War From The Clouds

Chapter Eight

It was 4:30. In four hours, more or less, Don Carlos Italla would fire his flare gun from the top of Alto Arete and the war masterminded from the clouds would commence. The only hope of stopping that signal was through the cave and up through the chimney. Even if we had had a military escort up the regular trail to the mountaintop, we still couldn't have made it on time.

We were at one end of the shortest distance between two points. And there was water in the way.

All right, I thought. Water certainly isn't impenetrable.

"Let's move the slab all the way off the well," I said, "and get some light into the damned thing. I'm going down."

"It is hopeless," Pico said. "We should spend our energies in returning to the tribal camp, in convincing Chief Botussin that we must move the camp farther into the hills, in…"

"Let Senor Carter go down," Purano said.

We all turned to look at him. He hadn't spoken five words during the whole of the afternoon, not even when the guerillas had attacked. When he had been shot in the arm and thigh, he hadn't uttered a sound.

I stared at his dark eyes and wondered if he wanted me to go down to a certain death, or if he really held out hope. I couldn't read a thing in those eyes, in that deadpan face.

Five minutes later, we had the slab removed from the well and I was tying the thin, strong rope around my chest, just under my armpits.

"How far down did you climb before you came to the entrance?" I asked Pico.

"I don't remember how far," he said. "There were steps, but I don't remember it being an ordeal."

"Okay," I said, picking up a heavy rock to use as a weight. "Let me down as fast as I can sink. Play out no more than a hundred feet of rope, though. If I'm not up in sixty seconds from the time my head goes under water, pull me up, fast."

I gave my digital watch to Elicia so she could serve as timekeeper. I passed the luger and the automatic rifle over to Purano, wondering why in hell I put so much trust in him. But I wanted Pico's strong arms on that rope and I was glad to see that he took it up without being asked.

The water was cold and clear. I dropped swiftly for a few feet, then put one hand on the slippery side of the well to slow the descent. I peered around and around at the sides as I dropped with the stone in my hand. There were no breaks, no holes, no steps.

About twenty five feet down, I encountered the stone steps and could see that the steps above that point had been chiseled away. Don Carlos had planned well when he had taken to the clouds.

I had been counting in my head as I dropped through the water and searched for a break in the sides of the well. I was up to forty and still counting. I let go of the side and dropped more swiftly, wondering how far it was to the bottom and if the entrance was there.

When I hit the count of sixty, I felt the rope go taut. My eyes strained downward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the opening to the cave. I saw only the deep gloom that exists in the bottoms of all wells. But there was something different about that gloom.

As the rope began hauling me up out of the water, and as my lungs began to sear from the pain of foul air, I realized what was different below me.

There were no more steps.

The steps ended at a point about sixty feet down. As I was being hauled past the point where the steps left off, I saw a dark spot on the wall to my left, on the downhill side of the well. It was the opening.

I almost did something foolish then. I slid my stiletto into my hand and was about to cut the rope, to swim through that opening, afraid I wouldn't be able to find it again. My lungs won out over my foolishness and I was soon breaking the surface of the water and sucking in air like a landed fish.

"Did you find the opening?" Pico asked as he helped me over the rim of the well.

"I think so. It's about sixty feet down, on the left side here. Can all of you swim?"

It was a kind of stupid question to ask people who had lived their entire lives on an island. But I had to make certain. We didn't have room for anymore foul-ups. I described the location of the opening, just below where the steps ended.

It was decided that Pico and Purano would remain behind and stack rocks around the opening to make it look as though no one had found and entered the well. Then, they would return to the village and help the others move to the ancient campsite, just in case. Although I feared insulting the Indians and their craftsmanship, I chose the nylon rope over the hemp. It was lighter and much stronger. I taped Wilhelmina in a waterproof pouch to my back and checked to make certain Pierre and Hugo were in place. I wasn't wild about the idea of Elicia going into this impossible situation with me and the surviving four spear-chuckers, but there was no other way.

The spearchuckers themselves weren't any too happy about the arrangement. Once they comprehended the situation, they went into another whispered consultation with Purano. He frowned, then turned to me.

"They fear the curse," he said. "They refuse to go into the cave."

I had expected this, but had hoped against it. There was no way I could go into that cave and up that chimney alone. Even if I could, what possible chance would I have at the top, if I, indeed, ever reached the top? And there was no way Purano and Pico could accompany us, with their wounds. I looked at the four warriors, peering into each face in turn.

