Well In Time Part 8

The thugs of the cartel were displaying no such organization. Shouting had erupted from among the parked SUVs. Bodies were being loaded in the backs of the vehicles. A fistfight broke out and several men joined in, while others tried to break them up. Then, as abruptly as they had arrived, everyone piled into their vehicles and drove away in the direction of town.

To do so, they had to pa.s.s in front of the walls and Javier's men peppered the cars with shot as they pa.s.sed. One veered off the road, its driver wounded. There was a hesitation and then the SUV lumbered back onto the roadway and sped away in the wake of the others.

Javier's troops were jubilant. A shout went up, and there was a spate of high-fiving and laughter. Javier held up his hand for silence. The men were instantly quiet.

"I congratulate you!" he said. "Each of you performed just as we trained to do and with real courage. I hope you're all very proud." The men grinned and jostled one another with their elbows. "The enemy has left and we are victorious-but..." he hesitated for emphasis, "they will be back. And next time, they'll be angry and they'll be prepared. That means we have to be even more prepared. We have to work very hard and very fast. Are you with me?"

A shout went up. "We're with you, Boss," Pedro called. "What do you want from us?"

"We have to implement Phase Two. That means getting your families out of the house and up into the crags on the west end of the ranch. Juan, you and Felipe get them organized and get them out, right now. Make sure they have food and blankets from the storehouse.

"Pedro, you're our demolitions expert. You know what to do.

"It's time to bring the big guns up. Who's going to do that?" Several hands shot up.

"All right. Let's get to it. Boys, you make sure to get the ammo up here and all the extra clips loaded." The teenagers, eyes wide with their first combat, nodded and skittered down the stairs to the armory.

Javier beckoned Pedro to him. "This is going to get really ugly," he whispered. "Make sure we can do as much preliminary damage as possible."

"I'm on it, Boss." Pedro turned away, stopped and turned back, holding out his hand. "Just in case," he said.

Javier knocked his hand aside and the two men embraced.

The Cave

"This cave runs for miles," Calypso said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes, mopping tears. Only twenty feet inside the cave, the light already was growing dim. She dug in her pack for LED headlamps, handed Hill his and shone hers ahead, illuminating a rounded tunnel with smooth, curving walls of red stone.

"It's kind of like being inside a big intestine," Hill said. "As long as there's no peristalsis, I'm good with it."

Calypso smiled through her tears. "It does get pretty narrow in places."

"Not something a man with the chest of an American bison can't navigate I hope?"

"Well...if only Pedro were here to pull, while I push..."

"He'd carve the extra parts off me more likely. Do you know he threatened to shoot me if I didn't rappel?"

Calypso shook her head. "But he wouldn't have."

"You'll never convince me of that." The shaft was wide enough for them to walk side by side. "How do you know where we're going?"

"We've practiced this many times." She stopped to face him. "I need you to know, Walter, that I'm not running away from danger. Javier made me promise that if we were ever under attack, I'd do this. And he made Pedro take a vow to get me to safety. Javier knows that the first instinct both Pedro and I have is to back him up. But he says he can't concentrate or fight or even survive if all he's thinking about is my safety."

"Makes perfect sense to me. And I never would have accused you of running away. I'm the one who knows you've got the heart of a lion, remember?"

Calypso nodded, satisfied. "Good. I just couldn't bear it if you thought I was cowardly." She swept the light ahead to where the pa.s.sage made a sharp inward turn. "The cave narrows beyond that turn. We'll have to go single file. And watch your head. The ceiling lowers, too."

The cave narrowed considerably beyond the turn. Calypso snaked through, crouching, with the grace of a dancer, while Hill huffed and sc.r.a.ped his way along, occasionally barking his head on the low ceiling.

"OW! s.h.i.+t! How much more of this?"

"Lots. But we're almost to a resting place. Are you hurt?"

"Nothing that a bottle of Saint-Emilion, a rare sirloin, and a few sutures couldn't mend."

"You're hungry. Well, hang in there, Walter. We'll be able to eat soon."

"There should be a warning chiseled in the rock over the entrance to this place: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE."

Hill kept up his genial grousing, as they wended deeper and deeper into the heart of the bedrock. Both were aware of the cooling temperature, the gently descending slope, and the growing sensation of weight. The ma.s.sive walls enclosed them; the ceiling seemed to press down ponderously.

It was the opposite of vertigo, Hill reflected as he scuffed along. Instead of the almost irresistible urge to throw himself into the canyon's gulf, he now felt suffocated, as if this solid rock would become his tomb. The only positive thing was that, this deep inside the mountain, the sounds of gunfire could no longer be heard.

After more than an hour of ducking, weaving and sliding through tight s.p.a.ces, they were suddenly aware of the distant sound of falling water.

"What's that?" Hill asked, stopping. "Have we connected with Rancho Cielo's sewer system?"

