“Right.”
Remi’s triweekly ninety-minute power yoga and Pilates sessions showed their value in spades as she shimmied up the rope like a monkey, then rolled onto the catwalk. The planks gave a sharp pop, followed by a slow splintering sound. Remi froze.
“Spread yourself flat,” Sam said. “Distribute your weight—slowly.”
She did so and then, using her knees and elbows, put some test pressure on the boards until satisfied none were going to give way. “I think we’re okay.” She shed her fins, secured them to her belt, then tied off the rope.
“I’ve got the dinghy and all our gear hanging from my belt,” Sam said. “I’m going to try to save it.”
“Okay.”
Between Remi’s knot and him there was only twenty feet of exposed rope; the rest was trailing in the current. Sam reeled in t
en feet of rope, fashioned a temporary waist harness, and then, working by feel alone, secured a closed clove hitch around his belt and the knotted end of the painter line. Right hand clenched around the line above his head, he pulled the release loop on the harness. With a wet zipping sound, the rope went taut. It lifted from the surface, trembled for a few seconds, then steadied.
“I think it’ll hold,” Sam called, then climbed the rope and rolled onto the platform beside Remi. She hugged him tightly, damp hair splayed over his face.
“I guess that gunfire answered our question,” she whispered.
“I’d say so.”
“You sure you’re not hit?” Remi asked, eyes and hands probing his chest, arms, and stomach.
“I’m sure.”
“We’d better get a move on. Something tells me they’re not done yet.”
While Sam knew Remi was almost certainly right, he also knew they had few options: go out the way they’d come in, find another way out, fight, or hide. The first option was a nonstarter—it would play right into their pursuers’ hands; the second option, a huge question mark—this cave system could be a dead end for them, both figuratively and literally; the third, also a nonstarter. While they were armed with Guido the Shoemaker’s snub-nosed .38 revolver, Kholkov and his men were armed with assault rifles. The fourth option, to hide, was their only viable chance to get out of this.
The question was, how long would their pursuers wait before following them here? They had one thing on their side, Sam realized, checking his watch. The inflow period was ending; in a few minutes the current would start flowing out again, making entry difficult.
“So this is what passes for a makeshift secret Nazi submarine pen,” Remi said, shucking off the remainder of her gear.
“Probably so, but there’s no way of telling until we find—”
“No, Sam, that wasn’t a question. Look.”
Sam turned. Remi was shining the flashlight on the rock wall above the pier. Clearly homemade out of pounded tin and paint that had long ago lost most of its color, the four-by-three-foot rectangle was nonetheless recognizable.
“Kriegsmarine Nazi flag,” Sam whispered. In his hurried survey of the cavern, he’d missed it. “The pride of home ownership, I suppose.”
Remi laughed.
Taking it one careful step at a time, probing for weak spots as they went, they made their way across the catwalk to the pier; aside from a few nerve-wracking creaks and pops, the planking held firm. The cables, though coated in a thick layer of slimy rust, were similarly solid, bolted into the ceiling and rock walls by thumb-sized steel eyelets. Under the helpful beam of Remi’s flashlight, Sam recrossed the catwalk, grabbed the rope, and returned to the pier, dragging the submerged dinghy along. Together they hauled it up onto the pier. While the dinghy itself was shredded, the motor and attached gas can had miraculously survived with only a few bullet scrapes. Similarly, of their two dry bags, one was riddled with a dozen or more holes, the other unscathed.
“We’ll sort through this, see what we can salvage,” Sam said.
They walked to the end to have a look at the rear wall. The second chamber was, as Sam had suspected, a fracture-guided system. While thousands of years of water erosion had smoothed the walls of the main cavern, the secondary chamber had jagged and wildly angled walls. At the juncture were two tunnels in the shape of a wide V, one tunnel slanting upward to the left, the other slanting downward to the right. Water sluiced from the left-hand tunnel, half its volume coursing into the main cavern, the other half disappearing down the right-hand tunnel.
“There’s your river,” Remi said.
“It can’t have been here long,” Sam replied. “Walls are too rough.”
“How long, do you think?”
“No more than a hundred years, I’d say. Here, let me see the light. Grab my belt loop, will you?” Remi did as he asked, leaning backward as Sam leaned forward. He shined the light down the right-hand tunnel, then said, “Huh. Okay, reel me in.”
“What?” Remi asked.