Terror Stash (23 page)

She stared at them as they chatted, working their way down a winding slope to the main part of the cave. They were each carrying a handful of supermarket shopping bags, each bag stuffed full.

She focused on what they were chatting about.

“If you are so tired of doing his hard labor for him, you tell him you no longer will carry for him anymore. I will do it always, I prefer to eat. It is only food, after all. It is not to wash his dirty clothes that he asks for.”

She turned to look at Caden and Steve.

Arabic?
Caden mouthed. She nodded fast and turned back to the cave.

“It is not so bad here,” one of them said, as they reached the bottom of the cave and walked single file along the swept path beneath the globes. “You get food, movies, you work a bit in the factory and you can even swim in the ocean sometimes. I like it here.”

“And you know what they are saying about the big plan. Two weeks, they say.”

“Ah, they have been saying it will be two weeks for six months now. They say it to make us silent and keep us happy.”

“I think you always complain because it makes
you
happy. Nuri has gone, no? Muntasir? Rashad? You are a pain in the belly.”

Caden had theorized that the deep pool of water Steve had said blocked the way out of the caves through the regular entrance would keep them penned up if they ever went stir crazy, as they must do after a time down here. It sounded like some of them were already stir crazy and looking for trouble.

As they drew level with her hole in the wall, she pulled back. Steve raised his brow at her. She leaned very close to his ear and cupped her hand around it to block sound waves. “They’re pissed. Have to carry food back to camp. In Coles supermarket bags.”

He shook his head in disbelief, although he didn’t explain why.

She carefully pushed her head out of the hole again. They were close to the end of the cave now. The electrical cord ran into another narrow fissure that they were heading for. As big as this cave was, it was still merely a part of the path that took them to their destination.

She waited until they had disappeared into the smaller passage, then prepared to climb out of their hole. Caden’s hand on her ankle halted her. She looked back. He pointed towards her right, to the north, and tugged on his ear.
Listen
.

He wanted her to make sure no one else was coming down the path.

She sat still and strained to listen for more sounds from the north. For long minutes the noise of the three men in the southern passage bounced back to them, distorting everything.

Finally she shook her head and eased herself out of the hole. She stood up, incredibly grateful to be able to stretch her body to its full length.

Caden and Steve followed her. Steve turned to study the electrical flex running up into the high northern passage, his hands on his hips. He seemed puzzled.

Caden looked around the enormous cavern and shook his head. It was a sign of silent wonder. He touched Steve’s arm to get his attention and leaned close to his ear.

“How deep?”

Steve looked up at the roof, thoughtful, then rocked his hand back and forth. “One, one and a half kilometers.”

Montana translated that with practiced ease. They were nearly a mile deep.

Steve waved them closer to him. “We should head back. We’ve seen all we need to.” His voice was very low. No sibilant whispering to echo and bounce.

Caden shook his head. “We have to go on. Follow them. You must see it with your eyes.”

“I’ve seen enough.” Steve gave another irritated glance towards the north passage. Something about it bothered him deeply, she realized.

Caden shook his head. “There’s a vent to the sea, you said, yes?”

“Yeah.”

And sometimes we swim in the ocean
, the men had said in Arabic.

“Yes, there is,” she agreed. “They were talking about it.”

Caden nodded. “We go all the way through. See everything. Go out there.”

Steve shook his head.
No
.

Caden caught his arm. “I’m not going back that way. You can if you want. I’m not.”

Well, well. He has limits
. It was a thought that touched her with surprise. Montana realized she had begun to think of Caden as invincible. To know he wasn’t, that he had a human weakness, was disconcerting but at the same time, comforting.

She stepped closer to his side. “Me, too,” she told Steve simply.

She saw him grimace as he dropped his chin to his chest. A bow of defeat. After a moment, he looked up again. “‘Kay.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe he was agreeing to it. “Okay,” he repeated.

Caden took the lead.

