War From The Clouds (17 page)

I looked back toward the struggling warriors and guerillas and knew that the automatic weapon was useless here. If I opened fire, I would kill friends and enemies alike. I reached back and snaked Wilhelmina from the tape.

Kneeling, I singled out a guerilla and took careful aim. The luger boomed and seemed to shake the trees around the clearing. But a guerilla went down. One by one, I picked off five guerillas and made a quick count in my head. Of ten guerillas, we had killed seven. Three were missing.

Worse yet, of the twelve Indian warriors Botussin had sent with us, eight were dead. Purano had been shot in the shoulder and Pico had slight wounds in his thigh and left arm. Both could walk, but they would never be able to climb that chimney to Alto Arete.

While Pico and Purano rallied the four surviving spearchuckers to go look for the three guerillas who had got away, I went down the slope to check on Antonio. Elicia was hovering over him, hugging his head to her bosom, crying softly. I could see from ten paces away that he was dead.

He was. His body was full of holes from the rain of bullets. I shuddered to think that, if I hadn't plunged into the forest wall when I did, my body would look much like his.

"We'll come back for him," I said gently to Elicia. "When it is over, we'll take him to the Indian camp for a proper burial."

She got up and went into the jungle. I waited, watching the minutes flip past on my digital watch. It was twenty minutes past four. We had just ten minutes to find the caves and begin our climb up that chimney.

But death has a way of stalling time, of making it stand still. I could do nothing but wait for Elicia's grief to run its course.

To make matters worse, the four warriors returned and told Purano in stilted whispers that they had lost the three guerillas they had been sent to dispatch. I calculated the distance to the nearest guerilla camp and figured we had plenty of time to be out of here before the alarm went out in any effective manner. Of course, there were the red-shirted guerillas of Don Carlos Italla's elite corps parading about and they could be here in minutes, but I decided not to let that worry me. Not much, anyway.

After five minutes, Elicia came back into the clearing, her eyes dry. In her hands was a cluster of wild roses she had found in the thicket.

She crossed her dead brother's hands over his chest and lay the roses on his hands. Then, she looked up at me.

"We will go now and kill the beast on the mountain."

The three guerillas who had escaped death in the battle in the clearing were still nowhere to be seen. Pico and I led the way to the rocks and then all of us began tossing the stones aside. Even Purano worked with his one good arm and rolled huge boulders down the slope and into the jungle.

It took ten minutes to clear away enough rocks so that we could see the top of the well. A very precious ten minutes.

The well was covered with a cut stone slab about the size of the top of a pool table. It took all of us to nudge it aside, inch by inch, until there was a big enough opening for one of us to slip inside. Pico took a small rock and dropped it into the well.

Less than a second later, we heard the splash. Pico shook his head.

"No good," he said. "The map was right, although I'm certain there was no water here thirty years ago. There must be a system for draining and filling it at will, but it would take us days to learn the key to that system. The cave entrance, the tunnel I recall crawling through after going down many steps, is filled with water. Perhaps even the cave itself is full of water."

We stood there on that pile of stones and peered into the darkness of the water-filled well, and thought of so many deaths that had come for nothing.

And of all the deaths to come.

It was 4:30. In four hours, more or less, Don Carlos Italla would fire his flare gun from the top of Alto Arete and the war masterminded from the clouds would commence. The only hope of stopping that signal was through the cave and up through the chimney. Even if we had had a military escort up the regular trail to the mountaintop, we still couldn't have made it on time.

We were at one end of the shortest distance between two points. And there was water in the way.

All right, I thought. Water certainly isn't impenetrable.

"Let's move the slab all the way off the well," I said, "and get some light into the damned thing. I'm going down."

"It is hopeless," Pico said. "We should spend our energies in returning to the tribal camp, in convincing Chief Botussin that we must move the camp farther into the hills, in…"

"Let Senor Carter go down," Purano said.

We all turned to look at him. He hadn't spoken five words during the whole of the afternoon, not even when the guerillas had attacked. When he had been shot in the arm and thigh, he hadn't uttered a sound.

I stared at his dark eyes and wondered if he wanted me to go down to a certain death, or if he really held out hope. I couldn't read a thing in those eyes, in that deadpan face.

Five minutes later, we had the slab removed from the well and I was tying the thin, strong rope around my chest, just under my armpits.

"How far down did you climb before you came to the entrance?" I asked Pico.

"I don't remember how far," he said. "There were steps, but I don't remember it being an ordeal."

"Okay," I said, picking up a heavy rock to use as a weight. "Let me down as fast as I can sink. Play out no more than a hundred feet of rope, though. If I'm not up in sixty seconds from the time my head goes under water, pull me up, fast."

I gave my digital watch to Elicia so she could serve as timekeeper. I passed the luger and the automatic rifle over to Purano, wondering why in hell I put so much trust in him. But I wanted Pico's strong arms on that rope and I was glad to see that he took it up without being asked.

The water was cold and clear. I dropped swiftly for a few feet, then put one hand on the slippery side of the well to slow the descent. I peered around and around at the sides as I dropped with the stone in my hand. There were no breaks, no holes, no steps.

About twenty five feet down, I encountered the stone steps and could see that the steps above that point had been chiseled away. Don Carlos had planned well when he had taken to the clouds.

I had been counting in my head as I dropped through the water and searched for a break in the sides of the well. I was up to forty and still counting. I let go of the side and dropped more swiftly, wondering how far it was to the bottom and if the entrance was there.

When I hit the count of sixty, I felt the rope go taut. My eyes strained downward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the opening to the cave. I saw only the deep gloom that exists in the bottoms of all wells. But there was something different about that gloom.

As the rope began hauling me up out of the water, and as my lungs began to sear from the pain of foul air, I realized what was different below me.