"If you don't go," I said as brutally as I could, "you'll have more than a curse to fear. Eight of your brothers died on this slope. If we remain here much longer, the red-shirted guerillas will kill the rest of you. And if they don't, I'll kill you before I go back into the water."

I meant what I had said. I had already swung a Russian rifle around toward them as I spoke. They looked to Purano for help.

"Go, or I will kill you before he has the chance."

It wasn't the sweetest of conditions, but the warriors gave grudging nods. I took the minimal amount of time to show them how to use the automatic rifles, then we were as ready as we ever would be.

"I'll go first," I said. "This time, I won't do anything to slow my descent. I'll drop as fast as the rock will take me. I'll find the opening again and swim through. If I find safe, dry land, I'll tug three times on the rope. If I don't signal within the allotted sixty seconds, pull me back up. If you pull and nothing happens, you'll know I've had it. Nobody should follow."

It would have been a safer plan for me to swim down, investigate the opening and come back to describe it in detail. But time was running out so fast that I decided on the far more dangerous aspect. It didn't matter, really. If this failed, we would all be dead within hours anyway. Or, with the elite corps in the area, within minutes.

This time, I cradled a much larger rock in my arms. As I hurtled down through the water, my ears kept popping from the sudden change in pressure. I was going so fast that I could barely see the steps flitting past.

When I reached the point where the steps ended, I tugged once on the nylon rope and immediately dropped the heavy stone. I swam upward a few feet and reached into the blackness. It was a hole. I flipped the trailing rope out of the way and swam into the hole.

The darkness was so total that I was certain I'd swum through into open space, into the mysterious Black Hole of Space. But there was nothing but blackness.

The fifty-second point passed and I felt the pain start up again in my lungs. I swam on and on. Sixty seconds. Sixty one. I felt the rope drawing tight around my armpits and knew that Pico was up there pulling, his strong arms bristling with muscles on the rope.

I was about to turn and swim with the tug of the rope when I saw a patch of light ahead and above. A lake? Impossible. I was well below the surface of the mountain. There couldn't be open water up there.

But it was something bright, something worth investigating. I pulled three times on the rope, then waited until it went slack. Our signals were working perfectly, but now I was totally on my own. If that patch of light turned out to be something other than open water, or at least a surface where I could breathe, I had no time left to swim back through the opening and up through the well.

My air was already exhausted and the pain that had begun to sear my lungs was now attacking all my joints. Everything in my body was crying out for oxygen.

My arms felt numb and tingly, almost refusing to work for me. I kept swimming, taking an upward angle toward the patch of light. The light grew in size and intensity, but it never became nearly as bright as the light at the top of the well.

And it seemed to be slipping away into the distance the farther and the harder I swam. The pain in my lungs and joints grew to a constant throbbing. I felt dizzy and disoriented, the way I had felt in special diving classes and on other assignments when I had had to swim to deep parts of the ocean. I recognized the sensation as what divers call "Raptures of the Deep." I was getting giddy and it seemed to me that it might be great fun to play with that patch of light above. I would swim almost to the surface, then dive deep again, teasing that light as though it were some benevolent animal.

Fortunately, I didn't dive. If I had, I would have instantly drowned. I broke the surface just as air came exploding from my lungs. It was an automatic spasm and the sucking in of air was just as automatic, just as involuntary. If it had happened underwater, I would have filled my lungs with water instead of air.

The light was indeed dimmer than the light outside. I was in the middle of a pool of water and there were dark rocks all around me. Above was a huge dome of a cavern. Off to one side, around an outcropping of rock, was a beam of light.

I swam to the rocks and crawled out onto what had to be the bottom of the sacrificial cave. I lay panting for several minutes and was just starting to investigate the huge cavern when something broke the water in the pond and I saw Elicia floundering near the rocky bank. She was too weak to swim any longer. I leaped back into the water and nudged her to shore.

One after another, the warriors popped up into the pond like corks from bottles. One after another, I jumped in and brought them to shore.

I waited five minutes after the last warrior was through and then began to pull on the rope, steadily but firmly.

Sure enough, Pico and Purano had tied six automatic rifles to the end of the rope. We were all armed, but we were also cut off from escape. It would have been impossible to swim back to the well without the rope to guide us.

After checking to make certain that Wilhelmina and the rifles weren't waterlogged, we began to move about the cavern. The light, we discovered, came from a wide fissure high up in the rocks. There was no way up to the fissure, so we concentrated on the center of the domed chamber. There was a raised section, like an immense stage. We climbed onto it.

