Lawyers in Hell (30 page)

When Pythagoras found him in a joke shop on Forty-Second Street, Houdini was morosely slumped over his counter, staring at a well-worn photo of his beloved Beatrice, once his wife and partner in the act known as “The Houdinis.”

“How are you, Harry?” Pythagoras inquired.

Houdini, looking up:  “Pi!  Could be worse.  What’s the occasion?  Have you found a way to transmigrate our doomed souls out of here?”

Pythagoras just smiled.  “Maybe….”  Then he made Houdini the offer:  “Not the chance of a lifetime, but of many lifetimes.  Join me.  Pull off the greatest escape in infernity’s history.”

Hearing Pythagoras’ proposal, Houdini’s eyes widened:  “Pi, I’m eager.  Your scheme is far preferable to selling magic tricks that won’t work to the desperate damned, to pay for my sins of pride and lust for glory.  The challenge is irresistible.”

“And should we succeed, my friend,” Pythagoras said softly, “the prize is freedom.”

*

It took Nichols hours to identify candidates for his ops team.  And hours weren’t reliably passing at the same rate.

By the time he had his short-list winnowed to two, he was diabolically pissed off.  The two candidates he adjudged most qualified were:  Captain John B. Merkerson, late of the 10
^th
Mountain Division and the 10
^th
Special Forces Group; and Major John Wesley Powell, late of the U.S. Geologic Survey.  These two men were experts in their fields, apparently fearless, and combat veterans.

Merkerson was the son of a ski instructor in the Colorado Rockies.  A mountaineer with an iconoclastic bent; he sought solitude but played well with others.  While assigned to a Special Forces A-team during Vietnam, Merkerson received a battlefield commission and was decorated for gallantry.  After the war, he transferred first to the 10
^th
Special Forces Group (Airborne) and then to the 10
^th
Mountain Division at Fort Drum.  He was killed in his prime during that tour by a drunken ambulance chaser.  When Nichols interviewed him, Merkerson’s only condition was that if they survived the mission, Nichols would help him find the ambulance chaser who’d killed him.

Next, Nichols tracked down Major John Wesley Powell, the quintessential exploration geologist.  Like Merkerson, Powell had explored the Rockies widely.  Fighting for the Union during the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, Powell lost his right arm.  In 1869, he led the Powell Geographic Expedition through the Grand Canyon and up the Green and Colorado Rivers, then wrote the definitive book on the Colorado Rockies.  Later, he became director of the U.S. Geologic Survey and founding director of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology.  If Powell had a personal stake in the outcome of this expedition, Nichols could easily enlist him.  Powell’s DIS file noted that since the onset of the time perturbations, the missing right arm had begun “ghosting” in and out of existence, disappearing and reappearing randomly.  Powell assumed the ghost arm was part of his personal torment.

Nichols was going to convince him otherwise.

*

“You’re useful,” Nichols conceded to Pythagoras.  “But now you want me to bring an escape artist on a caving expedition to an unexplored island?  Why?”  As Nichols got up, his heavy Desert Eagle snagged his ladder-back chair.  “Houdini’d be excess baggage.  A wild card with no training in rock climbing and spelunking.  The last thing I need is a damned magician.  It’s too risky.”

Pythagoras pouted.  “Fine, just leave me behind, too.”  Nichols needed an expert on time perturbations and all matters temporal.  Pythagoras was Nichols’ first, best choice.  And Pythagoras knew it.

Satan was already on Welch’s back, demanding results.  The window for reaching the
Yamato
via Huey on schedule was rapidly closing.  Nichols wouldn’t bother Welch with administrative detail.  Pythagoras had Nichols over a barrel, and the stubborn little Greek with the comb-over and the long nose knew it.

“Fine, Pythagoras.  You’re responsible to see that this Erik Weisz Houdini guy doesn’t get in the way.  The magician pulls any shit, or wimps out, we leave him behind – wherever or whenever.  A spectator on this mission is something I won’t fucking tolerate.”

*

The helicopter gunship moved stealthily on its flight path from the
IJN Yamato
to the mysterious island, giving Nichols too much time to think, and rethink, and wonder how he got into this fact-finding junket.

If his prima donnas followed orders, everything would go fine.  Get in, reconnoiter, get out.  That’s all there was to it … but his hackles were up.  Bad sign.

