns to get through before surfacing in the Gulf. Without an ample air supply, drowning would be inescapable."
How far do you think he might drift?" Sandecker asked him.
"From the treasure chamber?"
"Yes."
Duncan thought a moment. "Pitt might have a chance if he managed to reach a dry shore within five hundred meters. We could tie a man on a guideline and safely send him downstream that far, and then pull them back against the current."
"And if no sign of Pitt is found before the guideline runs out?" asked Giordino.
Duncan shrugged solemnly. "Then if his body doesn't surface in the Gulf, we'll never find him."
"Is there any hope for Dirk?" Loren pleaded. "Any hope at all?"
Duncan looked from Giordino to Sandecker before answering. All eyes reflected abject hopelessness and their faces were etched with despair. He turned back to Loren and said gently, "I can't lie to you, Miss Smith." The words appeared to cause him great discomfort. "Dirk's chances are as good as any badly injured man's of reaching Lake Mead outside of Las Vegas after being cast adrift in the Colorado River at the entrance to the Grand Canyon."
The words came like a physical blow to Loren. She began to sway on her feet. Giordino reached out and grabbed her arm. It seemed that her heart stopped, and she whispered, "To me, Dirk Pitt will never die."
"The fish are a little shy today," said Joe Hagen to his wife, Claire.
She was lying on her belly on the roof of the boat's main cabin, barely wearing a purple bikini with the halter untied, reading a magazine. She pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and laughed. "You couldn't catch a fish if it jumped up and landed in the boat."
He laughed. "Just wait and see."
"The only fish you'll find this far north in the Gulf is shrimp," she nagged.
The Hagens were in their early sixties and in reasonably good shape. As with most women her age, Claire's bottom had spread and her waist carried a little flab, but her face was fairly free of wrinkles and her breasts were still large and firm. Joe was a big man who fought a losing battle with a paunch that had grown into a well-rounded stomach. Together they ran a family auto dealership in Anaheim specializing in clean, low-mileage used cars.
After Joe bought a 15-meter (50-foot) oceangoing ketch, and named it The First Attempt, out of Newport Beach, California, they began leaving the management of their business to their two sons. They liked to sail down the coast and around Cabo San Lucas into the Sea of Cortez, spending the fall months cruising back and forth between picturesque ports nestled on the shores.
This was the first time they had sailed this far north. As he lazily trolled for whatever fish took a fancy to his bait, Joe kept half an eye on the fathometer as he idled along on the engine with the sails furled. The tides at this end of the Gulf could vary as much as 7 meters (23 feet) and he didn't want to run on an uncharted sandbar.
He relaxed as the stylus showed a depression under the keel to be over 50 meters (164 feet) deep. A puzzling feature, he thought. The seafloor on the north end of the Gulf was uniformly shallow, seldom going below 10 meters at high tide. The bottom was usually a mixture of silt and sand. The fathometer read the underwater depression as uneven hard rock.
"Aha, they laughed at all the great geniuses," said Joe as he felt a tug on his trolling line. He reeled it in and discovered a California corbina about the length of his arm on the hook.
Claire shaded her eyes with one hand. "He's too pretty to keep. Throw the poor thing back."
"That's odd."
"What's odd?"
"All the other corbinas I've ever caught had dark spots on a white body. This sucker is colored like a fluorescent canary."
She adjusted her halter and came astern to have a closer look at his catch.
"Now this is really weird," said Joe, holding up one hand and displaying palm and fingers that were stained a bright yellow. "If I weren't a sane man, I'd say somebody dyed this fish."
"He sparkles under the s
un as if his scales were spangles," said Claire.
Joe peered over the side of the boat. "The water in this one particular area looks like it was squeezed out of a lemon."
"Could be a good fishing hole."
"You may be right, old girl." Joe moved past her to the bow and threw out the anchor. "This looks as good a place as any to spend the afternoon angling for a big one."
