Atlantis Found (8 page)

Then a hand lifted from the murk, removed a mouthpiece to an air regulator, and raised a diver’s face mask over the forehead. A pair of vivid green opaline eyes were revealed under the miner’s lamp as the lips spread into a wide smile that displayed an even set of white teeth.

“It would appear,” a friendly voice said, “that I have arrived in the proverbial nick of time.”

4

PAT COULD NOT HELP but wonder if her mind, numbed by fright and the torment to her body from the frigid water, was playing weird tricks. Ambrose and Marquez stared blankly, unable to speak. Shock was slowly replaced with an overpowering wave of relief at suddenly having company and knowing the stranger was in contact with the world above. Cold fear abruptly evaporated, to be replaced with inspired hope.

“Where in God’s name did you come from?” Marquez blurted excitedly.

“The Buccaneer Mine next door,” answered the stranger, shining his dive light around the walls of the chamber before focusing its beam on the obsidian skull. “What is this place, a mausoleum?”

“No,” answered Pat, “an enigma.”

“I recognize you,” said Ambrose. “We talked earlier today. You’re with the National Underwater and Marine Agency.”

“Dr. Ambrose, isn’t it? I wish I could say it was a pleasure meeting you again.” The stranger looked at the miner. “You must be Luis Marquez, the owner of the mine. I promised your wife I’d get you home in time for dinner.” He stared at Pat and grinned slyly. “And the gorgeous lady has to be Dr. O’Connell.”

“You know my name?”

“Mrs. Marquez described you,” he said simply.

“How in the world did you get here?” Pat asked, still dazed.

“After learning from your sheriff that your mine entrance was covered by an avalanche, my team of NUMA engineers decided to try and reach you through one of the tunnels leading from the Buccaneer Mine to the Paradise. We’d only covered a few hundred yards when an explosion shook the mountain. When we saw water rising in the shafts and flooding both mines, we knew the only way left to reach you was by a diver swimming through the tunnels.”

“You swam here from the Buccaneer Mine?” asked Marquez incredulously. “That has to be nearly half a mile.”

“Actually, I was able to walk much of the distance before I entered the water,” explained the stranger. “Unfortunately, the surge was more than I expected. I was towing a waterproof pack containing food and medical supplies behind me on a line, but it was torn away and lost after a torrent of water swept me against an old drill rig.”

“Were you injured?” asked Pat solicitously.

“Black and blue in places I care not to mention.”

“It’s a miracle you found your way through that maze of tunnels to our exact location,” said Marquez.

The stranger held up a small monitor, whose screen glowed an unearthly green. “An underwater computer, programmed with every shaft, crosscut, and tunnel in the Telluride canyon. Because your tunnel was blocked by the cave-in, I had to detour to a lower level, circle around, and travel from the opposite direction. As I was swimming through the tunnel, I caught the dim glimmer of light from your miner’s lamp. And here I am.”

“Then no one aboveground knows that we were trapped by a cave-in,” stated Marquez.

“They know,” the diver answered him. “My NUMA team called the sheriff as soon as we realized what happened.”

Ambrose’s face showed an unhealthy pallor. He failed to display the enthusiasm of the others. “Is there another member of your dive team following you?” he asked slowly.

The diver gave a slight shake of his head. “I’m alone. We were down to our last two tanks of air. I felt it was too risky for more than one man to make the attempt to reach you.”

“It seems a waste of time and effort for you to have made the trip. I see little that you can do to save us.”

“I may surprise you,” the diver said simply.

“There is no way your twin scuba tanks hold enough air to take all four of us back through a labyrinth of flooded tunnels to the world aboveground. And since we’ll either drown or die of hypothermia in the next hour, you won’t have time to go and bring back help.”

“You’ve very astute, Doctor. Two people might make it back to the Buccaneer Mine, but only two.”

“Then you must take the lady.”

The diver smiled ironically. “That’s very noble of you, my friend, but we’re not loading lifeboats on the
Titanic.”

“Please,” begged Marquez. “The water is still rising. Take Dr. O’Connell to safety.”

“If it will make you happy,” he said, with seeming insensibility. He took Pat by the hand. “Have you ever used scuba gear before?”

She shook her head.

He aimed his dive light at the men. “How about you two?”

“Does it really matter?” said Ambrose solemnly.

