Chapter 31 The Devil’s Hole
The Devil’s Hole
Roberto crouched down next to the path, without taking his eyes off the black plastic device that was strapped to the trunk of a small, twisted pine tree.
There was a motion detector at the front, and above that a black screen.
Underneath were the words “Boly Guard,” and on one side a sticker that read “Property of the Atlantic Islands National Land and Marine Park Service.”
An infrared trail camera to detect animal movements.
“I should have damn well realized,” he groaned. “We’re in a national park!”
There must be dozens of the things all over the island to monitor the local fauna. The park rangers would use them to keep track of the island’s wildlife.
The Docampos must have forced the door to the rangers’ hut and availed themselves of the system.
Every time he’d passed one of the cameras, a photo would have been taken, which would then have been transmitted almost instantaneously to the central control.
He might just as well have been letting off flares as he went around the island.
He gave the camera the finger before ripping it off and tossing it into the bushes. He was furious with himself for having been so careless. But above all, he was scared.
The Docampos knew where he was, and there was only one way out. If he retraced his steps, he was sure to run into them, and all around there was nothing but low vegetation barely as high as his knees, and lichen-covered rocks. There was nowhere to hide.
As if fate had read his mind, just then he heard the SUV’s engine and spotted the shifting beams of its headlights as the vehicle jolted down the track.
You need to gain some time. Think, Roberto, think!
His only hope was to reach the shore and pick his way carefully down the rocky cliff, trusting that they wouldn’t follow him on such a reckless route.
But if they caught him on the way down, he’d be as dead as if he’d thrown himself over the edge.
Trapped between the roaring sea and their shotguns, he’d make perfect target practice for the Docampos.
The only question was how to win himself more time. There was nothing around that he could use.
Desperate, he searched his pockets, but the only thing there was the rusty Walther P38. Just then, his fingers came into contact with the little hank of fishing line that Elvira Couto had given him as an amulet. It had been lying there ever since, with no apparent use.
The idea appeared in his mind, from nowhere.
Absurd and unlikely, but it was all he had.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
He unraveled the fishing line, praying that it wasn’t broken.
Quickly, he tied one end to a twisted root that emerged from among the rocks on one side of the path, and stretched it out across the track, some eight inches above the ground.
He wrapped it around a large rock, which he balanced on top of another stone.
Pulled tight across the path, it was invisible, but at most it would cause somebody to trip. He needed something more.
He took the pistol from his pocket and removed a cartridge from the magazine. The projectile, produced by some Nazi arms factory almost a hundred years earlier, had rust marks on one side and didn’t look to be in the best condition. He buried it tip down, so that only the flat end was uncovered.
He was sweating profusely. He looked up and saw flashlights drawing near. The path was too narrow for the SUV, but its occupants were approaching, cautiously but relentlessly.
Time was slipping away. He took the badge from his coat and, very carefully, inserted it just a few fractions of an inch into the hole for the firing pin so that it sat upright.
His hope was that, when someone came along the path and tripped on the fishing line, they would dislodge the rock, which would fall onto the badge pin, detonating the propellant.
There were a thousand things that could go wrong, obviously. He’d learned this trick from some Kurdish rebels in northern Syria years ago, but they had performed it with a Soviet anti-tank mine, not a miserable 9-mm bullet from almost a century ago.
Even so, it might give his enemies a fright and make them think twice about coming after him.
He checked the trap one last time, then set off toward the rocky cliff edge, just as he saw the flashlights shine directly on that section of the track.
It was no longer raining, but the booming sound of the sea crashing against the cliffs was deafening. This was accompanied by a searing, scraping sound, which he realized was the rocks being dragged back and forth like marbles across the foreshore.
He swallowed, awed by the force of nature. The idea of climbing down the cliffs seemed even less attractive.
But he had no choice. The flashlights had almost reached the spot where he had rigged up his trap.
Please work. Please, I beg you . . .
Nothing happened.
