Landing Party: A Dinosaur Thriller (5 page)

Chapter 9

“This chamber looks very unstable. Keep us away from the walls.” Skylar pointed to a horizontal orange streak moving behind cavern walls that were not yet fully solidified. Anita nodded, digging the paddle into the water on the right side of the boat, veering it away from the fiery wall. Around them, steam vented into the air from the water below, where magma still issued from deep within the Earth.

“I see a place it looks like we could get out on, over there.” Lara put her radio away. She gave up trying to contact Slope Team since no signal could penetrate the cave walls. She pointed off to their right. Sure enough, a flat rocky shelf could barely be seen through the shroud of vapors. The others agreed to check it out, and Anita rowed them in that direction.

“There’s water bubbling up over there!” Joystna indicated an area next to the rock shelf where the water roiled with frothy activity. “It’s okay, just take us to the left of it,” Skylar advised. “Don’t go through the steam.”

Anita guided them to the other side of the landing shelf from the active water. She paddled faster as she approached the ledge, and soon they heard the soft hiss of the raft’s bottom sliding over the rock.

“Everybody out!” Anita said, jumping from the raft onto the rocky flat. “We don’t want to puncture the boat bottom.” The others hopped out of the boat, and they lifted it up onto dry ground before flipping on additional flashlights to have a look around.

The ceiling was low over half of the lava shelf, but high over the other half. The sounds of bubbling water and the occasional rock falling from high above echoed throughout the chamber.

The four of them spread out and walked toward the rear of the platform, looking for ways to get either further inside or higher up. They found neither. Skylar was in the midst of proposing a geological reason for this when she was interrupted by the sound of intense rushing water.

Anita pointed to what before had been a mere bubbly patch in the water, but now was a veritable geyser, shooting skyward with great force.

“Could this whole chamber flood?” Lara asked no one in particular. It was certainly an uncomfortable thought, to perish in this hellish cave system, crushed up against the chamber ceiling, clawing for the exit… Before anyone could give a response, a dark mass was buoyed up from the depths by the fountain of water.

“Stand back!” Joystna instinctively held her arm out to herd the others further from the edge of the platform, where a boulder was being lifted out of the water by the geyser.

The four explorers watched in disbelief as the large rock—perhaps the size of an overstuffed armchair—was tossed into the air. Then they covered their faces with their arms as the rock was smashed against the ceiling of the cave, casting off bits of rock shrapnel. The boulder landed on the rock shelf with a sonorous
crack
, wobbled for a second, and then settled.

They stood in place for a minute more, observing the geyser to see if it would throw up more projectiles from below, but the column of water gradually fizzled out, returning once again to the patch of bubbly water it had been when they arrived.

Curiosity got the better of Skylar, and she went to the big rock. She removed her rock hammer from her pack and struck the rock lightly until some of its surface layers chipped away. Lara moved closer behind her to shine a light on the work surface. As Skylar chipped away at the boulder, a thin vein of precious gemstone was uncovered. It sparkled hectically in the direct artificial light.

“What is that, more of that…what’d you say it was called?” Anita asked.

Skylar looked away from the rock for a second to frown in Lara’s general direction, so she didn’t see the boulder wobble slightly. “Mica. I’m not sure yet, need to get a better look…”

She resumed work again with the hammer, bringing the tool down near the mineral vein. Skylar cracked off a large sheet of the boulder and then paused with the hammer. She had opened up a sizable cavity so as to be able to reach in and try to excavate a chunk of what she was sure was diamond.

She had just passed her hand inside the cavity when the entire rock began to shake.

Chapter 10

Ethan wasn’t sure which way was up. The water in the lake was dark. Adding to the confusion of being dumped underwater from about fifty feet up were the strange noises—the rumbling and popping of geological activity still at work as magma rushed out from the Earth. Spot fires burned around him underwater, adding to the surreal dream scene. Making matters worse, he still wore his pack, which threatened to pull him down into the abyss, however deep this body of enclosed water was. His plastic canteen bumped him in the face as it floated up, and that’s when Ethan realized he was swimming the wrong way, down.

The photographer flipped himself around and kicked, straining against the weight of his backpack, but at the same time unwilling to ditch it except as a very last resort. He would be next to helpless on this island without his gear, and he couldn’t be that far from the surface already, could he? A few seconds later, his face broke into humid air, and he gasped for precious breath, inhaling the sulfur-tinged atmosphere, air that had never tasted any sweeter to him than right now. But the triumph of figuring out how to keep breathing soon gave way to another predicament.

