“I’m sure.”
“We’d better get a move on. Something tells me they’re not done yet.”
While Sam knew Remi was almost certainly right, he also knew they had few options: go out the way they’d come in, find another way out, fight, or hide. The first option was a nonstarter—it would play right into their pursuers’ hands; the second option, a huge question mark—this cave system could be a dead end for them, both figuratively and literally; the third, also a nonstarter. While they were armed with Guido the Shoemaker’s snub- nosed .38 revolver, Kholkov and his men were armed with assault rifles. The fourth option, to hide, was their only viable chance to get out of this.
The question was, how long would their pursuers wait before following them here? They had one thing on their side, Sam realized, checking his watch. The inflow period was ending; in a few minutes the current would start flowing out again, making entry difficult.
“So this is what passes for a makeshift secret Nazi submarine pen,” Remi said, shucking off the remainder of her gear.
“Probably so, but there’s no way of telling until we find—”
“No, Sam, that wasn’t a question. Look.”
Sam turned. Remi was shining the flashlight on the rock wall above the pier. Clearly homemade out of pounded tin and paint that had long ago lost most of its color, the four-by-three-foot rectangle was nonetheless recognizable.
“Kriegsmarine Nazi flag,” Sam whispered. In his hurried survey of the cavern, he’d missed it. “The pride of home ownership, I suppose.”
Remi laughed.
Taking it one careful step at a time, probing for weak spots as they went, they made their way across the catwalk to the pier; aside from a few nerve-wracking creaks and pops, the planking held firm. The cables, though coated in a thick layer of slimy rust, were similarly solid, bolted into the ceiling and rock walls by thumb-sized steel eyelets. Under the helpful beam of Remi’s flashlight, Sam recrossed the catwalk, grabbed the rope, and returned to the pier, dragging the submerged dinghy along. Together they hauled it up onto the pier. While the dinghy itself was shredded, the motor and attached gas can had miraculously survived with only a few bullet scrapes. Similarly, of their two dry bags, one was riddled with a dozen or more holes, the other unscathed.
“We’ll sort through this, see what we can salvage,” Sam said.
They walked to the end to have a look at the rear wall. The second chamber was, as Sam had suspected, a fracture-guided system. While thousands of years of water erosion had smoothed the walls of the main cavern, the secondary chamber had jagged and wildly angled walls. At the juncture were two tunnels in the shape of a wide V, one tunnel slanting upward to the left, the other slanting downward to the right. Water sluiced from the left-hand tunnel, half its volume coursing into the main cavern, the other half disappearing down the right-hand tunnel.
“There’s your river,” Remi said.
“It can’t have been here long,” Sam replied. “Walls are too rough.”
“How long, do you think?”
“No more than a hundred years, I’d say. Here, let me see the light. Grab my belt loop, will you?” Remi did as he asked, leaning backward as Sam leaned forward. He shined the light down the right-hand tunnel, then said, “Huh. Okay, reel me in.”
“What?” Remi asked.
“The tunnel curves back to the right. Just around the corner I can see another pier and more catwalks.”
“The plot thickens.”
CHAPTER 18
Using what remaining rope they had—sixty feet of the original seventy-five—they set up a system to ferry themselves and their gear down the right-hand tunnel. Remi went first, with Sam giving her slack from a loop around the piling until she reached the next pier.
“Okay!” she called. “It’s about thirty feet, I’d say.”
Sam reeled in the line, then attached the motor, the dinghy (which they didn’t want to leave for their pursuers to find, should they have any doubt about whether their quarry was still in the cave), the two dry bags, and the dive gear to the end. Once done, he played out the line until Remi called, “Okay, hold it.” He could hear her grunting as she fished the gear from the water. “Tied off!”
From the entrance Sam heard a gurgling sound, then the tellale sputtering blow of a regulator breaking into air. He dropped onto his belly and went still, face pressed to the pier’s planking. A flashlight clicked on and played over the walls and ceiling. In the ambient glow Sam could see the man’s head; floating beside him was a bullet- shaped object—a battery-powered sea scooter, Sam realized. Combined with good fins and strong legs, a sea scooter could propel a 180-pound man at a speed of four or five knots. So much for the outflow advantage, Sam thought.
The man threw what looked like a grappling hook over the catwalk, gave the attached rope a tug, then shouted in Russian-accented English, “All clear, come on!” The man turned the scooter toward the dock and started across the cavern.
Sam didn’t give himself a chance to think or second-guess, but gave the rope three emergency tugs, then rolled over the edge and lowered himself into the water. The current caught him and took him down the tunnel. A few seconds later the next pier came into view. Remi was kneeling on the edge, taking up the slack. Sam put his finger to his lips and she nodded and helped him onto the pier.
“Bad guys,” he whispered.
“How much time have we got?”
“Only enough to hide.”
Sam looked around. An E-shaped grid of catwalks spanned the cavern, connecting this pier to another against the opposite wall; both piers held stacks of wooden crates bearing the Kriegsmarine emblem.
Though almost twice as large as the first, this cavern was of the fracture-guided variety, which meant they would find no exit on the seaward side. Or would they? Sam thought, shining the light around. Hanging from the ceiling in the far corner was what he’d initially taken for an especially long stalactite. Under the flashlight’s beam he could now see it was actually a desiccated tangle of roots and vines drooping nearly to the water’s surface.
“A way out?” she asked.
“Maybe. The current’s slower in here.”
“Half a knot, no more,” Remi agreed.
From the first cavern they heard a pair of voices calling to one another, then a third. A gunshot echoed down the tunnel, then another, then a ten-second burst.
“Shooting into the water,” Sam whispered. “They’re trying to flush us out.”
“Look here, Sam.”
He turned the light around and pointed it at the water where she was pointing. Resting just beneath the surface was a curved shape.
“Hull,” Remi whispered.
“I think you’re right.”
“We might have just found the
“Come on, we got some work to do.”
Explaining his plan on the go, they wrapped the motor and the rest of their gear inside the riddled dinghy, cinched it shut using the painter line, then sank the bundle beneath the pier. Next they cut off a thirty-foot section of rope and started tying loops every few feet. Once that was done, Sam asked her, “Which part do you want?”
“You dive, I’ll climb.”
She gave him a quick kiss, then grabbed the rope and started half running, half creeping across the catwalk.
Sam took the flashlight, slipped off the pier, and dove.