Either his pursuers had seen the trip wire, or the stone hadn’t fallen on the cartridge. Or perhaps the ancient bullet simply hadn’t worked. Just when he had convinced himself that his booby trap had failed, he heard a detonation, followed almost immediately by a shout of surprise.
A hail of shots was immediately unleashed. From his hiding place, Roberto could see the flash of guns as they unleashed their projectiles into the darkness.
“Hold your fire!” roared a voice in the distance. “Stop shooting! You’re wasting ammo, you fools!”
“I’ve twisted an ankle!” came the voice of a woman who sounded as if she were in pain. “He’s left trip wires across the path!”
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t know,” she groaned. “I don’t think so. I’m sorry, Luis.”
The wind, which was blowing in Roberto’s direction, carried a sigh of frustration to his ears.
“Don’t worry. Go back to the truck and wait for us there.”
“On my own?” She sounded scared.
“Of course! What are you afraid of? We’re the only ones here!” Luis Docampo sounded furious. “Go on, get moving!”
A long, heated discussion ensued, the details of which Roberto couldn’t make out. But he’d given them something to think about, and he also had one pursuer less. The balance was still unequal, but he had tipped the scales. They’d be sure to advance more carefully now.
The path came out at a promontory at the cliff’s edge.
To one side, spattered with seagull shit, was an old information sign in various languages showing a cross-section of the Devil’s Hole.
But Roberto’s attention was on the large opening surrounded by a precarious wooden guardrail that barely came up to his waist. He cautiously approached the edge of the shaft and looked down.
It was a black abyss, the bottom invisible.
From below came a deep sound—half roar, half lament—every time the waves penetrated the narrow passage at sea level and crashed inside in a thunderous explosion.
From the shaft came a series of deafening bangs followed by strange silences each time the sea retreated, before the cycle began again, as it had for thousands of years in the carving out of that extraordinary rock formation.
He took a step back. The place—which must have been awe-inspiring in daylight on a calm day—was terrifying in pitch darkness in the middle of a storm.
He saw now that his plan to climb down the cliff was doomed to failure. Picking his way blindly over slippery stones without knowing where he was going was a self-imposed death sentence. If one of those frenzied waves hit him, he’d be squashed like a bug on a windshield.
There was nowhere to go.
This was the end of the road.
His hands trembling, he took the Walther P38 from his pocket and turned toward the lights, which had almost reached the promontory.
There were four of them, he now saw, two men and two women, with Luis Docampo at the head. Three were carrying shotguns, and the fourth held a huge axe. They stopped a few paces away, and for a moment, nobody uttered a word.
“It’s over, Lobeira.” Luis Docampo’s voice was full of tension. “You’re trapped. Put down your gun.”
“No way.” He tried to control the tremor in his voice and pointed the P38 at them. “You put yours down and let me leave. Nobody needs to get hurt here, Luis.”
Luis looked around, as if only just noticing where they were. “There are four of us and one of you,” he replied. “Do you really think you can escape?”
“Your shotguns can each fire once, and I have a magazine with a dozen cartridges,” replied Roberto. “I think that evens things up.”
“Seriously?” Luis looked at him with wide eyes and clicked his tongue. “Do you think you’ll kill all four of us before we fire? I doubt it.”
“You don’t want to find out.” He gripped his pistol tight. “I’m serious.”
“I don’t think you are.” Luis took a step toward him. “I don’t think you’ve got the balls to pull that trigger.”
Roberto swallowed with difficulty. His throat was tight.
Luis Docampo took a step closer, a sinister smile on his face.
Roberto raised the pistol and pointed at a spot slightly above his enemy’s shoulder. Luis was right about one thing: Roberto would never fire at them in cold blood. He wasn’t a murderer. But they didn’t need to know that.
The old P38 trembled in his hand as he squeezed the trigger.
There was a dull click, and Roberto felt as if his heart had stopped.
Decades of salt and rust. A complete lack of maintenance.
Old, damp ammunition. There were a thousand possible explanations.
