Authors: Gerald A. Browne

Slide (28 page)

Mud poured down, streamed down through the hole.

No doubt now.

There was mud above them. They were buried.

The buzzard named RAQUEL BABY lifted off at El Toro.

Within five minutes it was over the San Joaquin Hills, then the ocean, where it made a banking turn so sharp its frame strained and creaked.

On the starboard side of its fuselage was a special rig, a davitlike arrangement with loops of nylon line serving as a sling to carry the ten-foot section of thirty-six-inch polyethylene pipe.

Hackley brought the buzzard in close to the slide area.

Dodd searched for that ledgelike spot he'd fallen from the day before, but the face of the slide had changed. The mud had slipped, run down, covered over the letter E that would have been a sure marker.

“Were we this high up yesterday?” Dodd asked.

“Just about,” Hackley told him.

“I think we were a little lower.”

Hackley backed the buzzard off and came in twenty feet down the slope. Still there was no visible hint of where the supermarket lay.

They made three passes back and forth across the face of the slide. It all appeared the same, except at one spot where there was a slight hump around a sort of bubble.

Could be, Dodd thought. Or it could be just a random air pocket. Taking a calculated chance was better than doing nothing, he decided.

Hackley maneuvered the buzzard closer, hovered it over that spot.

The way the rig was built, the forward lines could be released first and the pipe lowered into a vertical position. Dodd's plan was to jam the pipe down through the roof of the supermarket â
if
he could locate it. If necessary he'd use the downward force of the helicopter to drive the pipe through the roof. Then he'd climb down through the pipe and in. Hackley had insisted he tie a safety line around his waist like a mountain climber.

Dodd released the pipe.

It swung into a vertical position and was lowered to that bubbling hump in the mud. The pipe penetrated quickly under its own weight, nearly eight hundred pounds. Dodd watched it disappearing. Half of it, six feet, seven feet of it. Before he could react the entire pipe had sunk from sight.

“Pull up!” Dodd shouted.

Hackley throttled the buzzard. The nylon lines connected to the pipe snapped straight with strain.

It seemed the pipe should slip out easily, but it was as though something beneath the mud had a powerful locking hold on it, refused to let go.

Hackley gave the buzzard more throttle.

Surely the lines would break or the rigging would tear loose from the fuselage. How good a welding job had Poss and Ruzkowski done?

More throttle, more strain.

If they lost the pipe they were through.

Dodd saw the blue circumference of it emerge. First just the mouth of it. He held his breath while the pipe was extracted slowly, foot by foot. Then, when most of it was out, the rest came all at once, like a plug pulled, and the buzzard recoiled suddenly from its own power, whipped upward.

Hackley fought to compensate for that and finally got the buzzard under control. He banked it wide out over the ocean. The pipe was dangling from it.

“Same altitude?”

“Yes,” Dodd told him.

Hackley brought the buzzard in for another attempt.

Dodd again studied the slide. He saw a jutting, like a corner, almost the same as the one yesterday. It seemed right. He pointed it out to Hackley, who proceeded to put the buzzard directly above it.

And then Dodd's eyes caught upon something else, about twenty feet farther to the right and up a ways.

An indentation in the mud, not very large, a sort of cleft, as though something underneath was sucking at it.

Something underneath?

It was unlike anything else on the slope.

He decided on it.

Hackley adjusted.

The pipe, in a vertical position, was lowered precisely on target â the indentation. The pipe penetrated quickly, and, as Dodd watched it sinking, he had a second second thought. Maybe he'd chosen wrong again, before it was too late they should pull up and try elsewhere.â¦ He was about to tell Hackley to do just that when the pipe, about six feet of it already under, stopped.

It remained straight up.

It must have settled on something.

Down inside, the seven survivors crouched. The mud poured in through the hole in the roof. It was like being in the bottom part of an hourglass with time running out. What little space remained was filling fast. The mud was nearly up to the platform. Not enough air. They breathed in rapid gasps, their hearts pounding. The more they breathed, the less they could breathe.

Lois closed her eyes.

Marsha hugged herself.

Spider hung his head and gritted.

Amy and Peter stared at each other.

Gloria pressed against Brydon, who felt done, finally, with nothing more to give.

But he was the first to notice the sudden decrease in the flow of mud from above. He didn't mention it because he didn't believe it and there was no use wasting breath. But he saw the flow was definitely less, reduced to a dribble.

And then directly below the hole, on the surface of the mud, appeared a circle of light.

Brydon crawled over to the hole, looked up.

He saw outside.

Air was pouring in.

He and the others tore at the gypsum, made the hole larger.

Peter climbed through first, through the hole and into the pipe. Made his way up the pipe in a crouched, horizontal position, keeping pressure with his shoulders and feet against the inside surface. He inched his way upward to the mouth of the pipe.

He was a complete surprise to Hackley and to Dodd, who was standing on the landing skids about to lower himself into, the pipe. It was as though a dead man had risen from the earth. Appropriate that he should be naked.

Dodd threw Peter a nylon rope ladder, which he fed down the opening. Peter helped Amy out.

Then the others came. Up, out and into the belly of the buzzard.

Lois Stevens. She was crying.

Marsha Hilbert hesitated, blinked, touched her hair, as though striking a pose.

Gloria Rand kept looking back for Brydon.

Spider had difficulty because his clothes were so heavily caked with mud. Odd the way his trousers were bound at the bottoms, and bulging. Of course, he wasn't aware the man giving him a hand was a police captain.

Brydon was last. He was standing knee deep in mud when he stepped onto the ladder to go up the pipe.

Outside, the rain had stopped.

The clouds were disbanding.

With all aboard, the buzzard lifted itself away, a joyous, side-slipping swoop over the beach.

Brydon glanced down.

It was Sunday morning.

Two girls in bikinis already lay stretched out on bright towels, starting to bake once again in the good California sunshine.

About the Author

Gerald A. Browne is the
New York Times
âbestselling author of ten novels including
11 Harrowhouse, 19 Purchase Street
, and
Stone 588
. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and several have been made into films. He attended the University of Mexico, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne, and has worked as a fashion photographer, an advertising executive, and a screenwriter. He lives in Southern California.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-4532-6840-7

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com