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Sergeant Bentley slipped through the brush and looked down, his expression granite. "Too many good men are dying today," he said slowly. Then his face hardened and he cautiously peered over the top of the embankment. The fire that killed Burton Angus he judged, came from an elevation. He spotted a perceptible movement high in the leaves. He set his rifle on semiautomatic fire, took careful aim and ripped off six shots.
He watched with grim satisfaction as a body slipped slowly out of a tree and crumpled to the moist ground.
Corporal Richard Willapa would never again stalk the deer of his native rain forest.
Soon after the shooting had broken out, Admiral San decker put in an emergency radio call for doctors and ambulances from the local hospitals. The response was almost immediate. Sirens were soon heard approaching in the distance as the first of the walking wounded began filtering down from the hillside.
Heidi limped from man to man applying temporary first aid, offering words of comfort while fighting back the tears. The worst thing was their incredible youth. None of them looked as if they had seen their twentieth birthdays. Their faces were pale with shock. They had never expected to bleed or even die on their home ground, fighting an enemy they had yet to even see.
She happened to look up as Riley came out of the escape portal, led by two members of the diving team, his face masked in blood. A sickening fear rose within her when she saw no sign of Pitt.
Dear God, she thought wildly, he's dead.
Sandecker and Giordino noticed them at the same time and rushed over.
"Where's Pitt?" Sandecker asked, fearful of the answer.
"Still in there somewhere," Riley mumbled. "He refused to turn back. I tried, Admiral. Honest to God, I tried to talk him out of going on, but he wouldn't listen."
"I would have expected no less of him," Sandecker said lifelessly.
"Pitt is not the kind of man to die." Giordino's expression was set, his tone resolute.
"He had a message for you, Admiral."
"What message?"
"He said to tell you he had a train to catch."
"Maybe he made it into the main quarry," Giordino said, suddenly hopeful.
"Not a chance," said Riley, putting a dampener on any optimism. "His air must be gone by now. He's surely drowned.
Death in the stygian blackness of a cavern deep inside the earth is something nobody cares to think about. The idea is too foreign, too horrible to dwell on. Lost and trapped divers have been known to have literally shredded their fingertips to the bone, trying to claw their way through a mile of rock. Others simply gave up, believing they had reentered the womb.
The last thing on Pitt's mind was dying. The mere thought was enough to instill panic. He concentrated on conserving his air and fighting against disorientation, the ever-present specter of cave divers.
The needle on his air pressure gauge quivered on the final mark before EMPTY. How much time did he have? One minute, two, perhaps three before he inhaled on a dry tank?
His fin accidentally kicked up a blinding cloud of silt that effectively smothered the beam of his light. He hung motionless, barely making out the direction of his air bubbles past the face mask. He followed them upward until he emerged into clear water again, and then began fly-walking across the ceiling of the cavern, pulling himself along with his fingertips. It was a strange sensation, almost as if gravity didn't exist.
A fork in the passage loomed out of the darkness. He could not afford the luxury of a time-consuming decision. He rolled over and kicked into the one on the left. Suddenly the light ray fell on a torn and rotting wet suit lying in the silt. He moved toward it cautiously. At first glance it appeared wrinkled and collapsed, as if its owner had discarded it. The light traveled up the legs and across the sunken chest area and stopped at the face mask, still strapped around the hood. A pair of empty eye sockets in a skull stared back at Pitt.
Startled, he began pedaling backward from the gruesome sight. The body of one of the lost divers had saved his life, or at least extended it for a brief space in time. The passage had to be a dead end. The bones of the second diver were probably somewhere deep within the gloom.
At the fork again, Pitt rechecked his compass. It was a wasted gesture. There was no place to go but to his right. He had already dropped the cumbersome safety reel. His air time was long past the point of no return.
He tried to contain his breathing, conserving his air, but already he could sense the lessening pressure.
There were only a few precious breaths left now.
His mouth was very dry. He found he could not swallow, and he became very cold. He had been in the frigid water a long time and he recognized the initial symptoms of hypothermia. A strange calm settled over him as he swam deeper into the beckoning gloom.
Pitt accepted the last intake of air as inevitable and shrugged off the useless air bottles, letting them drop into the silt. He did not feel the pain when he bashed his knee on a pile of rock. A minute was all that was left to him. That was as far as the air in his lungs would take him. An abhorrence of ending up like the divers in the other passage flooded his mind. A vision of the empty skull loomed ahead, taunting him.
His lungs ached savagely, his head began to feel as if a fire was raging inside. He swam on, not daring to stop until his brain ceased to function.
Something glinted up the passage in the light. It seemed miles away. Darkness crept into the fringes of his vision. His heart pounded in his ears and his chest felt as though it was being crushed. Every atom of oxygen in his lungs was gone.
