Chapter Fifty-Seven
Nate tumbled through darkness. Ana was ripped from his grasp as he bounced downward, riding a wave of sand and rock.
He reached out to try and stop himself, his fingernails digging into the earth, but was helpless to slow his descent.
He couldn’t tell how long he slid, but just as it seemed that the slope might be evening out, he felt the ground drop away, and he fell straight down through endless nothingness.
It was a terrifying sensation, but not one that was wholly unfamiliar.
Nate had conducted hundreds of free-fall parachute jumps in the Special Forces, and the weightless sensation of falling unimpeded through the air was something he had eventually become accustomed to.
However, back then he’d had a parachute.
On night jumps, when he was as blind as he was now, he had an altimeter to tell him when to pull his chute and then night vision to help guide him onto the objective.
Even while speeding through the sky at terminal velocity, he was in control. This time, however, he was helpless.
It registered to him that he was falling for an abnormally long time.
It must have been over a hundred feet that he had dropped as he was in the air for several seconds.
Then suddenly the feeling came to an abrupt halt with the introduction of a second sensation that was all too familiar from his days as a combat diver, and he was fortunate that he hit the water feet first before plunging deep into its icy depths.
The cold shocked his system, and Nate had to fight to keep the air from rushing out of his lungs.
He kicked his legs violently and eventually he stopped sinking and slowly ascended to the surface.
When his head popped above the frigid liquid, he began treading water and he took in several quick breaths as he scanned his surroundings.
It was dark, but there was a hole of light above his head that was growing bigger by the second.
At first all he was able to see was darkness in front of him, but slowly he started to make out a shape in the water a few arm lengths away.
He swam over to it and found Ana, unconscious and floating face down in the water.
He quickly grabbed her arm and wrapped it around his shoulder and treaded extra hard to keep her afloat.
Nate couldn’t tell if she was breathing, and he looked around frantically for some type of solid surface.
“Hello?” he yelled, his voice echoing back to him. He must have been in an extremely large cavern.
“Over here,” he heard a second voice respond, and recognized it as belonging to Tim.
Nate swam toward the sound and his friend became visible in the distance. He appeared to be standing on some sort of outcropping, a small island in the water. He dragged Ana over and handed her up to Tim, who hoisted her out of the water and onto the rock while Nate climbed up himself.
“Nice time for a swim,” Tim commented.
“Yeah, right.” Nate held Ana in his arms and checked for signs of life. She was breathing, and he let out a long sigh of relief. The shock of the fall must have knocked her unconscious. He patted her cheeks and shook her gently until she stirred.
“Ana, wake up,” he said. “Ana?”
Ana opened her eyes and took a second to grasp her bearings. When she finally focused on Nate’s face, she smiled. “Hey, stranger,” she said, and sat up.
“Easy,” Nate cautioned, but she ignored him.
Her eyes transitioned from Nate to their surroundings beyond him, and her expression morphed into one of disbelief.
Nate followed her gaze and had the same startled reaction, his eyes widening in bewilderment.
The hole in the ceiling was growing ever bigger, gobbling up the land above as sand streamed down into the cavern.
The distance to the opening must have been at least five hundred feet.
They were fortunate to have ridden down along a sloped angle, as a straight fall likely would have killed them.
He looked off into the distance, and even in the growing light he couldn’t see an end to the cave, merely more water.
The cavern must have been more than a mile wide, and he couldn’t even speculate at the length.
“This is amazing,” Ana said, her big brown eyes even larger as they drank in the subterranean structure.
“It sure is something,” Nate agreed, scanning the area.
“The largest-known cave in the world is Son Doong in Vietnam. It’s two hundred meters high, one hundred fifty meters wide, and nine kilometers long.
But this… it easily beats Son Doong in width and height.
I can only imagine the length.” Ana continued to stare in wonderment, climbing unsteadily to her feet.
Nate put out a hand to help her balance.
“It’s not only an underground river system. There’s a whole underground lake down here,” he said.
Ana leaned down, scooped up some of the water, and took a small sip. “It’s fresh! The underground river serves as an aquifer, cleansing the water before it’s deposited here. Then the coral limestone must create a natural cistern.”
“Could this have supplied a city of tens of thousands of people?” Nate asked.
“Depends on the depth, but it’s likely,” Ana said. “Today, this could provide a significant water source for the Saudis. The amount of fresh water down here could be used to transform the entire region from a wasteland into an agricultural hub.”
“Amazing,” Nate marveled, his breath coming out as a cloud of vapor and hanging in the cool subterranean air.
“I don’t suppose you guys saw anybody else on the way over?” Tim asked, snapping Nate back to the present.
“No,” Nate answered. “But if we all landed here, they can’t be far.” They were all combat divers and were all skilled in the water, so he had no doubt they would have survived, so long as they weren’t knocked unconscious like Ana.
