Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  John climbed down as did Mouse and they worked in opposite trenches digging at the pile of fallen earth.

  “I see a hand,” John called, and went to his knees to pull at the earth with his fingers. Mouse rigged a line from the top of the surface, and after a few moments it was attached to the trapped man’s waist.

  Amid falling earth and clay, the man finally pulled free from the fallen material and began to rise to the top. Guthrie called out, “Like Jesus said, ‘Rise up, rise up.’” As John and Mouse climbed out of the hole, they watched as most of the men and women fell to their knees giving thanks. Guthrie led the prayers. “Rise up, rise up,” they chanted.

  The paramedics arrived. The recovered man was quickly put into a waiting ambulance and the vehicle drove away siren wailing. The siren competed for a few minutes with the guttural prayers of the crowd and then was overtaken as the chanting increased. Amidst the praying, John and his friends slipped away, almost unnoticed, as they struggled through the mob.

  Guthrie saw them however and asked the crowd to stand back and let them leave. At the edge of the field, Father Phillip was waiting and blessed them. “May God go with you,” he said.

  John said, “Maybe you could have the crowd stop marching around our gate.”

  Father Phillip nodded. “You are not our enemy. I must make that clear to them.”

  The wind was growing in force. The storm clouds were no less ominous. Jesse was waiting impatiently at the wellhead. He had the collapsed boat in harness to be lowered with John and Andy. The hoist engine was idling.

  John looked at Andy and said, “Are you sure you want to do this? I mean with the storm and all.”

  She nodded and said, “We have to go.” In a few minutes they were standing in muck water up to their chest and half way up the entrance to the new tunnel.

  “The tide is filling the hole too fast for the pump,” said John.

  “We go now or we may never be able to go. This is it,” she said and started crawling into the hole in the wall.

  “All right,” John said, “No standing on ceremony. I’ll boost you up.” He got her into the tunnel and then handed her the lanyard of the boat kit package which was floating beside him. He followed her and together they pulled the raft kit up behind them. It was large enough to almost block the tunnel and scraped at the mummy skeletons and the clay walls as it bumped along after them.

  They ascended the slope. John shone his light behind them and noticed that the water was climbing up the slope after them. It was only a few feet below them.

  “Water is coming in faster, John.” Now he could hear the beginning of fear in her voice. He was scared too.

  “I guess I was too hasty in getting you and me into this. Maybe we should not be here,” she said, trying to smile. He reached out and lightly stroked her cheek.

  “You were right the first time. We have to go on,” he said. “I can’t see how we can do any more.”

  She said, “If the water gets too high in the well, we might be here for a while.”

  “Then we wait. Besides,” said John, trying to make a joke, “Who wants to be up there with all that rain?”

  She smiled and said, “You’re right. What’s a little darkness for the two of us? Come on, let’s get this boat to the lake.”

  Ten minutes later they had reached the bottom of the steps and were at the edge of the cavern water. They held the lights in front and could still see nothing except still water.

  Inflating the raft was a simple matter. John started the compressor and the rubber tubes filled quickly. Andy assembled the paddles and with John’s help, launched the boat.

  “Want to christen her?” she said.

  “How about Santa Maria?” said John. “That’s a nice religious exploration ship name and this is a holy place, at least we think it might be.”

  She nodded. “Off we go.” she said

  They paddled out into the pond. John said, his voice echoing in the confined cavern, “You know, we’re the first people here in a long time.”

  She nodded, paddling. “Since the people who made those steps,” she said.

  “Likely.”

  A huge crash occurred behind them. They quickly flashed the lights back at the ledge above. There, in the dim light they could see the water coming over the top, pouring down into the pond like a waterfall. It was increasing in power as they watched. At the bottom of the falls were a new pile of rocks that had tumbled down from above.

  “Something broke down out in the well,” John said.

  Andy said, her voice almost a whisper, “It must have fallen in. The cribbing collapsed. The power of the incoming water took out some of the restraining ledge.” She stared at him in the dim light. “John, we may not be able to go back.”

  John whispered, “It’s the high tides with the storm. The plugs on the inlets. Something must have let go.”

  She gripped his hand and said, “With the tunnel open down here the water has a new home, a place to go through the hole into this lake.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We’ll have all the pressure of the river filling this cavern up to the top or at least to the level of the river which is pretty much all the way to the top. Only thing that will save us is the air that is trapped inside and I don’t know how long that will keep the water level down.”

  “Mouse will work fast,” he said, trying to cheer her up.

  “Yeah,” Andy said, giving his hand a tug as she regained her sense of humor, “Or we’ll join the illustrious company of two mummies and two pirates.”

  Chapter 20

  Friday July 19, 11 AM

  The current caused by the incoming flood had worked up the surface of the lake and constantly swung the unwieldy rubber craft in circles. John and Andy worked hard to maintain headway in the dimness of the cavern. After five minutes, he signaled a stop so they could get their breath. They rested their paddles. John flashed the light behind them as the raft slowly spun. The small section of the wall where the steps ended was awash with white froth from the splash of the incoming water.