Where the heck was he? Ethan tread water while spinning in circles. Somewhere out in the middle of the lake. Looking up, he could see the main opening of the volcano, as well as a smaller aperture to one side of it—the new hole where he had fallen through with the collapsing slope rock. He heard splashing to his right. Hoping it wasn’t the ankylosaurus swimming for him—surely it sank by now?—he looked over to see a person splashing toward him.

“Ethan? George?” a male voice called out.

“Ethan here, Richard.” Ethan couldn’t yet see the man as anything more than a blurry form, but he recognized the English accent.

“Any sign of George?” Richard swam over to Ethan, and the two of them looked around until they heard another voice, a little farther away from Ethan than Richard had been.

“Over here!” They spun in the direction of the words. Just visible through the mist were a pair of waving arms.

“George?” Ethan called.

“Yes, it’s me.” George started swimming and soon disappeared into the fog.

“Wrong way, George. Turn around,” Ethan said.

The geologist, disoriented in the misty vapor, spun around until he was looking in the right direction. Richard activated a waterproof flashlight, and then George homed in on that with ungainly, splashy kicks. While they waited for him to reach them, Ethan and Richard looked around at their surroundings. They were far from the shore of the lake on all sides, near the middle. George reached them, and they asked one another if they were okay. All had cuts and bruises but nothing major; thankfully, all three were able to swim.

Richard, still wearing his pack, removed it and took from it a two-way radio. “Glad we sprung for the waterproof model now, right, mates?” Ethan nodded, but George looked around briefly. “I lost my pack. I wasn’t wearing it when the ground fell through.”

“Don’t worry about that right now. You’re still alive. I’m sure Kai would like to be in your position, precarious as it may be at the moment.” Richard pulled the radio from a compartment of his pack. “Ah, here we are. Let’s see if we can raise our Boat Team, perhaps we can arrange to be picked up. They must be putting about in here somewhere, right?”

Ethan spun about in a slow circle. “I don’t see or hear them…” Then he cupped his hands together and yelled through the vapors. “Skylar? Anita? Lara? Joystna?”

They waited a moment for the echoes to die down, but when no reply was forthcoming, Richard held up the radio. “Let’s give this a try, shall we?” He depressed the Talk button and spoke into the radio’s microphone. “Slope Team to Boat, Slope Team to Boat, do you read, over?”

A few seconds passed during which nothing, not even static, was heard. “You on channel 22?” Ethan asked.

Richard nodded. “Affirmative, I’m on 22. That’s what they should be on.” He tried the radio again, telling boat team they had fallen into the lake, lest they think the reason for the call was routine and were ignoring it. But still no response came.

“Why can’t we reach them? Shouldn’t they be in the lake? That’s where we dropped them, right?” George’s voice sounded as though he was on the verge of panic.

Richard leveled a stare at him. “Lots of reasons why it might not work. Signal could be bouncing all around down here, maybe they entered a cave along the shore, who knows?”

Richard shook his head as he clipped the radio off to a shoulder strap on his pack. “I’ll leave it on, but I think we’re going to have to take matters into our own hands at this point.”

All three of them once again surveyed the lake. “You mean swim for shore, right?” George asked.

Richard laughed. “Uh, yeah, unless you have some magical way out of here, or you know how to fly or something.”

“Hey, no need to be an ass about it, I was just—”

“Take it easy, mates.” Ethan tried to sound upbeat. “We’re all in this together, and we’re all going to get out of this together. So let’s figure out which way the shore is closest, then we’ll start our little power swim, okay?”

Richard shone his light beam straight toward the shore in the direction he faced. “You gentlemen still have your lights?”

Ethan felt around the outside of his pack until he found his. He unclipped it and then flicked it on, leveling the beam in the opposite direction from Richard.

“I don’t have a light. It was in my pack.” George sounded downbeat.

“I’m guessing about a quarter-mile in this direction.” Richard waved his light against the lava rock shore. “But it’s hard to say for sure.” Ethan turned around to look, comparing the distance to shore in the opposite direction, where the vapors were thicker. “I think your way is closest.”

“Let’s get on with it, then, before more crap falls on us from above, or more magma pushes up from below.” Richard clipped his light back on to his pack but left it on as a beacon for the others, so that they could find one another if separated. Ethan did the same with his light, and the three of them swam toward shore.

Ethan felt the weight of his wet pack on his shoulders as he kicked along, noting that Richard must feel the same. Only George lacked a pack, and for that reason, he was the fastest among them. It was strange to need the lights to see the shoreline, yet the center of the lake was bathed in daylight. Sunlight at this time of day penetrated straight down, leaving a cone of light in the middle of the lake and the surrounding shore in darkness. As they passed through the cone of sunshine, Ethan saw George stop swimming up ahead. At first, he thought it might be because he was afraid of getting too far ahead of Ethan and Richard, for to lose them would mean he was on his own with no equipment in the dark volcano.

