Death is Forever (32 page)

Slowly Cole shifted his right hand to one of the flexible ladder’s rungs. The stone was uneven enough to keep some of the rungs a few inches away from the wall of the shaft. Where the stone didn’t slope, Abe had chipped out places for hands and toes.

“Cole? Are you sure we shouldn’t wait?”

“I’m sure it’s going to get a lot wetter down there before the dry begins. I’m damn sure our chances of surviving the ladder are a hell of a lot better than our chances of surviving ConMin’s attention for the next six months with only the
possibility
of a diamond mine as a weapon.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“This from a woman who thinks king mulgas are beautiful?”

“Tasty, too.”

His smile flashed as he shifted his left hand onto the ladder. For an instant the handle of his knife gleamed beneath the flap of the muddy leather sheath.

The ladder held his full weight.

He let out a long, silent breath and began feeling blindly with his foot for the next rung below. The ladder flexed and twisted slightly until it crunched up against rock. He found another rung and dropped more deeply into the hole. The rucksack scraped against rock and hung up in the narrow opening.

Cole cursed and went up a rung. He wriggled out of the rucksack and slung one of the straps over his right arm. Carefully he descended again. It was still a very tight fit. If he’d put one more item in the rucksack it would have hung up.

“You’re too big,” she said. “Let me take it down.”

“I was hoping you weren’t coming down at all.” But he climbed back up again and handed the rucksack to her. “Put my extra shirt back on before you get any colder.”

She reached for the clammy shirt and pulled it on. “How long will it take for the limestone below to fill up with water?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t filled this far for ten thousand years. Maybe it won’t fill up at all.” He glanced up and caught a flash of intense green from her eyes. “But I’ll tell you this, honey. I wouldn’t plan on making more than one trip before the next dry.”

She bit her lower lip as he went back down the ladder once more. She heard the scrape of stone against cloth and flesh, followed by Cole cursing the size of the very body whose strength had gotten them this far.

“Can you make it?” she asked.

“Barely.” He grunted and swore again. “Abe was built more narrow in the shoulders than I am.”

Cole vanished by inches into the hole. Water hissed when it hit the glass shielding the flame in his helmet.

“Have you ever used a flexible ladder before?” he asked just before he disappeared completely below the stone lip.

“Every time I went from a cargo ship to a Zodiac. Usually in a force-five gale.”

“After that, this will be a piece of cake. The wall slopes away enough so that you don’t bang your hands much, but not enough to let you twist in the breeze.”

When he called up from the bottom, Erin put on the rucksack, took a deep breath, and reminded herself that she’d done the same thing before under worse circumstances.

But not in the dark.

Silently Cole watched her descend the ladder while water dripped and slid and splashed all around. The rivulets had become trickles as thick as his finger. They fell harder and stayed around longer. He was standing at the bottom of the ladder in an ankle-deep pool of water. There was just enough space for two people to stand close to each another. Closer than an embrace.

A nearly circular passageway led off at an angle. The tunnel was smooth-sided and narrow.

“Watch it,” Cole said, catching Erin when her foot searched for and didn’t find a final rung. “The shaft is two feet longer than the ladder.”

Her breath came in as cool water lapped above her ankles. “I hope we aren’t going much lower.”

“So do I.”

Cole looked down and ran his helmet light over every bit of floor that he could. In a spot that would have been the base of a waterfall during the wet, the limestone floor was eaten away, making an irregular bowl. Small hunks of water-rounded stone lined the bowl.

“Can you go back up the ladder a few feet?” he asked.

She climbed back up several rungs. “Is this far enough?”

“One more.”

Ignoring the cool shower of water, Cole sat on his heels in the space she’d opened. He started scooping out handfuls of stones, trying to find the bottom of the basin. Something in the eighth handful winked and shimmered in the light with a life of its own.

“Bingo.”

“What?”

Without answering he stood up and held out his hand so that it caught the full flood of his helmet light. A rounded crystal the size of a small marble gleamed between his thumb and forefinger.

