possibly at an angle where its rays were coming through the shaft with enough strength to find their way down to the tunnel he was in, but if that was the case, it meant that the light wouldn’t necessarily be there for long. He started drawing a mental picture of how the well could be laid out. During their fruitless exploration the night before, Tess had told him about the underground cities’ elaborate water-collection and ventilation systems, designed to allow the escaping villagers to bunker down for extended periods of time while hiding out from invading forces. The ventilation shafts extended all the way to the bottom of the complex and were barely narrow enough for a human adult to crawl through. They had gates and spikes built into them to block any uninvited guests. The design also catered to a safe supply of drinking water, one that couldn’t be cut off or tampered with from the outside. The villagers had dug wells that allowed access to subterranean streams, and carved out other shafts that collected rainwater from the surface. Both systems had to be well hidden to block enemies aboveground from either crawling in or pouring poison into them.
Reilly thought it over. He doubted he could make it up to the surface through a ventilation shaft. On the other hand, Tess had told him that the handful of wells in the underground settlements were usually connected to one another through a system of channels. Given that it was the height of summer, he thought there was a chance that the water level down there was manageable. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, he could use the well to reach another part of the complex—one that wasn’t blocked to the outside world.
He roused Tess from her sleep and showed her what he’d found. The glimmer was fading, no doubt from the sun’s shifting position. They had to move fast.
“I’ll go first,” he told her. “Keep an ear out in case any help shows up from the tunnels.”
Her hand reached out and grabbed his arm, stilling him. “Don’t. There’s water down there. What if you can’t get back up?”
“We don’t have a choice,” he said. He dredged up a smile, though it was barely visible. “It’s summer. The levels can’t be that high.”
“I’d buy that—if it weren’t for the melting snow, doofus.”
“I’ll be fine,” he assured her with a slight chuckle.
She frowned. “The codices,” she said. “If there’s water … they might get damaged. Beyond repair.”
“So leave them behind.”
“We might never find them again.”
Reilly reached up and cupped her cheek in his hand. “What’s more important? Your life, or these books?”
She didn’t answer, but he felt her nod slightly. Then her tone went dead serious again. “What if you don’t find your way back?”
Reilly could just about see the reflection in her eyes. That comment was harder to deflect. She was right. Then he remembered something, and glimpsed a possible solution on the wall behind her.
“The electrical cabling. Help me rip it off the walls.”
They went around the passageways and caverns in the darkness, feeling their way around and yanking as much electrical cabling as they could. They managed to gather a couple of hundred yards of it and tied the various sections together to make it one continuous length.
Reilly took one end of it and tied it onto the fixings of one of the wall lights. He tugged at it, hard. It didn’t budge. The fixing itself seemed solid enough to hold his weight, and the cable was strong. The weak link was the soft rock the fixture was anchored into. He had no way of knowing if it would hold, or if would just crumble off. Regardless, he dumped the big roll of cable down the well, then Tess handed him the pick-shovel combo tool from the Iranian’s rucksack.
“You’ve got the gun. Use it if you have to,” he said.
Tess nodded, still clearly uncomfortable with the idea of his leaving. She gave him a deep kiss, then he climbed into the hole.
“I’ll be back,” he told her.
“You’d better be,” Tess replied, her hand holding on to his tightly for a few seconds more before finally letting go.
THE CLIMB DOWN WAS, as Reilly’s drill instructor back at Quantico liked to say, character-building. Character-building, and slow. He made his way down one small, precarious move at a time, his back pressed against the wall of the tunnel, his arms and legs sprung out against the opposite face of the narrow passage, his taut muscles clamping him into place.
The way back up, if there was one, wasn’t going to be much fun either.
The tunnel didn’t widen, which allowed him to make it all the way down until his foot felt water, after what he estimated was a descent of not far from a hundred feet. He held there for a moment and caught his breath, hesitating. He had no way of knowing how deep the channel was. If he let go and allowed himself to fall into it, and if it was too deep for him to stand in, he risked getting carried away by the current—and drowning, if the canal didn’t have an air gap above it.
He didn’t have much choice.
He took hold of the cable and, slowly, eased himself off the wall and onto it, his legs the last to let go of the tunnel. The cable held. He breathed out with relief and, one hand at a time, lowered himself down into the water. The stream was, surprisingly, freezing. Surprisingly, because of the intense heat aboveground. Tess’s comment about the melting snow brought a small smile to his face. He kept going until the water was up to his armpits—then his feet felt something and landed on solid ground.
“I’m down,” he yelled up. “I can stand in it.”
“Can you see anything?” she shouted back.
He looked downstream. The pale shimmer on the water’s surface disappeared into blackness. He turned the opposite way. It was just as dark.
His heart sank.
“No,” he shouted, trying to keep his voice even.
Tess went quiet. “What do you want to do?” she finally asked.
He moved away from under the shaft and took a couple of steps upstream, his hands holding on to the cable tightly. There was an air gap between the surface of the water and the roof of the channel. If he bent his knees and crouched through, he’d be able to walk upstream—for a while, anyway. He couldn’t see how far it stayed that way. He tried the same downstream. The roof was lower there, and after barely a half dozen steps, it disappeared underwater.
He called up to her. “I’m going to see if there’s another shaft out of this place. Upstream looks doable.”
Tess went quiet again. After a beat, she said, “Good luck, tiger.”
“I love you,” he hollered back.
“I’m almost thinking it was worth getting into this mess just to hear you say it,” she laughed.
He reeled in the cable and tied its end around his waist, then started hiking up the channel.
The bottom was smooth and slippery, the soft tufa buffed and polished by eons of water. He had to move slowly and with extreme care, and even though the flow of the stream wasn’t too overpowering, it was still there. The difficulty was in having to use his arms to keep feeling the roof of the channel in search of another shaft. He narrowly lost his footing twice from the awkward stance, but before long it became a moot point as the roof dropped down and disappeared underwater.
The air gap was gone.
Reilly stood there for a beat, frozen, exhausted, his fingers and toes aching from the constant exertion. He stared into the blackness, contemplating what it meant if he had to make his way back to Tess without having found a way out. He cursed inwardly, wanting to yell out his rage and pound his fists against the damn tunnel walls, but he held back and sucked in some deep breaths and tried to calm himself down.
He refused to give up.
There had to be a way out.
He couldn’t fail Tess. Nor could he let the Iranian win.
He had to keep going.
He filled his lungs with air and exhaled twice, then sucked in a deep breath and held it and crouched underwater. The water chilled his eyes as he strained to look ahead, then he kicked forward and started swimming