  Andy let go a soft moan. “We’re in big trouble,” she shouted above the water noise.

  Slabs of the clay cavern walls were splitting off from the force of the water. As they fell into the lake, spurts of frothy salt-water rose up into the air sending spray over John and Andy. She splashed water out of the raft bilge in an attempt to bail as John intensified his paddling to escape the spray.

  Before they had left the steps John had rigged their largest flashlight to the front of the raft. The beam illuminated the waves that rolled beside them like two-foot breakers at an ocean beach. The rubber boat rose and fell as the waves went by, descending with a shock that buckled the tube sides each time.

  John called to Andy, “Keep up your hope. I believe that Mouse will get us out somehow,” he said, wondering if he was lying, wondering if he had lost faith in the big man’s ability.

  “I wish I could hear that pump truck engine again,” Andy said.

  He thought, “Suppose it wasn’t the storm that had caused the water to come in. It could have been someone who got to those inlets, maybe the farmer and his group or some of those homeless. Maybe someone wanted to slow them down like with the cutting of the cable, or maybe someone, the killer perhaps, wanted them dead. The homeless leader, though, did not appear to be the kind of person who would try to kill someone. Burn down a cathedral, yes, but not hurt anyone.” Then he remembered Ricker and his group. Perhaps the man Bent was as evil as the Captain had said.

  “The Captain told us it was going to be a bad storm,” Andy said. Her face showed her worry.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” John answered. “If it calms down outside then the pressure of the water should ease. Mouse will have a chance to get the pump ahead of the water again.”

  The hard paddling had paid off. The spray was at least a hundred yards behind them. However, as John searched forward of the raft, the flashlight showed not
hing but more dark water.

  She stopped bailing and aimed her own light at the ceiling thirty to forth feet above them. The cavern sides came up and met an area of flat or almost flat roof.

  “It’s just like I thought it would be,” she said, moving the light along the clay and sections of hanging roots.

  “How?”

  “The slant goes upward, see. On the sides you can see the marks of the rock moving upward from the thrust of the bolite pressure. There’s rock mixed with that clay.”

  She looked down into the water.

  “Still think it goes down a hundred miles?” asked John also looking over the side of the small raft.

  She nodded. “Probably more than that.”

  “Don’t fall in,” he laughed.

  She grinned for the first time since they had entered the lake. “No, I won’t. I’d keep going, sliding down off the slanted walls like I was going down a slippery pipe.”

  The drawings of the mastodons had stopped now as they proceeded out from the steps. It almost seemed that the early artists even in their exuberance had not dared to go far beyond the edge of the lake, and John reasoned that they must have feared some new taboo further across the water.

  The water was cold to the touch and the air was a mix of salty brine and sulfur which itself added a smell like rotten eggs. Outside the range of the light was absolute darkness with no glimmers of any kind on all sides. John still heard the sounds of falling water sounds behind them and the superimposed noise of their own paddles entering the water. The puddle ripples headed outward, mixing with the remnants of breakers from the distant overflowing steps. Along the edges of the cavern, the flashlights continued to uncover crusts of salt on the rock and clay surfaces. From time to time he and Andy put down their paddles and moved lights up and down trying to get an idea of the size and shape of the cavern. Going upward the light still showed a slightly curved ceiling. It had become rock, as if it were melted into the shape above them.

  “My God. Look at that,” shouted Andy as she halted the movement of her light.

  He looked where her light was pointing with a large circle on the high smooth rock. He saw the outlines of drawings.

  “That is what must have scared the cave people,” said John.

  “Yes, someone put them there to keep people out.”

  They were referring to a huge flat space extending as a square about a hundred yards across. Several figures were carved across it, rectangular shapes with round heads and large staring eyes. At the bottom of the rectangles or body sections small feet protruded similar to paws or webs but more human than animal. At the sides were small curved lines representing some type of fanciful arms.

  “They look like owls,” said John.

  “Or children,” she observed. “Maybe this is where the legend of the children comes from.”

  “They seem to be floating.”

  “Yes, like they are fish.”

  She pointed with her light to a scheme of round balls arranged around a larger ball. “That looks like our Solar System,” she said with her trained astronomer’s eyes.

  “Wait,” said John, “I count fifteen. We only have nine planets.”

  “Some day we may find other planets in our Solar System,” she said. “Or, that could be some other solar system around another star.”

  “Cygnus?” asked John.

  “If we ever get powerful enough telescopes, we can find out,” she said.

  Next to it was another design consisting of a group of dots.

  “That’s got to be a star system,” she said.

  “Which one?” John asked, his hand shaking as he held his flashlight. He looked at Andy and her face was bright with excitement.

  “Now this is Cygnus,” she said, in an excited voice. She leaned forward in the raft. “I know it is Cygnus. See, John, it’s Cygnus as seen from Earth,” she said. She looked at the sight for a few more moments, whistling her amazement. The raft drifted forward, towards other drawings.

