43
SHAKING HIS HEAD to bring himself back to his senses, Gideon scrambled to his knees in the blackness and crawled back the way he had come. The ground continued to shake with secondary collapses, rocks and pebbles falling all around him. He finally managed to get to his feet and, with a few more flicks of the lighter, make it back to the spot where Alida was waiting. She was crouching, coated with dust, and furious.
“What the hell did you do?”
“They were too close. I had to shoot at the blasting caps, blow the tunnel up.”
“Christ almighty. And that huge noise afterward? Was that a cave-in?”
“Right. The ceiling collapsed, blocking the tunnel. Now we’re safe—at least for the moment.”
“Safe? Are you nuts? Now we’re trapped!”
They began retracing their steps toward the fresh cave-in, looking for side tunnels or shafts they may have missed. There was nothing. Gideon was exhausted: his ears rang, his head pounded, and his mouth was full of muddy paste. They were both coated with dust and could hardly breathe in the choking air. Arriving at the cave-in, Gideon inspected it with the flame of the lighter. It was a massive heap of rocks, wall-to-wall, impassable. Gideon peered up at the irregular hole in the ceiling from which the rocks had fallen.
He snapped the lighter off and they were once again plunged into darkness. He could hear muffled voices from the far side.
“What now?” Alida asked.
They sat in silence for a while. Gideon finally removed the lighter, flicked it on, held it out.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for movement of air. You know, like they do in novels.”
But the flame burned utterly straight. The dust was so thick he could barely see. He flicked it off again. “It’s possible,” he said, “this cave-in opened a hole in the ceiling up there. I’m going up to check.”
“Be careful. It’s unstable.”
Gideon climbed the pile of rock. Each footfall sent more rocks and pebbles sliding down, including some larger ones that detached from the ceiling and crashed onto the pile. The rocks led all the way up to the concave hole in the ceiling. He scrambled to the top, sliding back a little with each step, the dust choking him, invisible rocks raining down all around—and suddenly, at the very top, he found air that was fresh and clear. He looked up and saw a star.
They crawled out into the dark and lay in a patch of sweet-smelling grass at the bottom of a ravine, coughing and spitting. A small stream ran down the ravine, and after a moment Gideon got up, crawled to the stream on his hands and knees, washed his face, and rinsed his mouth. Alida did the same. They appeared to be below the Los Alamos plateau, in the warren of heavily forested tributary canyons cutting down to the Rio Grande. Gideon lay back on the ground, breathing hard and looking up at the stars. It was incredible they had escaped.
Almost immediately he could hear the throbbing sound of a chopper.
Damn. “We’ve got to keep moving,” he said.
Alida stretched herself out on the grass, her filthy blond hair in tangles around her face, her once-white shirt the color of a dirty mouse, even the bloodstains obscured by dust. “Just give me a moment to catch my breath,” she said.