Soul Intent (33 page)

As I pitched forward, I tried to contain the damage by landing on my hands. My wrist lights illuminated a pile of rocks just before I crashed into it.

I scrambled up and used my lights to trace the contours of the rock pile.

What I saw dashed my hopes: large boulders, the smallest at least two feet in diameter, filled the tunnel all the way to the ceiling. I scrambled my way up the pile and tugged at the top-most stones, but they were wedged in, and despite my efforts, they wouldn’t budge.

I crept back the length of the tunnel, down the stairs, and into the gallery.

Sue looked up. “No cart?”

I shook my head. “They seem to have blasted the tunnel up close to the entrance, and it’s now full of huge rocks. We can’t get out that way.”

“Can’t get out…” Her eyes widened, and she reached out to George. “He needs medical attention, Scott—he’s barely getting any air. He’s got a tension pneumothorax.”

“A what?”

“A collapsed lung. Every breath forces more air through the bullet hole into his chest cavity, and it’s squeezing against his organs.” She pointed to George’s neck. “See how his veins are bulging? That’s the pressure building up against his heart. He’ll die, Scott, unless he gets immediate help.”

fifty-four

Present Day

Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

I stared at George’s ashen face and bloated chest. “What can we do?” I asked Sue.

“Get him to a doctor now!”

That wasn’t going to happen until we found another way out of the mine. I tried to remember anything from the first aid course I had taken as a teenager, but I drew a blank.

Maybe Sue knew. “What will the doctors do when we get him there?” I asked her.

She screwed up her face and clenched her fists, and I reached out and grabbed her arm. “I know you’re in a lot of pain, Sue, but you’ve got to help me help George.”

She stared at me and then back at her husband. It didn’t seem I was getting through. I reached up and grabbed her cheeks in my hands, forcing her to look at me. “Sue?” I whispered. “How does a doctor fix a pneumothorax?”

She bit her lip and closed her eyes. Then she opened them, and I noticed her panic had subsided. “They put a tube in the chest,” she said. “To let the air out and relieve the pressure.”

Of course! Memories of that long-ago first aid class surged through my head, and I could see my teacher holding up a ballpoint pen and saying, “when all else fails, the barrel can be used as a tube.” He had been talking about a tracheotomy, but that was close enough.

“Do you have a pen?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“How about George?”

She leaned over and felt through his pockets. “No pen.”

Dammit. I glanced around the gallery, and I saw my discarded bail-out bottle. Maybe that would work.

I scrambled over to the bottle and used my dive knife to cut off a four inch section of the narrow-gauge hose. I rushed back to Sue. “Which lung do you think collapsed?”

She put her hand on his left side. “This one.”

Her hand lay just above the bullet hole.

I decided to put the tube on the right side. I looked at Sue. “I’m going to cut a small slit with my knife, and then I’m going to shove in this tube. Are you okay with that?”

She looked at George, and then she reached out and stroked his cheek. She turned back to me, and I saw tears in her eyes. She nodded.

We unbuttoned George’s shirt. I felt for a space between his ribs down at the bottom right side, across from the bullet hole. I placed the point of my diving knife on the spot I had chosen. Then I paused and looked at her. “Ready?”

She nodded, and I wiggled the knife back and forth as I pushed it downwards. It went through George’s skin, but then stopped against something firm. I increased the pressure.

The knife broke through, and I wiggled it until I had a half-inch slit. I hesitated. “This is going to really hurt him.”

“Do it!” she cried. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

I twisted the blade, and George let out a yell. His arms flew up and slammed into both of us, and his hands grabbed at the knife.

I jammed the section of tubing into the hole. Then I forced it downwards until I heard the hiss of air escaping. It sounded like a tire valve when the filling hose first detaches.

“You did it,” Sue said.

I pulled out the knife, took a deep breath, and wiped my trembling, bloody hands on my pants. “Now we hope it works.”

We watched George’s bloated chest slowly subside. He seemed to be taking deeper breaths, and some color returned to his face.

Sue wiped his forehead and smiled at me. “What you did was amazing.”

“You’re the one who knew what to do.” I pointed up the stairs. “George still needs help—we need to find a way out of here.”

She grimaced. “The tunnel was the only way in. How big are those rocks?”

“I couldn’t move them. We need some tools.” I glanced around the cave. “But the winch is on the bottom, and we have no power, anyway.”

I heard Val cough, so I crawled over to her. She looked at me and gave a faint smile. “What did I miss?” she asked.

I swallowed the huge lump in my throat and let out a chuckle. I slid my arm under her shoulder and pulled her into an embrace. “You had me so worried,” I said.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Uh oh—how long was she without oxygen? “We’re in Dubnik Mine, in Slovakia.”

She turned her head toward me and kissed my cheek. “No, silly,” she said. “Are we next to the water or next to the radio?”

Whew. “Next to where George had the winch.”

She nodded. “Are the two power cables still there?”

I looked around. “Maybe, but the power’s out. Only the battery LED lights are working.”

“Good.”

I pulled back and stared at her. “What makes that good?”

“We can use the cable as an antenna.”

“For what? Your cell phone?”

She shook her head. “The impedance is all wrong for a cell phone. But I noticed that the base station for George’s ultrasonic gear has a sixty kilohertz LF relay. All it needs is an antenna, and we should be able to communicate from this mine.”

She grabbed my arm and pulled herself up. “George once told me that our communications centers scan many frequencies,” she said to Sue.

