The Daredevil Snared (The Adventurers Quartet Book 3) (28 page)

Hillsythe had insisted that he—Caleb—be the one to speak to the captives as a whole, and Dixon and the others as well as Phillipe, who knew him and his abilities better than most, had agreed.

But he knew that the trick to keeping spirits high, to carrying people with him, rested on ensuring that better times came. People could bear a great deal of hardship and adversity as long as they could see at least a glimmer of sunshine on the road ahead. Now it was up to him to find that road and lead them toward their metaphorical sunshine.

He made his way to where the others were waiting, a few yards inside the second tunnel. They weren’t in complete darkness, but the lantern they’d set on the rocky floor was turned down to a bare gleam; as they stood in a loose group around it, leaning in various poses against the tunnel’s rough walls, the pale glow lit their faces from below, transforming their features into haggard masks and distorting expressions.

Hillsythe shifted, making way for Caleb to prop his shoulder against the wall beside him. As he did, Hillsythe murmured, “We took another quick look into the lower level before we turned the lantern down.”

Dixon, beyond Hillsythe, raked a hand through his hair. “Given the way the stones are all but falling out of the wall along here”—he waved at the rock face on the opposite side of the tunnel—“then my best guess is that we’ve got a week. Maybe ten days, depending on how well we stretch things out.”

“That takes us to mid-August at best.” Hillsythe’s tone was noncommittal; he was merely stating a fact.

Caleb glanced across the tunnel at Phillipe, who was leaning against the rock face directly opposite Caleb. Phillipe’s expression gave nothing away, but when his gaze met Caleb’s, Caleb could sense the tension underlying his friend’s outer calmness. He and Phillipe had faced difficult—indeed, deadly—situations before. In the present case, Phillipe recognized the danger, but he knew they weren’t at their last gasps yet.

Next to Phillipe, Fanshawe looked close to defeat, but not yet quite there—as if he was looking defeat in the eye and seeing no way around it. Beyond him, Hopkins appeared rather more resilient. Hopkins was younger and less willing to give up hope. More, beneath his easygoing demeanor lay strength and determination—the sort that never yielded.

Caleb shifted his gaze to Dixon. He rapidly took stock of the engineer’s drawn face and decided that Dixon was holding up better than he’d expected. Which was fortunate, as Dixon and his expertise had a critical role to play in Caleb’s plan.

As for Hillsythe...he was Wolverstone’s man, which told Caleb all he needed to know. He could rely on Hillsythe to do whatever needed to be done, effectively and efficiently.

“We need,” Caleb stated, “to approach this step by step.” Within this group, however it had happened, there was no longer any pretense that he wasn’t the one in charge—that he wasn’t the ultimate captain of their troops. “As I said earlier, at this moment, the preeminent danger for us lies in Dubois inspecting the lower level, or in any way learning of the dearth of diamonds there. He’s seen this”—he waved at the rock face opposite—“and because of that, we’ve had to increase the output of stones enough to account for it. If he sees the lower level, he’ll throw all the men into mining this stretch. Once he does that, nothing we do will be able to slow production enough—not without Dubois realizing, and we all know we can’t afford to find out what twisted punishments he’ll devise.

“
However
, if we block off the lower level
before
Dubois or any of his henchmen see it, then you, Dixon, can feed him the line that the rock face down there is every bit as good as it is up here.” Caleb caught Dixon’s gaze. “You thought it would be. All the unconscious signals Dubois would have picked up from you would have him expecting that. If the lower level of the tunnel collapses, but you tell him the deposit down there was just the same—or possibly even better—than the deposit up here, what’s he going to believe?”

“More importantly,” Hillsythe said, “what’s he going to do?”

“He’s going to have us mining this level as we have been—assuming the collapse doesn’t cave this in as well.” Dixon’s face suggested he was already calculating the possibilities.

“But,” Hopkins said, “if he believes there are more diamonds in the lower level, he’ll have a decent-sized gang working on opening that up again.”

“And,” Caleb put in, “given the tunnel there will have caved in once, we’ll have reason to go extra carefully, which means extra slowly.”

“Well,” Dixon said, “obviously we won’t ever go so far as to actually reopen the lower level, but yes—after a cave-in, it’s easy to excuse moving very cautiously.”

