The Underground Cities Contract, page 11
Moncrief was staring at me. “Jesus H. Merciful Christ!” he commented. While heartfelt, the comment did not really help us much, so I didn’t answer. “You might even find Cornell,” he suggested, brightening.
I shook my head. “Another point. The acoustics down these tunnels are weird, but I think we can make each other out, using the wellshaft.…” I got up, went into the side vault that held our dwindling supply of wood, and started snapping off six-inch lengths of twigs and branches.
Getting into the shaft was no big deal. Shirtless, with my boots and socks off, I could arch my back comfortably against one side and use my bare feet and hands to guide me down. As Fitz had said, it was those slick spots which could send the express elevator down. When I was in position, holding the yarn strand in my right hand, Fitz flipped me a salute, and I winked at him, nodded at Moncrief, and started down.
The fourth level was like the third, except that it had no big central chamber. I crawled through all the lateral passages until I found a cold limestone wall blocking me, then backed out and picked another one. Once I stumbled across a skeleton and kicked its bones apart; some of them held tags of rotting clothing that I knew hadn’t been worn by the original inhabitants. Some local boy, I thought grimly, who was going to find some treasure.…
It took me an hour to finish that level, and when I went back to the central wellshaft and shouted, I could see their two heads peering down. Moncrief came crouching down the curving tunnel, and half the time I could hear his progress loudly, then for seconds, nothing at all. The open mouths of the other passages were blocking or siphoning off the sound.
When he was in place, guiding the lifeline between his right thumb and forefinger, I went down the shaft again. To the fifth level. It proved no more productive than the one above, with almost identical construction features. At the dead-end of one corridor, I found a concave shelf-bin and knew it had been used for storing something. I moistened my finger in my mouth and drew it across the bottom of the bin.
Salt. One more thing added to my fund of useless knowledge. I went back toward the shaft in darkness, realizing that although I only used my lighter in infrequent bursts, to light the short twigs, its flame was lowering ominously. And I was getting cold as a witch’s tit. That thought wheeled my reflection back to the white conical towers of Goreme, with the churches carved out of stone. With apartment windows breaking the symmetry of the tall white witches’ hats, a ghostly Cappodocian Hallowe’en…
Moncrief, after being called up the shaft, came down to join me on the fifth level. The air was colder, and he was choking up.
“You look like a goddamned stiff,” he announced bleakly. Crouching on all fours, although he was out of the tunnel and had room to stand upright. Dust-rimed; hysteria streaking his voice. “Your lips are blue.”
“We’re nearly down,” I said. “Hang in there, kid.”
He stared at me, pushed up off his hands, and sat like a trained and dusty bear. Then he broke completely, covered his dusty face with his hands and started sobbing. “Never get out of this fuckin’ place!” he howled, like a wild animal. “Never find—”
I slapped him so hard he pitched over on his side. Took his hands away from his face, and could see the snail’s trails, which tears had made through the cave dust. He must have been at least thirty years old.
“Here we go again,” I ordered. “Keep the line straight, please. If you blow it, you’ll never get down to me or back up to Fitz.” And as I clambered over the wellshaft, fitting my back to its contours, he was there, smiling like a forlorn idiot. Testing the shaft with my toes and my free left hand, moving down again, I decided I was in an almost ideal position.
Lost in an underground city in central Turkey, largely unexplored, with a cripple on the third level and a hysteric on the fifth. Freezing, with the ache of hunger beginning to knot my belly, and moving just to be moving … I hit a slick patch with my back and went sliding down out of control, trying frantically to keep the string from snapping.…
My slide had taken me past the sixth underground level, so I had to use considerable leverage to get back up to it. The distance wasn’t more than a few feet, but I had to arch my back and lunge upward with bowed legs and spread toes. It was on the sixth level that I found Cornell’s body. It was in a side passage, and he had been trying to butt his way to freedom.
