Legend: An Event Group Thriller

by David L. Golemon

  “Damn!” she exclaimed.

  “Yeah, I hope whoever is out there is paying attention, because our slave master is about to pay them a visit.”

  “Well, she’s ready,” Jenks said into the intercom as he reached out for the lever that opened the small two-door hatch at the bottom near the bilges. He winched Snoopy 3 into the murky lagoon, then made his way back to the main lounge, where everyone had gathered for their first glimpse into the mine. Even in the radar and communications room, Jackson leaned forward in his seat to watch, and accidentally hit the Sonar Contact Alarm switch, an audible warning system that allowed the operator to be warned of the approach of something moving toward Teacher. When the switch was accidentally thrown, it effectively converted the sonar’s programmed task to an ordinary eyes-only sweep.

  Twenty feet beneath the keel of Teacher, the creature was now swimming on its back, kicking easily as it stared upward at the bottom of the boat. Every few minutes it would rise and run a hand along the hull and then quickly dart away. When Snoopy 3 was lowered into the water, the beast swam quickly toward the opened hatch but came up short when the doors silently closed. The hand slowly reached out and touched Snoopy’s smooth, torpedolike shape. When the probe did nothing but sit there at zero buoyancy, the amphibian gently slapped at it, then struck it again as the device dipped its nose and then righted level. The beast became bored with the small craft and swam once again along the bottom, every once in a while rising and quickly peering through the underwater windows of Teacher. Finally it came to a window where several people sat on the opposite side of the clear acrylic. It closely examined all the faces within its view, slowly becoming agitated by what it saw. A second, smaller animal approached and was quickly chased away by the larger, more aggressive one. Even several of the plesiosaurs came close, out of curiosity, and were abruptly swiped at. They shot off into the lower extremities of the lagoon.

  There was a buzz of excitement as Jenks made his way to the additional control panel he had installed in the lounge. Virginia was already there and he smiled at her as he sat down next to her. Jack was leaning against the bulkhead, Sarah sitting in front of him, by the large underwater window. Carl and Danielle were seated next to her. When Jack nodded, Jenks turned to the controls and threw a switch. The four monitors arrayed around the lounge came to life, along with the six-inch screen in front of Jenks. The probe’s nose camera came on at the same time as the lights did, and they saw the bright green waters of the lagoon illuminate in a twelve-foot diameter around Snoopy 3 as the small craft bobbed just below the surface.

  “Here we go,” the master chief said as he toggled Snoopy forward and down into the depths. Virginia patted his leg and then placed her hands in her lap.

  Snoopy made a half circle under the boat and came out the opposite side, then made for a compass heading of magnetic north, toward the falls. As it approached, the water became choppier, but the master chief held it on course and depth, only adjusting the speed as he advanced the throttle to compensate for a current that was starting to push the probe back toward the center of the lagoon. Then Snoopy started forward again, its thruster started to gain a foothold in the current. To conserve power, Jenks kept only the forward light and camera on, the latter now picking up white water ahead as the two-hundred-foot falls struck the lagoon’s surface. He lowered Snoopy’s nose as the water became rough. He sent the device deep to smooth out its ride beneath the catarata. Ellenshaw was so nervous during this that he began ringing his hands together until Heidi reached and stilled them.

  Despite its depth, Snoopy 3 was in tumult as it reached the cascading falls. Its nose dipped again as the free-falling water above the device created turbulence as deep as thirty-five feet. Snoopy rolled to the right as the nose came up, only to immediately lose buoyancy as the full weight of the falls struck its hardened plastic body. On camera, it almost looked as if the probe were being manhandled by otherworldly forces as it was tossed by the natural falls. Jenks wasn’t too concerned, as his concentration was centered on the panel in front of him, where he had readouts showing speed, depth, and power usage. He held steady, then throttled back as the vortex of water pressure started to lessen. Most everyone in the room breathed a sigh of relief as Snoopy edged its way past the extreme edge of the waterfall and into calmer waters.