Phillipe stirred. “There’s another consideration. Mercenaries tend to be superstitious. If there’s a cave-in, you won’t get many of them venturing into the mine, certainly not far, no matter what orders Dubois or his lieutenants give.”

“And Dubois’s own aversion to being in the mine will only increase,” Hopkins pointed out, “so he, and Arsene and Cripps, too, will be even less likely to wander in, routine inspections be damned.”

“Which will give us a free hand in managing what’s done in the tunnels.” Hillsythe nodded. “That’s a valuable benefit in its own right.”

Caleb stared into the gloom farther down the second tunnel, then he looked at Dixon. “So...how do we go about blocking off the lower level?”

Dixon heaved a heavy sigh, then he looked at Hillsythe, then at Caleb, then at the other three. “It can be done, but it’s dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous in the usual sense but
hellishly
dangerous and on multiple levels.”

“Explain.” Caleb hunkered down, resting his back against the tunnel wall.

The others did the same.

After several moments of cogitation, Dixon said, “We’ll need to weaken the framing at the entrance to the lower level. The way we’ve constructed the bracing in the lower level, it’s all...anchored, for want of a better term, by the framing around the opening, where we’ve stepped the level down.” He paused, transparently mentally reviewing the structure he’d engineered, then he nodded to himself and refocused on Caleb. “If we take down the framing at the entrance, the rest will almost certainly collapse, too. That will necessitate a complete re-excavation of the lower level, and given it’ll be after a collapse, it’ll be touchy and tricky and very, very slow. If we bring it down in the next few days, we definitely won’t have the lower level reopened this side of mid-September.”

Caleb grinned. “That’s what we need.”

“Ah,” Dixon said, “but that’s the good news. The bad news is that, even though the lower level is an extension of the upper level—extending farther along under the hillside—the two tunnels abut. If we collapse the lower level by taking out the framework where the two levels meet, then we will inevitably take out some of the upper level as well.” Dixon held Caleb’s gaze. “The bad news is that I can’t be sure how much of the upper level will go, too. A yard? Three? Or the whole damn lot?”

Hillsythe sucked in a breath through his teeth, then he looked at Caleb. “We can’t risk losing the entire upper level. If we do, we risk the backers, if not Dubois himself, cutting their losses and calling an immediate end.”

Caleb grimaced. For a long moment, he stared at the lantern. Then he raised his gaze to Dixon’s face. “The only assessment we have to go on is yours.” He paused, then asked, “Realistically, can we collapse the lower level enough to shut it off from view, preferably to collapse it entirely, without taking down more than, say, a third of the upper level?”

Dixon looked away. He stared at the rock face above the others’ heads. Then he drew in a long breath, held it for several seconds, then exhaled. And nodded. “I think so.” He glanced at Caleb. “And acting now, while the lower level is no bigger than a crawl space, would be best. The thing we have to consider is that that space is now empty. When the supports collapse, what’s above—the hillside—will fall in to fill the gap. That’s where subsequent destabilization will come from—if the shift in that mass makes the rest of the hillside unstable. It might not have much of an effect away from the immediate site, but depending on the composition of the hill, it might. That’s where the wider risk lies, and there’s no way for us to predict what might happen.”

Silence fell while they all digested that.

Fanshawe shifted. “So what you’re saying is that, if we do this—collapse the lower level—we’ll be acting blind. That we won’t know how much of the hillside is going to collapse until it does.”

Grimly, Dixon nodded.

Caleb stirred. “As I see it, that’s a risk we have to take.” He looked around the circle. “One we have to face.”

He paused, then reiterated, “We
have to
block off the lower level before Dubois or any of his men get a chance to see it. Everything”—he strengthened the conviction in his voice—“all and every possible chance we might have to survive and get out of this jungle—rests on that. If we don’t take the risk, we have no hope.”

He gave the others a moment to take in that stark reality before concluding, “As far as I can see, we have no choice.”

Phillipe, Hillsythe, and Hopkins were already with him. Dixon and Fanshawe were reluctant, but they, too, saw no other option.

It was Dixon who asked, “Do we tell the others—the other men, the women, and the children, too?”

