“How many?” Remi called.
“Seven, I think.”
“I only got two,” she said. “When are you going to try your new strategy? Before or after we’re out of ammo?”
“Now might be a good time,” he said. He went down the steps to the entryway, looked around the wall to see if any enemies were in sight but saw none. He restacked the firewood he had piled in the passage, poured some of the whiskey on it, struck a match and lit a fire. As it grew, he kept his shotgun aimed at the opening beyond. When the fire was flaming high and the resin-dripping branches were blazing torches, he took four of them together and ran up to the walkway. He threw one of the flaming brands as far as he could over the wall, then each of the other three so they landed as widely as possible. He sat down on the walkway again and listened while thirty or forty rounds glanced uselessly off the high stone wall.
Remi made use of the concentrated fire. She fired three rounds and then ducked down. “Make that three,” she said.
“I’ll tell the scorekeeper.”
“How’s our strategy— Oh, my,” she said, looking over Sam’s side of the wall.
Sam looked too. The sky seemed to be lightening. He took the shotgun and stood up to get a better look, then ducked down as the next volley of shots hit.
The torches had started some brush on fire, and the flames were growing, beginning to eat their way into a large thicket where Sam had hidden, crackling and raising sparks. As the gunfire died down, Sam heard men shouting in Spanish. Sam ran downstairs, picked up three still-burning brands, climbed back up, and threw them over the wall on the other side of the enclosure near Remi.
“What are you doing? They’re all on that side.”
“I’m giving us light and space,” he said.
“For what?”
“We’ll deprive those guys of hiding places and put them in the light of the fire.”
She patted his shoulder and smiled, then pointed at the other side of the enclosure. She and Sam crouched, went to that side, and got ready. Then they popped up at the same time, ready to fire. The men were not visible. In the light of the growing fires, Sam stared but saw nobody.
Remi tugged on the back of his belt. “Don’t give them time to aim at you.”
Sam ducked. “Listen,” he said. “We’ve driven them back.”
“For a while,” she said. “As soon as the fire burns that brush away, they’ll be back.”
Sam shrugged. “It bought us a little time.”
“Thanks, Sam. I’ll still love you for at least two more hours.”
“After that, what?”
“We’ll see,” she said. “It depends on their marksmanship.”
They sat on the walkway, holding hands. Every few minutes, one of them would go along the walk, pick a spot, and pop up to look. The fires flamed along the strip, taking brush and trees but not going any farther because of the pyramids on each side.
As the moon set, Sam looked down the strip. “I think they’ll be coming soon,” he said. “And it looks as though more of them have arrived. It makes you wonder who they can be.”
“This is starting to get depressing,” she said.
He went through his pockets. “How much ammo have you got left?”
“Twenty rounds. Eight in each pistol, and one spare magazine with only four in it.”
“I’ve got fifteen. And five shells in the shotgun.” He hugged her. “I’m sorry to say, we’re about done.” They sat leaning their backs on the wall, silent.
Remi sat up straight. “Sam!”
“What?”
“The pool. It’s not a cenote, like a well.”
“No?”
“It has a current. You could barely feel it, but all the artifacts we found were off to the side, and it moved us in the same direction. It’s a sinkhole over an underground river.”
He looked into her eyes. “Are you saying that’s the gamble you’d like to take?”
She nodded. “If we stay here, we run out of bullets, and we’ll be at their mercy. I don’t want to go that way. I’d rather drown.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll give it our best try.”
She glanced out over the wall. “The fires are about to the end. I can see the men moving down there. We don’t have much time.”
Sam and Remi hurried down the steps and got their dive equipment ready and changed into their wet suits. Sam brought the waterproof bag of artifacts out of his pack. “Put the guns, phones, and ammo in here.”
While Remi gathered them into the bag and sealed it, Sam put a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and shoes in the net bag for each of them and lowered their pack into the water.
“That’s everything,” he said. “Maybe they’ll think we got out through the fires.”
Remi shook the bag. “Are you able to carry this?”
“It’ll make a good weight.” He removed the lead weights from his belt and attached the bag to it.
Sam and Remi put on the rest of their dive equipment, held their flashlights, and sat on the edge of the pool. He said, “I’m sorry it comes down to a long shot.”
She leaned over to bump him with her shoulder. “It’s not such a long shot. If there’s one sinkhole, there are probably others. We just have to conserve our air to give us more time to find one. We should have about twenty-five minutes.”
He nodded. As he did, there was a ferocious barrage of gunfire that ran along the top of the wall on three sides, knocking chips and mortar into the air. Sam and Remi turned their heads to kiss. Then they put on their masks, inserted their mouthpieces, and slid into the water. They swam downward for ten or twelve feet and then felt the slow current catch them and begin to push them gently away.
Chapter 12
Sam and Remi swam cautiously in the deepening darkness, just going with the current for about a hundred feet to make sure that no one standing above the cenote could see them turn on their flashlights, and they increased their speed to move along the stone corridor of the underground river. The water rose all the way to the ceiling of the cavern, leaving no airspace above the surface. At first, the walls were about twenty feet apart but thirty or forty feet deep. Each time the space between the walls narrowed, Sam and Remi would feel a growing dread. When the space opened up a little, their relief was intense.
They kicked their fins steadily to keep their speed up, and the current helped them along. They held their flashlights ahead of them, but what they saw was always the same — more curving tunnel. When the tunnel narrowed, Sam would wonder whether it was merely a fissure in the rock opened up by one of the frequent earthquakes in the region. If it was, it could narrow at some point from twenty feet down to six inches, and they would be trapped and drown.
Sam kept checking his watch as they swam. He and Remi had made a dive yesterday morning that had lasted about fifteen minutes. Each of their aluminum tanks still held about twenty-five minutes of air. That meant that for the first twelve minutes, if they reached an obstacle, they might still be able to swim back to the cenote and surface. Maybe if they did, they’d find that the men who had been after them had already stormed the enclosure, seen they were gone, and left to search for them. Sam knew this thought was part fantasy and part nightmare: the possibility that betting their lives on this underground river might be a dead end.
And then it was thirteen minutes, and he knew that if they tried to swim back, they probably wouldn’t make it before their air was gone. After five more minutes, they certainly wouldn’t.
When twenty minutes had passed, they could count on only five more minutes of air. Even that might be optimistic. They had been swimming steadily, so they had used air at an accelerated rate. He thought about their chances as rationally as he could. There was no reason to believe that they would reach another opening in the ground above them in the next five minutes. Remi was smaller and lighter and used less air than he did. If she had both tanks, she would have twice as much time to find an escape.