There was no rest for the weary. Pitt went over four more cataracts. Providentially, none had a steep, yawning drop like the one that almost killed him and Giordino. The steepest drop he encountered was 2 meters (6.5 feet). The partially deflated Wallowing Windbag bravely plunged over the sharp ledge and successfully ran an obstacle course through rocks hiding under roaring sheets of froth and spray before continuing her voyage to oblivion.
It was the boiling stretches of rapids that proved brutal. Only after they extracted their toll in battering torment could Pitt relax for a short time in the forgiving, unobstructed stretches of calm water that followed. The bruising punishment made his wounds feel as if they were being stabbed by little men with pitchforks. But the pain served a worthy purpose by sharpening his senses. He cursed the river, certain it was saving the worst for last before smashing his desperate gamble to escape.
The paddle was torn from his hand, but it proved a small loss. With 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of equipment in a collapsing boat in addition to him, it was useless to attempt a sharp course change to dodge rocks that loomed up in the dark, especially while trying to paddle with one arm. He was too weak to do little more than feebly grasp the support straps attached to the interior of the hull and let the current take him where it might.
Two more float cells were ruptured after colliding with sharp rocks that sliced through the thin skin of the hull, and Pitt found himself lying half-covered with water in what had become little more than a collapsed air bag. Surprisingly, he kept a death grip on the flashlight with his right hand. But he had completely drained three of the air tanks and most of the fourth while dragging the sagging little vessel through several fully submerged galleries before reaching open caverns on the other side and reinflating the remaining float cells.
Pitt never suffered from claustrophobia but it would have come easy for most people in the black never-ending void. He avoided any thoughts of panic by singing and talking to himself during his wild ride through the unfriendly water. He shone the light on his hands and feet. They were shriveled like prunes after the long hours of immersion.
"With all this water, dehydration is the least of my problems," he muttered to the dank, uncaring rock.
He floated over transparent pools that dropped down shafts of solid rock so deep the beam of his lamp could not touch bottom. He toyed with the thought of tourists coming through this place. A pity people can't take the tour and view these crystallized Gothic caverns, he thought. Perhaps now that the river was known to exist, a tunnel might be excavated to bring in visitors to study the geological marvels.
He had tried to conserve his three flashlights, but one by one their batteries gave out and he dropped them over the side. He estimated that only twenty minutes of light remained in his last lamp before the Stygian gloom returned for good.
Running rapids in a raft under the sun and blue sky is called white-water rafting, his exhausted mind deliberated. Down here they could call it black-water rafting. The idea sounded very funny and for some reason he laughed. His laughter carried into a vast side chamber, echoing in a hundred eerie sounds. If he hadn't known it came from him, it would have curdled his blood.
It no longer seemed possible that there could be any place but this nightmare maze of caverns creeping tortuously end on end through such an alien environment. He had lost all sense of direction. "Bearings" was only a word from a dictionary. His compass was made useless by an abundance of iron ore in the rock. He felt so disoriented and removed from the surface world above that he wondered if he had finally crossed the threshold into lunacy. The only breath of sanity was fueled by the stupendous sights revealed by the light from his lamp.
He forced himself to regain control by playing mind games. He tried to memorize details of each new cavern and gallery, of each bend and turn of the river, so he could describe them to others after he escaped to sunlight. But there were so many of them his numbed mind found it impossible to retain more than a few vivid images. Not only that, he found he had to concentrate on keeping the Windbag afloat. Another float cell was hissing its buoyancy away through a puncture.
How far have I come? he wondered dully. How much farther to the end? His fogged mind was wandering. He had to get a grip on himself. He was beyond hunger, no thoughts of thick steaks or prime rib with a bottle of beer flooded through his mind. His battered and spent body had given far more than he expected from it.
The shrunken hull of the Hovercraft struck the cavern's roof which arched downward into the water. The craft revolved in circles, bumping against the rock until it worked off to one side of the mainstream of the river and gently grounded on a shoal. Pitt lay in the pool that half-filled the interior, his legs dangling over the sides, too played out to don the last air tank, deflate the craft, and convey it through the flooded gallery ahead.