“Diamond?” Erin asked, hardly able to believe.

“As ever was. Hang onto it. I’ll see if Abe missed any more.”

“Missed?”

“This is the first pothole I’ve seen. He must have worked it over more than once on the way into the cave.”

The diamond felt cool on her palm. Adrenaline swept through her. In that instant she understood why men risked their lives mining the earth. She closed her hand around the crystal until her fingers ached.

Below her came the sound of rocks rolling together, Cole searching through debris down to the stony bottom of the basin itself. There was a long crack in the bottom where water flowed out. He probed the crack. It was too narrow for his fingers.

“Oh, well,” he said. “If there are any diamonds in that crack, they’re not real big.”

“How can you be so calm?” she demanded.

He laughed. “Calm? Honey, my hands are shaking almost as much as the first time I made love to you.”

The sound she made could have been surprise or laughter or both.

He stood and absently wiped his hands on his soaked khaki shorts. “Let’s not waste any more time here.”

“
Waste?
We just found a diamond!”

His only answer was “Watch that last step.”

Cole dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the opening that began at a right angle to the bottom of the shaft they had just descended. The floor of the tube hadn’t been pounded by falling water, so it wasn’t as deeply eroded as the plunge pool had been. The surrounding limestone was damp but not under water. The floor was scalloped.

He probed the scallops at random and found one small diamond. Tucking it beneath his tongue, he went forward. He didn’t bother to probe any more of the shallow scallops. Grimacing at the discomfort, he crawled deeper and deeper into the limestone formation.

Erin grubbed along right behind him, pushing the rucksack.

Gradually Cole realized that the tube was descending. Water seeped from ceilings and walls and collected into steady trickles. The trickles gathered in shallow channels on either side of the tunnel floor or found small cracks and disappeared deeper into the limestone. He wondered how high the water table was in this area of the Kimberley, and how long it would take to saturate the ancient, partially dissolved reef until the tunnel they were crawling through became full of water.

“The ceiling looks scalloped, too,” she said. “Does that mean this tunnel spends a lot of time full of water?”

He grunted. It was something he’d just as soon not think about.

From ahead came the sound of rushing water. He slowed down and began searching the flickering shadows ahead very carefully, seeking any openings in the floor.

Overhead, the ceiling shed water like a sieve with a handful of uneven holes. The tunnel widened from side to side. The floor was very rough, potholed from the con stant hammering of waterfalls during the height of the wet. Some of the potholes were as big as bathtubs. Others were no bigger than a fist.

Small mounds of stony debris appeared randomly, piled at either side of the tunnel.

“Abe dug out some of the potholes,” Cole said.

“Can we?”

“He kept going, which means there’s something better ahead.”

Water showered down on Cole and Erin, drenching them while they crawled forward. The temperature of the water had gone from cool to chilly. She began shivering as soon as she stopped to probe a small pothole, but she kept at it. Even her cold hands could tell the difference in texture between fragments of limestone and the sleek texture of a water-rounded diamond.

“I found one!” she called out.

“Good for you. Put it under your tongue and keep crawling.”

“But I found—”

“Abe’s tailings,” Cole interrupted. “See the debris shoved aside? He’s already been over these potholes.”

“Then why did I find a diamond?”

“Offhand, I’d guess he found something up ahead that made these potholes look like a waste of time.”

While Cole talked, he kept crawling toward the throaty, increasing sound of thunder coming from up ahead. Excitement sleeted through him, taking away the pain of cuts and bruises gotten from crawling over stone. The ceiling rose until he could duck-walk and then walk almost normally. Water lapped around his feet. He ignored it as he flexed muscles that had cramped. When Erin’s lamp appeared a few feet behind him, he turned and pulled her to her feet. She groaned with relief.

“This is more my idea of a cave,” she said, shining her light around. “A little cramped from top to bottom, but lots of space otherwise. Lots of puddles, too.”

“Yeah. And they’re getting bigger every minute.”

He spat out his diamond and put it into one of the pockets of the rucksack she carried. She handed over her own diamond and watched it disappear.