  “Chief, can we get a fathometer reading on the depth of the water where she’s at right now,” Sarah asked.

  Jenks toggled a switch. The readout on his remote control panel went from passive to active sonar. “I can only use this a few times, so this will be a quick scan of her surroundings. Just watch the monitors and the readout will appear there.”

  From within the confines of the ship, everyone in the boat felt as well as heard the powerful sonar ping that coursed through the water.

  Outside, below the boat, the animal brought its large hands up to its head and started thrashing about as the loud underwater noise struck. Then it settled down, shaking its head from side to side, as the sound dwindled to nothing.

  “There you go. It looks like we have twenty-five on the starboard side, thirty-seven on the port and … well, she’s a deep channel, numbers are still going up,” Jenks said.

  The numbers from the sonar reading resembled those they had received from Teacher when they had probed the bottom of the lagoon. The body of water looked to be bottomless, with the exception of two large shelves on either side of Snoopy. Other than that small anomaly, the shear rock walls appeared to extend down infinitely.

  “I am convinced this is a caldera—what we’re looking at is a lava shaft that runs hundreds of thousands of feet below the surface here,” Sarah said. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “Maybe we just found the front door and long hallway to hell,” Jenks joked.

  The poorly timed joke was met with deathly silence by everyone. Caldera or underworld, the question remained whether any of the missing students were still alive.

  Farbeaux and Mendez faced their men, on the far side of the rapids. The lagoon lay just beyond the bend, and the Frenchman had just seen the American craft sitting at the center of the lagoon, well lit and inviting within this hidden wonder.

  “Now am I clear—we are to use the shoreline as cover as we skirt the Americans. We will be lost among the shore clutter if they are actively using sonar as security.”

  The men nodded. Even Rosolo admired the Frenchman’s approach. It was just too bad he would not be following him. He had a detour to make.

  Mendez, rotund and ridiculous in his shiny wetsuit, went from man to man speaking Spanish to each. Farbeaux caught a phrase or two. The Colombian was promising they would have riches beyond belief if they succeeded in their mission. Farbeaux suspected the mines were indeed full of gold, but how much could be removed before the Brazilian government moved in to take their find? That fool Mendez thought he could buy off anyone, any government. But why should a government accept his pitiful payout when they could have the entirety of the greatest gold find in history? The greedy Colombian couldn’t be allowed to live once they reached El Dorado. The Frenchman didn’t need the Brazilian authorities to ever gain full knowledge of the other treasures that were hidden in veins underneath the ground here, which the gold would lead them to. No, he could not allow that.

  Farbeaux placed his face mask over his head and made sure his rebreather was operating properly. He held his hand in the air, then slowly lowered it toward the water and started off. He was followed by Mendez and his men. The last to enter the water was Captain Rosolo, who would swim as far as the boat with them.

  “It looks like a very wide shelf on the right, about thirty-five feet I would say,” Jenks said as Snoopy entered the cave behind the falls. The light picked up the calm water and the master chief proclaimed loudly that there was indeed a current inside, of about three knots.

  “That means the waters in here must empty out somewhere,” Sarah surmised.

  Snoopy shallowed as Jenks pulled upward on t
he toggle. The camera went from showing a solid green frame of water to a darker variant of the same as it aimed the camera up through the surface of the canal.

  “Turning to the right,” Jenks called as he angled Snoopy in that direction just as the probe came shallow to fifteen feet.

  Carl pointed at the screen. “Look at that! The shelf you were talking about has actually been carved out—”

  “Are those steps?” Virginia interrupted.

  On the monitor, the camera picked out first one, then two steps that went off into the distance on either side of Snoopy. These first two stone steps led to a third, then a fourth, and on and on.

  Jack leaned in closer to the monitor. “Chief, can you get me a shot of the upper areas of the cavern?”

  “Yeah, you see something?”

