His first step crunched loudly on the littering of limestone chips.
Every movement and noise seemed to take place in slow motion as Annie watched; the crunch of her father’s boots on the limestone chips, the sound of her own scream, distorted into a ghastly howl.
Higgins' left foot came down, six feet from where Kismet was struggling to rise, and suddenly, the floor beneath him buckled, collapsing away. He froze, his expression both terrified and purposeful.
It was the look of a martyr.
The entire section of floor beneath the cracked ceiling collapsed in chunks. Kismet too slipped forward, caught in a wave of rubble that was rushing into the newly exposed pit. A cloud of dust swirled up from the shower of rock.
Even louder than the rumble of the collapse however, was the twanging sound of a metal wire, concealed by a facade of limestone cement plastered to the cavern wall, being pulled away from the side of the tunnel.
Annie watched in horror as the singing wire exploded from the wall, working its way swiftly toward the ceiling where it would trigger the release of the enormous boulder onto her father and Kismet.
The wire went taut, like the string of a musical instrument stretched between the pit and the wall, just a few feet below the ceiling. It held there for a second, and then snapped with a final discordant twang. The loose end whipped around and disappeared into the rising cloud of dust above the pit.
Kismet felt a sting as the wire lashed across his back, but it was just one of a dozen sensory assaults that he barely noticed in his frantic scramble to get out of the shallow pit. He began clawing at the stone that was piling on top of him, trying to get free of its weight, and out of the pit before the ceiling crashed down upon him. Higgins lay nearby, half buried in the rubble. And in front of him, just a few steps away, was the far edge of pit.
Kismet grabbed the stunned Kiwi by the collar and heaved him forward. They reached the chest high wall of the pit, slipping uncertainly on the loose rubble, and desperately began clawing up the near vertical surface while overhead the rigged boulder groaned ominously.
And stayed exactly where it was.
When Fontaneda had first designed the trap, hewing the stone block out of the surrounding limestone, he had held it in place with just a few thin rock wedges, connected to the trip wire. When the wire pulled tight, the wedges would be dislodged and the block would drop, or so the Spaniard had intended. But centuries of moisture, seeping through the rock matrix and infused with mineral particles had effectively cemented the block in place. The stone remained poised overhead, seemingly ready to drop down and obliterate Kismet and Higgins, but it refused to move.
The trap was a dud.
Kismet lay on his back at the far edge of the pit, staring up in disbelief. Beside him, Higgins sat up, an expression of amazed disappointment replacing the frightened ecstasy of a moment before.
“You could have killed us all.” He grabbed Higgins’ shirtfront, but the other man just sagged in place, shaking his head miserably. He looked as if the universe, in refusing his sacrifice, had left him completely bereft and Kismet realized that maybe getting them all killed was exactly what Higgins had been trying to accomplish. The former Gurkha, the man he’d once fought beside and nearly died with, was caught in a trap of a very different sort, a web of his own desperate choices.
“Just whose side are you on, Al?” he whispered.
Higgins’ wounded expression offered no insights.
“Well done, Mr. Higgins,” said Leeds, standing on a narrow ledge that skirted the side of the pit. “Kismet's luck seems to have rubbed off on you. Fortune favors the bold. With men such as you leading the way, I cannot help but succeed.”
Kismet turned on him. “You’re insane, Leeds. These traps are getting more complex, and more dangerous. We're in over our heads, and we're all going to end up dead if we don't turn back.”
“Nonsense. We are beating the Spaniard at his own game. Keep your eyes on the prize, Kismet. Onward!” To underscore the fact that his statement was a command, not an admonition, Leeds caught Annie’s wrist in the crook of his prosthetic and pulled her along.
The tunnel turned just beyond the pit and grew increasingly cramped. The naturally formed walls seemed to close in around them, while the floor sloped up sharply. The rock underfoot was no longer the chalky white of limestone, but increasingly dark and oily, stained with a substance that reeked of ammonia and decay.
“Bat guano,” Kismet whispered to Annie. “That’s a good sign. It means there’s an opening to the surface somewhere nearby.”
He didn’t add that, for a colony of bats to come and go as they pleased, the opening would need to be only a few inches wide.
The tunnel leveled out and then abruptly ended, but this time, instead of a solid rock wall, the passage was blocked by what looked like densely packed soil. Kismet probed it with the tip of his kukri, dislodging a large chunk and releasing an almost overwhelming stench of nitrates. Fontaneda’s secret lay somewhere on the other side of an enormous heap of bat excrement.
Kismet could still feel the movement of air, and in the flashlight beams, he saw a narrow gap at the top of the mound. Reasoning that the accumulation was looser there, he started digging, using the kukri like an entrenching tool. In just a few seconds he broke through to the other side and through this hole he could see dust motes drifting in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the darkness of the cavern beyond.
The sight roused him. This was the chance he’d been waiting for. Though it would mean abandoning the search for the Fountain, probably allowing Leeds to seize his prize uncontested, he couldn’t pass up this opportunity to escape.
He backed out of the narrow crawlspace he had dug. The rest of the group had backed away from the shower of guano dislodged by his excavation. “It’s clear. No sign of any more surprises from our Spanish friend.”
Leeds gazed up at him suspiciously. Kismet could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s head. Was Kismet trying to trick him? He smiled and gestured forward. “Then by all means, lead on.”
It was exactly what Kismet was hoping for. He looked directly at Higgins. “It’s a pretty tight squeeze, Al. Keep Annie close so she doesn’t freak out.”
He couldn’t tell if the other man had understood the subtle message, or the implicit offer of trust and forgiveness in his tone.
Are you reading me, Al? We fought on the same side once. I dragged you out of that hellhole in Iraq. Now do this for me.
Higgins just nodded and pulled his daughter close.
Kismet crawled back into the hole and pushed through to the other side, spilling forward down a forty-five degree slope into the cavern beyond. The floor was covered in a thick layer of moist guano, like a peat bog, and his feet sank several inches as he struggled to stand up. From the hole behind him, he could hear Annie whimpering, seemingly on the verge of hysteria, as Higgins prodded her forward.
Perfect!
Kismet scrambled up the crawlspace and reached in, seizing hold of Annie’s arm, pulling her through. They tumbled down the slope together, but he quickly got her up and pointed to the shaft of sunlight streaming into the chamber, lighting the way to freedom.
That was when he realized that source of the light was at least twenty feet directly overhead. The almost perfectly round hole might have been big enough to crawl through, but it remained impossibly out of reach.
The ceiling around the hole began to ripple, like a still pond disturbed by a cast stone, and then large pieces of it came loose and started to fall — except they didn’t fall. Instead, the shapes began to flit about, swooping back and forth through the air above them. In the brilliant beam of natural light, Kismet could just make out the winged shapes.