Now that the path ahead was clear and the way well lit, they could move much faster. There was a huge risk in traveling along an enclosed tunnel. If they met anyone coming or going, there was nowhere to hide. Caden moved very fast, traversing it as quickly as possible. He paused to check around corners, then would stride to the next blind angle and ease his way around that.

Montana followed him. Steve came last.

As they moved, the sounds ahead became more distinct. Human sounds. Domestic ones. Warmth fanned their faces. It warned them and they slipped around the bends even more cautiously. Finally, Caden dropped to a crouch and wormed his way around the bend, his belly barely above the floor.

Montana copied him and found herself in another cavern. This one was smaller than the first and the roof much lower. A smaller space was easier to keep warm, she realized. The floor was more or less even – a shelf of rock rather than sand or gravel. At one side of the cavern, though, it curved down like a wave, to meet the wall about twenty feet below the rest of the cavern. Caden had crawled to this natural gutter and was creeping along it, his head twisted up to watch the floor above them for observers.

Montana carefully scanned the cave before following him down into the sharp crease. The entire far wall of the cavern was pockmarked with fissures. From one of them, a head had emerged, the man calling down to others on the floor. The fissures and holes were sleeping billets.

The men on the floor he had been calling down to were the same ones she had seen crossing the big cavern. They had placed their many shopping bags on a prosaic, very domestic-looking Formica dining table that would have looked at home in a ninteen-sixties kitchen. They were stacking the contents on the table. She spotted cans of tomatoes and the distinct shapes of packages of coffee before ducking down out of sight.

If there was one man to each billet, then there were potentially hundreds of them down here. If there was another cavern....

She realized there must be more caverns. The generator providing the power would make a hell of a racket down here, yet she couldn’t hear a motor at all. It had to be somewhere else. Then there was the ‘factory’ the men had spoken of. She assumed it was the place where they cut the imported heroin and repackaged it for sale on the street. To speak of working ‘in’ a factory implied it was in a separate location nearby.

Caden reached the end of the gulley and pointed up above his head. They had to climb up. He levered himself up, pushing against the sloping floor and the wall beside him, and jammed his feet against the two. Then he found toe holds and finger holds and crawled up the sharply sloping crease. He eased his head above the level of the floor, checking.

He beckoned and held out his hand to her. Montana grasped it and was hauled up the slope, then pushed up higher, his hand impersonally boosting her butt. She crouched for a second, taking her bearings. The men were still at the table, sorting groceries. The man in the hole had withdrawn back into it. There was no one else around. It must surely be close to three or four in the morning. Everyone else would be asleep, as Caden had suggested.

She saw two passages leading from the cavern. Both had electrical cable running into them. Only one had light coming from it. The other was clearly shut down for the night. Which one? Which one?

Steve landed next to her, also crouched, and looked around. “Where?” he murmured.

Then Caden boosted himself up. “Closest,” he said shortly. That was the lit one. Light meant people. Montana bit her lip doubtfully, but Caden had already gone ahead, running in a crouch, watching over his shoulder. She followed him, fear giving her speed. She felt more than saw Steve behind her.

She slipped into the lit opening, holding her breath, wondering what was ahead.

It was another, smaller cavern, also pock-marked with holes. Some of them had clearly been chipped at and dug deeper or wider. Many of them had blankets or cloth strung over the openings. There were not as many globes here and the light was barely enough to see her feet. She looked ahead. There was not another passage at the end of the upward sloping ground. The cavern simply became a passage, narrowing down until the walls almost met, the floor still climbing hard.

She could smell the sea. There was a tiny breeze fluttering along the passage. Fresh air, redolent of seaweed. Was that what had told Caden this was the right opening?

With cat-like stealth, Caden moved toward the passage and they followed. The sleeping holes ended as the cavern narrowed down, but the lights continued to glow, showing them the way. She wondered why they would let the lights burn where there were no people, then realized that the whole string of lights must either be on or off—they couldn’t select individual globes.

The passage began to twist and turn but there was never any doubt about the direction to take. The lights told them and the smoothed and swept path at their feet assured them, too.

