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“Smith, please, you don’t have to lock us up,” I say. “Tie our hands and leave us outside. Give us a chance.”
“Yeah, you’re right, Professor, I don’t strictly have to ditch you here.” The mercenary seems to consider. “I could have you walk outside with me and then find something to tie you to… But this is a huge building, and there’s two of you and only one of me. Why risk it? So much simpler to just leave you here…”
“Because we could die!” Winter repeats.
“You have food and water.” The colonel points at the floor and at our own backpacks. “You should be fine, unless”—he takes a whiff at the room—“you run out of air.” He lets out a bone-chilling laugh. “In which case, I’m really sorry.”
He starts backtracking toward the exit, the barrel of his rifle unflinchingly pointed at us.
“Wait,” Winter calls desperately. “Aren’t you even going to leave us the flashlight?”
“Sorry, miss, kind of need it out there.”
We watch him creep away like the poisonous snake he is, the room growing ever darker. Soon he is gone, and we can only hear the stone door closing, all thirty tons of it, slowly pressing down toward the rock below and effectively sealing us in with no means of escape.
12
LOGAN
For a moment, we both stand still, engulfed in the oppressive darkness around us. Buried alive.
No, I refuse to accept that fate. There must be a way out, another secret lever to set the door in motion from within the chamber. But we need to see to search for it.
“Try your flashlight again,” I tell Winter.
I hear rustling, and a few seconds later a feeble beam of light cuts through the darkness, illuminating Winter’s anxious face.
“Great,” I say.
“Great?” she hisses back, her features going from scared to angry. “There’s nothing great about our current situation. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re standing on the wrong side of that nice bit of stone over there. So unless you’re hiding a secret stash of dynamite in your backpack, I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out.”
“Don’t be so pessimistic. Whoever built this place must have left a switch for the door on the inside—otherwise, they’d risk getting trapped themselves. We just have to find the button before your lamp goes out again.” I point at the flashlight. “Let’s go.”
We run down the passage and stop at the door. With desperate energy, we begin to feel up and down the slab of stone and the sides of the tunnel. But we find no knob, or contraption, nor a retracting disk.
“There’s nothing here,” Winter says in a panicked voice. “It doesn’t work from the inside.”
I let my palms roam the bare walls a little longer before I have to admit defeat.
“Let’s go back to the other room and check our supplies,” I say.
In the treasure chamber, Winter sits behind Smith’s leftover stockpile and balances the headlamp on the floor so that the light points up in a vertical beam. Then she sorts the food, looking around herself with a forlorn expression.
“Well,” she sighs. “At least our grave will be pretty.”
I sit next to her. “Don’t be melodramatic. No one’s going to die.”
“No? And how do you suppose we’re getting out?”
“We came with a team, remember? When we don’t return, they’ll come find us.”
“What if Smith ‘deals’ with them the way he dealt with us?”
“Someone will notice the camp has gone silent. Both Dr. Boonjan and I checked in regularly with the satellite phone, and Somchai did too to coordinate supply runs with the villagers.”
“Even if someone does notice we’re missing, they still have to get to us through the jungle. And then they have to figure out how to open the secret door! What if they can’t? What if they don’t even realize it’s there?” Her voice rises a notch. “We’re going to die in here.”
She makes some excellent points, but I refuse to give up hope. We need to stay calm and coherent, and the best way to do that is to busy ourselves with mundane tasks. “We’re not going to die,” I say firmly. “Now, let’s be practical and see where we’re at with provisions.”