Rigor mortis had set in: he was strung tight as a harp. The perpetual flashlight he had bragged about was on the white dust floor beyond his right hand, and it was no longer perpetual. I pumped at the handle but couldn’t get a flicker out of it. His head was crushed on top, and his hair matted by dried blood, which had caked down to the fashionable sideburns. Since he had had no opponent in the deep passage, I concluded that he had gone mad with terror and fatally hurt himself by ramming into the dead-end wall.
Another lighted twig confirmed this. There was a round scoring in the tufa wall, and blood-matted hair was centered in it. Flipping his body over, I searched his pockets and found half a folder of matches from the Grand Ankara Hotel. There was a wad of currency in his billfold, too, but I wasn’t near a shopping center, so I left it. He also had an unopened package of Camlica menthol cigarettes, which he had not told us about when we were slavering for a smoke.
Ripping off the cellophane wrapper, I knocked one of them out and burned it down in about four drags. Then carefully stubbed it out in the floor dust and placed the butt under his dead hand. Let him be so remembered, the cheating bastard.…
Going back to the central confluence of passageways, I leaned into the wellshaft and shouted up at Moncrief. Twice, then a third time. He finally answered, but I could not see him. I told him to come down, and in a few minutes, he joined me. Or at least stopped ten feet away and hunkered down in the baseball catcher’s position. His face was sad—clownish, cheeks tear-streaked, and he did not speak.
“I’m beat, Monty,” I said. “We’ve got to sleep awhile. I know you’re hungry; so am I But our only hope is to conserve our strength while we’re strong enough. A few hours of sack time, and we’ll go at it again.”
“Right.” Moncrief went to his knees. “How’ll we know…”
“I’ll wake you up,” I said, sprawling and stretching. “No problem,”
“Got to have a drink,” he muttered.
“Okay. Take it easy, boy.” I got up, went to the wellshaft, and shouted with my head turned upward. “Bottle, Fitz. Lower it.”
“’Kay.” The distant reply was prompt, and the lifeline began reeling upward. Fitzgerald had to keep his end tied in place, so I unfurled more. In a few minutes, the bottle came dropping past me, caught in a neat reef knot, and went down toward the well below. After it splashed, I saw the line sag, go upward and down again. Fitzgerald reeled the line up; I shouted when the bottle was even with me.
The line stopped. I untied the knot around the neck of the bottle and took it over to Moncrief, who was sprawled on his back. He grabbed, but I jerked it away.
“Never in this world, señor,” I said. “Sit up. You get half the bottle, and I get the other half. And that will have to do us.”
Moncrief took the bottle in both hands. Tilted it and drank deeply. I saw that he was going to drink all its contents and leaned down to snatch, but he laughed, twisted, and threw the bottle at the cave wall. It shattered, the shards falling to the cave floor.
“Don’t remember,” muttered Moncrief contemptuously, “signing any contract to take orders from you.”
I stood looking down at him. Our chances had always been small, and he had ruined them. Without food, we could run awhile on nervous energy. Without water, we were dead men.
Moncrief saw the concern on my face. And I suppose I looked as clownish as he did, perhaps more so. Because I had explored more cave avenues, without success. He hitched away, pushing his butt back through the dust with his feet. Watching me with fever-bright eyes, he scuttled back into the dark passage behind him.
I took a deep breath and tried to tell myself that he was not responsible; that the pressure had been too great. That was true, but I was getting tired of people who were not responsible. By breaking our only water container, he had turned the survival screw so hard that I didn’t see how we had a chance. We were almost to the bottom of the underground city, and up until now I had at least had a chance to find the horizontal tunnel to Derinkuyu.
I was trying to find a comfortable position for sleep when Moncrief came rushing out of the dark passage like a madman, flinging himself at me.
“You dirty bastard!” he screamed, clawing and clubbing at my face. “You knew Cornell was down there with his brains knocked out.…”
I had to get him off but didn’t want to hurt him. I lifted a knee hard and bladed him with the outer edges, of both stiffened palms. He slumped, and I hoped I hadn’t killed him. Pushing up, I went to the wellshaft, craned my neck so that I was looking upward, and shouted “Fitz!”