Sue nodded. “They do—at least they used to, before we went digital. Maybe somebody is still listening, and they can get us out of here.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “And Mr. Morgan too—I almost forgot about him!”

Val looked at me. “A sixty kilohertz signal has a five thousand meter wave.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I once did shortwave. Radio travels at three hundred million meters per second. Divide that by sixty thousand, and you get five thousand meters.”

She definitely had recovered.

“Antennas have to be quarter, half, or full wavelength to work,” she said. “A quarter-wavelength antenna would be twelve hundred fifty meters.” Val scrunched up her face. “Where did you say the tunnel was blocked?”

“Close to the entrance.”

“Do you think there’s more than three hundred meters before the block?”

“Yes,” I said. But what did that matter? Then I got it. Two pairs of power cables running up the tunnel meant there were four wires. “You want to string the wires together to make an antenna?”

She nodded. “A quarter-wavelength one.”

“Let’s find the cables.” I passed her a wrist light, and we found the base station, its power cable, and the winch’s power cable. I pulled out my dive knife, cut the ends off, and stripped the red and black wires inside each cable.

Val twisted the two red wires together. “When you get to the far end, just connect each pair of wires, red twisted to black,” she said.

I needed to trust her on this. “How far up the cable do I go?” I asked.

“Three hundred and six meters, or three hundred and forty-six yards,” she said. “Approximately. But try to get it as accurate as you can, because we don’t have much battery power, and we can’t afford much signal degradation.”

Easier said than done. I knew my splayed hand spanned nine inches between thumb and pinky—it was my built-in ruler. I measured out four hand-spans on the bail-out bottle’s tubing. Then I headed up the stairs, using the tubing to measure my way yard by yard along the cables.

I took my time, knowing I had to get it right. Once I was afraid I had lost track of my numbers, and twice I banged my head on the low overhangs. But after crawling my way up the tunnel, I found the three hundred and forty-sixth yard was about ten feet short of the rock pile.

I hesitated before I cut the cable. This was our last possible link to the outside. But we’d need to call for help if we couldn’t force our way out, and George and Sue weren’t capable of digging.

I sliced through the cables and stripped the wires down. I twisted together each pair, then cut two small sections off the tubing and shoved them over the bare wires. Then I crept back down the tunnel.

fifty-five

Present Day

Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

Sue looked up as I came over. She had a big smile on her face. “He’s awake,” she said.

I knelt down next to George. “Hey, you really scared us,” I said.

“I’m still scared.” He gave me a tired smile. “Especially for Mr. Morgan. And Flora and the twins, of course.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Sue told me what you did, and I appreciate it, Scott.”

I patted his shoulder. “You’d do the same for me.”

“You betcha.” He raised his hand and slowly flexed it. “Val says you two are rigging up an LF antenna.”

I nodded. “Does anybody in Sterling still listen in on the low end of the spectrum, or did you guys go totally digital?”

“We have two offices who never upgraded—Tibet and Siberia,” he said. “Sterling keeps the scanners on for the odd message coming from them.” His voice had faded, and I had to lean in to catch his words.

“Low frequencies will reach all the way to Sterling?” I asked.

“They will,” Val said. “That’s why submarines, airplanes, and boats use them. They’re even better than short wave, because their waves are ground-hugging.”

“You’re going with a quarter-wavelength antenna?” George asked her.

Val nodded. “That’s all the wire we have. We’ll have to use the ground to reflect the other quarter.”

“Will that work?” I asked. I knew next to nothing about antennas.

“It will, but usually only when the antenna is vertical,” George said. “Since we’re underground, we’ll have to hope there’s not too much feedback.”

“We can make a balun to cut out the noise,” Val said.

She smiled when he saw my perplexed look. “You’ve seen the magnet rings on some computer cables, right?” she asked.

I nodded. “My old keyboard had one. That’s a balun?”

She nodded. “Balun is short for balance-unbalance,” she said. “The radio is expecting an unbalanced signal over coax, and that long monopole antenna you made is balanced. We can unbalance it by wrapping its close end around a magnet before we hook it up.”

“Where will you get a magnet?” Sue asked.

I snapped my fingers. “Speakers have magnets—inside the underwater headphones.”

Val nodded. “We can use the facemasks. Bring every magnet you can.”

I retrieved the four facemasks and unsnapped the headphones. I sliced the speakers open with my dive knife and extracted a pill-shaped magnet from each earpiece. Then I brought the eight magnets to Val.

She stacked the magnets and wrapped eight loops of wire around the resulting cylinder. Then she pointed at the cart rails. “Attach the other end to the rails as a ground,” she said.

I took my dive knife and slid the blade between one of the spikes and the rail’s lip. I sawed it back and forth as I blew out the rust particles. Then I folded over the exposed black wire from the end of Val’s makeshift antenna and jammed it into the de-rusted space.

Val shoved her end of the wire into the hole in the middle of the external antenna port on the base communicator. “We have an antenna,” she said.

“Now let’s hope the batteries last,” George said. He still lay on his back with his feet propped on the rebreather. He motioned for the microphone, and Sue stretched the cord and handed it to him. He looked at each of us, and then he gave us a grin. “Relax—it’ll work.”

“That’s my Georgie,” Sue said. “Always positive.”

Val turned on the communicator. A loud buzz came out of the speakers, and she frowned and turned it off.

“It’s still too balanced,” George said.

Val scratched her head. “I must have miscalculated. I think I need at least a meter of wire on the balun.” She pulled on the antenna to make some slack, then replaced the existing eight loops with thirty new closely-spaced ones.