  “Like Daddy suspected. The aliens came from Cygnus.” Then she said, “They left this diagram for us to know where they came from, the people who first visited this cave.”

  “The first visitors?” John asked. “Maybe it wasn’t a bolite. Maybe it was a space ship of some kind.”

  Andy looked at him, her eyes large, then said, “The children of the sun. They could have been coming back to their origin, their home. After all, this place has been here for thirty five million years. The drawings were left by someone who could reach that high ceiling and make those lines.” She studied the drawings with her light. “Look closely, John. The lines are cut into the clay and rock. Burned in like with a laser. See how the earth is melted or fused together into what looks like rock around the lines? Those designs. I’ve seen them before.”

  “Where?”

  “The Nazca people of southern Peru and their sky pictures.”

  He remembered the homeless building their ditches and how they had inadvertently formed a sun diagram for the helicopter newsmen to photograph for evening reports.

  She said, “Remember the science programs on television, the ones that featured the great drawings on the desert in Peru that can only be seen from airplanes? These are identical.”

  “Look at these animals,” she said as she ran her light over new smaller figures. Then she said, “These are old. They are mastodons. See the tusks. These move upwards. These animals lived in this region millions of years ago. They predated the mammoths in the other drawings by the stairway.”

  She stared back at him in the dim light of the flash. “They were laser drawn like the others. No cave man could have done these and they had to be done long before the cave people even existed.”

  John said, “I don’t know about you, Andy, but this whole thing is scaring the hell out of me.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Remember, Incas didn’t have lasers and I don’t think Nazcas ever traveled from Peru.”

  Johns light picked up a reflection from the lake water in front of them.

  “Look at that,” he said, moving his light back and forth as the glint reappeared, each time stronger as the raft drifted closer. “Something’s out there.”

  She looked where his light was pointing. “It’s like a small piece of sunlight. See, it’s yellow.”

  They both began paddling harder, the glint ahead of them shining more and more in their flashlights. It took shape as a small beach with a yellow object several feet above the edge of the water.

  In a few more minutes they touched the rubber raft to the pebbles of the shoreline. John was beginning to think, that they were marooned like the pirates of old, on some island with no hope of rescue. They had to get closer to the yellow glitter to see what it was. They climbed out of the raft, stood several feet from the edge of the water and turned both lights directly ahead and upward into the dimness.

  They saw the outline of a building, its stone columns and archaic walls protecting hundreds of huge golden artifacts.

  Chapter 21

  Friday July 19, 12 noon

  Around them the cavern was in overwhelming black night. However, where the hand held flashlights were shining, the glare went forward in a tunnel of illumination. They moved the beams from one wild reflection to another as if feeding the light starved ancient artifacts after so long in darkness.

  “I think I am beginning to understand what happened,” she said.

  “Well, tell me what you think.”

  She went on, “Think about the warriors we found. They must have been Mayans and Incas, teamed up somehow in an international project, that had traveled across the wilderness to this place. I think they came here to bury these objects we see.”

  “Ok,” said John, unable to stop looking at all the gold artifacts.

  “Think about it. This army is traveling here, men and perhaps women in strange dress, from a different civilization with the mummified remains of ancestor kings held up in front of them. The Mayans were o
cean travelers. I’m thinking of the legends about visitors in canoes.”

  John added, “They’d probably be feared because they were strangers.”

  “The natives would call them gods,” she said.

  “Yes, treat them like gods,” he answered. “The history of their visit would be told and retold. The legend would be spread to visitors, maybe to the sailors who came along later from the colonial island ports. That’s probably how the pirates heard of this place.”

  They climbed up the beach and began to look through the piled treasure. The temple, if that is what it was intended to be, and Andy was pretty sure of that, had been constructed with four pilings of rock stacked in the four corners of the structure.

  “It’s a trapezoid like the doors we found,” Andy said. “The front columns are spread further apart than the back ones. Funny thing, the shape reminds me of an open stable, like the manger in the Jesus stories.” Columns rose up forty to fifty feet and were fitted into the clay and rock of the ceiling. The surfaces were covered with plates of gold metal, which was almost as bright as it had been since it was first hammered into the surfaces when ancient artisans built this temple area. On the back wall the plates of gold were larger, filling a space more than forty feet wide and as high. On the gold of the wall were etchings, which were very faint in the distance. Andy started forward to examine them then stopped.

  “Look at the boat,” she said.

  To the left of them barely visible in the darkness was the half sunken wreckage of a thirty foot long double-ended boat. John could see that it had been constructed with heavy beams most of which still held their shape. Stuck into the sides of the boat were great oars.

  Andy said, “That might prove they came by ocean. Even by land they would have needed boats to cross-rivers. It was probably used here on the lake to carry this gold to the temple. After they left, it probably broke loose from the steps where it was moored and drifted over here.”