He’d gotten past the section where he’d become stuck previously. With his head turned to the left, he could no longer see Tom behind him, but could hear Tom’s exerted breathing. In front of him, he could see the light of the opening. He was close. He just needed to get another couple of feet across and then descend until he could reach the opening.
But instead he was stuck.
Fear and claustrophobia, which had haunted him as a child, now reared its ugly head. He concentrated on small movements with his hands and feet to shift his weight, trying not to let the terror override his decisions.
Even so, his fine movements were no longer getting him any closer to the edge of the crevasse. Claustrophobia, it turns out, was only irrational when you could breathe. In this case, so much pressure was being exerted on his chest wall, that inhaling was impossible.
He tried to breathe out further, but there was no more air left in his lungs to exhale.
Beyond the panic, he heard Tom’s voice.
“Let go.”
Let go of what? I’m stuck!
Tom continued. “Just relax your entire body… and let gravity do its job.”
Sam untensed his arms and legs.
Nothing happened.
Then he shifted slightly downward. A moment later, he slipped down into the large area. Several feet down, the narrow section suddenly appeared as wide as a house. He took a deep breath, and reveled in the open expanse.
His gaze shifted upward toward Tom, who was already quickly working his way to the same spot in which he’d become stuck. Sam had learned long ago that caving was as much about technique as it was about size. In this case, despite Tom being physically larger, he was considerably more capable and adept at spelunking — the process of navigating through the narrow sections of a cave system.
Sam focused his flashlight across the crevasse. A beam of light stopped at the entrance to the escape tunnel, through which they’d come. The first of their Pirahã guards came into sight. The man carried a blade of obsidian, slicing at the sandstone wall as though he could enlarge it.
“You’ve got a very angry looking man with a very big sword on your tail, Tom.”
“I see him!”
Sam shifted backward, toward the exit of the crevasse. He braced himself against the two walls with his back and feet in opposing directions. Then, he removed his MP5 and removed the safety.
He aimed the submachine gun at the guard. “Don’t come any farther!”
It was a waste of his breath. The man couldn’t understand English, and if he had, Sam doubted very much that it would have made any difference. His attacker was following divine orders from a Master Builder, who had no intention of letting them escape.
The guard hadn’t spotted Tom above yet. Instead he tried to come straight across the crevasse to attack him. Sam watched in horror as the Pirahã guard moved quickly, with such ease through the narrow section, that he thought the man might just squeeze through and reach him.
He shuffled backward another foot.
His attacker squeezed into the narrowest section of the crevasse directly opposite him, and became stuck. Every muscle in the man’s wiry body tensed and struggled to free himself, and when it became abundantly clear that his desire was impossible to achieve, the Pirahã warrior extended his arm and tried to strike with his obsidian sword.
The attack was so swift and unexpected that Sam didn’t have time to react to it. The obsidian blade sliced downward, narrowly slipping past his face, so that Sam could feel the rush of wind as it scraped past his eyes.
Sam snapped his head backward.
The sword swung downward without connecting to anything. The momentum pulled the Pirahã forward, and he fell downward. He slid twenty or more feet until his chest became wedged in the vice-like section below.
Sam watched in horror as the man tried to fight his entrapment. He scrambled with his arms and legs like an insect in a spider’s web. With each movement, he slid farther downward, until his chest became lodged tight between the two walls of stone. Aghast, Sam noticed the poor wretch was now incapable of moving and unable to breathe. He flailed his arms and legs, moving them faster and faster, until fatigue and hypoxia thankfully took over and suddenly everything went limp.
Sam moved the beam of his flashlight upward, where more Pirahã were now racing toward him. One of them threw a spear. It ricocheted across the sandstone, missing him by a couple of feet, before falling to the ground eighty or more feet below.
Tom slipped down next to him. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
“You…” Sam said, exhaling a sigh of relief.
He quickly shuffled to the end of the crevasse and out into the open — onto a half-a-foot wide precipice. His eyes swept his new environment. The ledge was a little over ten feet in length, and positioned approximately halfway up a fourteen-hundred-foot vertical wall of sandstone. The golden wall appeared to be floating in a sea of early morning mist. To the right, where the sun had penetrated the ancient valley earlier, there were speckled views of the jungle. Its dark green canopy appeared like little more than dark green grass. They were on the vertigo-inducing face of the Tepui Mountains.
Sam turned to Tom. “Now where the hell do you suppose we go?”
Chapter Nine
Sam turned to meet Tom’s hard and steely gaze.
“Maybe we took a wrong turn?” Tom said.
Sam swallowed. “You think we were supposed to go right back there?”
“No. But it is looking more like a possibility.” Tom shrugged, as though he was indifferent to having to fight his way back through hundreds of attackers.
Sam faced the precipice, searching for another option. Something that didn’t involve killing more than a hundred Pirahã guards who were most likely being used as slave-workers by the Master Builders.
His eyes focused on the sandstone ledge. It narrowed as it reached the end, before disappearing completely. Above and below, the vertical cliff was smooth with no indents carved into it to form hand holds, or metal climbing rungs, like those he’d seen along the Via Ferrata in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy. Heck, there were so few natural cracks in the rock that he doubted many professional rock-climbers could scale the wall.
Then he stopped. Because something silver flickered in the early sunlight. It was so small his eyes had skimmed past it multiple times before.
Sam grinned. “Would you look at that!”
Tom asked, “What?”
“At the end of the ledge, about five feet high — there’s the eye of a climbing bolt.”
“So there is… too bad we didn’t bring about eight hundred feet of rope.”
Sam put vertigo aside and carefully walked along the narrow ledge until he reached the end of the sandstone precipice. He touched the climbing bolt. It was hot. A certain sign that someone had only very recently run a lot of rope through it very quickly.
He leaned over the ledge.
A hundred feet below, someone was pulling the excess rope into a separate tunnel. The man glanced up at him. Despite the distance, Sam met his eyes. There was something sinister and evil about the stranger’s look.
He could just make out the man’s smile.
Sam withdrew his MP5 from his shoulder. With reckless abandon, he aimed the weapon, as though he might still get to kill his attacker before he most certainly became overrun by the Pirahã guards. He aimed the submachine gun and squeezed the trigger.
The small burst of bullets fell harmlessly several feet short of his intended target. The stranger smiled, amused by Sam’s audacity, and then disappeared inside the separate tunnel.