They discussed the point. It was immediately agreed that the rest of the men would need to be told; all worked in the mine and would be involved in one way or another with the operation.

All agreed that the children should be left in ignorance. Although many would be in and out of the upper level as well as helping in the continuing digging out of base ore surreptitiously going on at the end of the first tunnel, they’d grown used to Dixon and the others working on the timbers at the far end of the upper level and wouldn’t see anything sufficiently out of the ordinary to pique their curiosity. But if they were informed, it was very likely that their anxiety would become apparent—possibly even to the extent that too many of them became fearful of entering the mine.

That, Dubois and his men would notice.

“The way we’ll engineer it,” Dixon said, “there’ll be no more danger than there already is to anyone in the mine, not until we initiate the collapse.” He went on to assure them that all danger would come after that point.

Caleb exchanged a wry glance with Phillipe; Dixon was throwing himself into the challenge of collapsing the lower level with significantly greater zeal than he’d invested in opening it up in the first place. It was hardly surprising that Dixon had such a sterling reputation in the corps.

They then moved on to the trickier question of whether to share their plans with the women.

Caleb was for; all the others were against.

Indeed, all the others were faintly aghast at the notion.

From their comments, Caleb realized that, all experience to the contrary, they saw the six women as weaker beings it was their duty to shield and protect. He could understand the protectiveness, but had trouble equating “willfully keeping them in ignorance” with protection. He knew beyond question how his mother, had she been there, would react to not being told—to not being trusted, as she would interpret it. As for his sister-in-law, Edwina—much less his soon-to-be sister-in-law, Aileen Hopkins—they would erupt. The thought made him wonder how well Will Hopkins knew his sister; as Will was adamant that the women not be told, apparently not that well.

At Caleb’s suggestion, they called Jed in and asked what he thought.

Jed frowned and considered long and hard, but eventually, he stated that he would rather not have Annie worry.

Caleb inwardly sighed. “I still feel—strongly—that it would be wrong to keep this from the women.”
Especially from Kate.

Phillipe caught his gaze. “Do you really want Katherine worrying and fretting over whether the tunnel will suddenly give way and bury you—and everyone else—inside? Children and all?”

Caleb frowned and absentmindedly corrected him. “Kate.”

Phillipe bent an exasperated look on him. “Exactly. Just
think
, man! She’s going to be agitated—enough for Dubois to notice. We might think he’s not watching, but he is. He knows damn well that we’re plotting and planning. It’s purely his arrogance—and his peculiar brand of malevolence—that makes him just watch and laugh at our helplessness, and believing we are ultimately helpless, he continues to let us amuse him. And remember, he caught the change in her—and whatever that was, it wouldn’t have been overt—enough to think to follow her and capture us in the first place. And with this, she and the other women will be even more anxious, more than enough for him to notice. Then when the tunnel collapses, he’ll know what to think.”

“And we can’t risk that.” Fanshawe looked determined.

Hillsythe weighed in with, “At present, viewed from the perspective of getting the job done while fooling Dubois, one of the most attractive aspects of this plan is that it
is
so bloody dangerous. That it’s such a crazy, desperate, reckless, and—given Dubois knows nothing about our impending rescue, as far as he will be able to see—stupidly senseless thing to do.” Hillsythe spread his hands. “Why would we bring the hillside down on our heads? To him, such a notion will make no sense at all. He’ll never think it was our deliberate doing—not unless something occurs to tip him off.” Hillsythe caught Caleb’s gaze. “We can’t risk telling the women, because we can’t risk alerting Dubois that something’s afoot, even nonspecifically.”

Phillipe leaned forward. “We can’t risk him making the connection because he will retaliate.” He paused for an instant, his gaze locked with Caleb’s, then more quietly said, “And you know who he’ll reach for first.”

Not you. Kate.

Caleb heard the words Phillipe left unsaid more than loudly enough. He dropped his head back on his shoulders, stared upward for a second, then straightened his head and nodded. “All right. I agree. We’ll tell only the men.”

With that decided, they opted to get at least a few hours’ sleep before they started on the work to put their plan—their bloody dangerous, crazy, desperate, reckless, and thoroughly sensible plan—into action.