I ran at a crouch towards the plunger box and knelt over it, hoping that our answer to Gatt would be decisive. He shouted again. ‘Your hour is up, Wheale.’ He laughed boomingly. ‘Fish, or I’ll cut you into bait.’
‘Listen!’ said Smith urgently. ‘That’s a plane.’
The droning noise was much louder and suddenly swelled to a roar as the aircraft went overhead. Desperately I gave the plunger handle a ninety-degree twist and rammed it down and the hut shook under the violence of the explosion. Smith yelled in exultation, and I ran to the window to see what had happened.
One of the huts had almost literally disappeared. As the smoke blew away I saw that all that was left of it was the concrete foundation. White figures tumbled from the other hut and ran away, and Smith was shooting fast. I grabbed his shoulder. ‘Stop that! You’re wasting bullets.’
The plane went overhead again, although I couldn’t see it. ‘I wonder whose it is,’ I said. ‘It could belong to Gatt.’
Smith laughed excitedly. ‘It might not—and, Jeez, what a signal we gave it!’
There was no reaction from Gatt; the loud voice had stopped with the explosion and I desperately hoped I’d blown him to hell.
It was too much to hope for. Everything was quiet for another hour and then there came a slow and steady hail of rifle fire. Bullets ripped through the thin walls of the hut, tearing away the interior insulation, and it was very dangerous to move away from the cover of the thick baulks of timber Rudetsky had installed. The chief danger was not from a direct hit but from a ricochet. From the pace of the firing I thought that not more than three or four men were involved, and I wondered uneasily what the others were doing.
It was also evident that Gatt was still alive. I doubted if the chicleros would still keep up the attack without him and his bully boys behind them. They wouldn’t have the motive that drove Gatt, and, besides, an unknown number had been killed in the hut. I was reasonably sure that none of the men in that hut could have survived the explosion, and it must have given the rest a hell of a shock.
The fact that the attack had been resumed after an hour also demonstrated that Gatt, no matter what else he was, could lead—or drive—men. I knew personally of three chicleros that had died; say another four, at a low estimate, had been killed in the hut, and add to that any that Fowler or Rudetsky had killed before being slaughtered themselves. Gatt must be a hell of a man if he could whip the chicleros into another attack after suffering losses like that.
The aircraft had circled a couple of times after the hut blew up and then had flown off, heading north-west. If it
belonged to Gatt then it wouldn’t make any difference; if it belonged to a stranger then the pilot might be wondering what the hell was going on—he’d certainly been interested enough to overfly the camp a couple of times—and he might report it to the authorities when he got to wherever he was going. By the time anything got done about it we’d all be dead.
But I didn’t think it was a stranger. We’d been in Quintana Roo for quite some time and the only aircraft I’d seen were those belonging to Fallon and Gatt’s little twinengined job that had landed at Camp One. There’s not much call for an air service in Quintana Roo, so if it wasn’t Gatt’s plane then it might be someone like Pat Harris, come down to see why Fallon had lost communication with the outer world. And I couldn’t see that making any difference to our position either.
I winced as a bullet slammed through the hut and a few flakes of plastic insulation drifted down to settle on the back of my hand. There were two things we could do—stay there and wait for it, or make a break and get killed in the open. Not much of a choice.
Smith said, ‘I wonder where all the other guys are? There can’t be more than four of them out front.’
I grinned tightly. ‘Want to go outside and find out?’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘Uh-uh! I want them to come and get
me
. That way
they’re
in the open.’
Katherine was crouched behind a thick timber, clutching the revolver I had given her. If she had not lost her fear at least she was disguising it resolutely. Fallon worried me more; he just stood there quietly, grasping the shotgun and waiting for the inevitable. I think he had given up and would have welcomed the smashing blow of a bullet in the head which would make an end to everything.
Time passed, punctuated by the regular crack of a rifle and the thump of a bullet as it hit thick timber. I bent
down and applied my eye to a ragged bullet hole in the wall, working on the rather dubious principle that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. The marksmen were hidden and there was no way of finding their positions; not that it would have done us any good if we knew because we had but one rifle, and that had only two rounds in the magazine.