They kept climbing and the smell of the sea grew stronger. Montana thought she could hear the boom of surf too. A few minutes later it became definite. Waves rolling in against cliffs.

The passage turned into a smaller cave and the path skirted the edges, for the middle of the cave was a still, black pool of water. Still moving fast, Caden dipped his hand into it and brought it to his mouth.

Montana did the same and tasted salt. Seawater.

Encouraged, she surged ahead. Caden was jogging now, a slow pace that could be kept up for hours if necessary. The boom of the sea was louder, battering at their ears.

Into another narrow passage. She had utterly lost all sense of direction, although she had a feeling that both Steve and Caden would be able to point to north with little thought, even here.

The breeze on their faces was stronger now.

Suddenly, they were there. Lying along the length of the passage were three-foot wide panels of wooden flooring, nailed to wood frames, with posts along each side. Each was about ten foot long. There were three of them. The flooring lay on dozens of old car tires, some with the treads worn down to the steel, others with great holes in the sides.

Caden kicked one of the tires. “Hell of a set up,” he said. “They’ve even got themselves a floating dock for when the ship arrives.”

She realized the injunction against speaking was lifted here. With the noise of the sea drowning them out, nothing would carry back to the sleeping cave dwellers.

She faced the opening to the sea. It was an irregular crack in the face of the cliffs, and from here it looked enormous. It was wide enough for the floating dock to be pushed out through it, with room to spare. But she knew that from the sea, it would be a barely-seen, small shadow on the face of the huge cliffs that ran up and down a lot of the coast here.

She could see the sea beyond, heaving and falling restlessly.

“We swim?” she asked.

“Climb,” Caden declared. “They’d expect us to swim.”

“They?”

“Just being cautious. If they suspected we were here at all, they’d be combing the place, every man turned out to find us. We’re safe. I’m just making sure it stays that way. So, we climb.”

* * * * *

It was already light when they began to climb the cliffs. It was easy going. The cliffs looked sheer and unscalable, but were actually craggy, rough walls with built-in steps and hand holds.

As they hauled themselves over the top, the sun lifted above the horizon and dazzled them.

“Five a.m., thereabouts,” Steve declared as they stripped off their nylon overalls. Montana saw Caden withdraw his knife and the small leather pouch.

“Sunrise,” Montana said, drawing Steve’s attention to her. “Jacko and the others will be in the water. With this offshore wind, the Bommie will be gnarly as hell.”

Caden bundled up the nylon coveralls and belt and handed them to Steve, who packed all the gear together and dumped it under a heavy rock. They might remain there for a century, untouched. People rarely ventured this far off known paths.

They all turned to the north and began to walk along the cliffs back towards Margaret River.

“Now what?” Montana asked, voicing a question she knew they were all thinking.

“You need to go to your superiors,” Steve said. “This is too big for local police.”

“Go to them with what? The fact that we saw guys living in a cave? That’s all we have to tell them. Given the lack of reaction they had to my sighting Ghenghis Bob in the first place, this is going to totally thrill them.”

“How much more serious does it have to get for them to care?” Steve asked. “Six people are dead.”

She couldn’t think of a way to soften her answer, but Caden beat her to it.

“None of them were American,” he told Steve. “They can’t get involved.”

Steve threw his hands up in the air. “Bloody hell, what does it take to make people care? How about I shoot you?” he demanded of Caden. “Then they’ll have to care, right?”

“It wouldn’t do you any good at all,” Caden said, with a rueful smile.

“What about this worm of yours in the database at the consulate?” Steve demanded, turning to her. “We saw four people in there. We know Bob. We all got a very good look at the five in the hospital. If any of them apart from Bob turns up in the database, will that get them interested?”

“The worm is dead,” Montana told him. “It implodes after twelve hours and wipes away all traces of itself. I had to build it that way. You usually don’t get a second chance to get in and retrieve it and if a computer coder gets a long enough look at it, he can trace it back.”