The ceiling falling in.
‘Miller,’ he said. Miller came. Mallory spoke to him. Miller nodded, trotted back into the shadows.
Mallory called over his shoulder. ‘Jaime. The exit?’
‘Found it,’ said Jaime.
Oh, God.
Andrea was crouching behind a boulder. He caught Mallory’s eye. His face was the same old face, large and impassive above the sweeping black moustache. But there was something about the set of the big, unshaven jaw that shocked Mallory. Andrea had walked alone from Greece to Bulgaria, through the heart of occupied Mitteleuropa. He was a full colonel in the Greek army, and with that army had suffered defeat. With him, Mallory had spent eighteen months behind German lines in Crete, stared death right between the eyes on Navarone and in the Zenica Cage. But in all that time, Mallory had never seen this expression on his face. Up here, five thousand feet above sea level, in a dank cave near the summit of this tilted sheet of limestone, Andrea’s face was … resigned.
Mallory found that his muscles were tense as boards, and in his mind something was scrambling and scuttling, like a terrified animal. He made himself think of the Channel covered with ships, the ships crammed with men, and among them giant submarines swimming swiftly, undetectable, laden with torpedoes. A Spandau burst punched into the cave wall above his head. He said to Andrea, ‘Jaime has found the back way.’ Andrea’s face relaxed. Resignation gave way to the expression that with Andrea conveyed anything from polite curiosity to frenzied enthusiasm. ‘Then we should take it,’ he said. ‘Soon.’
Four minutes later Miller was alone, standing among the boulders at the back of the cave. The entrance was a narrow white window, pointed at the top. The rest of it was dark, black as ink, in contrast to the glare of the snow outside.
Miller filled his eyes with that glare, and tried for three seconds not to think about anything but daylight, and sky. But his right hand was chilled by the stone-flavoured draught blowing from the crack in the cave floor on his right – the crack down which his companions had vanished, and down which he must vanish himself, now that his preparations were complete –
A sleet of bullets lashed through the entrance, and the air was deafening with ricochets. The snow beyond the entrance was suddenly peopled with grey figures, running, firing as they came. Miller fired a burst of his Schmeisser into that brilliant white lancet. Then he lowered himself into the crack, and started to climb down the doubled rope into the dark.
The first two Germans flattened themselves against the walls outside the entrance. They pulled the string fuses on two stick grenades, and flung them into the cave mouth. There was a hollow boom, and smoke rolled out. There was no sign of life from the black interior. They threw in two more grenades, to make sure, and waited for the bang.
They did not get it.
What they got was a thunderous roar, and a sheet of flame that lashed out of the entrance and melted the snow for fifty feet, and picked up the men who had thrown the grenades and fired them like cannonballs out of the gully and onto the plateau, where they lay under a sheet of rock fragments that fell out of the sky like hard rain. Where the cave had been was a raw cleft in the mountainside, half-filled with fuming scree.
‘Gott,’ said the Feldwebel. ‘What are they putting in the grenades, nowadays?’
‘Whatever it is, it’s done the job,’ said the Sturmbannführer. ‘Now pick up those men and for God’s sake let us get out of this snow.’
Miller was twenty feet down the crack when the big explosion came. A blast of hot air frizzled his eyebrows and the doubled rope in his hands became two separate ropes. He thought, in one compressed moment: one kilo of plastic with a thirty-second time pencil will not only blow up a limestone cave, but cut a wire-cored climbing rope.
Then he had landed with a crash on wet stone, and a big pain in his leg was filling the world, and dust was in his lungs, and stone was falling on his head.
He became aware that he was lying in a place lit by yellow torchlight, and that the stones falling on his head were small, and the pain in his leg was ebbing. Bruised, not broken, he thought. He groped for a cigarette in the breast pocket of his blouse, and lit it. The smoke rose vertical in the torchlight. Before, there had been a draught.
He said, ‘Looks like the roof fell in.’
‘Quite,’ said Mallory, in a voice perhaps a shade lighter than usual. ‘Thank you, Dusty.’