There were no more steps.

The steps ended at a point about sixty feet down. As I was being hauled past the point where the steps left off, I saw a dark spot on the wall to my left, on the downhill side of the well. It was the opening.

I almost did something foolish then. I slid my stiletto into my hand and was about to cut the rope, to swim through that opening, afraid I wouldn't be able to find it again. My lungs won out over my foolishness and I was soon breaking the surface of the water and sucking in air like a landed fish.

"Did you find the opening?" Pico asked as he helped me over the rim of the well.

"I think so. It's about sixty feet down, on the left side here. Can all of you swim?"

It was a kind of stupid question to ask people who had lived their entire lives on an island. But I had to make certain. We didn't have room for anymore foul-ups. I described the location of the opening, just below where the steps ended.

It was decided that Pico and Purano would remain behind and stack rocks around the opening to make it look as though no one had found and entered the well. Then, they would return to the village and help the others move to the ancient campsite, just in case. Although I feared insulting the Indians and their craftsmanship, I chose the nylon rope over the hemp. It was lighter and much stronger. I taped Wilhelmina in a waterproof pouch to my back and checked to make certain Pierre and Hugo were in place. I wasn't wild about the idea of Elicia going into this impossible situation with me and the surviving four spear-chuckers, but there was no other way.

The spearchuckers themselves weren't any too happy about the arrangement. Once they comprehended the situation, they went into another whispered consultation with Purano. He frowned, then turned to me.

"They fear the curse," he said. "They refuse to go into the cave."

I had expected this, but had hoped against it. There was no way I could go into that cave and up that chimney alone. Even if I could, what possible chance would I have at the top, if I, indeed, ever reached the top? And there was no way Purano and Pico could accompany us, with their wounds. I looked at the four warriors, peering into each face in turn.

"If you don't go," I said as brutally as I could, "you'll have more than a curse to fear. Eight of your brothers died on this slope. If we remain here much longer, the red-shirted guerillas will kill the rest of you. And if they don't, I'll kill you before I go back into the water."

I meant what I had said. I had already swung a Russian rifle around toward them as I spoke. They looked to Purano for help.

"Go, or I will kill you before he has the chance."

It wasn't the sweetest of conditions, but the warriors gave grudging nods. I took the minimal amount of time to show them how to use the automatic rifles, then we were as ready as we ever would be.

"I'll go first," I said. "This time, I won't do anything to slow my descent. I'll drop as fast as the rock will take me. I'll find the opening again and swim through. If I find safe, dry land, I'll tug three times on the rope. If I don't signal within the allotted sixty seconds, pull me back up. If you pull and nothing happens, you'll know I've had it. Nobody should follow."

It would have been a safer plan for me to swim down, investigate the opening and come back to describe it in detail. But time was running out so fast that I decided on the far more dangerous aspect. It didn't matter, really. If this failed, we would all be dead within hours anyway. Or, with the elite corps in the area, within minutes.

This time, I cradled a much larger rock in my arms. As I hurtled down through the water, my ears kept popping from the sudden change in pressure. I was going so fast that I could barely see the steps flitting past.

When I reached the point where the steps ended, I tugged once on the nylon rope and immediately dropped the heavy stone. I swam upward a few feet and reached into the blackness. It was a hole. I flipped the trailing rope out of the way and swam into the hole.

The darkness was so total that I was certain I'd swum through into open space, into the mysterious Black Hole of Space. But there was nothing but blackness.

The fifty-second point passed and I felt the pain start up again in my lungs. I swam on and on. Sixty seconds. Sixty one. I felt the rope drawing tight around my armpits and knew that Pico was up there pulling, his strong arms bristling with muscles on the rope.

I was about to turn and swim with the tug of the rope when I saw a patch of light ahead and above. A lake? Impossible. I was well below the surface of the mountain. There couldn't be open water up there.

But it was something bright, something worth investigating. I pulled three times on the rope, then waited until it went slack. Our signals were working perfectly, but now I was totally on my own. If that patch of light turned out to be something other than open water, or at least a surface where I could breathe, I had no time left to swim back through the opening and up through the well.

My air was already exhausted and the pain that had begun to sear my lungs was now attacking all my joints. Everything in my body was crying out for oxygen.

My arms felt numb and tingly, almost refusing to work for me. I kept swimming, taking an upward angle toward the patch of light. The light grew in size and intensity, but it never became nearly as bright as the light at the top of the well.

And it seemed to be slipping away into the distance the farther and the harder I swam. The pain in my lungs and joints grew to a constant throbbing. I felt dizzy and disoriented, the way I had felt in special diving classes and on other assignments when I had had to swim to deep parts of the ocean. I recognized the sensation as what divers call "Raptures of the Deep." I was getting giddy and it seemed to me that it might be great fun to play with that patch of light above. I would swim almost to the surface, then dive deep again, teasing that light as though it were some benevolent animal.

Fortunately, I didn't dive. If I had, I would have instantly drowned. I broke the surface just as air came exploding from my lungs. It was an automatic spasm and the sucking in of air was just as automatic, just as involuntary. If it had happened underwater, I would have filled my lungs with water instead of air.

The light was indeed dimmer than the light outside. I was in the middle of a pool of water and there were dark rocks all around me. Above was a huge dome of a cavern. Off to one side, around an outcropping of rock, was a beam of light.

I swam to the rocks and crawled out onto what had to be the bottom of the sacrificial cave. I lay panting for several minutes and was just starting to investigate the huge cavern when something broke the water in the pond and I saw Elicia floundering near the rocky bank. She was too weak to swim any longer. I leaped back into the water and nudged her to shore.

One after another, the warriors popped up into the pond like corks from bottles. One after another, I jumped in and brought them to shore.