As we stumbled across the stage, through the half-light of the cavern, we began to shuffle through ashes and bits of burned debris. Elicia picked up a charred object, screamed and immediately flung it down.

It was the remains of a human thigh bone.

Somewhere in this debris, I thought, were the ashes and charred bones of Pico's eleven-year-old daughter. In a way, I was glad that the giant had been wounded and wasn't along. It would have been painful for him to walk through these ashes. It was painful to me.

I couldn't take my eyes from the ashes as we walked through them. I didn't really know what I was looking for, or if I would recognize it when I saw it. And then the toe of my boot struck something that clattered.

I looked down and there it was, charred and blackened, but recognizable as a necklace made of seashells. I turned my head so that the warriors and Elicia wouldn't see the tears.

When we had reached what we determined to be the center of the immense platform, we stopped and gazed at the high dome of a ceiling. There were black smudges here and there. One of the warriors suddenly began to jabber. He was pointing to a small outcropping of rock at the center of the dome.

We moved around on the platform, looking at the outcropping from different angles. From one side we could see that a narrow opening went up through the dome. From below, it looked too small to accommodate a man, but the smoke around it clearly identified it as the start of the chimney up through the mountain.

"We have found it," Elicia said wistfully, her shoulders slumped and her face sad, "but we can do nothing. It is too high and this cave is empty of everything but rocks and bones and ashes." She shuddered.

We could have piled up rocks to give us more elevation, but that ceiling was thirty feet away. It would take days to pile up enough rocks to do us any good. By my calculations, we had just over three hours to do four hours of climbing, as it was.

The realization of failure was stronger because it also signalled our entrapment. We couldn't go forward and we couldn't go back. Our bones would be added to those in the cave, and it was no solace to us that we would not have been burned in sacrifice. Death by starvation, my boss David Hawk once said, is no damned picnic.

The four warriors also realized the hopelessness of our situation. They sat on the cold floor and began to chant in a kind of sing-song fashion that made my flesh creep. In my mind's eye, I envisioned scenes of years ago when young maidens were brought here for ceremonial torture, ceremonial sex and then ceremonial burning. I imagined that the torturers — Don Carlos leading them — had chanted in that same creepy way.

I was about ready to join them, though, when I looked up again at that outcropping of rock that had hidden the opening from us when we had first looked up. I walked around in a circle, kicking burned bones aside, studying that piece of jutting rock.

It stuck out from the ceiling at right angles, spearing across a corner of the hole. And I could see that the hole was bigger than we had first thought. There was ample room for a man to get past that outcropping, that spear of rock, and into the chimney.

But how was a person to get up to the jutting piece of rock?

The answer was still tied around my chest. I looked down at the rope trailing away into the darkness. It was thin, but it was strong. And it was supple.

"What are you doing?" Elicia asked as I began coiling up the loose end of the rope.

"I'm going to play cowboy," I said, grinning at her. "Just watch."

The four warriors stopped their chanting to watch my strange activities. I tied a loop in the end of the rope and coiled about forty feet of it around my shoulder. I took a few practice throws, but the loop never rose more than twenty feet in the air. The warriors and Elicia were looking at me as though I'd lost my senses.

"All right," I said, grinning at them as I coiled the rope for another throw. "That's enough practice. Now I go for the real thing."

"For what real thing?" Elicia asked.

"Just watch."

I went for the outcropping of rock. The lariat arched up through the air and missed the rock by inches. The warriors, not understanding what I was trying to do and convinced that I'd gone daft, began their chant again. Elicia suspected the truth and began to bite her lower lip and give body English to the trajectory of the lariat.

On the fifth try, the loop snaked over the end of the rock spear and I tugged gently on the rope. The loop tightened, but it was far out near the end of the rock, at its weakest point. The chances of the rock supporting my weight were sparse, but I had no other choice.

I put more weight on the rope and the loop tightened more. Pebbles came loose somewhere up there and rained down on us. The warriors chanted louder and began to howl. Elicia bit her lip so hard that I expected to see blood spurt out.

The suspense was also killing me. I took a chance then. I lifted myself by the rope, felt a ping in my side from my wound, and began to swing back and forth across the platform of old bones. The warriors let out a cheer. They finally understood the principle of the lariat. They also were hoping that I was more powerful than the curse put on the cave. I'd try not to disappoint them.

But we were far from out of it. I climbed a few feet on the rope, my eyes on that slender point of rock that jutted out beside the chimney hole. I flopped about, testing the strength of the rock, then began a swift, hand-over-hand climb.

