Atlantis Found (Dirk Pitt 15)

Holding up the directional computer, he said, "This little gem led the way." He placed her hands on the slimy rungs of a badly rusted ladder leading upward. "Do you think you can make it up to the next level on your own?"

"I'll fly if I have to," said Pat, overjoyed at being free of the hideous chamber and knowing she was still alive, with a chance, albeit a slim one, of eventually becoming a senior citizen.

"As you climb the ladder, pull yourself up with your hands on the vertical bars, and mind you don't step in the center of the rungs. They're old and probably half rusted through. So go carefully."

"I'll make it. I wouldn't dare mess up. Not after you got me this far."

He handed her a small outdoorsman butane lighter. "Take this, find some dry wood from a timber, and start a fire. You've been exposed to the cold water much too long."

As he pulled the dive mask back down over his face and prepared to duck under that water again, her hand suddenly tightened around his wrist. She felt drawn into the opaline green eyes. "You're going back after the others?"

He nodded and threw her a smile of encouragement. "I'll get them out. Don't worry. There's still time."

"You never told me who you are."

"My name is Dirk Pitt," he said. Then, the mouthpiece reinserted, he gave a brief wave and vanished into the murky water.

The water had reached the shoulders of the men in the ancient chamber. The terror of claustrophobia seemed to rise along with the water. All barbs of panic had receded as Ambrose and Marquez quietly accepted their fate in their private Hades deep inside the earth. Marquez chose to fight to the last breath, while Ambrose silently embraced a diehard death. He steeled himself to swim down through the cleft into the tunnel and go until his lungs gave out.

"He's not coming back, is he?" Marquez mumbled.

"Doesn't look like it, or else he won't make it in time. He probably thought it best to give us false hope."

"Funny, I had a gut feeling we could trust the guy."

"Maybe we still can," said Ambrose, seeing what looked like a glowworm approaching from under the water.

"Thank God!" gasped Marquez as the beam from the halogen dive light refracted and danced off the ceiling and walls of the chamber just before Pitt's head broke water. "You came back!"

"Was there ever a doubt?" Pitt asked lightly.

"Where is Pat?" demanded Ambrose, as Pitt's eyes met his through the plate of the dive mask.

"Safe," Pitt said briefly. "There's a dry shaft about eighty feet down the tunnel."

"I know the one," acknowledged Marquez, his words barely intelligible. "It leads to the next level of the Paradise."

Identifying the obvious signs of hypothermia in the miner, the drowsiness, the confusion, Pitt elected to take him instead of Ambrose, who was in the better shape of the two. He had to be quick, because the numbing cold had tightened its grip and was draining the life out of them. "You're next, Mr. Marquez."

"I may panic and pass out when I'm submerged," Marquez moaned.

Pitt gripped him on the shoulder. "Pretend you're floating in the water off Waikiki Beach."

"Good luck," said Ambrose.

Pitt grinned and gave the anthropologist a friendly tap on the shoulder. "Don't go away."

"I'll wait right here."

Pitt nodded at Marquez. "All right, pal, let's do it."

The trip went smoothly. Pitt put all his strength into reaching the shaft as quickly as possible. He could see that unless the miner got dry soon, he would lose consciousness. For a man afraid of water, Marquez was game. He'd take a deep breath from the regulator and dutifully pass it back to Pitt without missing a beat.

When they came to the ladder, Pitt helped push Marquez up the first few rungs until he was completely out of the cold water. "Do you think you can make it up to the next tunnel on your own?"

"I'll have to," Marquez stammered, fighting the cold that had seeped into his veins. "I'm not about to give up now."

Pitt left him and returned for Ambrose, who was beginning to look cadaverous from the effects of the icy water. Hypothermia from the cold water had lowered his body temperature to ninety-two degrees.