“It does to me.”

“I’m a qualified diver.”

“I guessed as much. And you?”

Marquez shrugged. “I can barely swim.”

The diver turned to Pat who was carefully wrapping her camera and notebook in plastic. “You swim alongside me and we’ll buddy-breathe by passing the mouthpiece on my air regulator back and forth. I’ll take a breath and hand it to you. You take a breath and hand it back. As soon as we drop out of this chamber, grab hold of my weight belt and hang on.”

Then he turned back to Ambrose and Marquez. “Sorry to disappoint you, fellows, but if you think you’re going to die, forget it. I’ll be back for you in fifteen minutes.”

“Please make it less.” Marquez stared back from a face as gray as the granite. “The water will be over our heads in twenty minutes.”

“Then I suggest you stand on tiptoe.”

Taking Pat by the hand, the man from NUMA slipped beneath the water and disappeared in the murky water.

 
KEEPING the beam of his dive light aimed ahead in the tunnel, the diver followed one of the illuminated lines displayed on his little computer. Looking up from the tiny monitor, he aimed his dive light ahead into the tunnel and swam toward the forbidding shadows. The water had risen to the roof of the tunnel, and the surge he’d experienced earlier had fallen off. He stroked and kicked his fins mightily through the flooded cavern, dragging Pat behind him.

Stealing a quick glance backward, he saw that her eyes were tightly closed, her hands clinging to his weight belt in a death grip. The eyes never opened, even as the mouthpiece to the air regulator was passed back and forth.

His decision to rely on a simple U.S. Divers’ Scan face mask and a standard U.S. Diver’s Aquarius scuba air regulator instead of his old reliable Mark II full face mask turned out to be wise. Traveling light made it easier for him to swim nearly half a mile through a maze of underground passages from the Buccaneer Mine, many partially filled with fallen rock and timbers. There were also dry galleries the flooding water had not yet reached, where he had to crawl and walk. Trudging over ore car rails and ties and fallen rock while toting bulky air tanks, buoyancy compensator, various gauges, a knife, and a belt loaded with lead weights was not an easy chore. The water was icy cold, but he stayed warm inside his DUI Norseman dry suit during the passages he was forced to swim. He had chosen the Norseman because it had greater ease of movement when he was out of the water.

The water was turbid and the beam from the dive light, cutting a swath in the liquid void, penetrated only ten feet into the murk. He counted the shoring timbers as they passed, trying to gain a perspective on how far they had traveled. At last the tunnel made a sharp turn and ended in a gallery that led to a vertical shaft. He entered the shaft and felt as if he had been swallowed by an alien monster from the depths. Two minutes later, they broke the surface, and he aimed the dive light into the black above. A horizontal tunnel leading on to the next level of the Paradise Mine beckoned forty feet above.

Pat smoothed the hair from her face and stared wide-eyed at him. It was then he saw that her eyes were a lovely shade of olive green. “We made it,” she gasped, coughing and spitting water from her mouth. “You knew about this shaft?”

Holding up the directional computer, he said, “This little gem led the way.” He placed her hands on the slimy rungs of a badly rusted ladder leading upward. “Do you think you can make it up to the next level on your own?”

“I’ll fly if I have to,” said Pat, overjoyed at being free of the hideous chamber and knowing she was still alive, with a chance, albeit a slim one, of eventually becoming a senior citizen.

“As you climb the ladder, pull yourself up with your hands on the vertical bars, and mind you don’t step in the center of the rungs. They’re old and probably half rusted through. So go carefully.”

“I’ll make it. I wouldn’t dare mess up. Not after you got me this far.”

He handed her a small outdoorsman butane lighter. “Take this, find some dry wood from a timber, and start a fire. You’ve been exposed to the cold water much too long.”

As he pulled the dive mask back down over his face and prepared to duck under that water again, her hand suddenly tightened around his wrist. She felt drawn into the opaline green eyes. “You’re going back after the others?”

He nodded and threw her a smile of encouragement. “I’ll get them out. Don’t worry. There’s still time.”

“You never told me who you are.”

“My name is Dirk Pitt,” he said. Then, the mouthpiece reinserted, he gave a brief wave and vanished into the murky water.