When I was ten feet off the ground, I heard a fluttering sound and thought perhaps the whole ceiling was starting to crack open above me. I saw nothing. The rock was holding and the ceiling had no new cracks in it. I climbed faster.

I reached the twenty foot level when the fluttering came again, louder, more menacing, closer.

"Look out, Nick," Elicia screamed.

Her voice echoed through the chamber and seemed to come at me from a hundred different directions. I looked up and saw why she had shouted.

Something huge and black and pulsating had dropped from the chimney and was zooming straight down toward me. I thought at first that it was a great glob of soot, then I thought of a soot-blackened boulder.

But why was it pulsating?

The black glob was about to hit me when it seemed to break apart with a great fluttering sound. I nearly let go of the rope. My heart was pounding several hundred miles an hour. I let out a yip of my own and heard the cries and shouts of Elicia and the warriors below.

But I held tight to the rope and tried to duck my head away from the falling glob. The fluttering sound rose and seemed like thunder in my ears. Small black objects were zooming around my head and off to distant parts of the cave. Soft wings beat at me.

And then I knew.

Bats.

The cave had been strangely absent of life when we had entered it, but that opening that provided light should have told me that wildlife of some sort must be using this cave. That wildlife was bats and they had all been in their favorite nest in the opening of the chimney.

That black glob that had looked like a soot-covered boulder was a cluster of several hundred bats.

Elicia was screaming below me, but I knew she was in no danger. She was merely reacting to the bats that were now streaking back and forth in the cave, dive-bombing every alien object spotted by their special radar. While the bats occupied themselves with harassing Elicia and the warriors, I continued my climb to the top of the rope.

My side was on fire and every muscle in my body — especially my hands — threatened to go soft on me as I took one hand from the rope and clasped it around the rock spear. The spear, I could see in the dim light, actually was the leading edge of a small ledge just outside the hole leading up.

There were hundreds of baby bats in a nest on that ledge.

A high-pitched squeal came from the nest when my hand bumped against it. This set off the other bats in the cave. They were still streaking back and forth, dive-bombing Elicia and the four warriors. Now they began a screaching and squealing that was almost deafening, and was certainly hair-raising.

Distasteful as it was, I raised myself with both hands on the rock ledge and reached in to scoop out the nest. Bony wings flapped against my arm and face as the debris came falling down past me. Straw, twigs, dried grass and large cakes of bat shit made up most of the debris.

The screeching in the cave reached a fever pitch when the baby bats went plummeting down to the platform. The adult bats began swooping down and catching the little ones in wiry claws, then flying around and around in a circle, looking for a safe place to nest them. But I had fought hard for this place at the peak of the cave's dome and I wasn't about to be unseated by mama bats.

It took several minutes, however, to work my way up through the hole and onto the ledge. The hole was bigger than it had looked from below.

There was plenty of room for me to stand on the ledge, haul the others up one by one with the rope and let them get past me into the chimney.

I looked up to see if other ledges existed above me, but the walls were smooth and black. I stood on the ledge and ran my hands over the smooth walls of the almost round hole. Soot fell away, covering my body and falling down into the cave.

The only way to climb, I deduced, would be to put my feet on one side of the wall and my back against the other. By scooting along, like a mountain climber in a narrow ravine or cleft, I'd be able to make progress. It would be slow progress, but I knew the chimney must narrow as it rose. It must also twist and turn, giving us purchase with our feet and hands.

Then again, I thought, this isn't a man-made hole up through the mountain. Smoke and air don't need large or perfect openings. The chimney might have places where it narrowed too much to permit the passage of anything the size of a man.

There was, of course, only one way to find answers to all my speculations. And that was to climb up.

I was tempted to go on alone, knowing that time was precious and that I could make much better time on my own. But I would need the warriors and Elicia at the top. I would need firepower. That is, if this chimney had an opening at the top big enough for us to get through.

I loosened the loop of rope on the jutting rock and made a more secure link over a greater section of rock. When the rope was ready, I looked down and saw that Elicia and the four warriors were still fending off bats.

"Climb up first, Elicia," I shouted. "The rope is secure."

"Nick, I can't do it," she shouted back. "The bats. They're attacking our eyes."

I looked harder and sure enough the bats were not missing them in their diving attacks. Most were still swooping past Elicia and the others, but some — perhaps the mothers of the disenfranchised babies — were making direct hits, going for the eyes.

I remembered reading somewhere that bats were frightened of loud noises. The sound of our voices had alarmed them and had got them stirred up. What would a louder sound do to them?