Fowler’s body was lying about thirty feet from the hut. The wind plucked at his shirt and rippled the cloth, and ten-drils of his hair danced in the breeze. He lay quite peacefully with one arm outflung, the fingers of the hand half-curled in a natural position as though he were asleep; but his shirt was stained with ugly blotches to mark the bullet wounds.
I swallowed painfully and lifted my eyes higher to the ruined hut and the litter about it, and then beyond to the ruins of Uaxuanoc and the distant forest. There was something about the scene which looked odd and unnatural, and it wasn’t the ugly evidence of violence and death. It was something that had changed and it took me a long time to figure what it was.
I said, ‘Smith!’
‘Yeah?’
‘The wind’s rising.’
There was a pause while he looked for himself, then he said tiredly, ‘So what?’
I looked again at the forest. It was in motion and the tree-tops danced, the branches pushed by moving air. All the time I had been in Quintana Roo the air had been quiet and hot, and there had been times when I would have welcomed a cool breeze. I turned carefully and strained my head to look out of the window without exposing my head to a snap shot. The sky to the east was dark with thick cloud and there was a faint and faraway flicker of lightning.
‘Fallon!’ I said. ‘When does the rainy season start?’
He stirred briefly. ‘Any time, Jemmy.’
He didn’t seem very interested in why I had asked.
I said, ‘If you saw clouds and lightning now—what would you think?’
‘That the season had started,’ he said.
‘Is that all?’ I said, disappointed.
‘That’s all.’
Another bullet hit the hut and I swore as a wood splinter drove into my calf. ‘Hey!’ shouted Smith in alarm. ‘Where the hell did that one come from?’ He pointed to the ragged hole in the wooden floor.
I saw what he meant. That bullet had hit at an impossible angle, and it hadn’t done it by a ricochet. Another bullet slammed in and a chair jerked and fell over. I saw a hole in the
seat
of the chair, and knew what had happened. I listened for the next bullet to hit and distinctly heard it come through the roof. The chicleros had got up on the hillside behind the cenote and were directing a plunging fire down at the hut.
The situation was now totally impossible. All our added protection was in the walls and it had served, us well, but we had no protection from above. Already I could see daylight showing through a crack in the asbestos board roofing where a bullet had split the brittle panel. Given enough well-aimed bullets and the chicleros could damn near strip the roof from the top of us, but we’d most likely be dead by then.
We could find a minimum shelter by huddling in the angle of the floor and the wall on the side of the hut nearest the hill, but from there we could not see what was happening at the front of the hut. If we did that, then all that Gatt would have to do was to walk up and open the door—no one would be in a position to shoot him.
Another bullet hit from above. I said, ‘Smith—want to break for it? I’ll be with you if you go.’
‘Not me,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I’ll die right here.’
He died within ten seconds of uttering those words by taking a bullet in the middle of his forehead which knocked
him back against the wall and on to the floor. He died without seeing the man who killed him and without ever having seen Gatt, who had ordered his death.
I stooped to him, and a bullet smacked into the wall just where I had been standing. Fallon shouted, ‘Jemmy! The window!’ and I heard the duller report of the shotgun blasting off.
A man screamed and I twisted on the ground with the revolver in my hand just in time to see a chiclero reel away from the already long-shattered window and Fallon with the smoking gun in his hand. He moved right to the window and fired another shot and there was a shout from outside.
He dropped back and broke open the gun to reload, and I leaped forward to the window. A chiclero was jumping for cover while another was staggering around drunkenly, his hands to his face and crying in a loud keening wail. I ignored him and took a shot at a third who was by the door not four feet away. Even a tyro with a gun couldn’t miss him and he grunted and folded suddenly in the middle.
I dropped back as a bullet broke one of the shards of glass remaining in the window, and shuddered violently as two more bullets came in through the roof. Any moment I expected to feel the impact as one of them hit me.
Fallon had suddenly come alive again. He nudged me with his foot and I looked up to find him regarding me with bright eyes. ‘You can get out,’ he said quickly. ‘Move fast!’
