Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗
There was an elastic spring in his stride, his head turned restlessly from side to side as he moved down the footpath, and the whites of his eyes under the brim of his jungle hat showed clear and sharp.
Suddenly he gave the urgent hand signal for deployment, and as he changed the AK 47 from one hip to the other to cover his left flank and dropped into cover, he heard his men spread and go down behind, covering him and backing him. They lay in the elephant grass beside the track, searching and waiting while the sergeant examined the small sign that had alerted him. It was a bunch of long grass on the opposite side of the path: the stems had been broken and then lifted carefully to try to disguise the break, but they had sagged slightly again. It was the type of sign a man might make when leaving the path to set up an ambush beside it.
The sergeant lay for two minutes, and when there was no hostile fire, he doubled forward ten paces and then went flat again, rolling twice to throw off an enemy's aim, and he waited two minutes longer.
Still no fire and he came up cautiously, and went forward to the damaged clump of grass. It was man sign: a small band of men had left the path here or joined it, and they had swept their spoor. A man only took this much trouble if he was anticipating pursuit. The sergeant whistled up his tracker and put him to the spoor.
The tracker worked out from the path, casting ahead, and within minutes he reported, "Two men, wearing boots.
One of them walks with a slight favour to his left leg. They were headed down the valley." He touched one of the footprints in a sandy patch. An antlion had built its tiny cone-shaped trap in the toe of the spoor, giving the tracker an accurate timing.
"Six to eight hours," said the tracker, "during the night.
They went on the path, but we cannot follow them, their spoor has been covered by others."
"If we cannot find where they are going, then we will see where they came from," said the sergeant. "Backtrack them! Three hours later, th8 4sergeant walked up to the wreck of the Cessna.
raig slept for a few hours and then by the light of the paraffin lantern began modifying the oxygen equipment for use underwater. The central part of his primitive oxygen rebreathing set was the bag. For this he used one of the inflatable life-jackets. Oxygen from the steel bottle was introduced into the bag through the oneway valve of the mouthpiece, the connection made with a length of flexible tubing.
As he worked, Craig explained, "At a depth of forty feet underwater, the pressure will be greater than two atmospheres you remember your high school physics: thirty-three feet of water equals one atmosphere, plus the pressure of the air above it two atmospheres, right?" His interested audience of three made affirmative sounds.
"Right! So for me to be able to breathe freely, the oxygen has to be fed into my lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water the oxygen in the bag is under the same ambient pressure as I am, et voild!"
"My old daddy always used to say, it's brains what counts!" Sally-Anne applauded him.
"The chemicals in these two canisters remove the water vapour and carbon dioxide from the air that I exhale, and the purified oxygen goes back into the bag via this tube, and I breathe it again." He was sealing the new connections to the bag with epoxy cement from the repair kit.
"As I use up the oxygen in the bag, I keep topping it up with fresh oxygen from the steel bottle strapped on my back. Like this-" he cracked the tap of the black-and white-coded bottle and there was an adder hiss of escaping gas.
"There are a few problems, of course-" Craig began work on altering the shape of the face-mask to give him a watertight fit.
"Such as? "Sally-Anne asked.
"Buoyancy," Craig answered. "As I use up the oxygen in the bag I will become less buoyant, and the steel bottle will pull me down likea stone. When I top up the bag I'll tend to shoot up likea balloon." "How will you beat that?" J will weight myself with rocks to get down to the tomb entrance, and once I'm there, I'll rope myself down to stay there." Craig was making up a backpack on which were suspended the two canisters and the oxygen bottle. Carefully he positioned the steel bottles so that he could reach the tap over his shoulder.
"However, buoyancy isn't the big problem," he said.
"You've got more?" Sally-Anne demanded.
"As many as you ask for," Craig grinned. "But did you know that pure oxygen breathed for an extended period at more than two atmospheres absolute, that is at any depth below thirty-three feet, becomes a deadly gas, as lethal as the carbon monoxide in the exhaust fumes of an automobile?"
"What can you do about that?"
"Not much," Craig admitted. "Except limit the duration of each dive, and monitor my own reactions very carefully while I am working at the wall of the tomb."
"Can't you work out how much safe time you will have before it starts to poison-" Craig interrupted. "No, the formula would be too complicated and there are too many variables to calculate, from my body mass to the exact water depth. Then there is a cumulative effect %f the poisoning. Each successive dive will become mar risky."
"Oh my God, darling." Sally-Anne stared at him.
"We will keep the dives short, and we will work out a series of signals," Craig reassured her. "You will give me a rope signal from the surface every minute, and if I don't reply or if my reply is not immediate and decisive, you will haul me out. The poisoning is insidious but gradual, it will affect my reactions to the signal before I go out completely.
It gives us a little leeway." He set the bulky equipment carefully aside, close to the fire, so that the warmth would hasten the setting of the epoxy cement.