  Jack just looked at him and didn’t answer.

  Jenks adjusted the right-side camera and brought three pounds of ballast into the small probe, tilting it to the left and raising the angle of the camera. As the lights disappeared into the darkness, the camera caught another sight that made everyone’s mouth drop. Once again, a strained silence filled the cabin. Onscreen were level upon level of pillars and, beyond them, ornately carved walls.

  “Look at those walls, how they angle inward toward the waterfall at the top,” Virginia observed with awe.

  “A pyramid,” Keating said as he studied the camera’s moving image. “It’s a damned stepped pyramid.”

  “It’s like we’re looking at it inside out,” Heidi said, moving closer.

  Each level of the interior became smaller the farther toward the top they went. Each pillar lining its respective level served as a load-bearing strut, strengthening each story as they climbed higher toward the source of falls. Giant openings were visible beyond the pillars, indicating that there were portals into the mine itself.

  “This is an impossible engineering feat,” said Keating.

  “The Inca must have turned the inside of a natural cave, or lava vent, into a more recognizable architectural interior. After all, they couldn’t take anything out of here without praying and having their god Supay sanction the removal of his treasure,” Sarah said and then looked around her at everyone. “I’m just guessing, of course.” A silence followed.

  “I think it’s as good a theory as we have at the moment,” Virginia finally said.

  The camera continued to send back images of the vast expanse of the mine. Because of Snoopy’s depth in the water and its being only the right-side lens that poked free of the surface, their view was limited. But to Jack, this information, along with what Sarah had gathered in the diving bell earlier, indicated that the mine shafts not only rose with the pyramid, but also would lead down into the earth, far beyond the level of the lagoon.

  “Surfacing,” Jenks finally called, anxious to see the pyramid in a better light. He and everyone in the section again leaned forward in their seats, as Snoopy broke the surface. “Turning on all her lights and cameras,” he said, and quickly flipped the switches on the other three cameras and three sets of lights.

  On the monitor, the screen image separated into four separate camera angles. One showed the long staircase as it rose out of the water and continued another fifteen or twenty steps above the surface of the entrance canal. The steps terminated at what looked like a giant flat rock, about two hundred feet in length.

  “A platform?” Heidi wondered aloud.

  “Close, Heidi,” Jack said, uncrossing his arms. “Do you want to tell them, swabby?” He turned to Carl.

  The lieutenant commander rose from his seat next to Danielle and pointed along the image on one of the wall-mounted monitors. “See how this rises out of the water as a solid square of stone with steps petering out in the middle, and then they start up again on either side of this platform? Now, look along the edge of this giant stone—see these?” He pointed to ten different protrusions that lined the edge of the platform. They looked like a set of longhorns, each horn branching out left and right about three feet each. “They’re cleats, and what we’re looking at here is a dock.”

  Everyone finally saw it. It was a two-hundred-foot-wide docking area, with two-pronged projections used for tying off boats. The stairs came up from either side of the dock, for swimmers to go to and from the canal.

  “Think we can tie up there, Chief?” Jack asked.

  “Be awful rough heading through those falls, not like the smaller ones we went through earlier. I don’t think so, Major. My bet would be she would be battered to pieces.”

  “I suspect there may be a mechanism inside that place, which can alter the direction and force of the falls, to draw the fury of the water away from entering and exiting boats,” Heidi ventured. “That’s how the ancients collected their treasure.”

  Jack just nodded. On the screen he saw Snoopy back away from the dock, giving the four bright lights a chance to take in more higher up. Several darkened objects became visible on the top of the platform, shapes that the voyagers had come to know intimately. Two towering statues of Supay, the Incan god of the underworld, rose majestically on either side of the huge dock. The stone carvings stared down on Snoopy with belligerent eyes that were heavily lidded and appeared to be made of solid gold as the light from the probe played on it. The artwork was far more meticulous than on the two statues they had passed at the tributary entrance. The stone was studded with gemstones of all shapes and sizes; rubies and emeralds lined the arms and wrists of the giants. The trident and ax were also made of gold, and looked even more lethal than the ones outside. Then the light picked up something on one deity’s belly. The statue on the right had been vandalized. Professor Keating loudly voiced his outrage, making everyone else in the lounge jump.

