The small viewing aperture put just enough light along the ceiling for me to finally see the crack. The front third of the upper container’s floor had dropped down to form the ramp. When my weight had come off, it had rotated on spring hinges back up into position, which meant there had to be a latch. The problem was that the ceiling was almost nine feet high. I couldn’t reach it, and thus I couldn’t use my knife to probe the crack and find that latch.
I looked around for the shepherds, and found them cautiously sniffing the snake’s almost inert body. My ribs hurt just looking at that thing, and I still hadn’t pulled back my shirtsleeve to see how big a mess I had there. I needed to get something antibiotic on it pretty soon, though, or the snake would have lost the battle and won the war.
The SIG. I could reach the ceiling with the SIG.
Now the question became: Was it a center latch or a side latch? I’d walked right down the middle of the container and hadn’t detected any sagging or lack of support under my feet. I voted for center latch.
“Cover your ears, mutts,” I said. I lay down on the floor, holding the gun up with both hands. I fired directly up into the crack on what I hoped was the centerline of the container. Once again, the noise was really startling. I missed the crack by about an inch the first time, steadied my grip, hit it with the second round, and then bracketed that with the next two rounds. The dogs were cowering in one corner, and the space was filling up with gunsmoke. There was a ragged hole of shattered plywood in the middle of the ceiling, and my face was covered with bits of wood. I rubbed the debris off my face and felt a scrape of metal on my cheek. The latch?
I rolled to my feet and got out my utility knife. My right forearm was beginning to throb now, and my ears were ringing. Fortunately I still had that tiny square of white light, or I’d never have been able to find the crack, much less the latch. I held up my right hand and, yes, there were tiny bits of metal on my hand. I examined the crack, but it hadn’t opened or changed shape. Center latch and side latches? Or maybe it just needed some weight.
I squatted up and down on my haunches a couple of times to limber up my thigh muscles. Then, pointing the knife straight up, I thrust my whole body, right arm rigidly extended, up at the ceiling as hard as I could. I jammed the serrated point of the knife into the plywood and held on as I fell back down to the floor. I felt burning lines of pain running up and down my right arm.
The plywood held and the knife came back down with me, showering me with more wood bits.
I tried again, with the same results, except this time I felt the plywood move just a little. I rested for a minute, and then took another stab at it, moving the aim point to one side of where I thought the latch should be. Definite movement, but apparently there was enough of the latch still there to hold the ramp. I got out the SIG again and used up two more rounds in the center of the hole already there. It was getting hard to breathe with all the smoke.
I rested again for a minute or so and talked to the dogs. Their sensitive ears wouldn’t work for a week after this. Neither would mine, probably. I was really thirsty and beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get out of here. I kept hoping Pardee had recovered and was probing the boxes outside looking for the source of all the gunfire. Unfortunately, I was eight feet or more below ground level. If the upper box doors were closed, he could be right outside and unable to hear anything.
I stared up at the mess on the ceiling. If I’d learned anything in my life, it was that persistence was everything if you were in a jam. Maybe if I could use the knife to pry the seam down and get a hand in there, I might be able to hang, dead weight this time, and pull the whole thing down with just my body weight. The thought of jamming my unprotected fingers into the splintered hole up there made me wince, but I had to try something. The air was filling with CO 2 and there was no air supply that I could see except for the snake hole. The shepherds were lying down and panting heavily.
I put away the SIG, stretched my thigh muscles again, and tried my previous trick of jamming the knife. This time the center of the plywood panel bellied out a little, but it didn’t come down before the knife pulled out again. So I took a deep breath, moved forward a few inches, and jumped again, jabbing at the crack with the knife in my right hand while grabbing for a fingerhold with my left. It would have worked except for the fact that my left arm, injured in a tussle with a mountain lion a few years back, let me down, literally. So I switched hands-the knife in my left hand and my right hand going for the gold.
It hurt. Splinters under the fingernails always do. But I managed to get four fingers jammed into that crack tight enough that I could hang there, extract the knife, and then jam it into the crack and turn it sideways.
Now I had two handholds. The one on the left hurt my upper arm, but the one on the right made my fingers feel like they were on fire. I began to bounce, trying to set up a rhythmic pull on that panel, and finally, with a loud tearing noise, down it came. It happened so unexpectedly that I forgot to hold on, and back it went, slapping into the ceiling with a mocking crack as I tumbled down onto the floor. My snakebite reminded me that it was still there.
I yelled in frustration, but then noticed that the whole panel was drooping an inch or so below the ceiling above. No more latch, so its own weight was working for me this time. One more straight-arm knife jump and I was able to pull it down to face level and, this time, hold on to the damned thing. The air became instantly fresher. I stared up into perfect darkness, though. No lighted aperture in the upper container. Who cared.
Using the knife in a series of sticks, I pulled myself up the ramp and to the base of the exterior doors. The dogs tried to follow but couldn’t gain any traction. I told them to hang on and went looking for those latch plates Houston of the ICE had told me about. I had to do it all by feel, and then remembered the penlight. It still had a tiny spark of power left, and this allowed me to find the safety release lever. I pulled that, and the sockets for the locking lugs came off.
I pushed on the door in front of me. The bottom moved; the top did not. Persistence, I reminded myself. Almost there. A few more minutes of humping and thumping and I found and released the top latches. Now: Were they locked from the outside or just shut? Time to find out.
This time when I pushed, and to my vast relief, the door opened, and I rolled out onto the dirt of the junkyard path. I looked around for bad guys, but it was just me in the semidarkness. The fresh air felt wonderful, but the shepherds became frantic when I rolled out of sight, so I went back to the container doorway to reassure them-and found that the ramp, with my weight gone, had come back up, leaving them in their subterranean prison. They were audibly not pleased with that result.
It took another fifteen minutes of wedging and hauling to get them out of there, and their frantic efforts to “help” had just the opposite effect. I swore at them, and they undoubtedly returned the favor, but finally all three of us were outside the dreaded snake pit and gratefully breathing in the smells of rotting junkyard debris, diesel oil, rust, and ancient grease. It smelled wonderful.
Now to find Pardee. And that bastard Trask.
Ari Quartermain joined me in the ER at a little past one in the morning. He looked like he hadn’t been to bed in a couple of days, and that gray tinge I usually associated with cardiology patients was back in his face. I was sporting a bandage the full length of my right forearm and several new injection puncture wounds from an enthusiastic if not very competent male nurse.
The ER docs had been visibly disturbed when they saw the scale of the teeth marks on my forearm. It was obvious to anyone who looked at them that I’d been bitten by at least an alligator, except for the fact that the individual tooth marks were much too small, and far too numerous. The. 45 had laid down a quarter-inch-deep gouge right through the middle of the bite area, but none of the docs had picked up on the fact that it was a bullet wound. That, in turn, meant no police report was necessary. For the moment, anyway; one of the docs had mentioned he was studying to be a tropical medicine specialist and wanted to talk to me later. I mumbled some promises I didn’t intend to keep and then closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as he tended to the wound with some kind of liquid fire.