Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

Peter tossed him up lightly and as he fn seized one ankle. The child shrieked with shocked oAt rage dangling upside down from Peter's fist.

"Where are the enemies of the state hidden?" The child's face was swelling and darkening with blood.

"She says she does not know." Peter Fungabera lifted the child high above the flames.

"Where are the enemies of the state?" Each time he repeated the question he lowered the infant a few inches.

"She says she does not know." Suddenly Peter lowered the little wriggling body into the very heart of the flames, and the child squealed with a totally new sound. Peter lifted it clear of the flames after a second and dangled it in front of its mother's face. The flames had frizzled away the child's eyelashes and the tight little criss,curls from its scalp.

"Tell her that I will roast this little piglet slowly and then I will force her to eat it." The girl tried to snatch her child back, but he kept it just beyond her reach. The girl started screaming a single phrase, repeating it over and over again, and the other women sighed and covered their faces.

"She says she will lead you to them." Peter Fungabera. dropped the infant into her arms and strolled back to the Russian. Colonel Bukharin inclined his head slightly in grudging admiration.

arty feet down Craig hung suspended before the wall4 of the tomb. He had anchored his waist strap to a lump of limestone, and by the feeble yellow light of the lamp from one of the life-jackets was carefully exam OF

ming the masonry for a weak point of entry. Using his hands to supplement his water-distorted vision, he found that there was no break or aperture, but that the foot of the wall was composed of much larger lumps of limestone than the top. Probably the availability of large rocks within easy portability of the tomb had been exhausted as the work progressed and the old witch-doctor and his apprentices had fallen back on smaller material, and yet the smallest was larger than a man's head.

Craig seized one of these and struggled to dislodge it.

His hands had been softened by the water, and a tiny puff of blood clouded the water as his skin split on the sharp file edge of the stone, but there was no pain for the cold had numbed him.

Almost immediately the bloodstain in the water was obscured by a darker shadow as the dirt and debris that had lain so long undisturbed swirled into suspension at his efforts. Within seconds he was totally blinded as the water was filthied, and he switched off the lamp to conserve the battery. Small particles of dirt irritated his eyes, and he closed them tightly, working only by sense of touch.

There are degrees Of darkness, but this was total. It was a darkness that seemed to have physical weight and it crushed down upon him, emphasizing the hundreds of feet of solid rock and water above him. The oxygen he drew into his mouth had a flat chemical taste, and every few breaths a spurt of water would find its way around the ill fitting seal of his mask and he choked upon it, forcing himself not to cough, for a coughing fit might dislodge the mask entirely.

The cold was likea terminal disease, sapping and destroying him, affecting his judgement and reactions, making it more and more difficult to guard against the onset of oxygen poisoning, and each signal on the rope from the surface seemed to be an eternity after the last.

But he worked at the wall with a grim determination, beginning to hate the long, dead ancestors of Vusamanzi for their thoroughness in inlding it.

By the time his half-hour shift finally ended, he had pulled down a pile of rock from the head of the wall and had tunnelled a hole three or four feet mito the masonry just wide enough to accommodate his upper body with its bulky oxygen equipment strapped to it, but there was still no indication as to just how much thicker the wall was.

He cleared the rock he had dislodged, kicking it down the incline of the chute and letting it fall away into the depths of the grand gallery. Then, with soaring relief, he untied the anchor rope and slid down after it and began the long ascent to the surface of the pool.

Tungata helped him clamber out of the water onto the slab, for he was weak as a child and the equipment on his back weighed him down. Tungata pulled the set off over his head, while Sarah poured a mug of black tea and ladled sticky brown sugar into it.

"Sally-Anne?"he asked.

Tendula is standing guard in the upper cavern,"Tungata answered.

Craig cupped his hands around the mug, and edged closer to the smoky little fire, shaking with the cold.

"I have started a small hole in the top of the wall and gone into it about three feet, but there is no way of guessing how thick it is or how many more dives it will need to get through it." He sipped the tea.

"One thing we have overlooked: I will need something to carry the goodies, if we find them." Craig crossed his fingers and Sarah made her own sign to ward off misfortune. "The beer-pots are obviously brittle old Insutsha broke one and they will be awkward to carry. We will have to use the bags I made from the canvas seat covers. When Sarah goes up to relieve Pendula, she must send them down." As the numbness of cold was dispelled by the fire and hot tea, so the pain in his head began. Craig knew that it was the effect of breathing high-pressure oxygen, the first symptom of poisoning. It was likea high-grade migraine, crushing in on his brain so that he wanted to moan aloud.

He fumbled three painkillers from the first-aid kit and washed them down with hot tea.

Then he sat in a dejected huddle and waited for them to take effect. He was dreading his return to the wall so strongly that it sickened his stomach and corroded his will.

He found that he was looking for an excuse to postpone the next dive, anything to avoid that terrible cold and die suffocating press of dark waters upon him.

Tungata was watching him silently across the fire, and Craig slipped the frir cape off his shoulders and handed the empty mug back to Sarah. He stood up. The headache had degraded to a dull throb behind his eyes.