I gaped, and he swung his arm and pointed to the scuba gear. ‘Into the cenote, damn it!’ he yelled. ‘They can’t get at you there.’ He crawled to the wall and applied his eye to a bullet hole. ‘It’s quiet out front. I can hold them for long enough.’
‘What about you?’
He turned. ‘What about me? I’m dead anyway. Don’t worry, Gatt won’t get me alive.’
There wasn’t much time to think. Katherine and I could go into the cenote and survive for a little longer, safe from
Gatt’s bullets, but then what? Once we came out we’d be sitting targets—and we couldn’t stay down forever. Still, a short extension of life meant a little more hope, and if we stayed where we were we would certainly be killed within the next few minutes.
I grabbed Katherine’s wrist. ‘Get into your gear,’ I yelled. ‘Get a bloody move on.’
She looked at me with startled eyes, but moved fast. She ripped off her clothes and got into the wet-suit and I helped her put on the harness. ‘What about Fallon?’ she said breathlessly.
‘Never mind him,’ I snapped. ‘Concentrate on what you’re doing.’
There was a diminution in the rate of rifle fire which I couldn’t understand. If I’d have been in Gatt’s place now was the time when I’d be pouring it on thick and heavy, but only one bullet came through the roof while Katherine and I were struggling with the harnesses and coupling up the bottles.
I turned to Fallon. ‘How is it outside?’
He was looking through the window at the sky in the east and a sudden gust of wind lifted his sparse hair. ‘I was wrong, Jemmy,’ he said suddenly. ‘There’s a storm coming. The wind is already very strong.’
‘I doubt if it will do us any good,’ I said. The two-bottle pack was heavy on my shoulders and I knew I couldn’t run very fast, and Katherine would be even more hampered. There was a distinct likelihood that we’d be picked off running for the cenote.
‘Time to go,’ said Fallon, and picked up the rifle. He had assembled all the weapons in a line near the window. He shrugged irritably. ‘No time for protracted farewells, Jemmy. Get the hell out of here.’ He turned his back on us and stood by the window with the rifle upraised.
I heaved away the table which barricaded the door, then said to Katherine, ‘When I open the door start running.
Don’t think of anything else but getting to the cenote. Once you are in it dive for the cave. Understand?’
She nodded, but looked helplessly at Fallon. ‘What about…?’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Move…now!’
I opened the door and she went out, and I followed her low and fast, twisting to change direction as soon as my feet hit the soil outside. I heard a crack as a rifle went off but I didn’t know if that was the enemy or Fallon giving covering fire. Ahead, I saw Katherine zip round the corner of the hut and as I followed her I ran into a gust of wind that was like a brick wall, and I gasped as it got into my mouth, knocking the breath out of me. There was remarkably little rifle fire—just a few desultory shots—and no bullets came anywhere near that I knew of.
I took my eyes off Katherine and risked a glance upwards and saw the possible reason. The whole of the hillside above the cenote was in violent motion as the wind lashed the trees, and waves drove across as they drive over a wheatfield under an English breeze. But these were hundred-foot trees bending under the blast—not stalks of wheat—and this was something stronger than an English zephyr. It suddenly struck me that anyone on the hillside would be in danger of losing his skin.
But there was no time to think of that. I saw Katherine hesitate on the brink of the cenote. This was no time to think of the niceties of correct diving procedure, so I yelled to her, ‘Jump! Jump, damn it!’ But she still hesitated over the thirty-foot drop, so I rammed my hand in the small of her back and she toppled over the edge. I followed her a split-second later and hit feet first. The harness pulled hard on me under the strain and then the water closed over my head.
As I went under I jack-knifed to dive deeper, keeping a lookout for Katherine. I saw her, but to my horrified astonishment she was going up again—right to the surface. I twisted in the water and went after her, wondering what the hell she thought she was doing, and grabbed her just before she broke into the air.
