Adebowale pulled himself through the small opening and continued swimming upwards. He raced toward the surface like a torpedo, breaking into the cool air high above in under a minute. He quickly removed his wetsuit, then placed the backpack carrying the C4 over his shoulders once again.
He shined his flashlight around, until he found a tunnel heading due north. He took it hoping that it would reach the elevator shaft, well above where the elevator was stuck.
He moved quickly. The height of the tunnel was too low to run, but in a bent-over stance, he moved fast. It didn’t take long to reach the main elevator shaft. He shined the flashlight below. The focused beams came to rest on the water not far below. He looked up, and saw the wooden ladder leading straight up.
Adebowale started to climb immediately. Twenty feet up the first set of ladders, and a sudden pressure gripped the joint of his right elbow. The pain was sharp and intense, but intermittent. From what little he knew about SCUBA diving, he understood there was something about the compressed nitrogen not being able to escape his blood stream fast enough if he ascended too quickly. He should have slowed his ascent, but what could he do? His men needed action, not hesitation.
Adebowale shrugged off the pain and continued climbing. He gritted his teeth, and forced himself to grin. He was getting close to the fulfilment of the prophecy and the greatest achievement of his lifetime. He’d seen the future and it wasn’t the bends that was going to kill him.
Chapter One Hundred and Nine
Sam slipped through the feathered turbo-fan blade and ascended carefully. There was no sign of Adebowale’s light above, but there was no doubt in his mind that this was the way he’d traveled. The question was why did Adebowale try to lose them?
He didn’t wait to commence their ascent. They had a long way to go if they were to reach the top levels of the mine, and they would need to travel fast if they were to catch up with Adebowale.
Sam asked, “What could he possibly be trying to achieve?”
Tom said, “I don’t know how he fooled us, but he’s not on our team.”
“If that’s the case, why bother dragging us here, at all?”
Sam thought about that and shook his head. “I have no idea. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe he has some entirely different purpose for being here. Something he obviously didn’t want us to know. That doesn’t mean he’s against us.”
“Sure. But he’s definitely not with us.”
Sam slowed his rate of ascent as they approached the second ventilation fan. He carefully slipped through the single opening where a fan blade had been broken off. The sharp fracture in the rusted metal appeared recent. He slipped through very carefully, and continued to ascend.
Sam said, “We might still be able to complete the mission without him.”
Tom shook his head. “No we can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he took the bag with the C4.”
“Christ! I thought you were carrying that?”
“I was, but just before we left the helicopter he offered to carry it. He said I already had enough to carry with all the additional diving equipment.”
Sam approached thirty feet of depth and slowed his ascent to a stop. He carefully waited five minutes and then ascended to fifteen feet, before waiting another five minutes to decompress. He climbed out through the surface of the water and removed his wet suit, and discarded it next to Adebowale's abandoned suit.
A trail of water heading down the northern tunnel showed where Adebowale had gone. Sam switched his Heckler & Koch MP5 from safety to fully automatic, while Tom surfaced and skinned out of his wet suit. There was no telling how long Adebowale had taken to decompress, so they would have to be quick to catch him.
They ran to the end of the tunnel and then started to climb the rickety ladder in the main elevator shaft. It was a grueling climb, but they reached the top, where the vertical shaft joined the main tunnel on level five. From there, Sam hoped they would be able to open the locked grates for the prisoners, and still reach the main tunnel that led underneath Lake Tumba in time to block it somehow.
He and Tom made it less than five hundred feet down the tunnel, before his hopes were shattered — because the echo of a tremendous explosion echoed through the tunnel.
Sam swallowed, hard. “Oh, shit!”
Chapter One Hundred and Ten
Adebowale had no idea how much C4 would be required to bring the ceiling down onto the tunnel, so he used all of it. Better to be too much than not enough. There was no risk of bringing down too much rock. After all, his intention was to create a stone barrier between the end of the tunnel, where General Ngige had ordered dynamite to be laid and ready to open the tunnel to the bottom of the lake, and the entrance to the main tunnels of the mine.
In his nightmares he’d seen the moments directly after the explosion repeatedly since he was a small boy. But he’d never seen how he actually reached that point. So, without any concern he might not be doing it right, he’d stuck all the C4 from the back-pack onto the rock ceiling. He’d then run the ignition wires a couple hundred feet down the tunnel and pressed the detonation button.
Within the narrow confines of the tunnel, the shockwave raced toward him with an incredible force. It knocked him to the floor, and he struck his head hard. His world shook and for a moment he thought he’d already been killed. He felt the strange wet feeling on his face, and carefully touched it with his right hand. It took him a moment to realize it was his own blood. In his head, he heard the constant ringing, as his burst eardrums tried to make sense of what had happened.
There was too much dust and debris ahead to see if the cave-in had worked. Somehow, intrinsically, he knew that it hadn’t. It couldn’t have, could it? After all, water would soon come flowing from the other side of the cave-in and kill him.
He forced himself back on to his feet and started to run back the way he had come. A moment later the aftershock of a second explosion dropped him to the ground again. General Ngige’s men, hearing the first explosion and having expected an attempt to escape, must have detonated the dynamite.
Adebowale knew he couldn’t outrun it, but still he tried.
A third explosion occurred up ahead, somewhere between him and the main tunnels of the mine. In an instant he realized what always went wrong — something he’d never even considered.
Someone must have been drilling holes in the ceiling further up the tunnel, so that any large seismic activity would cause it to collapse and form a natural barrier of rock. Now he was trapped, unable to go backwards or forwards. Behind him, he felt the gust of air being blown through the tunnel, followed by the sound of raging water.
He’d been here before — a thousand times in fact.
But still he turned and ran.
Adebowale didn’t have far to run, not far at all. He reached the cave-in ahead. It had formed perfectly. There was no way he could escape now. He turned to face the torrent of water that would kill him.
Despite the knowledge that he would be dead within moments, he grinned broadly — because the prophecy was complete.