And now all we have to do is get out of here, thought Miller, and find some submarines.
Mallory lit a cigarette himself. The entrance to the shaft had been narrow – almost too narrow for Andrea. Down here it had widened out. It was better down here, as long as you did not think of all those billions of tons of rock around you, the dynamited entrance –
His heart was going like a rivet gun. He could hardly breathe for all that rock up there, sitting on his chest –
Panic later, he told himself. Once you have done the job. For now, there are six men depending on you. The Benzedrine made that sound like a good thing. He took a deep breath. ‘Flashlights off,’ he said. ‘Use one at a time, only when moving.’ The light went out. Darkness descended, thick and suffocating as wet velvet. ‘Jaime,’ he said. ‘Your friend Casteret. What did he tell you?’
‘It was two years ago,’ said Jaime.
‘Try to remember.’
There was a pause, in which he could almost hear the wheels spinning in Jaime’s brain. ‘He entered the cave,’ he said. ‘The shaft. A river. He said there are many passages: the river made one way out, then found a way to another, lower down, then another. So the mountain is full of holes like a Gruyère, some blocked, some flooded. There is a route, because Casteret found it. But it took him many days.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
Many days. In this darkness. Mallory could hear his own breathing, very loud. ‘So if we head downhill, we can’t go far wrong.’
‘Maybe,’ said Jaime.
‘Very good,’ said Mallory. ‘I’ll lead. Hugues and Andrea, carry Wallace.’
They made a sort of sedan chair out of a couple of webbing straps and Wallace’s crutch. Mallory stood up, flexing his stiff limbs. He turned on his flashlight.
It began.
The beam of the flashlight showed a water-smoothed gallery heading steeply downwards. It was high, the gallery, so high in places that the flashlight failed to touch its roof. Once, it had been a runnel of acid rainwater, dissolving its way through a seam of limestone. The water had gone now, leaving a bed of grey pebbles down which they walked as if down the gravel drive of a house in the suburbs of hell.
They went two hundred yards like this, downwards at an angle of perhaps forty degrees, heading west by Mallory’s compass. Then the gallery took a turning to the right.
Mallory was pointing the flashlight down at the ground. Suddenly there were two flashlight beams, one where he was pointing it, and another on the roof of the gallery, which was low here. The reason that it was on the roof was that it was being reflected by the black pool that spanned the gallery from side to side before it sloped down into the water.
Dead end.
Mallory’s heart was thumping in his ears. In front of them, the roof ran down into the water. Behind them, the cave was sealed.
Trapped.
Dusty Miller saw the flashlight stop. He heard the drip of water, the rasp of the stretcher-bearers’ breath. He remembered the panic-stricken rigidity of Mallory in the bread oven. He fumbled in his breast pocket, and lit a cigarette.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Hugues, in a voice a good octave too high. ‘You will use up the air.’
‘Plenty of air,’ said Miller, languidly, for Mallory’s benefit. There used to be a howling draught up that shaft, remember?’ He heard Mallory grunt, as if he did not trust himself to speak.
‘And this is a most commodious cave by cave standards. Did I ever tell you about the time I was working the Go Home Point amethyst mine back in Onta
rio? Little tiny shaft, and we get a flash flood. So there is me, a half-ton of dynamite, and as it turns out a rabid skunk, one hundred foot under the Canadian Shield, and that sucker is filling up quicker’n a whore’s bidet –’
‘Some other time,’ said Mallory.
Miller could hear his voice was back to normal. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Well, seems to me there must be some place above that water for all that air to have been coming from, before we blew the cave.’ He took a last drag on his cigarette. It made a bright shower of sparks as he threw it away. ‘So it ain’t the air we have a problem with, it’s the cigarettes, and I guess they need smoking right up, because I have a feeling I am going to get real wet.’ He walked forward, eyeing the swim of the flashlight beam in the water and unbuttoning his tunic.
‘Take a rope,’ said Mallory.
‘Sure.’