So far it had all gone like clockwork.  Shipboard, Merkerson and Powell clicked immediately and became fast friends, a geologic mutual-admiration society.  Houdini was quiet and intense:  agile, and physically strong enough for the task ahead.  Despite his oldish bookworm’s body, Pythagoras was in reasonable shape.

So what had Nichols so torqued?  Maybe it was killing the oracle.  Maybe just nerves.  Pre-mission jitters.  Still, he needed to shake his forebodings.  His team couldn’t be allowed to guess that he harbored doubts about this mission.

On initial approach, Nichols had Achilles swing wide and circle the island.  It was about five miles wide by about seven miles long, with a large rock outcropping off shore on the leeward side, a small mountain rising a thousand feet at its center, and forested with deciduous trees, wrong for this latitude.  A white sand beach with a scummy black border encircled it like a dirty collar.

There were structures on the beach.  Or rocks that looked like structures.  Nichols had Achilles put the Huey down on the beach near the offshore outcroppings, to get a better look.  He ordered Houdini to stay with Achilles, and Merkerson and Powell to reconnoiter the adjoining woods.

He and Pythagoras then got out and walked toward the rocks.

Structures?

*

Merkerson, with Powell, beside him, encountered utter silence in the woods.  Normally, even in hell’s bleakest regions, you heard something:  birds, beasts, insects.

But here nothing howled or peeped or even fluttered.

Could he and Powell be the only living things in this forest?  The trees around them, trees that shouldn’t have been growing here, were twisted unnaturally.  The deeper they trekked, the weirder the forest became.

Time to get back to the beach.  If they could find it.

*

When Nichols and Pythagoras reached the rocks, they found a series of altars or ceremonial stones there, inscribed with kanji characters, sigils, runes and grotesque figures.  The large upright slabs had shackles attached.  The stones were stained dark with blood.

Nichols looked up and away, his attention drawn to a spot at the center point of the horizon.  A face like the face of Chaos itself arose from the ocean and filled the entire horizon before him.

That face scared the devil out of him.

The vault above darkened to an ominous crimson.  A shimmer of gold wreathed the great head rising from the sea.

Nichols trembled.  Suddenly, he was cold.

Pythagoras shook him:  “Are you all right, Nichols? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Nichols shook his head, as if he could shake the fear out of his brain.  The apparition disappeared (if it had ever been there).  The horizon was merely horizon:  sea and sky, nothing more.

Nichols didn’t daydream.  Something had been there; now it wasn’t there.

He grabbed Pythagoras by the arm, dragging him toward the helicopter:  “I’m fine.  Let’s go – we’ve got work to do.”

*

As the party reassembled at the helicopter on the beach, Nichols outlined his plan of action:  “First, we emplace a data-link repeater on top of the mountain.  This will be the only conduit that permits real-time communications with Achilles on the
Yamato
.  Then we set up a VHF data transceiver and digital image transmitter outside the mouth of that cave entrance we spotted from the air.  Within mutual line-of-sight of the repeater and the transceiver antennas, we can control the transceiver remotely via the comm link.  Same for the multi-spectral video recorder we’ll carry into the mountain with us.”  Everything depended on a MIL-SPEC fiber-optic cable, rugged enough to be unraveled as they moved through the cave, but light enough not to bog them down.

Nichols continued:  “Second:  Achilles, after the comm link is in place and we’re working our way into the cave, you return to the
Yamato.
  With you in reserve, at least part of the team will be safe and Welch will have his report for Satan.  Stay alert.  Be prepared for an emergency extraction if things get too hot.”

Achilles, hero of the siege of Troy, began bitching:  “Here we go again – you guys go off and have all the fun while I have to cover your rear.  Why can’t I –”

“At ease, cowboy,”
Nichols cut off Achilles in mid-sentence.
 
“We’re running a military expedition here.  You know how to play the game.  If you didn’t want to come, you shouldn’t have let Welch volunteer you.”

Achilles scoffed but said nothing more.

“Third:  Powell, as our geologist, you’ll lead the party into the cave system and determine the most expedient course to our destination.”

Nobody argued the details.  Achilles and Merkerson took the helicopter up again while the rest of the party remained on the beach.