Then I saw what was wrong. The mask had been ripped from her head, probably by impact with the water, and the airline was inextricably tangled and wound among the bottles on her back in such a position that it was impossible for her to even touch it. She was fast running out of air, but she kept her head, and let it dribble evenly and slowly from her mouth just as she had done when I surprised her in Fallon’s swimming pool back in Mexico City. She didn’t even panic when I grabbed her, but let me pull her under water to the side of the cenote.
We broke into air and she gasped. I spat out my mouthpiece and disentangled her airline, and she paused before putting the mask on. ‘Thanks!’ she said. ‘But isn’t it dangerous here?’
We were right at the side of the cenote nearest the hill and protected from plunging fire by the sheer wall of the cenote, but if anyone got past Fallon we’d be sitting ducks. I said, ‘Swim under water for the shot line, then wait for
me. Don’t worry about the shooting—water is hard stuff—it stops a bullet dead within six inches. You’ll be all right if you’re a couple of feet under; as safe as behind armour plate.’
She ducked under the water and vanished. I couldn’t see her because of the dancing reflections and the popple on the water caused by the driving wind, but the boys on the hillside evidently could because of the spurts of water that suddenly flicked in a line. I hoped I was right about that bit of folklore about bullets hitting water, and I breathed with relief as there was a surge of water at the raft as she went beneath it and was safe.
It was time for me to go. I went down and swam for the raft, going down about four feet. I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a bullet dropping vertically through the water, its tip flattened by the impact. The folklore was right, after all.
I found her clinging to the shot line beneath the raft, and pointed downwards with my thumb. Obediently she dived, keeping one hand in contact with the rope, and I followed her. We went down to the sixty-five-foot level where a marker on the rope indicated that we were as deep as the cave, and we swam for it and surfaced inside with a deep sense of relief. Katherine bobbed up beside me and I helped her climb on to the ledge, then I switched on the light.
‘We made it,’ I said.
She took off her mask wearily. ‘For how long?’ she asked, and looked at me accusingly. ‘You left Fallon to die; you abandoned him.’
‘It was his own decision,’ I said shortly. ‘Switch off your valve; you’re wasting air.’
She reached for it mechanically, and I turned my attention to the cave. It was fairly big and I judged the volume to be in excess of three thousand cubic feet—we’d had to pump a hell of a lot of air into it from the surface to expel the water. At that depth the air was compressed to three
atmospheres, therefore it contained three times as much oxygen as an equal volume at the surface, which was a help. But with every breath we were exhaling carbon dioxide and as the level of CO
2
built up so we would get into trouble.
I rested for a while and watched the light reflect yellowly from the pile of gold plate at the further end of the ledge. The problem was simple; the solution less so. The longer we stayed down, the longer we would have to decompress on the way up—but the bottles in the back-packs didn’t hold enough air for lengthy decompression. At last I bent down and swished my mask in the water before putting it on.
Katherine sat up. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I won’t be long,’ I said. ‘Just to the bottom of the cenote to find a way of stretching our stay here. You’ll be all right—just relax and take things easy.’
‘Can I help?’
I debated that one, then said, ‘No. You’ll just use up air. There’s enough in the cave to keep us going, and I might need what you have in that bottle.’
She looked up at the light and shivered. ‘I hope that doesn’t go out. It’s strange that it still works.’
‘The batteries topside are still full of juice,’ I said. ‘That’s not so strange. Keep cheerful—I won’t be long.’
I donned my mask, slipped into the water and swam out of the cave, and then made for the bottom. I found one of our working lights and debated whether or not to switch it on because it could be seen from the surface. In the end I risked it—there wasn’t anything Gatt could do to get at me short of inventing a depth charge to blow me up, and I didn’t think he could do that at short notice.
I was looking for the air cylinders Rudetsky and I had pushed off the raft and I found them spread out to hell and gone. Finding the manifold that had followed the cylinders was a bit more tricky but I discovered it under the coils of
air hose that spread like a huge snake, and I smiled with satisfaction as I saw the spanner still tied to it by a loop of rope. Without that spanner I’d have been totally sunk.
