Night Probe! (Dirk Pitt 6)

"Then it's diamond cut diamond. I'm Lieutenant Digby Macklin of Her Majesty's Royal Marines."

Sanchez stood there open-mouthed. All he could think of to mumble was "Well, I'll be damned."

The first thing Shaw noticed as he eased himself down the ventilator shaft was the dank and musty stench that welled up to meet him. After about twenty yards he could no longer reach out with his feet and touch the encircling earth walls. He clutched the rope in a near death grip and beamed his light into the dark.

Shaw had dropped into a vast cavern, at least forty feet from floor to ceiling. It was empty except for a large pile of debris in one corner. The rope ended twelve feet from the ground. He shoved the flashlight under his armpit, took a deep breath and released his grip.

He fell like a pebble falling down a well through the blackness, a frightening experience he would never care to repeat.

A gasp was squeezed from his lungs when he landed. He should have struck clean, his legs taking most of the impact. But when he fell to one side, his outflung wrist smashed against something hard, and he heard the sickening crack as it fractured.

Shaw sat there for two or three minutes, lips tightened in agony, feeling sorry for himself. Finally, he snapped abruptly to his senses, realizing it was only a question of minutes before the Americans would be coming down the air shaft and struggled to a sitting position.

Groping in his waist for the flashlight, he pushed the switch. Thank God, it still worked.

He found himself next to railroad tracks of a narrow gauge that ran from the cavern into a tunnel carved at one end.

Awkwardly he one-handedly slipped off his belt and made a crude sling, then rose to his feet and struck out along the track into the tunnel.

He walked between the rails, careful not to trip on the raised ties. The tracks ran level for fifty yards and then started to slant up a slight incline. After a while he stopped and played the beam into the darkness ahead.

What seemed like two monstrous red eyes reflected back at him.

Cautiously he moved forward, stubbed his toe against something solid, looked down and saw another set of rails. They were spiked at a much wider gauge, even wider than the ones British trains ran on, Shaw judged. He came out of the tunnel into another cavern.

But this was not an ordinary cavern. This was an immense crypt filled with dead.

The red eyes were two lanterns mounted on the rear of a railroad car. On the observation platform were two bodies, mummies really, still fully clothed, their blackened skulls staring into the eternal dark.

The hair on the back of Shaw's head raised and he forgot about the stabbing ache in his wrist. Pitt had been right. The underground quarry had yielded the secret of the Manhattan Limited.

He glanced around, half expecting to see a shrouded figure holding a scythe, beckoning with a bony finger, beckoning for Shaw. He passed alongside the coach, noting that it was surprisingly free of rust. At the boarding steps, where the next car was coupled, another grotesque bundle lay, its head propped against the six-wheeled truck. Out of morbid curiosity, Shaw stopped and studied it.

Under the flashlight the skin showed a dark brownish-gray color and had the consistency of leather. As the months and years passed, the body had desiccated and hardened and become naturally mummified by the dry air of the quarry. The round visored cap still resting on the head indicated that this map had been the conductor.

There were others, scores of them, scattered around the train, frozen in the final posture of death. Most had died sitting up; a few were lying outstretched. Their clothing was in a remarkable state of preservation and Shaw had no trouble telling the men from the women.

Several of the dead were stiffened in warped positions below the open door to the baggage car. In front of them a jumbled stack of wooden crates sat partly loaded into an ore car. One of the mummies had pried open a crate and was holding a rectangular-shaped block against his chest. Shaw rubbed away the grime on the object and was stunned to see the smear turn the color of gold.

My God, he thought. By today's prices there must be

over three hundred million dollars' worth of the stuff lying about.

Tempting as it was to linger and contemplate the riches, Shaw forced himself to push on. Sweat was soaking his clothes, yet he felt as if he were in a refrigerator.

The engineer had chosen to die in the cab of his locomotive. The great iron monster was blanketed under a century of dust, but Shaw could still decipher the fancy gold numerals "88" and the red stripe that ran down the side.

Thirty feet in front of the cowcatcher there was a massive fall of rock that had buried the main entrance of the quarry. More dead were strewn about here; having dug frantically with their final breath, their gnarled hands still clutched around picks and shovels. They had actually moved several tons of stone, but it had been only an exercise in futility. A hundred men couldn't have dug through that mountain of rubble in a month.

How did it all happen? Shaw trembled unconsciously. There was an undeniable horror about the place.

Helplessly trapped in a cold and dark underground prison, what tortures of the mind had they all endured before death ended their sufferings.

He continued around the locomotive and coal tender, then mounted the steps of the first Pullman car and walked down the aisle. The first sight he saw there was a woman lying in a berth, her arms embracing two small children. Shaw turned away and kept moving.

He rummaged through any and all hand cases that remotely looked like they might contain the North American Treaty. The search went with frustrating slowness. He began to rush as the cold fingers of panic touched his mind. The flashlight was dimming, the batteries would not last but a few minutes longer.

The seventh and last Pullman car, the one with the grisly occupants on the observation platform, bore the emblem of the American eagle on the door. Shaw cursed himself under his breath for not starting here.