again before he stepped through into the blackness.
???
???!
The characters had a macabre look about them this time. He went on into the mine.
— oO0Oo-
Each step gave a shooting pain. Stone was breathing heavily. It was surprising how much effort it was to walk with this foot. And how easy to stumble in the darkness. Stone was losing track of time, of up and down. He was disoriented — had no idea whether he’d been curving left or right. And he’d imagined a dozen times that he could see smaller passageways leading away through the rock — and every time he’d hobbled over to check, there were none. Just shadows in the rock.
With the broken ankle and the slight bend in the tunnel, it was impossible for Stone to say how far he’d come. It was blackness behind him, and blackness in front. No sign of Ying Ning either. Maybe she’d broken through the rock fall. More likely she’d been crushed. Whatever. There was no way he could have pulled her out of there in the state he was.
He knew if he was going to get back to the shaft to the surface, he would have to go left and left, or right and right. But up to now there had been no fork, no turns, no branches at all. This was bad. The other way, where he’d reconnoitered beyond the cage and the shaft, there had been a network of passages. Here there was only one tunnel. It did not bode well. The other thing he realized was — it was getting hotter. It wasn’t just the effort of walking with that shattered ankle. The rocks themselves were getting hotter.
At last he came to a fork, a split in the tunnel. Stone eased himself down into a sitting position on the warm rocks, exhausted by the pain. He forced himself to stop and think. He had to make the right decision here. He was in no position to use “trial and error” with that ankle. He had to evaluate. Look for any kind of clue.
But there were two tunnels, hewn into the rock, looking just the same the same. Stone flicked his head from side to side to examine the scene with his head torch. The tunnels were the same.
It was then he heard the breathing, shallow and calm, from the darkness of the left hand tunnel.
Chapter 74–12:36pm 14 April — Garze Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China
The correct path was obvious. At least on the balance of probabilities. The thick power cable snaked off in one direction. It would go down to the toward the reactor turbines. Not much point going that way.
From the other fork came the breathing. Stone cut his helmet light. The feet were stealthy, deliberate. He kept his position on the floor of the tunnel by the wall. Stilled his breathing as best he could. A dim light approached. The stranger came alongside.
‘Ying Ning,’ he said quietly as she came abreast.
She jumped half a metre. The first time Stone had managed to surprise her with anything.
— o0°0o-
Ying had managed to crawl through the rock fall after all, and she’d made her way to the shaft and the cage. But when she got there, the cage wasn’t there. It had gone. Ekstrom must have taken it. ‘This is bad without cage,’ she said. Something of an understatement.
She planted herself under Stone’s shoulder and he was able to move at three times the speed. She knew the way back as well. It was a matter of only a few hundred metres. Not that it made much difference to two people who were stuck at the end of an overgrown drinking straw eight hundred metres under a Sichuanese hillside called The Death Hole. You could say they had time on their hands.
Worse was to come when they finally reached the shaft to the surface. The cage had returned. It could scarcely be more obvious. Black humour assailed Stone’s senses.
‘Virginia’s disabled Ekstrom with a neat karate chop,’ joked Stone, deadpan. ‘She’s come down to render assistance, possibly in the form of a two minute video piece in front of the Machine. Hope you told her there’s no hair consultant down here.’
‘Huh?’ said Ying Ning. As well she might.
‘Either Ekstrom sent this cage down as some kind of trap,’ said Stone, ‘Or he’s still lurking down here with a nine millimeter pistol.’
‘I think trap,’ said the slim Chinese girl. There was, bizarrely, a gleam in her eye. ‘I like traps. We can get out.’ Stone simply had to admire her nerve. But she was right. It wasn’t exactly a plan, but something might come up, some slim chance, and it was better than sitting down here waiting to die. It was the old maxim. If you want something to happen, make something happen. An argument, a fight, anything. Then, if you're lucky, you'll see an opportunity.
They had to think ahead here. Get themselves ready, then go for it. Stone took a toolbox from the nearby engineers’ station and began to remove the cone-shaped fairing from the top of the cage. It would give a means of escape if the cage were stopped mid-transit. As Stone had to assume it would be. He tried not to think of the being trapped alive in utter darkness, in a tube five hundred metres into the rock.
They unbolted the fairing from the cage, no problem. That left three steel tubes of the frame at the top of the cage. Stone thought he might be able to squeeze through the gap, and Ying Ning certainly could.
‘Ready?’
She nodded.
Stone took a deep breath and picked up the phone. An American voice answered, but this time it was Semyonov. Which was a surprise, and not altogether a pleasant one. What had happened to Virginia? Was Semyonov now co-operating with Ekstrom just as the Swede had said he would, to get his precious Machine out of the hole? It looked like it.
‘Stone,’ said Semyonov’s flat New England voice. ‘Is that you? Are you there?’
‘It’s Stone. Can you wind us up?’
‘Sure.’
‘Give me two minutes,’ said Stone and hung up, his mind racing. He’d agreed with Ying Ning they’d squeeze into the cage together. It gave them both a chance at least. And two people in the cage would probably die sooner than one if it came to it.
Stone climbed in first and tried to hook his bad ankle behind him. It was excruciating again. Then it was Ying Ning’s turn to somehow squeeze in with him. In she came, slinky as ever, somehow fitting in around him. He thought of the time she’d sat athwart his lap to seduce him in Shanghai.
Stone remembered for a second of the prisoner of war stories he’d read as a child, where the prisoners stripped naked — to create the extra millimetres of space they needed to escape the prison camp through a tight bend in a culvert pipe. Was it weird to think like of being naked with Ying right now? He should have succumbed to Ying Ning's seduction in Shanghai. What the hell had he been thinking?
Stone and Ying Ning were locked into the cage, unmoving for about thirty seconds before the cage slid smoothly upwards and the utter darkness of the half-mile tube began. Stone was willing the cage up every single metre of its progress. He hoped Ying Ning was too, but it didn’t look like it. She was either meditating, or sleeping. More likely she was scared shitless, but she was incapable of showing any emotion. Any genuine emotion at any rate. The cage rattled slowly upwards, at what seemed like about half the speed it had done before. Was it the extra weight? Unlikely. Stone feared the worst.
Which was borne out after what Stone reckoned was about half the ascent. In fact, knowing Ekstrom it would halfway to the exact metre. Anyhow, the cage slowed to a crawl, then finally stopped altogether, with four hundred metres of solid rock above and below. Stone had half expected it, but had shut his mind to the possibility. Ekstrom was torturing them. He was going for mental torment, and Stone would be lying if he said it wasn’t working. Even Ying Ning’s eyes were screwed tight.
Ekstrom could have walked away off the site and left them stranded for a slow death. That might appeal to him. He would really get a hard on about that. But it wouldn’t work. If Ekstrom left them there stranded for a slow death, there was a decent chance they would be discovered and rescued. Stone weirdly found himself hoping that they would be stranded there for a few hours or days.