I didn't know, but anything was worth a try. I got Wilhelmina out of its pouch and aimed at a point to the side of the platform. It wouldn't do to have a ricochet or a hunk of splintered rock hit Elicia or the others.

BOOM!

The whole damned cave seemed to explode in a rolling crescendo of thunder. The sound of the shot echoed from wall to wall and back again, nearly blasting out my eardrums. I could imagine what the sound must have been like below.

The bats went wild then. The deafening sound of the luger shot must have fritzed up their radar. They screeched and slammed into the walls of the cave. The mothers gave up their attack on Elicia and the warriors and went sailing off into walls. Some of them even flopped into the icy pond and a few others sailed out through the narrow opening into the afternoon light.

"Hurry and climb," I called down. "Once they get their senses back, they'll renew their attack. Come on, Elicia."

Elicia climbed as though she'd been squirreling up ropes all her life. She reached the outcropping of rock and I put out a hand to help her. She missed my hand on the first try and did a crazy spiral on the rope. Her hand slashed at the air and she was about to lose her grip with her other hand. I leaned down, caught her swirling arm and literally dragged her into the hole and onto the narrow ledge.

"Climb farther up to make room for the others," I said. "Put your feet against one side and your back against the other. Just scoot your body along until you're ten to fifteen feet up the tunnel."

She was short and her body barely gained purchase on the opposing walls. When she went past me, I put my hands on her buttocks to give her a boost. Her skirt was hanging free and my hands were against bare flesh. For a fleeting moment, I remembered that delicious hour in the council hut, then put it all out of my mind. Wrong time, wrong place. And she was Purano's woman now.

Most of the rest went smoothly and without mishap. But not all. When three of the warriors were shuttling along up after Elicia and the fourth was on the rope, climbing up, the bats returned.

"Hurry, before their radar picks you out," I said in a hoarse whisper. "Climb, man, climb."

The Indian came streaking up the rope, hand over hand, his legs dangling free. The bats sensed him and, after making several swoops just beneath him, they zeroed in on his body and, finally, his face.

He was almost at the top when a huge bat came swooping in a wide arc around the full circumference of the cave below. It took a radar bead on the warrior's eyes and scored a direct hit just as my hand was touching the Indian's outstretched hand.

We never made the proper link.

The warrior let out a scream, and let go of the rope. The bats skittered to dark areas of the cave and I lunged forward to catch the man's flailing arms. I missed and he went plummeting thirty feet through the dimly-lighted air.

I heard him hit, heard the sickening thwack of skull being cracked open. I knew he was dead the moment he landed. But I waited there at the opening to make sure. The Indian had landed on his |head, and his rifle had gone clattering across the platform, sending up a cloud of ashes. Human ashes. I stared at his body, at the grotesque way he was strewn on the platform. There was no movement and the bats were already attacking his face.

Even as a sick feeling was rumbling through my stomach and chest, I looked up to see that the others had also witnessed the disaster. The three warriors and Elicia were silent, watching the bats work over the battered corpse below. I didn't try to imagine what they were thinking or feeling: there was no time for the obvious.

But I did respect their feelings and thoughts. I waited until they had obviously prayed for the soul of the dead warrior and then I began to climb slowly past them.

"I'll take the lead," I said as I edged past the three warriors in the channel. "We'll have to hurry now."

"How much time do we have?" Elicia asked as I eased past her.

I took my digital watch from its waterproof pouch and saw that it was still running. The numbers flipped over to 5:32.

"We have just about three hours," I said. "We'll have to really punish ourselves and keep at it."

"Do you think the bats will return?"

"I doubt it," I said, although I didn't doubt it for a minute. 'The way should be clear and easy now."

It wasn't.

As I moved up into a narrow channel and saw that it split into two equal-sized holes, I heard movement above. A soft buzzing sound came from the hole to my left. I flipped on my flashlight and examined the hole openings. Soot covered the walls of both holes, so both apparently were open. I played the light into the left hole, trying to see what was making the buzzing sound, but could see only a twisting, turning, soot-covered channel ahead. The hole on the right presented an identical sight, but it had no buzzing sound in it.

I took the hole to the right. I hadn't gone five feet into it, though, when I realized that it was narrowing radically. I no longer could maintain purchase with my feet against one side and my back against the other. I reached out and found small ledges in the darkness above. I let my feet hang free and began to climb the ledges with my fingertips. It was rough going, but I knew it would be easier once my feet were inside the hole and I could use my feet on the ledges.