“Yo…” came the distant answer from far above. I seemed to be sighting up a clumsy telescope.
“We’ll sleep now,” I shouted. “Sleep … Sleep four hours. Understand? Sleep four hours, and call you again …”
“’Kay, ’kay, ’kay …” his calm answer came, echoed and over-rung by the long shaft.
Chapter 30
I awakened in less than three hours. Came awake suddenly, feeling cold, hungry, and frightened. I have been frightened many times before, in wars and on my contract assignments, and any man who isn’t fearful in the presence of imminent danger is already round the bend. But usually I had an opponent, someone I could charge, hurt, or kill. This time I was sure that I would die far beneath the weird silver landscape of Cappodocia.
Only one other time had I been so overwhelmed as to be almost helpless. That was in a French cave; I had been wedged solidly in a narrow corridor and had fired my pistol at a man fleeing, far ahead of me. After the shot had reverberated off the low cavern’s roof, I had been engulfed in a tremendous blanket, several feet thick, of falling spiders. I could not get my shoulders free, and my hands could not dislodge the crawling masses of spiders. They had clogged my shouting mouth, my eyes, and ears.…
Lying sprawled on the sixth underground level, I batted my dust-matted eyelashes and reviewed the position with great clarity. If I got up again, I had enough energy to go for possibly another three hours. I had no water or food; my gut was already cramping, and my lips parched.
The rule is: root, hog, or die. I pushed wearily up, went to the well-head, and shouted at Fitz gerald. He didn’t answer, but there was enough slack in the line so I lowered it carefully down to the water level below. Saw it strike and shatter the black mirror. Drew up the line and held its dripping end over my mouth. Three times. Then climbed into the well shaft again.
I caught the rim opening on the seventh level and pulled myself out. Dropped to the floor and carefully lighted another of the small sticks. Crawling was easier than heaving up again, so I started the usual pattern, moving cautiously as any failing hominoid. Swore like an outraged Rotarian when the dry stick burned down to my fingers.
The pattern on this seventh underground level was not the same. The powdery floor beneath me had started tilting downward; where the southern passage on the other levels had stopped at a solid stone wall, a high tunnel, big enough for me to walk upright in, led off into darkness.
Carefully, with infinite patience and trying to control my shaking hands, I lighted a match. There were only four of the wooden sticks left in my pocket. Went crawling forward with the match cupped in my right hand, and as I entered the larger tunnel, a steady draft of air blew it out. But not before I had time to see that the tunnel did not seem to stop.
I was sweating icewater because of this jackpot; my adrenal glands were cavorting. “Okay,” I assured myself, “this is the one that goes to Derinkuyu. Not, please God and Paul of Tarsus, one of those that goes to an unexplored underground city.”
That seemed a pretty funny prayer, so I pushed up on my hands and laughed quite a bit. The sound of my merriment went racketing down the other white tunnels and passage ways. I hadn’t heard anything except the sounds created by my own movement in so long that the diminishing laughter startled me. In the darkness, I started crawling forward, thinking that I could hold out longer that way.
Two sticks later, I had covered possibly a quarter mile. The connecting tunnel was level, and I knew my knees were bleeding, but I didn’t even try to stand up. Once I bumped into a large tufa fragment, fallen into the passage from the sidewall, but managed to manhandle it aside. Then, as I was crawling past, I brushed the dislodged stone, and it teetered back onto my left calf and knee.
I tried to work the leg loose but couldn’t. And couldn’t turn to get my hands on the rock. So I lighted another broken twig and turned to look back at the damage. It didn’t seem severe. The leg hurt, blood was trickling down to my ankle, but I couldn’t see any major damage.
The flame flickering off my little twig arced out of my left eye like a curving rocket, and I thought, now I’m hallucinating. Because the spinning thread of light had turned into a moon that blinded me.
“Sir,” said Peri Cicek, peeping under the moon, which was on her hat, “as a boss, you are some taskmaster!”
