Reamde

It was more or less as Chet had predicted. The chamber at the end of this adit contained a surprisingly large machine that must have been brought down in pieces and assembled here. Its most prominent feature was a giant, rusty wheel with cables running over grooves in its rim and descending into the hole below. Obviously the thing hadn’t moved in eons and so Zula, had she been a recreational spelunker, would have given up and turned around at this point. But Chet insisted, and more Day-Glo-green graffiti affirmed, that there was a way down. She followed him around to the back side of the machine. She began to collect that the shaft below them was circular in cross section, but that the circle had been parceled out into a bundle of separate squarish or rectangular passageways. The largest of these was in the middle and was serviced by the giant wheel, but smaller ones seemed to be reserved for other purposes such as cabling, ventilation, dumbwaiter-like rigs for carrying ore, and the ladder that could be used when nothing else was functioning. Chet gave the top of this a good careful look, inspecting for booby traps. Then he undid his belt, threaded it through the wrist loop on his flashlight, and rebuckled it so that the light would dangle in front of his crotch and the beam would shine downward. He began to descend the ladder with such speed that Zula feared he was falling, rather than climbing. She got the sense that he just wanted to get this over with. Perhaps he was expecting to find a booby trap at the bottom and wanted to set it off long before she got there. This didn’t give her a lot of incentive to move quickly. Gripping her flashlight in one fist so that it shone downward, she began to descend the ladder, and quickly found herself in an environment that would have been violently claustrophobic had she been disposed to such feelings. Space in the shaft was apparently precious and the engineers didn’t want to sacrifice any more than was absolutely necessary to this purpose. Her pack kept getting wedged against the wall behind her, or hung up on brackets, forcing her to push back a little wave of panic each time.

“I think there’s another booby trap,” she said, passing by a fresh annotation in green spray paint.

“I saw it too,” he announced. “Hold on for a second.”

She stopped and forced herself to look down. Chet was hanging from a rung near the bottom, unfolding his Leatherman. She heard a crisp snip as it severed a piano wire, and then several seconds of absolute silence as they both waited for a detonation.

“I think we’re good,” he announced.

They had made no effort to hide this one: it was a curved rectangular slab, simply lying on the floor at the base of the ladder, lashed into place with zip ties. “Claymore,” Chet announced. “Aimed straight up. Would have taken out anyone on the ladder.”

“How are you doing?” Zula asked him, since there didn’t seem to be much more to say on that topic.

“Not bad!” Chet said, sounding a bit surprised. “Going to sit down and take a little rest. I’ll meet you at the drift intersection up thataway.” He waved his flashlight beam down one of three adits that radiated away from the base of the shaft. “Go about a hundred feet, we’ll be taking the second adit on the left.”

Zula had been noticing that Chet’s condition improved markedly when something happened to trigger an adrenaline surge and declined during uneventful parts of the journey. At the moment he seemed quite energetic, so she was surprised that he was now requesting a break; but perhaps this was just his polite way of saying that he wanted her to leave him alone so that he could take a leak. Certainly he had been drinking enough water. So she walked up the adit to the second hole on the left and smelled and saw more graffiti. But she smelled something else as well: a current of fresh air coming down from that direction.

She tried shutting off her flashlight and letting her eyes adjust, and she convinced herself that she could see faint gleams of daylight ricocheting from the tunnel’s moisture-slickened walls.

Which was obliterated by a wash of glare from Chet’s flashlight. He had finished his potty break, or whatever, and was bringing up the rear. Moving heavily again, lurching frequently to the side, as if he needed the wall of the adit to hold him up. He had zipped up his leather jacket as if to ward off a sudden chill.

“This is the way out,” Zula said, announcing as much as asking it.

“You can find the way out from here,” Chet confirmed. “Just go slow and look for booby traps.”