To her surprise, Cole didn’t immediately press further into the cave’s wide horizontal opening. He simply stood and ran his lamp over everything within reach of the cone of light, memorizing his location within the larger opening. Then he turned and scanned the tunnel they had just emerged from.

A large, rough
#1
had been gouged into the limestone above the tunnel. As Cole turned away, a
#2
appeared just at the limits of his helmet light.

“See any more marked openings?” he asked.

Erin turned in the opposite direction and looked. All she noticed was a distinct cool breeze.

“No more numbers, but there’s a lot of air moving.”

“Probably because there’s a lot of water coming in and pushing the air out of the way.”

“What?”

“Listen,” Cole said. “That’s not thunder. Somewhere up ahead there’s at least one cascade or waterfall pouring from the ceiling down to whatever passes for the floor around here.”

Shivering, she stood and listened.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“I’ve been a lot colder and survived just fine.”

He hesitated, then accepted her judgment of her own physical limits. “We’d better get going. I don’t know how much longer we have down here.”

“Which way?”

He pointed to the wall. “See that arrow? We go in the opposite direction.”

“Why?”

“In a cave or a mine, all arrows point to the way
out.
”

She walked closer to the arrow and made a sound of surprise. “It looks like it was just made.”

“When it comes to rocks, a decade or two isn’t much time.”

Cole turned and began walking against the arrow. After thirty feet it was clear that somewhere ahead water was pouring in faster than it could drain out. A thin puddle appeared on the floor. Within twenty feet, the water was over his shoes.

“Don’t trust the footing,” he said. “There could be potholes underneath this puddle deep enough to drown in.” He stopped and turned toward her. “You can swim, can’t you?”

“Yes, but I’d rather not. This water isn’t getting any warmer.”

“Do you want—”

“No,” she said, cutting across his words. “I don’t want to go back. I want to see Abe’s jewel box.”

“We may be walking over it right now.”

Instantly Erin’s light flashed down to the water lapping over her feet. “Do you really think so?”

“Maybe, but not likely. I don’t see any piles of rubble. Mining, even placer mining, is a messy process.”

Accompanied by the steadily increasing thunder of distant water, they splashed through the broad, shallow puddle. He was careful to stay within sight of the wall and its arrows until the
#2
opening appeared. The prospect of crawling through it wasn’t inviting. The opening was small. The water was at least six inches deep and flowing with a pronounced current.

“Well?” she asked as she came to stand beside Cole.

“It’s flowing away from us.”

“So?”

He shrugged. “So I expected it to be flowing
toward
the sound of falling water, which is behind us.”

With that he dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl, cursing steadily.

She followed without hesitating. A few minutes later she understood why he was swearing so savagely. The ceiling came to within a foot of the floor and the sides of the tube closed in until his shoulders audibly scraped both sides.

“Can you make it through?” she called.

His only answer was a grunt, followed by splashing and another round of curses as the tunnel took a hard bend to the left. He jackknifed through it and found himself in easier going. The ceiling lifted again. Soon he was standing upright, but sideways. The solution channel was so narrow that his shoulders wouldn’t fit any other way.

The sound of falling water filled the narrow space, but only a few trickles showed in the lantern light. Twelve feet farther down the channel, another ladder appeared. It led up through another long narrow shaft that had been widened at one point by rushing water. The ladder was wet with runoff.

“Wait until I’m up top before you start climbing,” Cole said.

He put his weight onto the first gleaming metal rung. The opening of the crack was so narrow there was no worry about the ladder twisting and banging him against stone. Water poured over an unseen lip above, drenching the ladder with an insistent shower.

Fourteen rungs later, his helmet light picked up another opening in the slowly dissolving limestone. He rolled out of the hole and called down to Erin.

“Come on up.”

Her helmet light went out halfway up. Instantly he shined his own light over the rim. When her shoulders and the rucksack poked above the hole, he lifted her free, removed her helmet, and lit the flame. She gave a broken sigh of relief.