There was a column of people behind her. Shielding my eyes, I accepted a drink of water from a canteen and listened with my head down in tunnel dust as she said her friends were from the university. Doing a field trip, in anthropology. This statement was such an anticlimax that I opened my eyes again.
The young Turkish girl was kneeling beside me, holding the canteen. Same good legs. Although dusty, looked as neat and capable as ever.
“Higher education,” I croaked. “Simply can’t touch it.” And after muttering that Moncrief was flaked out on the sixth level, and Fitzgerald on the third, lost touch completely. Peri was lifting my head, and I was trying to tell them that Cornell had gotten lost and killed himself, when I went out.
Chapter 31
Nine days later, I was lying flat on the ground outside a ruined fortress called the Citadel. The gaunt tower is at the edge of Lake Van, a huge landlocked body of water in far eastern Turkey. A freezing rain was falling, but that was a help, because it concealed me and my troop of hastily assembled irregulars as we crawled toward the ruined tower.
My old friend, Yana Cihan, leader of the Turkish People’s Liberation Army, was holed up there. Since leaving us to our fate in the underground city at Kaymakli, he had roamed all over the eastern part of the country. Kidnapping, robbing banks, and generally looting in the name of his jihad. These activities were not really dangerous in the wild and arid Van region, because Ankara’s writ was not strong there.
Now, having dispatched two more looting parties, he was waiting, dug in behind the Citadel’s walls with only his headquarters cadre, not more than twenty men.
After we had been brought up to the surface, Fitzgerald and Moncrief had been driven to the Unye Base and from there flown immediately back to the States in an ambulance plane. I had holed up in Nevsehir, not far from the two cave cities, and Peri Cicek had gone back to Istanbul with the other members of the university field trip. She had then driven all night to get back to me in the little village in central Turkey.
She had news. Colonel Morse at the air base had told her privately that the Turkish secret police had been to see him four times; they were holding a warrant for my arrest. Nine counts; on one of them, trafficking with enemies of the State, I could get life at hard labor. In Istanbul, she had delivered my note to Mike Costain, and he had promised her he would send me, at the Nevsehir pension, the remainder of the hundred thousand dollars in US currency, which I had drawn through him while I was living in the Istanbul safe apartment.
When she had reported, Peri flopped on the bed. The trim little girl had been traveling most of two days without any sleep, and I suggested that she flake out for a while in my bed.
“Sir!” she said indignantly, and her gamin face broke into a grin. “Okay, but a shower first. I saw one in the back when I parked the car.” Without hesitation, she began undressing before me, ripped the blanket off the narrow bed, wrapped herself in it, and went pattering off barefooted down the back stairway.
I walked down the front one and got her a plate of doner kebab, and she wolfed it down. Sitting in the bed, with her hair still dripping. When I had taken the tray downstairs and returned, she was asleep, still sitting up. I eased her down to a more comfortable position and sat watching her from the room’s only chair.
She awakened before dawn and dressed in the chilly darkness, saying she would get breakfast on the road to Ankara. I walked her downstairs, kissed her and thanked her, and she spun the little Fiat around and went rolling away. Going back up to my room, I reflected that I would have been dead without her help. She didn’t like my country much, or the way they did things, but her fealty to me had been absolute.…
The courier arrived with the money before noon. He also had a new passport and other supplemental travel papers for me. He drove me to Konya, where I caught a flight to Teheran. There in the next week, working from our embassy, I recruited my small task force and reentered Turkey from the Iranian side. Most of my men were Kurdish brigands who had once fought for Barzani in Iraq (or their fathers had) but who did not buy Yana Cihan’s movement and would not follow him.
We had come to ground, Cihan and I. And it was extra work. There was nothing in my contract which said that I had to recapture him; my job had been to retrieve Fitzgerald, and he was back in the States. The other Americans, too, if I could, and it was no fault of mine that Cornell had been a hardhead, who had insisted on getting himself lost in the underground city. So, numerically, I had scored two-thirds, and the main object of the contract was safe at home.
