Free Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

Even through his mask, Paine could smell the change in the ammonia, getting fouler, more penetrating.
    “This is the last cave you go into. I’m going to see to that,” Joe Paine said.
    “We’re almost there.”
    It was the end of the rope, not the diminishing air, that finally halted Paine.
    “Madre de Dios,” Ochay was sobbing.
    Paine had brought a selection of wet and dry poisons in the expedition’s trucks. For a cavern as large as this, he’d selected Cyanogas. The bottom half of each tank was compressed air, the top half a compartment of poisonous dust. He strapped the two canisters together so that they’d lie flat and lowered them by a separate rope from the last piton until their tops hung level with the ridge. After he adjusted the tank nozzles to achieve a ninety-degree range, he set the timer on each nozzle at thirty minutes. When the timers ticked down, the tanks would release a hundred-foot spray of Cyanogas which, in contact with the cavern’s moisture, would change into hydrocyanic acid lethal to every life-form it touched, including the men who brought it. The strapping and adjustments Paine made with a mechanical deliberateness.
    “Por favor . . .” Ochay pleaded.
    “We’re heading back,” Joe Paine told his son. “Maybe when you and I get to Mexico City, we’ll keep on going to the States.”
    Paine wasn’t listening. He remained alone to make certain both timers were ticking down. When he was sure, he shined his hand lantern up to where the roof seemed to be covered by jagged brown stones. Then one of the stones spread its wings and shifted to bare its teeth at the light. Paine turned the lamp away before any more vampires were disturbed.
    He released himself from the rope and knotted it to the last piton. His father and Ochay were about thirty feet away. They were making better time going than coming, already nearing the pearly stalactite they’d claimed they couldn’t clear. He checked the gauge of his air tank. Twenty minutes. Just enough time.
    From the sudden lack of tension on the strung rope, before he’d seen it happen Paine knew someone was gone. With his lantern, he picked out legs flailing in mid-air, blackness, and the solid impact of a body hitting at the end of a long drive. Then the beam found Ochay, who’d cried all during his climb and never uttered a word when he slipped. He was sinking into the ooze.
    “Spider!” Joe Paine shouted. “Spider on the rope.”
    The rope jerked again in Paine’s hands and went slack.
    “Hayden! Hurry up!”
    Joe Paine hung three feet below the ridge on a thin shelf. Paine moved arm over arm along the rope.
    “I’m slipping.”
    Paine could see his father’s fingers spread flat over the slick rime of the limestone, giving ground. A tarantula, ten inches across at the legs, darted along the ridge towards Paine. He stomped it under his boot.
    “Give me your hand.” He reached down.
    “Can’t reach.”
    Paine wrapped the piton rope twice around his left wrist and leaned as far as he could. His father heaved himself up, stretched a hand that was too short and too wet for Paine to get a grip on. The two men looked at each other for a moment and then Joe Paine started sliding. He slid down the incline of the cave, dropping ten or fifteen feet at a time and then sliding again until, very small in the beam of Paine’s lantern, he hit the bottom.
    “Hayden! Throw me something!”
    Paine wrenched the rope, almost losing his own balance as pitons sprang out of the soft limestone. He tied the slack rope around his axe and threw the axe down. It swayed at its limit of fifteen feet over his father’s head.
    “They’re all over me! Jesus, they’re eating me alive!”
    Ochay’s axe was still on the ridge. Paine slammed it deep into the limestone and hung himself by it. His own axe now dangled five feet over his father. He pulled his mask off.
    “Get to the wall! Climb!”
    “I can’t see! Hayden, they’re . . . Oh, God! . . .