was an insulated Flexi-tube nearby connected to a ceiling grate that was used to feed warm air into the room. Linda pulled the silvery tube off the grate and peered downward. She had a pretty good bird's-eye view.
The adrenaline that shot through her system when she heard Linc's shouted warning was wearing off fast, and she became aware of the cold again. She didn't have to contend with any wind, but the crawl space was the ambient thirty-plus degrees below zero. Her face was numb, and her fingertips were starting to lose sensation despite the heavy mittens. Keeping still was the worst thing possible for her body right now, but it was exactly what she had to do.
More bursts of guttural Spanish sounded below. She closed her eyes, imagining soldiers scouting the base as she and her team had just done. What would they make of the massacre? Would they even care?
A man wearing a white arctic uniform and carrying a large pistol suddenly entered the bedroom. He wore a mask much like the one Linda had sported, so she could not see his features. Like Mark, he stared at the bloody writing on the wall.
It happened so fast, there was nothing Linda could do to stop it. A drop of clear fluid dripped from her nose and pattered against the man's shoulder. He brushed at it without turning his head and made to leave and continue his search.
As soon as he stepped out of the room, Linda was in motion. Like a spider keeping to its web, she moved hand and foot along the tile ceiling's support rails. They weren't meant to take the weight of a fully grown person, and she was afraid the wires that kept them in place would snap.
There came a sudden eruption of gunfire. The tile where she'd been a moment earlier exploded in a fine powder and fell down into the bedroom. Two more shots boomed out and two more tiles disintegrated. Seeps of weak sunlight filtered through the holes the bullets had torn through the outer roof.
Linda used the sound of the blasts, and the momentary deafness sure to accompany them, to slide over a larger trunk line for the base's ventilation system. This tube was more than big enough to hide her. The safety on her rifle was off.
She knew not to hold her breath but to let it come slow and even. With her heart racing, she needed oxygen. The roof above her snapped into sharp focus under the beam of a flashlight.
The Argentine had realized something liquid had dripped on his shoulder, but with the base so cold any fluid would be frozen solid. He had become suspicious.
Breathe, Linda, breathe. He can't see you, and he's too big to crawl up here.
Ten of the tensest seconds of her life went by. Ten seconds that she knew he could fire a shot into the ventilation hose for the fun of it and put a round through her head.
There came the sounds of another man entering the room heavy footfalls and a shouted question. A terse conversation followed, and suddenly the light went away, and she could tell the men had left the room below.
She willed her body to relax and ever so gently sniffled.
That would have beat all, Linda thought. Killed because of a runny nose. This was one story she knew she'd keep to herself. She buried her face in her parka's fur-lined hood and prepared to wait out the Argentine search party for as long as it took.
The Silent Sea
Chapter FIFTEEN
CABRILLO WAITED FOR THE WINCH TO START HAULING him up, but nothing happened. Then he realized that wasn't true, more of the line was coming down the shaft and forming an ever-enlargening loop just below where he hovered in the water. Max had hit the wrong button. Juan tried to hail him over the comm link but received no reply. Hanley had gone off alone to deal with the Argentine threat. And in his haste had trapped Juan in the Treasure Pit.
The prudent thing to do would be to surface according to the dive tables he'd memorized decades ago and wait for Max to return. But Juan wasn't one to let opportunity go to waste, so he inverted himself and swam back for the bottom. There was no sense leaving until he was positive he'd missed nothing.
He examined the niche first, going so far as to press himself into it to see if it activated any kind of device. The chiseled stone around him remained innocuous. He sank lower still. The silt he'd kicked up earlier had settled back to the bottom. He cleared away an area where the wall met the floor. And something caught his attention. He pulled his dive knife from the sheath strapped to his calf and ran it along the seam. The tip vanished into a tiny gap between the floor and wall. He tried again at another spot and found the same thing.
Three more attempts convinced him that the floor of the Treasure Pit was fitted like a plug. There was something deeper in the earth, something buried below this false bottom.
He thought for a moment. There had to be a way to get there. The Ronishes had figured it out. Cabrillo swam a slow circuit of the floor, his dive light shining on the joint. It was in a corner. A stone was wedged tightly between the floor and a small irregularity projecting from the wall.
Juan didn't touch it. Instead, he pulled his knees up to his chest and thrust them down onto the floor. The impact sent pain shooting up from his heels but also made the entire floor of the pit bobble ever so slightly. He glanced back up at the niche.
Clever, he thought. Very, very clever.
He returned to the rock wedge and got himself ready. He had no idea how much time he had, but he assumed he'd have to be quick. Reaching out a hand, he pulled the stone free, then finned for the grotto as fast as he could. Where a second ago all he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the pit was suddenly filled with the scrape of stone against stone.
The bottom of the chamber was an enormous float, kept in place by the wedge. Juan threw himself into the niche just as the silt-covered floor reached it. He pressed himself as far back as possible. The pit's designers hadn't had bulky scuba tanks, so the fit was tight. He watched in awe as the floor rose higher and higher. It climbed past his knees, then waist, and continued upward. It wasn't so buoyant that it raced for the surface, but rather it ascended at a stately pace.
He realized that his fiber-optic cable was trapped between the float and the wall, and said a silent prayer that it wouldn't get cut. No sooner had he thought it than the frayed end drifted down over him, the plastic abraded away. A second later, the loose end of his lifeline drifted past, too.
He had no idea how the float would stop but he figured it must, otherwise the Ronish brothers would have perished down here seventy years ago.
One mystery was solved when he got his first look at the side of the giant float. The top layer was just a thin veneer of slate while the rest of it was metal. When he tapped it, it rang hollow. The metal had withstood centuries of immersion in salt water because the designer had covered it in a layer of fine gold flake. Gold never corrodes, and could protect the metal float for centuries.
There were marks in the gold, thin lines cut through it as if someone had scraped some away with a knife. He imagined it had been one of the Ronish boys thinking the whole drum was made of gold only to see it was just a patina not even a millimeter thick. Where the knife had left scars, Juan could see that the float was made of bronze. While this metal resisted corrosion better than steel, he figured in another couple of decades the sea would find a way to eat through the scar. The hollow float would fill with water, and the trap would never work again.
Cabrillo estimated the drum was ten feet tall, and when the bottom of it finally passed over his head it stopped in line with the top of the niche. It had to have hit another small projection from the shaft wall that he had overlooked on his way down. He marveled at the engineering it took to make this work.
He swam out of the niche and looked up. There was a handle on the underside of the float. He grabbed it and tugged. The buoyancy had been so perfectly calculated that he was able to pull the enormous contraption downward a bit. He knew he could get out by tying his lead weight belt to the handle and letting the float settle back to the bottom while he waited in the niche. He assumed that's what the Ronishes had done, only their weight had dropped away. He descended past where the bottom of the shaft had been and sank lower still.
In the exact center of the real floor of the Treasure Pit he found a pile of rocks from the beach. The Ronish brothers' counterweight. The bag that had once held them had long since been dissolved by the Pacific's salt water. The other discovery Juan made was far more intriguing. There was a low tunnel off the main vertical shaft.
Cabrillo entered it, his tanks tapping on the ceiling because the fit was so tight. The tunnel angled up sharply,
