Slowly, just as they’d done with Strand, they lifted her from the deep, dank winze. By the time she reached the top, the other half of the team had begun to move Dennis Strand across the chamber toward the tunnels that would take them out.
“Good job, Marina,” Bruce clamped her shoulder. “Perfect set-up, and—“
A sound that sent prickles over the back of Marina’s neck stopped his words. As one person, she and Bruce dashed over to the vertical shaft from which she’d just arisen and looked down. Their lights mingled together, down into the blackness, to illuminate a swell of water swirling inside. A helluva lot more water than Marina had been splashing around in.
“Jesus Christ,” Bruce breathed. “It’s coming fast.”
Marina spun away from the shaft. “Go! Now! Fast!” she screamed after the team that had already started through the tunnel that led to the larger passages, and then to the exterior chamber. “Leave him and get out of here!”
She turned and ran into Bruce. It was as if he read her mind. “You’re not doing it alone,” he said. “I’m with you.”
“You’ve got two daughters and a wife. Get your ass out of here. I’ll get him out.” She shoved him toward the tunnel and followed behind.
They had thirty minutes, maybe forty-five if they were lucky. She resisted the urge to dash back over and check to see how fast the water was rising; refused to think about how quickly it could fill that shaft and rush in to fill the tunnels they had to negotiate to get out.
Tunnels they had to crawl through.
Tunnels they might, if they were lucky, only have to swim through.
Bruce hesitated for a moment as Marina bent over the stretcher to rearrange Strand’s limbs. She didn’t look up at her colleague because she didn’t want to see the look on his face. Though he’d tried to hide it, he was in love with her. She’d known it for some time. It happened, she supposed, when you worked in life and death situations with another person you admired. Or, at least, for some people.
Even if she cared about Bruce the same way he obviously did for her, she would never act on it, or even allow him to acknowledge it. And the last thing she wanted, or needed, was to have him do something stupid like risk his life for hers, and not make it out of here. He had daughters, and wife that she knew he loved.
Swiftly, aware that the water was bubbling up rapidly in the tunnel, she buckled Strand’s legs and arms so that they wouldn’t catch on the walls of the tunnel and made him a more compact burden. His tall shadow loomed over her as he shouted to the others to make their way out. As she finished the last buckle, she said, “Bruce, go. I will not have Anna and Olivia and Maria’s grief on my conscience.”
She stood and he grabbed one end of the stretcher, leaving her to pick up the other. “I’ll help you get to the Close, at least,” he said. This part of the tunnel was tall enough to run through, although he, with his above-average height, needed to bow his head.
Marina could fit easily at this stage, and with the two of them carrying the stretcher, they’d make it much more quickly. But after this, she’d drag Dennis Strand’s stretcher by herself if she had to. She wasn’t going to leave the man behind.
A hundred meters into the tunnel they reached Close Knocks. It wasn’t called Close Knocks for nothing. It was tight and twisty and the only way one could fit through it was to duck-walk the first thirty feet, then crawl and twist through the rest.
Marina and Bruce dragged Strand’s stretcher through the tunnel as quickly as they could. The rest of the team was far ahead of them; reluctant though they’d been, they’d followed her instructions and run as far as they could. Now she could hear them as they made their way through the Close. The water sound was getting closer, and Marina knew it would be much sooner than later before it came surging through the tunnels.
“Go,” she told Bruce, shoving him with as much force as she could toward the narrow entrance. Since he was well over six feet by at least three inches, and muscular enough to carry that height, her prod was about as ineffectual as it would have been against an elephant. “Please, Bruce. Go. I’m right behind you. This was my rescue plan, and I’m not taking you down with it. You know how hard it is to get through here, and how fast the water’s coming.”
They couldn’t push the stretcher between them through the narrow tunnels, for if something happened and the stretcher became wedged, the one behind wouldn’t be able to crawl through.
He looked down at her, and for a moment, she thought he was going to say something they’d both regret. “Bruce, go on,” she said quietly. “You have to go. I’ll do this.”
At last he turned away, stooping to crawl through the tunnel, leaving her alone with Strand. Fear rose inside her, just like, she imagined, the water was bubbling and swirling in that pit behind. She could hear the sound of pouring, echoing through the cave, and knew that it was only a matter of time.