Heaving the cylinders into one place was a labour fit for Hercules but I managed it at last and set about coupling up the manifold. Divers have very much the same problem of weightlessness as astronauts, and every time I tried to tighten a nut my body rotated around the cylinder in the other direction. I was down there nearly an hour but finally I got the cylinders attached to the manifold with all cocks open, and the hose on to the manifold outlet with the end valve closed. Now all the air in the cylinders was available on demand at the end of the hose.
I swam up to the cave, pulling the hose behind the, and popped up beside the ledge holding it triumphantly aloft. Katherine was sitting at the further end of the ledge, and when I said, ‘Grab this!’ she didn’t do a damn thing but merely turned and looked at me.
I hoisted myself out of the water, holding the end of the hose with difficulty, and then hauled in a good length of it and anchored it by sitting on it. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I demanded.
She made no answer for some time, then said cheerlessly, ‘I’ve been thinking about Fallon.’
‘Oh!’
‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked with passion in her voice, but the sudden violence left her as soon as it had come. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ she asked more calmly.
I considered it. ‘Probably,’ I said at last.
‘My God, I’ve misjudged you,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘You’re a cold man, really. You’ve just left a man to die and you don’t care a damn.’
‘What I feel is my business. It was Fallon’s decision—he made it himself.’
‘But you took advantage of it.’
‘So did you,’ I pointed out.
‘I know,’ she said desolately. ‘I know. But I’m not a man; I can’t kill and fight.’
‘I wasn’t brought up to it myself,’ I said acidly. ‘Not like Gatt. But you’d kill if you had to, Katherine. Just like the rest of us. You’re a human being—a killer by definition. We can all kill but some of us have to be forced to it.’
‘And you didn’t feel you had to defend Fallon,’ she said quietly.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said equally quietly. ‘Because I’d be defending a dead man. Fallon knew that, Katie; he’s dying of cancer. He’s known it ever since Mexico City, which is why he’s been so bloody irresponsible. And now it’s on his conscience. He wanted to make his peace, Katie; he wanted to purge his conscience. Do you think I should have denied him that—even though we’re all going to die anyway?’
I could hardly hear her. ‘Oh, God!’ she breathed. ‘I didn’t know—I didn’t know.’
I felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit mixed up. I’d forgotten you didn’t know. He told me just before Gatt’s attack. He was going back to Mexico City to die in three months. Not much to look forward to, is it?’
‘So that’s why he could hardly bear to leave here.’ Her voice broke in a sob. ‘I watched him looking over the city as though he were in love with it. He’d
stroke
the things we brought up from here.’
‘He was a man taking farewell of everything he loved,’ I said.
She was quiet for a time, then she said, ‘I’m sorry. Jemmy, I’m sorry for the things I said. I’d give a lot not to have said them.’
‘Forget it.’ I busied myself with securing the hose, then began to contemplate what I’d do with it. The average diver doesn’t memorize the Admiralty diving tables, and I was no exception. However, I’d been consulting them freely of late,
especially in relation to the depths in the cenote, and I had a fairly good idea of the figures involved. Sooner or later we’d have to go to the surface and that meant decompressing on the way up, the amount of decompression time depending on the depth attained and the length of time spent there.
I had just spent an hour at nearly a hundred feet and came back to sixty-five and I reckoned if I spent another hour, at least, in the cave, then I could write off the descent to the bottom of the cenote as far as decompression went. The nitrogen would already be easing itself quietly from my tissues without bubbling.
That left the ascent to the surface. The longer we spent in the cave the more decompression time we’d need, and the decompression time was strictly controlled by the amount of air available in the big cylinders at the bottom of the cenote. It would be unfortunate, to say the least, to run out of air while, say, at the twenty-foot decompression stop. A choice between staying in the water and asphyxiation, and going up and getting the bends. The trouble was that I didn’t know how much air was left in the cylinders—Rudetsky had been doing the surface work on the raft and he wasn’t available to tell me.