He couldn’t know the cause, but the pistol had jammed, just as he had feared it might.
He registered a fleeting look of terror in Luis’s eyes before the man realized that the weapon hadn’t fired.
Roberto squeezed the trigger again, desperately, but the mechanism was locked solid.
Luis’s expression went from fear to surprise and, finally, to comprehension and triumph.
He approached Roberto, who was staring at the pistol with the funereal expression of someone who has just received a terrible piece of news.
Almost delicately, the islander removed the gun from his hand while the rest of the party kept their shotguns trained on him.
Luis inspected it for a moment, then tossed it into the Devil’s Hole.
“Turns out you did have the balls,” mused Docampo. “I definitely didn’t see that coming.”
Before Roberto had a chance to ready himself, Luis punched him hard in the stomach.
Roberto gasped and took a step back, and felt the ground sloping away behind him, marking the edge of the shaft.
Being punched by these people was becoming a tiresome routine, but he suspected that worse things were about to happen to him.
“I’ve never liked you.” Luis Docampo grabbed him to stop him falling and, in a delicate, almost intimate gesture, pulled him close. “You have no idea how much I’m going to enjoy killing you.”
Roberto struggled to his feet and, after getting his breath back, gave him a faint smile. “That’s . . . never . . . going to happen,” he panted. “Ever.”
“Really? And can I ask why not?”
“Because if you kill me, you’ll never find the money.” Roberto gave him a defiant stare, having just thrown his winning card onto the table. “I’ve hidden it well. You can turn the island upside down and you’ll never find it, not a single cent. You need me alive.”
Luis Docampo stared at him for a moment. Then, to Roberto’s surprise, he laughed. But it was mirthless laughter, full of pain. “Do you really think I give a damn about the fucking money?” he asked quietly. “After everything you’ve done?”
“I don’t understand,” Roberto replied, with a horrible sense of foreboding. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about my cousin Ricardo, the one whose head you cut off,” whispered Luis furiously. “About old Elvira Couto, who you murdered in cold blood. Don’t worry, we had time to see what you did at her place. You’re a sick, twisted son of a bitch, Lobeira.”
Roberto’s whole body went numb. Luis thought that he was the murderer roaming around the island. That he was responsible for the two deaths. The injustice of the situation made him want to scream.
“The moment you showed up, things started going wrong. You just happened to find my cousin’s body.
” Luis was seething with rage. “And we just happened to see you coming out of the home of a woman who’d been murdered in exactly the same way.
You come to Ons, and people start dropping like flies and, guess what, you always just happen to be close to the scene of the crime. Don’t insult my fucking intelligence!”
“It isn’t what it seems. I . . . oof!”
Another punch, this time to the face, made Roberto lose his footing. He tasted blood inside his mouth.
“Don’t lie to me! I know you did it, you bastard! Tell me where my son is! Where have you hidden him? What have you done to Tristán?”
Roberto froze. The last time he’d seen Tristán, the kid had been heading home just after saying goodbye to him and Helena Freire. For some reason, he’d never reached the Docampo house, and the boy’s family thought Roberto had something to do with his disappearance.
“I don’t know where Tristán is.” He shook his head. “The last time I saw him, he was heading home. That’s the truth.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s all I know. I’m sorry.” Roberto stood up, defiant. He’d seen enough situations like this to know that his death sentence had already been signed, no matter what he did. If he was going to die, then at least he would do it standing upright, with dignity.
“Tell me where my son is.”
“I swear I don’t know.”
Luis Docampo looked at him, his eyes blazing with pain and rage. “If you aren’t going to tell me anything,” he said, spitting out the words without taking his eyes off Roberto, “you can tell the devil.”
He shoved Roberto, a hard, direct jolt to the sternum, winding him. Trapped in a sensation of absolute panic, Roberto staggered back, as if in slow motion, and toppled over the low barrier.
Finally, with a scream of terror, Roberto Lobeira plunged into the shaft of the Devil’s Hole.