Disoriented, he scanned the area for signs of his attacker. A long line of white scratch marks from the pontoons ran along the blacktop, leading to where the wreckage of the de Havilland Otter rested on the edge of the road some eighty feet farther away.
From the edge of the crooked fuselage, the pilot was already scrambling out. Sam met his attacker’s eye. The man cursed and then started to run.
Ahead of him, Tom was already bringing the little helicopter around at a punishing pace, settling into a hover, ready to land.
Another two hundred feet away, he spotted his attacker entering a bar as if nothing had happened, and his seaplane wasn’t parked in the middle of a resort city street. Sam shook his head to clear it and scrambled to follow the pilot, not waiting for Tom.
Inside, the bar was rollicking. Despite the hour, party-goers were drinking and dancing as if they were celebrating the ending of the world. Sam pushed his way through the crowd, looking for his target. He was halfway through when he spotted the man opening the back door. Some woman grabbed him and pulled his head down to hers for a drunken kiss. He smiled and set her gently aside. Someone else thrust a beer in his face.
He kept going, racing to reach the door.
Sam opened it, and spotted his attacker getting into a cab, which peeled away with a screech of tires. Sam looked around wildly for another cab, but there were none to be seen. The adrenaline surge was over.
Dejected, he slid down the doorframe to land on his butt.
He felt something digging into his left hand. What could this be? He opened his hand. He glanced at the contents and smiled. He was still holding his wristwatch. Well, what do you know? It still works.
Seconds later, Tom opened the door.
“Where did he go?”
“He got away.” Sam swallowed hard. “Which means we’re back to square one.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The old man had once worked deep in the Mir open-cut diamond mine in Yakutsk. In 2004, its seemingly endless supply of gem-quality diamonds ran dry, and the production was forced to close. In 2009, the mine was reopened, but this time with deep underground shafts.
He told the very few people who asked, that a cave-in at one such mine shaft had caused his left leg to become grotesquely crushed. A local medicine man was able to set his leg so that he could one day walk on it again, but the foot was left a permanently disfigured mess of mangled bone and skin tissue. With a gregarious smile and a once handsome face, he would then hint at the more somber reflections of his past. Telling them that suffering is a good way to pay penance for the mistakes of his youth, and then he would refuse their kindness and continue on his way.
Because he alone knew the truth.
It was all lies.
His leg had indeed been crushed in a mine collapse. But it wasn’t at the underground Mir mine in Yakutsk. The accident had taken place at the end of a very different mine altogether. And there was nothing accidental about the cave-in.
It was the last week of their extensive mining project, which had taken years to complete. They were all meant to go home to see their families. But they couldn’t, could they? Not anymore. They knew too much. It would be impossible to stop them from revealing secrets the world wasn’t ready to hear.
When he heard the distinctive sound of dynamite charges being triggered and the shifting of earth beneath his feet, he didn’t try to flee like the rest of the men. Instead, he ran deeper into the tunnel. The entire shaft led nowhere, and it soon became apparent the entire place was set to collapse.
But deeper still, a ventilation shaft had been bored.
It led eighty feet to the surface. He was close. If he had left a couple seconds earlier, he would have reached it without harm. As it was, he’d left it too late. The cave-in continued, like a chain-reaction, until it was over the top of him.
A single boulder caught his leg as he was climbing into the entrance of the ventilation shaft. It took him nearly an hour to break the stone apart using a chisel and hammer normally used to set dynamite. When he was free, his foot and lower leg were badly damaged.
He looked up, where the slim light of the night’s sky shined down from the opening of the ventilation shaft. It would have been a struggle to climb had he been uninjured. In his current state, he knew it was closer to impossible.
But then he had thought about the secret, and he knew he had to escape. He had to live long enough to tell someone, so that his family could be spared. He alone survived through tenacity and sheer will. He had a purpose. He needed to tell a secret.
It took him three weeks to reach his old home, and when he got there, he discovered that everyone he’d ever loved had been taken from him.
His secret no longer seemed important to him. He wanted nothing more than to die, but even that seemed too easy a way out for him. So, he continued as he had always done, striving to survive through any means he could.
Without a family to support him, that means had recently taken him to the Gateway to the Underworld — a massive crater in the frozen heart of Siberia.
The old man took another step closer. His disfigured foot hurt like hell. It always had, but recently the combination of age and cold seemed to worsen it tremendously. He slowed his pace as he got closer to the dreaded place. He’d been three years old when the massive crater first made its appearance, and in the nearly fifty years since, he and everyone he knew had believed it was evil, the gateway to the underworld.
Each year, it had claimed more and more of the surrounding land, devouring all vegetation in its path. Those who lived in the closest village of Ese-Khayya, in East Siberia, knew it to be a living, breathing monster from hell. It was growing rapidly, and the foreign scientists who came to study it during the summer months said nothing would stop it. Its very nature meant that it would grow faster and faster each year — until the end of the world.
He forced himself to smile.
It had been decades since he’d viewed the place and much had changed in that time. He grew up in the nearby village of Ese-Khayya. Born to a poor family of the local Yakutian tribe that barely eked out a living in the frozen north, he’d dreamed of one day leaving this place.
As a teen, he’d thought it might be a dinosaur egg, or even an intact skeleton. His imagination was captured by the great lizards for several years. Now an old man of 52, he knew that the secrets of the monstrous crater were more likely to be mammals from 4000–5000 years ago. Perhaps a musk ox or mammoth. One year, the thawing permafrost had disgorged a horse from what the scientists called the Pleistocene. He’d even heard that the walls of the crater showed bands of forests like those that covered the land now, indicating it had once been warmer here.
Already it was warmer in summer than it had been during his youth. Somehow, in a way he didn’t quite understand, the melting and caving in of the crater meant that it would continue to be warmer each year. He couldn’t wait for that. His bones craved a place where he didn’t freeze for nine months of the year. It was time to put aside the superstitions that had kept him from entering the crater all these decades. This would be the summer he either found a treasure that would allow him to leave this place, or die trying.
The half of him that clung to the stories he’d been told all his life fully expected to die trying. Either the earth would open and swallow him as it had done when others went to explore the crater, or the denizens of the underworld would capture him and carry him away. But even that was better than to endure another winter here.
He plodded along beside his oxcart. The crater was only three miles from the village, but no roads went there. His route skirted hills and crossed streams from the closest road, forcing him to spend a night under a canvas in the cart. Today he would gain the edge of the crater, and God help him with whatever came next. He was getting too old to spend a freezing night with no more than canvas to shelter him.