So I took a chance and assumed they were half full and carried on from there. My small back-pack bottles were nearly empty, but the ones on Katherine’s harness were nearly full, so that was a small reserve. I finally figured out that if we spent a total of just over three hours in the cave I would need an hour and three-quarters, decompression—a total of five hours since we had dived under the bullets. There could possibly have been a change up on top in five hours. I grinned tightly. There wasn’t any harm in being optimistic—Gatt might even have shot himself in frustration.
I consulted my watch and considered it lucky that I’d made a habit of wearing the waterproof and pressureproof
diver’s watch all the time. We’d been down an hour and a half, so that left about the same time to go before vacating the cave. I stretched out on the hard rock, still weighing down the hose, and prepared to wait it out.
‘Jemmy!’
‘Yes.’
‘Nobody ever called me Katie before—except my father.’
‘Don’t look upon me as a father-figure,’ I said gruffly.
‘I won’t,’ she promised solemnly.
The light went out—not with a last despairing glimmer as the batteries packed in, but suddenly, as though a switch had been turned off. Katherine gave a startled cry, and I called out. Take it easy, Katie girl! Nothing to worry about.’
‘Is it the batteries?’
‘Probably,’ I said, but I knew it wasn’t. Someone had turned the light off deliberately or the circuit had been damaged. We were left in a darkness that could be felt physically—a clammy black cloak wrapped around us. Darkness, as such, had never worried me, but I knew it could have peculiar effects on others, so I stretched out my hand. ‘Katie, come here!’ I said. ‘Let’s not get too far away from each other.’
I felt her hand in mine. ‘I hope we’ll never be that.’
So we talked and talked in the blackness of that cave—talked about every damned thing there was to talk about—about her father and his work at the college, about my sports of fencing and swimming, about Hay Tree Farm, about the Bahamas, about my future, about her future—about our future. We were forgetful enough in that darkness to believe we had a future.
Once she said, ‘Where did the wind come from so suddenly?’
‘What wind?’
‘Just before we ran for the cenote.’
I came back to the real and bloody world with a jerk. ‘I don’t know. Rider was telling me there was a hurricane
off-coast. Maybe it swung inland. He was keeping an ear open for the weather forecasts, I do know that.’ The crash of the chopper and the chase in the forest seemed to have happened an aeon before.
I looked at my watch and the luminous dial swam ghostlike in the darkness. It was just about time to go and I said so. Katherine was practical about it. ‘I’ll get ready,’ she said.
My mouth was dry and I could hardly get the words out. ‘You’re not coming,’ I said.
There was a brief gasp in the darkness. ‘Why not?’
‘There’s only enough air to take one of us to the top. If we both go we’ll both die. You can’t go because God knows what you’d find up there. Even if Gatt has given up you’d still have to find the compressor parts which Rudetsky hid away and get the compressor going again. Could you do that?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘No, I couldn’t.’
‘Then I must do it. God knows I don’t like leaving you here, but it’s the best way.’
‘How long will you be?’
‘Nearly two hours going up and maybe another hour to get the compressor going. You won’t run out of air here, Katie; you should have enough for another seven or eight hours.’
‘Seven hours will be too late, won’t it? If it’s as much as seven hours you won’t be coming back at all. Isn’t that right, Jemmy?’
It was—and I knew it. ‘I’ll be back long before then,’ I said, but both of us knew the chances against it.
Her voice was pensive. ‘I’d rather drown than just run out of air slowly.’
‘For God’s sake!’ I burst out. ‘You’ll stay in this bloody cave until I get back, do you hear me? You’ll stay here—promise me!’
‘I’ll stay,’ she said softly, and then she was suddenly in my arms. ‘Kiss me, darling.’ Her lips were on mine and I
held her tight, despite those damned clammy and unromantic rubber wet-suits we wore.
At last I pushed her away. ‘We can’t waste time,’ I said, and bent down, groping for the hose. My fingers encountered something metallic which clattered on the rock, and I grasped it, then found the hose with my other hand. I pulled down the mask and whatever I was holding was in my way so I thrust it impatiently under the harness straps. ‘I’ll be back,’ I promised, and slipped into the water, dragging the hose.