The hole continued to grow, lighting up more of the cavern as it did so. Off in the distance another cropping of land slowly materialized out of the darkness that appeared significantly larger than the one they were standing on.
“Over there,” Nate pointed. It was about five hundred meters away. Tim nodded.
“Let’s go check it out.”
Nate turned to Ana. “Are you up for a little swim?” She shivered briefly but nodded.
Doing a quick pat down, Nate was amazed to find that both his knife and the pistol remained on his person, but his rifle was long gone. A quick glance at his friend told him that Tim was completely unarmed.
“Let’s be cautious,” he said. “I’ve got John’s Glock, but we don’t know how many of those soldiers fell down here with us.”
The three of them waded into the cold water until the bottom fell away beneath them, then began swimming toward the shoreline.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to reach their destination and they approached cautiously, lying in the surf and listening for any sounds of danger.
Nate shivered in the frigid water, and he was certain that Ana must be freezing, though she said nothing.
Satisfied that there was no overt threat, the three of them came ashore.
“Wally! Shane!” Tim hissed in a voice barely above a whisper. At first there was nothing, and he repeated the call several times.
Eventually a whisper returned from close by. “Here!”
They followed the sound to a small ditch several meters away. Wally and Shane were lying in it, and they trained rifles on them as they approached, Shane holding a Mosin-Nagant and Wally an AK-47, which he propped up on his medical bag.
“We thought you guys were dead,” Nate said as they lowered their weapons.
“Ditto,” Shane replied. “Where the hell are we?”
“According to Ana, the largest cave in the world,” Tim replied.
“Cool,” Shane said. “So how do we get out?”
Nate pondered the question. The landmass they were on appeared to continue running what he assumed was north, and he wondered if it might not lead them to a solution.
The ground here was different than where they had just come from, not slippery rock like it was part of the cave.
Rather, it seemed like solid ground, dirt covering a hard surface beneath.
Nate looked up at the hole hundreds of feet above them.
Sand was still pouring through, not whole pieces of earth. How had this gotten here?
He reached down with his hand and gently brushed some of the dirt and sand away. Very quickly, his fingers found an edge, followed by another. He squatted down and began furiously moving dirt around with both hands, exposing the edges. The rest of them stared at him as if he were losing his mind.
“Something you want to share with the group?” Tim asked.
“It’s stone,” Nate said excitedly. “Paving stones. This is a walkway, a street. It’s engineered. Constructed.”
“Meaning?” Tim asked. Nate stared up at the group, a look of awe on his face.
“Meaning,” Nate said, “there might be a city down here.”
Novikov slowly got to his feet and dusted himself off, glad that he had sent men forward and held back with the rest. He had not expected an explosion, let alone one of such magnitude.
He’d lost several men, but that was the least of his concerns at this point.
A sinkhole had opened and begun swallowing the land at an alarming rate.
He led his group of men back to the vehicles and they pulled off a safe distance until the ground stopped falling away.
The sandstorm still raged outside, making the task more difficult, but they were able to monitor the situation until he deemed it safe to return to the area.
When they did, what they found was truly amazing.
Novikov stared down into a gaping hole that must have been the size of several soccer fields.
Several hundred feet below he could make out the sparkle of water.
This was exactly what he had been sent here to stop, he thought to himself.
His employers did not want the existence of this water getting out.
They had discovered it months ago while drilling for oil.
It was an illegal survey operation, and the company hadn’t informed the Saudi government that they were conducting probing research before purchasing oil rights.
When they found water, they immediately recognized the significance of it and sought to prevent that information from being released to the world.
The Saudi government would never entertain selling the land for oil rights if they knew a massive underground river existed.
But what they had found during the probe was smaller, not a whole sea, which is what it appeared like to him now as he stared at an unending surface of water. It was an amazing sight, and a stark contrast to the desolate desert landscape that he now stood upon.
But he wasn’t here to gaze at contrasting marvels of nature.
Nor was he meant to question the actions or motives of his employer.
He had a job to do, which was to ensure that Wilde and his entire expedition were dead.
It was possible that the sinkhole created by the blast had taken care of them as well, although he couldn’t guarantee it.
His men had swept the surrounding area and found no traces, so it was likely they fell into the hole as the terrain collapsed in on itself.
But if there was even a chance that they survived, he had to check.
He couldn’t go back to the ones who wrote his checks with that type of uncertainty, and so he ordered his men to bring the trucks up to the edge and use the winches to lower lines down.
They would rappel in and check out the scene below.
The men did as instructed, carefully walking in front of the vehicles to ensure the ground would support the weight.
They attached climbing ropes to the winches and sent lines down into the abyss.
Swiss seats were made to support their weight as they used the lines to test the depths of the cave, and chem lights and powerful flashlights were used to illuminate the way down.
Novikov geared up alongside them. He would set the example and show the men they had nothing to fear. And if Wilde was still alive somewhere down there, he would find him and gut him like a fish.