He couldn't pass out. Not now. He had too far to go. He took several deep breaths and drank a small amount of water. He groped for the thermos, untied it from a hook and finished the last of the coffee. The caffeine helped revive him a bit. He flipped the thermos into the river and watched it float against the rock, too buoyant to drift through to the other side.
The lamp was so weak it barely threw a beam. He switched it off to save what little juice was left in the batteries, lay back, and stared into the suffocating blackness.
Nothing hurt anymore. His nerve endings had shut down and his body was numb. He must have been almost two pints low on blood, he figured. He hated to face the thought of failure. For a few minutes he refused to believe he couldn't make it back to the world above. The faithful Wallowing Windbag had taken him this far, but if it lost one more float cell he would have to abandon it and carry on alone. He began concentrating his waning energies on the effort that still lay ahead.
Something jogged his memory. He smelled something. What was it they said about smells? They can trigger past events in your mind. He breathed in deeply, trying not to let the scent get away before he could recall why it was so familiar. He licked his lips and recognized a taste that hadn't been there before. Salt. And then it washed over him.
The smell of the sea.
He had finally reached the end of the subterranean river system that climaxed in the Gulf.
Pitt popped open his eyes and raised his hand until it almost touched the tip of his nose. He couldn't distinguish detail, but there was a vague shadow that shouldn't have been there in the eternal dark of his subterranean world. He stared down into the water and detected a murky reflection. Light was seeping in from the passage ahead.
The discovery that daylight was within reach raised immensely his hopes of surviving.
He climbed out of the Wallowing Windbag and considered the two worst hazards he now faced-- length of dive to the surface and decompression. He checked the pressure gauge that ran. from the manifold of the air tank. Eight hundred fifty pounds per square inch. Enough air for a run of maybe 300 meters (984 feet), providing he stayed calm, breathed easily, and didn't exert himself. If surface air was much beyond that, he wouldn't have to worry about the other problem, decompression. He'd drown long before acquiring the notorious bends.
Periodic checks of his depth gauge during his long journey had told him the pressure inside most of the airfilled caverns ran only slightly higher than the outside atmospheric pressure. A concern but not a great fear. And he had seldom exceeded 30 meters of depth when diving under a flooded overhang that divided two open galleries. If faced with the same situation, he would have to be careful to make a controlled 18-meter (60-foot) per-minute ascent to avoid decompression sickness.
Wha
tever the obstacles, he could neither go back nor stay where he was. He had to go on. There was no other decision to make. This would be the final test of what little strength and resolve was still left in him.
He wasn't dead yet. Not until he breathed the last tiny bit of oxygen in his air tank. And then he would go on until his lungs burst.
He checked to see that the manifold valves were open and the low-pressure hose was connected to his buoyancy compensator. Next, he strapped on his tank and buckled the quick-release snaps. A quick breath to be sure his regulator was functioning properly and he was ready.
Without his lost dive mask, his vision would be blurred, but all he had to do was swim toward the light. He clamped his teeth on the mouthpiece of his breathing regulator, gathered his nerve, and counted to three.
It was time to go, and he dove into the river for the last time.
As he gently kicked his bare feet he'd have given his soul for his lost fins. Down, down the overhang sloped ahead of him. He passed thirty meters, then forty. He began to worry after he passed fifty meters. When diving on compressed air, there is an invisible barrier between sixty and eighty meters. Beyond that a diver begins to feel like a drunk and loses control of his mental faculties.
His air tank made an unearthly screeching sound as it scraped against the rock above him. Because he had dropped his weight belt after his near-death experience over the great waterfall, and because of the neoprene in his shredded wet suit, he was diving with positive buoyancy. He doubled over and dove deeper to avoid the contact.
Pitt thought the plunging rock would never end. His depth gauge read 75 meters (246 feet) before the current carried him beneath and around the tip of the overhang. Now the upward slope was gradual. Not the ideal situation. He'd have preferred a direct ascent to the surface to cut the distance and save his dwindling air supply.
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