Calypso glanced over her shoulder at him. "It's a surprise," she said with a mysterious smile. She moved forward then, her vigor renewed by antic.i.p.ation, with Hill lumbering after her.

The narrow pa.s.sage began to widen and the close air was relieved by a cool, damp breeze that moved toward them, fanning their sweating foreheads. At last, they broke out of the corridor into a vast rock chamber. The headlamp beam could not encompa.s.s it in a single sweep, but Hill could tell by the echoes that the room was high and wide. The sound was of falling water, thundering into a pool.

"Is that what I think it is?" he shouted to Calypso.

"Yes! Look at this!" She flashed her light over a pool of black water, its surface chipped with wavelets, and followed the flow backward toward its source. The narrow beam revealed an area of turbulent, frothy water, and then the gla.s.sy ribbon of a waterfall. She directed the light upward so that Hill's eye could follow the water to its source, high on the far wall of the cavern.

"It must be forty feet high!"

"At least." Calypso lowered her light and searched with it along the edge of the pool. "There's a flat spot over here where we can rest. We've got water bottles cached. We can fill up for the rest of the way. This is the only water for miles."

She led the way along the verge of the pool and then turned left behind a sloping wall of stone. Hill followed her into a sheltered nook where she was already lighting a suspended camp lantern. By its light, he saw a hanging mesh bag of empty neoprene water bottles hooked over a thumb of stone and a couple of metal hampers with locking lids sitting against the stone wall.

"This is pretty cozy! Did you stash a couch down here, too?" he asked hopefully.

Calypso chuckled. "You'll just have to sit on your own padding I'm afraid." She unlatched a hamper and brought out a small camp stove. "Here, pump this up for me. I'll get some water. We've got dried soup here. You must be starved."

"I could eat." Hill fiddled with the stove and lit it, while Calypso went to dip water from the pool. "Is that water safe to drink?" he asked when she returned.

"Are you kidding? This aquifer is ancient and filtered through layers and layers of bedrock. It may be the purest water on the planet." She poured water into a small aluminum saucepan, added a foil pouch of dried soup mix, and set it on the stove. "I wish we had some bread to go with this, but..." she sighed, leaving unspoken her thoughts of her kitchen and its delicious foods on the plateau above them. "We have another stash of air mattresses and sleeping bags up ahead. But it'll be hours before we get there."

"You and Javier did all this?"

"And Pedro. We've felt for a long time that it might come to this. And we had no intention of fighting to the death. We always wanted a sure escape route. Of course, we always planned that Javier would be here too."

"Instead of me."

"I didn't mean that. I mean our plan was never complete. Did I really expect that Javier would leave his workers undefended? Or his property? Maybe he always knew it would be like this, but I had the idea we'd be doing this together." She stirred the soup, averting her face, but Hill heard the crack in her voice. "His plan all along was probably to send me with Pedro and I just never realized it."

"Do you have any idea where we are?"

"Yes. This cavern is about five hundred feet lower than the plateau where the house sits and over two miles east of it."

"No kidding!"

"The pa.s.sage slopes much more steeply from here on. There are even a couple of places where we've installed ropes. And we've marked the places where the tunnels split, so that we don't wander forever under here, like the Piper of Keil."

"The who?"

Calypso poured soup into a small aluminum bowl and handed it to Hill along with a camp spoon. "The Piper of Keil. He made a bet that he could play the bagpipes better than any fairy piper. Of course, he lost. His punishment was to wander forever under the ground in the mazes of fairyland, playing as he went. In Scotland, you'll find people who swear they've heard him pa.s.sing under their feet."

"How do you know these things?" Hill's voice registered his amazement.

"My grandmother was a Scot from Clan Ross. She was born in the Orkney Islands, up in the North Sea. She used to regale me with stories about Scotland."

"So Celtic mysticism runs in your blood."

"Pretty much. I think my grandmother's sense of the occult made it easier for me when Berto gave me the locket. She'd told me about similar precious objects-especially the Holy Grail. It's supposed to be in a vault deep under Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, you know."

"That sounds like someplace in Tolkien's Middle Earth."

"No. It's in Scotland. Almost as many stories attach to it as to this locket." She touched the necklace that lay beneath her s.h.i.+rt as she settled beside Hill and leaned against the stone wall. She blew on her soup to cool it.

Hill rummaged in his pack and with an "Aha!" came up with two crumpled scones. "Your bread, madame," he said, handing her one with a flourish.

"My scones! That's what you went back for this morning?"

Hill grinned wickedly. "I can have surprises, too."

They bit into the pastries and savored them in silence. "Apricot," Hill said at last.

"Um-hum." Calypso's voice was small. "I picked these apricots last spring and dried them." Her eyes, filled with sorrow, found Hill's. "There are so many little reasons why I love it here, Walter. Mainly because Javier loves it so. But these apricots are reason enough, aren't they?"

"They are," he agreed solemnly.