 
THE water had reached the shoulders of the men in the ancient chamber. The terror of claustrophobia seemed to rise along with the water. All barbs of panic had receded as Ambrose and Marquez quietly accepted their fate in their private Hades deep inside the earth. Marquez chose to fight to the last breath, while Ambrose silently embraced a diehard death. He steeled himself to swim down through the cleft into the tunnel and go until his lungs gave out.

“He’s not coming back, is he?” Marquez mumbled.

“Doesn’t look like it, or else he won’t make it in time. He probably thought it best to give us false hope.”

“Funny, I had a gut feeling we could trust the guy.”

“Maybe we still can,” said Ambrose, seeing what looked like a glowworm approaching from under the water.

“Thank God!” gasped Marquez as the beam from the halogen dive light refracted and danced off the ceiling and walls of the chamber just before Pitt’s head broke water. “You came back!”

“Was there ever a doubt?” Pitt asked lightly.

“Where is Pat?” demanded Ambrose, as Pitt’s eyes met his through the plate of the dive mask.

“Safe,” Pitt said briefly. “There’s a dry shaft about eighty feet down the tunnel.”

“I know the one,” acknowledged Marquez, his words barely intelligible. “It leads to the next level of the Paradise.”

Identifying the obvious signs of hypothermia in the miner, the drowsiness, the confusion, Pitt elected to take him instead of Ambrose, who was in the better shape of the two. He had to be quick, because the numbing cold had tightened its grip and was draining the life out of them. “You’re next, Mr. Marquez.”

“I may panic and pass out when I’m submerged,” Marquez moaned.

Pitt gripped him on the shoulder. “Pretend you’re floating in the water off Waikiki Beach.”

“Good luck,” said Ambrose.

Pitt grinned and gave the anthropologist a friendly tap on the shoulder. “Don’t go away.”

“I’ll wait right here.”

Pitt nodded at Marquez. “All right, pal, let’s do it.”

The trip went smoothly. Pitt put all his strength into reaching the shaft as quickly as possible. He could see that unless the miner got dry soon, he would lose consciousness. For a man afraid of water, Marquez was game. He’d take a deep breath from the regulator and dutifully pass it back to Pitt without missing a beat.

When they came to the ladder, Pitt helped push Marquez up the first few rungs until he was completely out of the cold water. “Do you think you can make it up to the next tunnel on your own?”

“I’ll have to,” Marquez stammered, fighting the cold that had seeped into his veins. “I’m not about to give up now.”

Pitt left him and returned for Ambrose, who was beginning to look cadaverous from the effects of the icy water. Hypothermia from the cold water had lowered his body temperature to ninety-two degrees. Another two-degree drop and he would be unconscious. Five more minutes and it would have been too late. The water was only inches away from the chamber’s ceiling. Pitt didn’t waste time in talk, but shoved the mouthpiece into the anthropologist’s mouth and pulled him down into the cleft and out into the tunnel.

Fifteen minutes later, they were all grouped around a fire that Pat had managed to ignite from scraps of wood she’d found in a nearby crosscut passage. Scrounging about, Pitt soon discovered several old, fallen timbers that had remained dry over the years the mine had been abandoned. It wasn’t long before the tunnel was turned into a blazing furnace and the survivors from the inundated chamber began to thaw out. Marquez began to look human again. Pat rebounded and was her old happy self as she vigorously massaged Ambrose’s frozen feet.

While they treasured the warmth of the fire, Pitt busied himself with the computer, planning a circuitous route through the mine to the ground above. The Telluride valley was a virtual honeycomb of old mines. The shafts, crosscuts, drifts, and tunnels totaled more than 360 miles. Pitt marveled that the valley hadn’t collapsed like a wet sponge. He allowed everyone to rest and dry out for close to an hour before he reminded them that they weren’t out of the woods yet.

“If we want to see blue skies again, we’ll have to follow an escape plan.”

“What’s the urgency?” shrugged Marquez. “All we have to do is follow this tunnel to the entrance shaft and then sit it out until rescuers dig through the avalanche.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,” Pitt said, his voice grim, “but not only were rescuers finding it impossible to get their heavy equipment through twenty feet of snow up to the mine on a narrow road, they were pulled from the search because of rising air temperatures that were increasing the chances of another avalanche. There is no telling how many days or weeks it will take for them to clear a path to the mine entrance.”