Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler

“Grab it!” Remi called. “Right in front of you!”

Sam felt something brush his cheek and he slapped at it. His fingers touched the rope and he closed his fist around it. He jerked to a stop.

He caught his breath, waiting for the sparkling behind his eyes to subside, then looked over his shoulder.

Remi was hanging half out of the water from the other end of the rope. The dive light dangled from her belt loop, casting dancing shadows over the walls.

“Nice toss,” Sam said.

“Thanks. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, you?

“Just barely.”

They hung still for a few moments, getting their bearings, then Sam said, “I’m going to hoist you up to the catwalk. Tie off the rope and then I’ll join you.”

“Right.”

Remi’s triweekly ninety-minute power yoga and Pilates sessions showed their value in spades as she shimmied up the rope like a monkey, then rolled onto the catwalk. The planks gave a sharp pop, followed by a slow splintering sound. Remi froze.

“Spread yourself flat,” Sam said. “Distribute your weight—slowly.”

She did so and then, using her knees and elbows, put some test pressure on the boards until satisfied none were going to give way. “I think we’re okay.” She shed her fins, secured them to her belt, then tied off the rope.

“I’ve got the dinghy and all our gear hanging from my belt,” Sam said. “I’m going to try to save it.”

“Okay.”

Between Remi’s knot and him there was only twenty feet of exposed rope; the rest was trailing in the current. Sam reeled in ten feet of rope, fashioned a temporary waist harness, and then, working by feel alone, secured a closed clove hitch around his belt and the knotted end of the painter line. Right hand clenched around the line above his head, he pulled the release loop on the harness. With a wet zipping sound, the rope went taut. It lifted from the surface, trembled for a few seconds, then steadied.

“I think it’ll hold,” Sam called, then climbed the rope and rolled onto the platform beside Remi. She hugged him tightly, damp hair splayed over his face.

“I guess that gunfire answered our question,” she whispered.

“I’d say so.”

“You sure you’re not hit?” Remi asked, eyes and hands probing his chest, arms, and stomach.

“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 UM-77.”

“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.

He immediately realized this was not a Molch-class mini sub. It was far too small, at least six feet shorter and half the diameter of the UM-34. It was a Marder-class boat, he decided, essentially a pair of G7e torpedoes stacked atop one another, the upper one hollowed out and converted into a cockpit/battery compartment with an acrylic-glass viewing dome, the lower one a live, detachable torpedo.

Following the curve of the hull to the bottom, Sam could immediately see there was no torpedo attached, but only a cockpit tube lying on its side, the viewing dome half buried in the sand. He kicked down the length of the hull to the dome, laid the flashlight in the sand, and set to work on the unlatching bolts. They were frozen in place.

Time, Sam, time . . .

His lungs began to burn. He wrapped both hands around a bolt, braced his feet on the hull, and heaved. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing.

Through the water he heard muffled voices again, this time closer. He clicked off the flashlight, looked up, got his bearings, then kicked off the sub and swam toward the far wall. The pier’s pilings appeared in the gloom and he slipped between them and turned right, following the wall. Clearing the pier, he let himself float upward and gently break the surface.

Across the cavern and down the adjoining river tunnel he could see lights dancing off the walls—Kholkov and his men at the end of the pier; they’d be coming here next. Ten feet to Sam’s left the root/ vine tangle hung just above the surface; close up it was even larger than he’d estimated, as big around as a fifty-five-gallon drum. He sidestroked to it, dug around a moment, and found Remi’s rope. He started climbing.

A minute later and fifteen feet higher his reaching hand found Remi’s foot, which was resting in a loop. He gave it a reassuring squeeze and got a wiggle in reply. He placed his foot inside a loop, did the same with his right hand, then got comfortable.

“Luck?” she whispered.

“No. Locked up tight.”

“Now what?”

“Now we wait.”

Their wait was short.

Kholkov’s men moved fast, using generally the same ferry-rope system Sam and Remi had used to reach the second pier. Peering through the vines, Sam counted six men. One of them stalked down the pier, shining a flashlight over the crates, into the water, and down the catwalks.

“Where the hell are they?” he barked.

It was Kholkov himself, Sam realized.

“You four, flush them out!” Kholkov ordered; then he nodded at the other man and said, “You, with me!”

As Kholkov and one man searched the crates, the others lined up at the pier’s edge and started firing short, controlled bursts into the water. After nearly a minute, Kholkov called, “Cease fire, cease fire!”

“There’s something down there,” one of the men called, shining his light into the water.

Kholkov walked over, looked a few moments, then pointed to two of the men. “That’s it! Get your gear and have a look.”

The men were back in five minutes, and five minutes after that they were diving under the water.

“Search the cavern first,” Kholkov ordered them. “Make sure they’re not hiding somewhere.”

In a cloud of bubbles, the men disappeared beneath the surface. Sam watched their lights move over the bottom, under both piers, and along the walls, before finally both men resurfaced.

“Not here,” one of them reported. “There’s no place to hide.”

Sam let out the breath he’d been holding. They’d missed the sunken gear.

“Perhaps they went down the river tunnel,” the man standing beside Kholkov suggested.

Kholkov considered this for a moment. “You’re sure there was nothing?” he asked the divers.

Both men nodded, and Kholkov turned to the man who’d suggested the river tunnel. “Take Pavel, rope yourselves off, and search the tunnel for any sign of them.”

The man nodded, moved to the end of the pier, and began uncoiling a rope.

“Search the sub,” Kholkov ordered the divers, who both replaced their regulators and dove.

Sam watched their lights move along the hull until they stopped at what he assumed was the cockpit dome. The lights wobbled and shifted and there came a faint clinking of metal on metal. After three more minutes, one of the men broke the surface and pulled the regulator from his mouth.

“It’s a Marder,” the man said. “The 77.”

“Good,” Kholkov replied.

“The bolts are frozen, though. We need the crowbar.”

One of the men on the pier kneeled beside a backpack and pulled out a crowbar. The diver swam over, took it, and dove again.

There were five more minutes of muffled metal-on-metal banging, then silence for a few moments, then suddenly a giant bubble burst on the water’s surface.

The minutes ticked by until finally both divers broke the surface again. One of them gave a hoot and lifted an oblong object from the water.

“Bring it!” Kholkov ordered. When they reached the pier he knelt down and took the object, which Sam could now see was an all-too-familiar loaf-shaped wooden box. Kholkov studied the box for a full minute, turning it this way and that, peering closely at its surface, before carefully lifting the lid and peeking inside. He closed it and nodded.