  “What kind of a hoax is this?” he shouted as he went to the nearest monitor and raised his glasses. As the others looked at the image closely, just more than one jaw dropped. Curses erupted throughout the lounge. If Jack hadn’t been so taken aback he would have laughed. Etched in paint on the belly of the giant deity was a graffito that had traveled from the docks of the Brooklyn shipyards in New York to Africa and through all of Europe and Japan during World War II, once used as a universal marker in all the places where American troops had already been:

  “So, how long will you need to decipher this message?” Jenks laughed, but inside he was just as stunned as everyone else.

  “After the days and the danger our people faced in finding the Padilla route, we find this?” Heidi said angrily.

  “Someone in our government has known all along that this was here,” Virginia said, standing up. “What were they after, gold?”

  Jack reached out and selected the proper switch on the intercom. “Stiles?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How’s the transmitter coming?”

  “Been online for five minutes Major; just finished up,” Stiles answered from the main mast.

  “Good. Get in here and get me Group, ASAP,” Jack said as he watched the bobbing and unstable picture from Snoopy 3.

  “On my way,” was the quick answer.

  “This can’t be about gold,” was all Jack said as he turned toward the radio room.

  Rosolo had left the long line of men as they continued on past the American boat. He had easily swerved away without being noticed and swam toward the large hull, which was aglow with bright light emanating from the interior. He would have to be careful to avoid the underwater windows. He reached the stern, slowly made his way to the halfway point amidships, then studied the design. He placed his hand against the hull. He could feel the activity inside even through his gloves. He didn’t need a flashlight, as the water was lit up as if he were inside a giant emerald. He reached into his bag and brought out a three-pound limpet charge. He placed it against the hull and pushed, engaging the large suction cups on the back of the mine. Then he traveled down toward the stern, where he’d estimated the boat’s engines would be, and placed another charge there. As he set the timers for three
minutes, he felt movement around him. It was as if something had swum by at a very fast speed, but as he turned he saw nothing.

  Jackson had turned back from the window to his sonar when the major had called for a situation report on the repairs for the radio. He was no longer looking outside, to see the approach of Rosolo or that of the creature. He even failed to notice that he had unintentionally changed the setting of the sonar alarm, the very specialized piece of naval equipment that had been previously activated to warn of the proximity of an underwater threat.

  “This is Teacher Actual one, on the line for Group Director Compton,” Stiles said into the large handheld phone, then he set the instrument down and switched the communications to the speaker, to enable the voyagers to hold a conference call.

  “Jack, where in the hell have you been?” Niles asked.

  “Well, we had a bit of wildlife trouble here; knocked out our transmitter.”

  “Boris and Natasha had your visual for most of the day, and then we had a circuit failure on her and we lost picture. But before the old girl went down we saw who we thought was Stiles on the main mast working on your dish. Any luck finding those kids, Jack?”

  “Negative, but we have discovered something we need you to check on.”

  “What’s that?”

  With just those two words Jack heard how some of the hope had drained from Niles’s voice. Finding no survivors was not what the director had wanted to hear.

  “Stand by to receive a fax of a still photo. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  Stiles placed an eight-by-ten of the graffito painted on the belly of the eighty-foot statue of Supay into the scanner and then hit send.

  Several moments later Niles came back on, furious.

  “All right, I want you and Carl to disembark Teacher and go it alone in the search. Get everyone else out of there, Jack. We’ve been had by someone. Either the president is lying outright to me or someone is lying to him, but I’m not taking any chances. Someone knew what was there and didn’t warn us— or Helen. Get your people out now!”