Miller’s body was long and pale, corded with stringy muscle in the dimness. He tied the rope round his waist in a bowline, took the waterproof flashlight in his hand, and stepped into the pool.
The water was so cold it burned. He set his teeth and walked on. The gravel under his feet sloped down sharply, continuing the forty-five degree slope of the cave’s floor. Within three paces the water was up to his chest, and he was gasping for breath. Within four, he was swimming, the coldest swimming he had ever done. He swam hard, hoping that he was right, that there was a way through here, between the gallery roof and the water, for the draught to blow –
But perhaps the draught had come from somewhere else, a hole in the rock high in the roof, invisible. Perhaps this was a blind-ended hole, deep as the mountain was high, full of this icy water.
What a way to go, thought Miller. Drowning in mineral water. I promise that if I get out of this, I will never drink anything but brandy again.
He clamped the flashlight between his teeth and dived.
Back on the gravel beach Mallory saw the light fade in the dark water, then vanish. He tried not to think of the cold under there, the pressing down of the roof, the ridges of stone that could catch you and keep you under there while you drowned, in the middle of miles of rock –
But the coils of rope moved slowly through his fingers and into the water. Miller was making progress –
The rope became still.
He’s in the air again, Mallory told himself.
But the rope remained still for a minute, then two. Mallory’s mind told him that it was normal, there was an explanation. But deep down, that creature was raving at him: he’s stuck, he’s drowned, for Christ’s sake –
Mallory found he had seized the rope and was tugging at it, hauling for all he was worth, and the bight of it was thrashing the black pool. Andrea was at his side, saying something soothing, but he could not hear what –
And suddenly a flashlight clicked on, and a voice said, ‘Colder ‘n the nipple on a witch’s tit in there.’ Miller’s voice.
For a second, Mallory felt deep shame.
‘It’s like the bend in your toilet bowl,’ said Miller. ‘There’s a little uphill the far side, stalagmites, stalactites, the whole shebang. I put the rope on a stalactite. Or ’mite, whichever. Anyways, it’s cold and wet, but once you get to the other side you can breathe.’
Mallory put the shame behind him. There was a lot to do, and he needed a clear mind to do it with.
Miller wrapped his battledress in his waterproof cape, and went back through the icy water. The rest of them came after him, one by one, dragged under the low roof, breath held, clothes and weapons wrapped against the water, Andrea bringing up the rear. On the far side, they stood and shivered in the tomb-like cold. Wallace was the most worrying. ‘Work your arms,’ said Mallory. ‘Circulation.’
Wallace raised his arms weakly, let them fall again. Miller bent over him, tugging his tunic over his arms. He was too weak to dress himself. ‘Physical jerks,’ he said, and tried to grin. Even the grin suffered from lack of muscle power.
They sat and drank soup brewed on a pressure stove, and checked their weapons. Miller put his oil can down by the edge of the water, and went over the lock of his Schmeisser with a corner of pullthrough. When he had finished the gun, he looked down again at the oil can.
It had been six inches from the water’s edge. Now the water’s edge was lapping against its base.
Up in the world, there was wet snow and rain. Down here in the underworld, the waters of the earth were rising.
Best not tell Mallory.
After five minutes, Mallory stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’
The gallery ran downhill again. There were a couple more pools, neither of them more than waist-deep. Hugues marched through the blackness head down, hands in pockets, shoulder aching under the pressure of Wallace’s crutch. When he brushed against Wallace’s hand it felt cold as marble. It was obvious to Hugues that this man was going to die. Why carry him, when they had abandoned Lisette? It was folly, madness. Hugues was a soldier. He accepted that in war there were sacrifices to be made. But some things were too precious to sacrifice. Like the life of the woman you loved, and your unborn child. Deep under the mountain, Hugues was making promises to himself. If I live, he was thinking, things will be different. From now on, I will take care of the things I can see and touch with my own eyes and hands. From now on, it is not the big causes I will fight for. From now on, it will be the people I love.
If there is a from now on.
