Matthew shook his head. “Adebowale!”
She nodded. “There’s something else, too.”
“What?”
“I’m getting a number of pings right now on social media and traditional media inside the DRC. General Ngige died this morning. Apparently his right eye had been burned with a cigarette. Horrific but unlikely to have killed him. Somehow, there was a complication in the routine operation and he died on the table.”
Matthew turned to face her. “Then who was the twin who’s going to die?”
She said, “His name’s Dikembe and he’s Adebowale’s twin brother.”
“Christ! Adebowale has a twin! How did we not work this out earlier?”
Elise shook her head. “We took Adebowale at his word. We had no reason to doubt him. It wasn’t like it made any difference whether or not he was an only child or a twin — until the Nostradamus Equation told us a royal twin would need to die.”
Chapter One Hundred and Six
Sam reached the bottom of the sinkhole. It was eighty feet deep in total. The water was discolored and murky, with a visibility of less than five feet. The heads up display showed a vague outline of the dramatic sinkhole, based on the sonar’s impression. The quality was poor, but a darkened spot at the very bottom suggested it still penetrated the old Lake Tumba Gold Mine, Mine B. He waited for Tom and Adebowale to reach him, confirmed they were all right, and then opened up the throttle to the Sea Scooter and entered the mine.
The headlight positioned in front of the diver propulsion vehicle flicked light off the walls of the tunnel. It was as dark as any cave Sam had ever explored, and unlike the water in a cave which is clear, the mud and silt in the water here still blocked much of his visibility.
Sam said, “Keep close gentlemen. The vis is poor and doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon. Keep track of the person in front of you on your sonar screen. The last thing I want is to turn this into a rescue mission for the three of us.”
“Copy that,” Tom said. “See your slow ass, right ahead of me.”
“What about you, Adebowale? Have you got us on your sonar?”
“I can see you. Just keep going and I will follow.”
Sam said, “Good man.”
The navigation screen suddenly flashed green. It meant the relationship between the current outline of the mine, based on the sonar reading, had matched with a known section of the map. The two readings became superimposed, and the computer placed an asterisk, where it believed Sam was inside the mine. He grinned. It was a good start. He clicked the route button, and a red line followed a series of tunnels, like a giant maze, through to the seventy-ninth level.
Sam drove the sea scooter along the first tunnel for approximately two hundred and fifty feet, before turning to the left. He followed the directions given on the heads-up navigation display, as the tunnel opened to seven separate exploratory runs. Away from the giant sinkhole, and the disturbed water of the Tumba River, the visibility greatly improved. Sam made another turn around a corner, and the light from his sea scooter returned to him, greatly amplified.
He stopped. A large reef of quartz hung on the ceiling. Tiny specks of gold reflected the flashlight’s glow mysteriously. He smiled. The shaft would have been quite profitable if they hadn’t struck the river. The width of the mineshaft here increased to a total of forty feet, as the miners had once dug, following the gold-rich quartz reef.
At the end of the gold-rich section, the tunnel returned to a straight and horizontal profile for about a hundred feet, before turning to the right. On the map, the entire area looked like one giant game of snakes and ladders.
About an hour in, Sam reached the first vertical shaft. “You two still behind?”
“Sure am,” Tom said. “I’ve got Adebowale right on my tail. What’s taking you so long?”
Sam looked upwards. “I’ve reached the first of the vertical shafts. I’ll wait until I see your lights following before I keep going.”
He ascended thirty feet and stopped. It was a short shaft. There was no elevator. Only the wooden rungs of an old mining ladder. The miners must have reached a gold reef, or something which made them stop. There were two tunnels, leading in opposite directions away from the vertical shaft. Sam checked the map, and confirmed that he needed to take the one to the right.
As soon as he could see Tom and Adebowale below him in the vertical shaft, Sam followed the tunnel for a total of five hundred and thirty-eight feet. The tunnel meandered in a westerly direction, with a series of jagged dog legs and zig-zags. At that point, he stopped. Above him was the elevator shaft Number Four. Per the map, it ran all the way up to level ten. Not only would they be well and truly out of the water by then, but at that point, they could take the horizontal tunnel to reach any of the four mines. And more importantly, they could reach the three tunnels that run below Lake Tumba, and complete their mission.
Sam waited until he saw the lights of his two companions darting along the tunnel’s walls. “I’m starting on the vertical shaft, Number Four. I’ll see you guys on dry land.”
Tom said, “Good. See you at the top.”
Adebowale said, “Once you see how long that shaft travels vertically, you will wish it was filled with water all the way to the top.”
Sam grinned. He already knew they were going to have one hell of a climb to reach the top. Sam positioned the sea scooter so its sonar transducer pointed straight up the shaft. Thirty seconds later, the heads-up display flashed green again. The map and the sonar images matched up.
He left the sea scooter in neutral and slowly adjusted his buoyancy, until he was ascending. Once he’d begun to move in a vertical direction, Sam concentrated on bleeding air from his buoyancy control device. As he ascended, he reduced the exertion of pressure, measured in atmospheres, which in turn caused air to expand. Without letting that air bleed off, his buoyancy control device would rapidly overfill and he would shoot to the surface — most likely killing himself with an embolism in the process.
After rising nearly forty feet, Sam stopped. He swore loudly to himself.
Tom asked, “What’s wrong?”
Sam said, “I don’t think we’re going to reach the surface tonight.”
“But we must!” Adebowale’s voice boomed over the underwater radio. “What’s happened?”
Sam shook his head. “The elevator’s permanently stopped at level twenty-nine. There’s no way we can get around it, and I’m doubting there’s any way we could coax it to ascend again.”
Chapter One Hundred and Seven
Sam studied the electronic map in front of him until Tom and Adebowale caught up with him. There were a series of lateral tunnels with some vertical shafts all over the place, like a giant rabbit’s warren, but every time he followed any of them he reached the same conclusion — he would need to return to the main elevator shaft to reach the top.
Tom slowed his ascent and came to a stop next to him. His eyes glanced at the stuck elevator and back to Sam. “That’s not good.”
“No, and we’ve already reached the point of no return,” Sam agreed. “The batteries are already getting low on the sea scooters, and it would be impossible for our air supplies to last that long if we swam back the way we came.”
Tom studied the elevator. “How much C4 do you think it would take to bring that thing down?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. We do that and the guards above are going to be on us in a flash. The whole mission will be blown.”