Water. Her hands grew icy in her gloves, unrelated to the chill and dampness of the cave. She was well beyond that now. Air and land … .they held no fear for her. But water clogging her nostrils, blanketing her like some smooth, heavy cloak, tangling her limbs … .
Marina had to shake her head, hard, to pull herself from her reverie. A near-drowning when she was ten had given her a healthy respect for lakes and seas. She’d tried to conquer that fear; to take hold of it and manage it by learning to scuba dive; but in raw situations like this, all of her forced training disintegrated.
Bruce was gone. He’d heeded her warning and moved ahead, and at least she’d not die with his two daughters on her conscience.
Die?
Marina moved toward the tunnel of Close Knocks. Where had that morbidity come from? She wanted to get the hell out of there, and get to Myanmar.
The thought of actually getting her hands on the Archive gave her a slam of adrenaline. Poring over the dusky brown papers, the fading ink. She focused on that, on discovering something new, something that had been lost for centuries. Strength flushed through her, and she made a massive effort, dragging, tugging, shimmying that stretcher with Dennis Strand still buckled on, his legs and arms crossed over his trunk to make him as short as possible.
She made it through the “easy” part of Close Knocks, and felt her breath going short and her gasps for air covering any sound of rising water behind her. But she knew it was there; only a matter of time.
She thought she heard her name once, far ahead, but she didn’t respond. No need to have someone come back for them.
Marina pulled the stretcher into the narrowest part of the Knocks and maneuvered it through the passage she had traversed four times already that day. As she moved through, backwards, feet first, so that she could pull Dennis behind her, she heard a low noise … .it sounded like steam, hissing from a whistling tea pot.
Good God. It wasn’t steam. It was water.
And it was coming up fast.
Terror zipped through her, red and numbing.
She was trapped, nowhere to go, nowhere but into Close Knocks. Further in, tighter and smaller, but she knew she could get Dennis around those corners if she had enough time.
If she only had time, a way to slow that water.
She moved three feet, three excruciating feet.
Another two more.
Then she came to a curve, a hairpin bend, and felt the stream of sweat trickle down the side of her face as she strained to tip the inert body to the side, along the wall, and pull it through and around. Like getting a sofa up a narrow two-flight staircase that turned … but much more precarious. And impossible. She tugged and shimmied and jerked at her burden, aware that the greater the movement, the worse it could be for Strand…but it would be even worse if she couldn’t get him out. The stretcher wedged; it was too wide to get around the corner.
It was stuck.
Smothering a shout of frustration and fear, acutely aware of the rush of water in the distance, Marina realized what she had to do. Frantically, in the closeness of the tunnel, she flipped and pulled and tugged until she freed Dennis Strand from his moorings on the stretcher.
She was going to endanger his injuries further by pulling him through, but she had to take the chance—or he wouldn’t have any chance at all.
And neither would she.
She inched them three more feet.
It was a little easier now that she didn’t have to contend with the board. She pulled and twisted, and felt him groan against her once, in pain, and she gritted her teeth and kept moving, feet first, belly-crawling; backward, backward, scooting, scooting, pulling, pulling … .She focused on the rhythm, because that was all she had.
The sound was loud now, she could feel the shift in the close air and her heart rammed in her throat. Her knees screamed in pain and her back ached.
How much further?
Too far. Much too far.
-12-
July 6, 2007
The Western Coast of Ireland
When Junie Peters finally dragged herself out of bed, it was still dark. Four-thirty in the a.m. She’d had a total of three hours of sleep since tumbling into the bed inside a church that had been reorganized as a base for the crew. It was a cot, really; but that was better than one of those inflatable mattresses on the ground, where she’d slept more than once during a clean-up.
She’d dreamt of oil slickening her hands and her body; smothering her as it did the loons that tried to clean it from their feathers, clogging her breathing as it did the whales that needed to swim in it, blinding and suffocating her as it did to the crabs and lobsters that lived near the oil-drenched shores. Twisting through her hair like evil black braids, liquid ones that closed around her neck and arms and into her nostrils.
It was always like this. She had the nightmares and dreams during the cleanup, and for months after, with decreasing frequency, until they finally went away … until she was called to the next one.
She’d worked on ten different spills over her career as a marine biologist, and each one seemed to affect her more deeply. The dreams and images hung in her consciousness longer each time, and her despair with the carelessness of a world so dependent upon oil worried deep in her stomach. She swore she was developing an ulcer.