The brandy throbbed in his head. He marched on, detesting Mallory and Miller and this Greek killer Andrea, their cold, sunken eyes, the hard jokes they made, the way they did not care about individual people, thought only of their operation –
Andrea’s boot trod on his heel. He was out of step, stumbling, panting for breath, the blood roaring in his ears.
Not just the blood.
Ever since they had been inside the mountain, the air had been tremulous with a faint rumble. Now the rumble was gaining in intensity. At first it was a long, uniform growl. Then the growl had become a roar that shook the ground underfoot and vibrated in the still air of the gallery. After perhaps a mile the gravel underfoot had become finer, and the ground had started to rise. At the top of a low mound the gallery was suddenly blocked by a wall of rock.
The beam of Mallory’s flashlight wavered up the wall to a crack of darkness at its summit. The crack was a foot wide, the roar as loud as a bomber’s engines. He put a foot on the wall and began to climb.
It was only twenty feet high, but running water had smoothed away the footholds. It took him a careful five minutes to get to the top. And when he did, he wished he had not.
When he put his head through the crack, the thunder of falling water was like a hand that grabbed his head and shook it. He shone his torch into the darkness. The beam lanced into emptiness. He put his head into the racket, and looked down.
Once, the wall must have been the sill of a waterfall. Now the river had found a lower channel, and the place where the waterfall had been was now a cliff, smooth as ivory, falling away below beyond the reach of his flashlight beam, plummeting like a gigantic mine shaft into the bowels of the earth. From the depths rose the bellow of falling water, and a fine mist of spray that chilled Mallory’s face.
Curiously, this hellish hole in the world made Mallory feel better. It might be underground, and dark as the inside of a bank safe. But it was an open space; a problem that with a small stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a problem in mountaineering.
Mallory called for Miller and Andrea. They looked over the edge, and went back to the bottom of the sill. Miller said, ‘Holy cow,’ in a voice not altogether steady.
‘We’ve got two ropes,’ said Mallory. ‘I’m going to put them together, double. If I find anything useful, I’ll pull twice. Send Wallace down first. You’ll have to show the other three how to rappel.’
‘Ideal place to learn,’ said Miller.
Mallory knotted the first two ropes together, slung the last coil over his shoulder, an
d went over the edge.
The wall was as smooth as it looked: no purchase for feet. He kept his weight well out, rope over shoulder and up between his legs, walking down the wall. By the time he came to the first knot he was walking in complete darkness. Miller’s flashlight was a faint yellow glow far above. The roar of water surrounded him like a thunderstorm. He unclipped his own flashlight and shone it downwards.
Sixty feet below, the beam met something black and gleaming, muscular as the back of a giant slug. For a moment he could not work out what it was. Finally, the truth filtered through. It was a waterfall. A river, a big river, was pouring out of a ragged hole in the side of the shaft, tumbling down into a blackness too deep for the flashlight to penetrate. The roar numbed his mind. He saw a sudden picture of himself suspended like a spider on a string of gossamer, hung in this dreadful shaft. He blanked it out.
The shaft would have been a pothole: a whirlpool a million years old, a spinning auger of carbonic acid sinking its way slowly into the limestone. After the river had gnawed its way down a hundred and fifty feet, it had joined forces with another seam of water, and adopted its course as its own. The new waterfall emerged to his left, almost at right angles to the wall he was descending.
There should be a ledge. Where the old waterfall had been supplanted by the new, there should definitely be a ledge.
He knew he must be getting to the bottom of the second rope. The wall was still smooth. To his left, he could feel the wind of the down-rushing water, falling God knew where. The spray of it had soaked him to the skin. He felt cold and weak. What if there was no ledge, only this smooth wall falling direct to the bottom?
Something touched his back. He almost shouted with the shock. He was lying on his back on a ledge. He shone his flashlight. The ledge was four feet wide, twenty feet long, piled with boulders, crusted white with limy deposits, and shining with water. When he shone his light over the edge, he still saw nothing. There was only the black water rushing past with its mind-numbing roar.