'The prestige of being the first to catalogue and photograph the treasure will go a long way toward enhancing our scientific reputations,' Henry Moore explained as he holstered his gun.
'Customs would also like a detailed report on the objects, if you don't mind?' asked Gaskill.
Moore nodded vigorously. 'Micki and I will be happy to work with you. We've already inventoried the treasure. We'll have a report for you before it's formally returned to Peru.'
'Where will you store it all until then?' asked Micki.
'In a government warehouse whose location we can't reveal,' answered Gaskill.
'Is there any news on Congresswoman Smith and the little man with NUMA?'
Gaskill nodded. 'Minutes before you landed we received word they were rescued by a local tribe of Indians and are on their way to a local hospital.'
Micki sank down into a passenger seat and sighed. 'Then it's over.'
Henry sat on an armrest and took her hand in his. 'It is for us,' he said gently. 'From now on we'll live the rest of our lives together as a pair of old teachers in a university with vine-covered walls.'
She looked up at him. 'Is that so terrible?'
'No,' he said, kissing her lightly on the forehead, 'I think we can handle it.'
Slowly climbing from the depths of a dead stupor, Pitt felt as if he were struggling up a mud-slick slope, only to slip back every time he reached out and touched consciousness. He tried to retain a grip on these brief moments of awareness, only to fall back into a void. If he could open his eyes, he thought vaguely, he might return to reality. Finally, with a mighty effort, he forced open his eyelids.
Seeing only grave-cold blackness, he shook his head in despair, thinking he had fallen back into the void. And then the pain came rushing back like a burst of fire, and he came fully awake. Rolling sideways and then forward into a sitting position, he swung his head from side to side, trying to shake off the fog that clung to the alcoves of his mind. He renewed his fight with the pounding ache in his shoulder, the stiff hurt in his chest, and the sting from his wrist. Tenderly he felt the gash on his forehead.
'A hell of a fine specimen of manhood you are,' he muttered.
Pitt was surprised to find that he didn't feel overly weak from loss of blood. He unclipped from his forearm the flashlight that Giordino had given him after their drop over the falls, switched it on, and propped it in the sand so the beam was aimed at his upper torso. He unzipped his wet suit jacket and tenderly probed the wound in his shoulder. The bullet had passed through the flesh and out his back without striking the scapula or the clavicle. The neoprene rubber on his shredded but still nearly skintight wet suit had helped seal the opening and restrict the flow of blood. Relieved that he did not feel as drained as he thought he would, he relaxed and took stock of his situation. His chances of survival were somewhere beyond impossible. With 100 kilometers (62 miles) of unknown rapids, sharp cascades, and extensive river passages that passed through caverns completely immersed with water, he did not need a palmist to tell him that the life line running across his hand would halt long before he reached senior citizenship. Even if he had air passages the entire way, there was still the distance from the opening of the subterranean channel to the surface of the Gulf.
Most other men who found themselves in a Hades of darkness deep within the earth with no hope of escape would have panicked and died tearing their fingers to the bone in a vain attempt to claw their way to the surface. But Pitt was not afraid. He was curiously content and at peace with himself.
If he was going to die, he thought, he might as well get comfortable. With his good hand he dug indentations in the sand to accommodate his body contour. He was surprised when the flashlight beam reflected from a thousand golden specks in the black sand. He held up a handful under the light.
'This place is loaded with placer gold,' he said to himself.
He shone the light around the cavern. The walls were cut with ledges of white quartz streaked with tiny veins of gold. Pitt began laughing as he saw humor in the implausibility of it all.
'A gold mine,' he proclaimed to the silent cave. 'I've made a fabulously rich gold strike and nobody will ever know it.'
He sat back and contemplated his discovery. Someone must be telling him something, he thought. Just because he wasn't afraid of the old man with the scythe didn't mean he had to give up and wait for him. A stubborn resolve sparked within him.
Better to enter the great beyond after an audacious attempt at staying alive than to throw in the towel and go out like a dishrag, he concluded. Perhaps other adventurous explorers would give up everything they owned for the honor of entering this mineralogical sanctum sanctorum, but all Pitt wanted now was to get out. He rose to his feet, inflated the buoyancy compensator with his breath and walked into the water until he was adrift in the current that carried him along.
Just take it one cavern at a time, he told himself, flashing the light on the water ahead. There was no relying on eternal vigilance. He was too weak to fight rapids and fend off rocks. He could only be calm and go wherever the current took him. He soon felt as if he had been cruising from one gallery to another for a lifetime.
The roof of the caverns and galleries rose and fell with monotonous regularity for the next 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Then he heard the dreaded rumble of approaching rapids. Thankfully, the first chute Pitt encountered was of medium roughness. The water crashed against his face and he went under churning froth several times before reaching placid water again.
He was granted a comfortable reprieve as the river turned smooth and ran through one long canyon in an immense gallery. When he reached the end nearly an hour later, the roof gradually sloped down until it touched the water. He filled his lungs to the last crowded millimeter and dived. Able to use only one arm and missing his swim fins, the going was slow. He aimed the flashlight at the jagged rock roof and swam on his back. His lungs began to protest the lack of oxygen, but he swam on. At last the light revealed an air pocket. He shot to the surface and mightily inhaled the pure, unpolluted air that had been trapped deep beneath the earth millions of years ago.
The small cave widened into a large cavern whose ceiling arched beyond the beam of the flashlight. The river made a sweeping turn where it had formed a reef of polished gravel. Pitt crawled painfully onto the dry area to rest. He turned off the light to prolong the life of the batteries.
Abruptly, he flicked the flash on again. Something had caught his eye in the shadows before the light blinked out. Something was there, not 5 meters (16 feet) away, a black form that revealed a straight line aberrant to natural geometrics.
Pitt's spirits soared as he recognized the battered remains of the Wallowing Windbag. Incredibly, the Hovercraft had come through the horrific fall over the cataract and had been cast up here after drifting nearly 40 kilometers. At last a gleam of hope. He stumbled across the gravel beach to the rubber hull and examined it under his light.
The engine and fan had been torn from their mountings and were missing. Two of the air chambers were punctured and deflated, but the remaining six still held firm. Some of the equipment was swept away, but four air tanks, the first-aid kit, Duncan's plastic ball of colored water dye tracer, one of Giordino's paddles, two extra flashlights, and the waterproof container with Admiral Sandecker's thermos of coffee and four bologna sandwiches had miraculously survived.
'It seems my state of affairs has considerably improved,' Pitt said happily to nobody but the empty cavern.
He began with the first-aid kit. After liberally soaking the shoulder wound with disinfectant, he awkwardly applied a crude bandage on it inside his tattered wet suit. Knowing it was useless to bind fractured ribs, he gritted his teeth, set his wrist and taped it.
The coffee had retained most of its heat inside the thermos, and he downed half of it before attacking the sandwiches. No medium-rare porterhouse steak, doused and flamed in cognac, tasted better than this bologna, Pitt decided. Then and there he vowed never to complain or make jokes about bologna sandwiches ever again.
After a brief rest, a goodly measure of his strength returned and he felt refreshed enough to resecure the equipment and break open Duncan's plastic dye container. He scattered Fluorescein Yellow with Optical Brightener into the water. Under the beam of his flashlight he watched until the dye stained the river with a vivid yellow luminescence. He stood and watched until the current swept it out of sight.
'That should tell them I'm coming,' he thought aloud.
He pushed the remains of the Hovercraft out of the shallows. Favoring his injuries, he awkwardly climbed aboard and paddled one-handed into the mainstream.