"The hardest part isn't sitting here in the dark, surrounded by tons and tons of stone, is it? It's not knowing what's going on up above. That part is almost more than I can bear."

Hill nodded. There were no words in any language to comfort the desolation in Calypso's voice.

She began to clean up their lunch mess. "Wash these in the pool, will you? We need to move on now. We still have a long way to go." She turned to the open hamper with such solemnity it might have been a sarcophagus. "And we'll need to fill the water bottles. There won't be open water again for a long time."

"This cavern must have been an initiatory chamber in ancient times," Calypso said as they shouldered their packs. "Before we leave, I want to show you something." Her headlamp beam played along the edge of the black pool until it lit upon a narrow ledge, just above water level. "Come over this way," she said as she sidled onto the ledge, facing the wall of stone.

Hill, realizing he would never be able to antic.i.p.ate Calypso's sudden changes of direction, sighed resignedly and followed her onto the rock shelf. It was just wide enough to accommodate his size fifteen shoes as he sidestepped along. "This better be good," he grumbled.

About twenty feet onto the ledge, where the wall of rock curved to encircle the pool, Calypso halted and directed her headlamp beam onto the stone in front of her. "Here it is! Look at this!" She turned toward Hill, who was blinded momentarily, as he tried to steady himself and keep the weight of his pack from pulling him backward into the water.

Hill squinted at the stone wall in front of them. "What? I don't see a thing." In the same instant, he saw them: handprints. Actually, stencils of hands. "Oh! What are they?"

"They're the signature of one of our ancient cousins. They blew pigment through a reed, leaving a negative imprint of their hands. See . . . this hand fits mine perfectly! The fingers are the exact lengths of mine." She held her long, slender hand against the stone for Hill's perusal. "And that one over there fits Javier as if he'd made it himself." She indicated a large imprint with tapering fingers. "You try this one. I bet it will fit you!"

Hill edged closer to Calypso, raised his thick, square hand with fingers spread and carefully aligned it with the hand outlined on the wall. As he did, he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. The handprint fit him like a glove. He had the uncanny sensation that it was his handprint, left there long ago as a reminder to himself. It seemed preposterous, yet the sense of owners.h.i.+p of the print was overpowering.

By his headlamp's beam he examined his hand, looking for overlaps or places where the print was too big for him, and found none. He stared at his hand with its surrounding aura of timeless red pigment and lost all sense of himself as a twenty-first century man, of his place in the world, of time altogether. He stood suspended in the eternal moment, with time's linearity collapsed into the ever-present and ongoing Now. A deep sense of wonder and humility pervaded him.

And then the moment pa.s.sed. He was aware again of the weight of the pack, the thin spray from the waterfall, of Calypso's large, solemn, observing eyes.

"Well?" she breathed.

Hill didn't answer but began sidling back off the ledge. Calypso followed him silently. When they had regained solid footing, she put her hand on Hill's arm.

"I know," she said. "You don't have to say anything." Then she turned and, hitching her pack up on her hips, started into the void of the tunnel.

Rancho Cielo

When it came, it was as bad as Javier expected. A convoy of SUVs and trucks came racing down the road at dawn the next day. The beds of the trucks were filled with men and bristled with guns. Javier watched with field gla.s.ses as the convoy turned across the first cattle guard onto Rancho Cielo property. First one, then another, then another laden vehicle pounded forward, tearing across the second cattle guard at the base of the driveway.

Javier muttered under his breath, "Let them come, Pedro. Just enough. Not too many." Six vehicles were inside the perimeter, and the seventh was just crossing the upper cattle guard, when there was a tremendous explosion. The front end of the seventh SUV rose up and the vehicle flipped over backward, bursting into flames as it rose in the air. Parts flew off and bodies hurtled, as it landed upside down on the hood of the truck following. That vehicle, too, burst into flame, and the two SUVs following rammed into it, in a ma.s.sive collision.

A victorious shout went up from the men on the walls. Javier turned and caught the eyes of his gunners. He raised his arm and brought it down decisively, and three men stood up, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders, took aim, and fired. The three lead SUVs exploded. The men sank down behind the parapet wall again, and Javier signaled three more to stand. Their RPGs took out the next three vehicles in line, leaving bodies and burning metal littering the driveway.

Behind the cattle guard, all was chaos. Men swarmed from the stalled vehicles, shouting, to congeal behind one of the trucks. Javier followed them with his field gla.s.ses, but could not make out what they were doing. At last, the crowd began a concerted effort and suddenly, from behind the truck, they rolled out a howitzer and positioned it facing the walls.

Javier's heart sank. He could see they had positioned it about two hundred yards away, just beyond the reach of the RPGs. He knew that, using comparatively small propellant charges, the artillery piece could propel projectiles at relatively high trajectories, with a steep angle of descent. Against such a weapon he, his men, and their fortifications were powerless.