I never got that far. The hole narrowed until my shoulders were touching the sides. Soon, I couldn't get my shoulders through. I started crawling back down.

Meanwhile, below me, one of the warriors had seen me go into the right-side hole and had decided to take the left. He had edged past Elicia and was climbing up into the hole where I had heard the soft buzzing.

"Hold it," I said, tapping his foot just as he was lifting it to a small ledge inside the hole. "We'd better find out what's buzzing first."

"No problem, Senor," he said, his voice muffled in the narrow hole. "The buzzing is only flies making a nest. I clean them out good."

Elicia, the other two warriors and I propped our bodies in the wider channel below and waited for the intrepid warrior to clean out the nest of flies. It was good to rest, though I was conscious of the digital watch flipping over numbers as precious time went by.

From above came a louder buzzing, as though the warrior was stirring up the flies. I heard a low curse from the warrior, then a furious buzzing, then a scream from the hole.

"Aaaaiiiiii!"

The man's feet began to thrash in the hole and the warrior slipped down until he was almost kicking me in the face. He screamed again and I reached out to support his legs. He kicked me twice alongside the head and I was ready to scream myself when the buzzing grew louder and I felt soft furry things falling down across my head, face and chest. They dropped into the gloom below.

'Scorpions!" the warrior shouted between screams. "A nest of scorpions! They're stinging me!"

He screamed again as another scorpion obviously stung him up in that hole. I pulled on the man's legs and brought him down out of the hole. Three large scorpions were skittering across his upper body and he was almost white with shock. I batted away the scorpions and, with Elicia's help, we nestled him against the wall between us. He was no longer screaming, but a low moaning sound was rattling constantly from his lips. His face and arms were swollen from scorpion stings.

The poison from a single scorpion normally isn't enough to kill a man, or even to incapacitate him immediately, but this man had received several stings. I had no idea how many and there wasn't time to strip him there in the channel. The point was, he was of no use to us now: he was a liability. We would have to carry him, in spite of the fact that it was becoming even more difficult to continue without having anything or anyone to carry.

It wasn't easy to generate compassion for the man who was obviously dying in my arms. I considered his great pain and the shock of the poison, but I kept thinking of him as a liability, an impossible burden.

"He is dead," Elicia said, looking up from the warrior's face. Her small hand was across his forehead. He was indeed motionless, his lips no longer letting out that unintelligible moaning. "What can we do now, Nick? We cannot go on and we cannot go back?"

I was about at the end of my endurance. I had no desire to climb into that nest of scorpions that still remained in the hole on our left, and the other hole obviously was too small to get through. I was sore and raw from scraping against the rough walls of the hole. I was exhausted from the day's strenuous activities — I still hadn't recovered from that frightening swim before we had begun the climb up this impossible chimney. And the shocks to my emotions, from the bats, from the brutal death of the first warrior and from the tightening suspense of knowing that Don Carlos Italla might start his war while we were still burrowing up through the mountain like moles were taking a rigorous toll. And the newly-dead warrior was getting heavier by the minute.

I wanted to let go, to just make my body and my mind go slack. I wanted to drop through space, back down the incredible chimney and join the broken warrior on the sacrificial platform far below.

"What can we do?" Elicia asked again.

I didn't have an answer for her. In addition to physical exhaustion and emotional shock, I felt tremendously frustrated, as though I'd been involved in a series of impossible tests and wasn't passing any of them. And the dead Indian being supported by Elicia and I was gradually slipping down the smooth wall of the chimney.

Thoughts of just plain giving up were running rampant in my mind. Such thoughts must be amazingly close to those experienced by a person just before he commits suicide. At that moment, giving up meant committing suicide. On the other hand, my mind told me — actually screamed at me — going on was just as suicidal.

A great deal of my past life flashed through my mind in staccato bursts, like quick images of filmed replays. I saw myself in previously «hopeless» situations, saw how I had come out of them alive and triumphant. In my many years as N3, as Killmaster for AXE, such hopeless situations were legion, but I had experienced innumerable miracles to bring me out of them.

There was no miracle at hand this time. No light in the water ahead. No retreat. No weapon that could destroy the nest of scorpions above us without destroying us in the process.

"Nick?" Elicia said, her voice rising in panic as she recognized the look of total defeat on my face. "We must do something. We must do it soon. I feel myself giving out. I can't hold on much longer."

"Neither can I, Elicia," I said, looking at her sadly, helplessly. "Neither can I."