But then George spoke. “Something touched me.”

“Keep swimming, George, don’t freak yourself out.” Richard heeded his own advice, transporting his heavy pack via his lumbering crawl stroke.

“Probably just some floating debris, maybe a cooled magma pillow drifting around the lake,” Ethan offered.

“I’m a geologist, Ethan, so while I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, I —”

Suddenly, George was pulled underwater in a swift and violent motion. The water roiled and then an object of some kind was seen breaking the water’s surface.

“What is that?” Richard gasped, halting his forward progress to tread water.

Ethan, being an experienced nature photographer, had an idea, but not one that made him feel any better. “Some type of creature, mate. I don’t know what kind, but that looked like a flipper or fin.”

“Great, we have a shark in here?”

Before Ethan could answer, an enormous dark mass arced up out of the water—an animal in a breaching dive. To Ethan, it looked sort of like a whale, except it had four flippers instead of two, and it had a
neck
, a long, thin neck…at the end of which was a head with sharp teeth that had George Meyer, the geologist, clenched between the jaws. The man screamed wordlessly as he was taken into the air for the final time. Then the animal dove underwater with its prey and disappeared.

Richard shifted his light from the position where the creature had dived to the shoreline, sweeping it across the rockscape, seeking the closest point of escape.

“Let’s go!” Forgoing stealth in favor of top speed, Richard launched into a flurry of windmilling arms and kicking legs, propelling himself toward the rocks. Ethan kept his light trained on the spot where he last saw the creature, his mind’s eye picturing it launching itself out of the crater lake…and he was a kid again, looking at those dinosaur books…
I know this one…plesiosaur
! But attaching a name to the beast didn’t provide additional comfort. In fact, the opposite proved to be true, since he knew that plesiosaurs were formidable marine predators.

Ethan stopped looking for George and his plesiosaur and struck out after Richard and the shoreline. It seemed impossibly far away when being chased by a primordial monster, but he told himself that if the dinosaur wanted to take him, it was going to take him regardless of his actions in the water. The only thing he could do was to get out as fast as possible so that he wasn’t around when the creature finished swallowing George. What if it decided that wasn’t half bad and went looking for more?

Ethan stopped swimming when Richard aimed his light back at him, waving the beam back and forth. “I see a ledge I think we can get up on over there.” He jiggled the light beam off to their left. Ethan moved off in that direction, expecting to feel a powerful set of jaws tugging at his legs at any moment. But he reached Richard without that happening, and the professional explorer surprised him by handing him his torch.

“Hold this, will you, and aim it up there so I can get out. Then I’ll pull you up.”

Ethan hesitated for a split second.
Wonder what he’d say if I said I would go first?
But he didn’t want to prolong his stay in the lake a microsecond more than was necessary, plus the ledge was a couple of feet of razor sharp lava rock above their heads and wouldn’t be all that easy to climb out on. Ethan wouldn’t mind being pulled out, at the cost of being second. He took the light. Richard eyed him hard for a moment, then nodded and turned around.

“Right here,” he said, pointing. “Shine it right here.”

Ethan complied, and the Brit began to climb. He made it about three feet up and was stretching an arm out onto level ground when he suddenly fell back, splashing into the water next to Ethan. He cried out in pain, and Ethan’s first thought was that somehow the plesiosaur had struck Richard instead of him, even though Richard had been mostly out of the water until one second ago. But then Richard let loose a string of oaths and shrugged out of his pack.

“That was stupid, I should have known to take my pack off first. Also, let me don my climbing gloves. This stuff is like trying to climb a wall of razor blades.”

Ethan shined the light as the explorer unzipped a side pouch on his bag and took from it a pair of gloves. He put them on and shoved the pack over to Ethan. “Just hold it there until I get up, and then I’ll pull it up, okay?”

Ethan nodded. He had already removed his own pack and so now floated with two of them while shining the light. But the extra work paid off, as this time Richard scaled the ledge without incident, hauling himself out and taking a brief look around. Then he turned back to Ethan, extending a hand. He pulled up first his backpack, then Ethan’s. The photographer had to admit that as pompous as the explorer was, he was quick and efficient in his movements once he selected the proper gear. He was not leaving Ethan to dangle in the water a second longer than necessary.

“You’re going to have to brace your feet against the side—there’s a little cutout—there, yes. Now get a good grip…” He held out a hand and Ethan held on.

“Up you go…” Richard pulled, and Ethan was able to take a couple of vertical steps up until he could step up onto the horizontal ledge. He eyed the explorer in the misty, dim light.

“Thanks.”

Richard nodded, then aimed his light behind them. “Now then, where are we?”