*

Nichols handed his binoculars to Pythagoras, who winced as he watched Merkerson execute a rappel out of the helicopter:  quickly drop face-down from the helicopter to the top of the mountain.  When the repeater and antenna were emplaced atop the mountain, Nichols angled the antenna so the main lobe would have maximal line of sight to the repeater.

With the comm check apparently successful, Merkerson grabbed the rope, put his foot in its loop, and Achilles ferried him back to the beach at the mountain’s base.  Pythagoras was certain that Merkerson would fall any second to a grisly death.

In a wash of stinging sand and beaten air, Achilles gently lowered the helicopter.  When Merkerson was low enough to comfortably drop into the midst of the team assembled on the sand, Achilles released the line suspending him.

With the last team member safely disembarked, the helo went invisible, as if by magic:  no sign of it was left save the residual sand its rotor blades kicked up.

*

Meanwhile Powell, undertook a cursory inspection of the cave mouth, pronouncing it a natural entrance based on the exposed karst resulting from limestone dissolution, and kept up a running dialogue in Nichol’s earbud:  the cave descended in a gentle incline for as far as he could see, and appeared totally unremarkable.

“No matter how natural it looks, stay alert, Powell,” Nichols said into his wire.  Now was not the time to let down their guard:  he knew damn well that in hell appearances could be deceiving.

The party donned helmets with headlamps and connected a safety line among them in thirty foot intervals; Nichols took the rear:  they’d be screwed if the fiber-optic cable tangled with the ropes they’d need to stake off for any upcoming vertical descents.

Several hundred meters into the subterranean void, Powell reported the first vertical chasm.  Powell warned that he was lighting a flare and dropped it into the hole, revealing the chasm was several hundred meters deep, and ended in water.  Saying that the cave system still sloped ahead of him, Powell asked for and received Nichol’s permission to continue down the gentle slope.

At the rear, Nichols played out his comm cable, hoping that the makers of the altars outside were long gone.

Another five hundred meters in, the tunnel widened into a long horizontal gallery.  Lights from their helmets illuminated stalactites and stalagmites, glorious and eerily serene.  They trekked through an enchanted forest of crystalline columns, sink holes and helictites until a wall blocked their path, featureless but for a narrow squeezeway.

Traveling through the squeezeway set Nichols’ teeth on edge:  weapons were useless in such close confines.  Persevering for thirty meters more, they then found themselves in a second gallery (lower-ceilinged and much shorter), leading to a long, tight crawlway.

From here, they must belly their way forward.  After forty meters, the second gallery abruptly opened up into a downward sloping cavity, leading to a crevasse dropping fifty meters, straight down, to a solid floor leading into a tunnel.

Powell swung his rock hammer, firmly anchoring a piton into the cliff top, then undid his safety to allow Merkerson to come forward.  Powell was good, but Nichols couldn’t take the chance that his ghostly right arm would disappear during the abseil – not without a belay-man to prevent his fall.  So Nichols had Merkerson make the initial descent and take up the belaying position.

Pythagoras and Houdini were next, with Powell talking them through the procedure, checking the safety of their sit-slings and carabiners and murmuring encouragement.

As Pythagoras expected, Harry Houdini didn’t hesitate to take the initial step over the edge:  Houdini was a veteran escape artist and had thrilled many an audience straight-jacketed, suspended high in the air.

As Houdini’s body disappeared over the edge of the cliff, Pythagoras heard him call, “Don’t worry, Pi, just lean back into it.  This is the fun part.  Relax and enjoy it.”

If you weren’t worried, you didn’t understand what was happening,
Pythagoras thought as his feet went vertical against the face of the precipice.  He froze there, unable to move, equally unwilling to go back up or follow Houdini down.

Powell coaxed Pythagoras from above and Houdini coaxed him from below.  His clumsy progress down the cliffside to the waiting team members seemed never-ending.  Safe.  Relatively.

From high above, Powell called, “Let me show you how it’s done,” and descended the entire distance in two bounds.

Pythagoras, still queasy, muttered “braggart” and opened his canteen to water his painfully dry mouth.

Nichols, still at the top, unreeled the fiber-optic cable and lowered the box-spool casing to Merkerson.  He then mimicked Powell’s fast-bounding descent.