“Ben, do you copy?” It was Julie’s voice.
He immediately brought the walkie-talkie back up to his mouth. “Julie — that you?”
“Yeah. Hey, I have an idea.”
“I’m all ears,” he replied. They’d quickly abandoned the radio protocol of saying ‘over’ every time, and Ben didn’t miss it.
“Listen — I need to get with Randy to figure it out. Randy, if you’re on this frequency, let me know…”
“Right here, Julie. What’s up?” Randy’s voice sounded hollow on the police radio, and Ben wasn’t sure if he was farther away from them or if the police officer was holding it up to him in the car.
“Guys, I need to get out of this hole. My battery’s going down on this radio, too.” To be sure, he checked it. There was a light next to the battery charge symbol, and it was now flashing. That can’t be good, he thought. “I’m going offline for a few, but I’ll jump back on when I’m out. Try calling me on my cell if you can’t reach me.”
“Roger that, Ben. Stand by.”
Ben spent the last few yards painstakingly scraping his head and back against the ceiling of the low roof inside the cave. He didn’t want to slow down, but the cramped space had been taking its toll on his body, and he was forced to tread carefully. A few of the same jutting rocks he’d tried to dodge on the way into the cave seemed determined to not let him escape.
A few minutes later, however, and he’d navigated around or beneath the rocks, and his head soon popped back out of the hole he’d entered long before. Too long.
He looked down at the radio, only to find the battery low indicator light still blinking at him. No telling how long he had left. He should have checked it before he left. He clicked it on, just in time to hear a broadcast from Julie.
“—Back on? Ben, can you hear me?”
“I’m here,” he said. He stood, stretching to his full height for the first time in over an hour. He could feel the deep muscle pain in his lower back already beginning to creep over the area, and he made a mental note to himself to work out more often.
“Okay, great. I’ve got something for you. Check out the cave on the northeastern side of the lake. There are a few, but the one farthest north should be right.”
Ben had reached the truck and was simultaneously fumbling with the ignition as he grabbed the maps spread on the passenger seat. He took the first one, which was a close up of the western side of the lake, with a few caves — including the one he’d just emerged from — labeled and highlighted. He threw it back and grabbed the second map.
This was the correct one, showing a detailed blown-up view of the northern and northeastern sides of the lake, a dozen or so winding caves traced over. One of the larger lines was drawn on top of the body of water itself, signifying that at least a portion of the cave traveled below the lake.
“Got it,” he said as he put the truck into gear and sped up onto the road. He could already see the lake glistening back at him, catching light and bouncing it back into his eyes. He took a quick look back down at the map to confirm. “I’m looking at it. Seems to be one of the only ones that goes under the actual lake, and not just stop before it gets there.” He waited for a response, but none came. “How’d you find this one?” he asked.
Still nothing.
He held up the radio to examine it and found that it was completely dead. No lights blinked.
Crap.
He hoped Julie was right.
Chapter Fifty-Four
This cave was significantly larger than the first, a fact he was more than a little excited about. Hopefully he wouldn’t need to crawl or slide down the cave shaft like before, and he could no doubt move much more quickly through it.
He parked the truck again, left the keys on the seat, and jumped down. He’d unclipped the radio as well and left it on the stack of maps on the passenger seat — no use letting it weigh him down.
The ceiling of the cave was high enough that he had multiple inches above his head as he followed its twisting curves. It descended much slower than the first, but he was able to almost jog through it, making up for lost time.
He kept the beam of the flashlight in front of him, finding few obstacles such as rocks or sticks to watch out for.
This could almost not be easier.
As soon as the thought ran through his mind, he almost tripped over a deep step-like formation. He caught himself on the wall and immediately slowed to a walk. He saw that this step was only the beginning — while the cave’s main artery remained large enough to run through side-by-side with another person and tall enough to stand inside, it now took a steep drop and began the real descent.
He calculated that this shelf must be the point where the cave twisted beneath the lake’s bottom, a cavity carved from millions of years of water dripping through cracks and fissures in the ground.
The precarious drop shallowed a bit as he descended, and he was able to pick up the pace once again. After a minute he came to a fork, but barely slowed as he chose the left passage.
The right side was larger and seemed to continue beneath the surface of the lake, while the left was a bit smaller and had a shallower decline. But it was the way the tunnel had been cut that made it the obvious choice.
Instead of being smooth from years of water and weather, the left tunnel had an unnatural sheen to it, along with a rugged, scratchy look.
As if it had been created by a series of explosions.
Ben slowed to a walk as he examined the walls more closely. He could now see the slightest hint of depressions in the rock, small half-cylinder horizontal pathways, dead-straight and spaced out about two feet from each other up the wall and over his head.
Dynamite.
It would have been a low-grade explosive, with enough in each channel to blow the rock to bits and allow it to be cleared, but weak enough that it wouldn’t cave in on itself.
Still, it was a massive amount of work, and Ben grew livid as he walked. They did this right under our noses.
Whoever “they” were, they had done a fantastic job, too. The lines were straight, and the tunnel was well-defined and seemed extremely stable. No support beams framed the arced cave, either.
They brought in their tools, dug this place out, cleared the mess, and no one knew about it.
He couldn’t remember the specifics of the numerous park restoration and construction contracts he’d heard about over the years, but this one had to have been one of them. Most likely this one had been part of a larger one, masked as a standard safety excavation and then piled with paperwork to become lost in a bureaucratic mess.
Still, it had been done, and it had taken a long time — perhaps started before Ben was even hired on.
He stifled his anger, focusing instead on reaching the end of this manmade tunnel and finding whatever it was they’d hidden down here.
The tunnel bent to the right and down, and suddenly came to a stop. There, in the dim light of the flashlight’s glow, Ben saw it.
The bomb.
It was… different than he’d expected, but then again, he had no idea what it would look like. He remembered the newscasters explaining that the first bomb had been a… hyperbaric bomb? Something like that. Is this the same kind?
The bomb looked strangely like a beer keg, the kind he’d seen at a few of the park’s staff parties at the end of their summer seasons. It was silver, and stood in the middle of the room. The sides bulged out, rounded, but the top and bottom were flat, perfect circles. It wasn’t huge, maybe rising to his waist.