Suddenly his outstretched hand struck solid wall The passage ceased; it was a dead end. He flicked the lighter and saw his mistake. The air current came from a small crack between the rocks. An audible humming noise also issued from the crack. It was the sound of an electric motor, hidden somewhere beyond the wall in the bowels of the mountain. Pitt listened for a moment, but then the sound ceased.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” be mused aloud,
“try another passage.” He retraced his steps and quickly reached the intersection, this time taking the tunnel directly opposite the one he had cautiously crawled through.
He lengthened his stride and pounded on into the impenetrable darkness; the cool damp paving numbing his stocking feet. He idly wondered how many other men, or women for that matter, had von Till literally thrown to the dog. In spite of the near chilly air, the sweat ran off his body in streams. The pain across his chest seemed remote, too remote to belong to him. He could feel the blood mingling with the sweat and running down into his pants. He kept going and was determined to keep going until he dropped. A thought tugged at his mind to slow down and rest, but he rejected it and quickened his pace.
Again and again his groping hands and the periodic but welcome flicker of the lighter discovered new passages that branched off into endless nothingness. In some, the rocks had caved in, sealing them off, probably forever.
The lighter was on its last breath, the fluid almost gone. Pitt used it as little as possible, relying more and more on his bruised and scraped fingers. An hour passed, and then another. He continued on, pushing his tired and torn body through the ancient passages.
His foot struck something solid, and he pitched forward onto the bottom steps of a stone stairway. The edge of the fourth step caught him across the nose, gashing the bridge to the bone. Blood spurted down his cheeks and coated his lips. All at once the exhaustion, the emotional drain and the despair flooded over his battered body, and he folded limply on the stairs. Everything began to slow down. He lay and listened to the blood drip on the step beneath his head. A soft white cloud materialized out of the black gloom and gently covered him.
Pitt shook his sore and fuzzy head violently, trying to clear the cobwebs. Slowly, very slowly, like a man lifting a tremendous weight he raised his head and shoulders and began agonizingly to crawl up the stairway. Step by step he struggled, until at last he reached his destination.
A webbing of heavy bars marked the top of the stairway. The grille work was ancient and heavily rusted but still thick and strong enough to hold back an elephant.
Pitt hauled himself painfully onto the landing. A curtain of fresh air greeted his skin, replacing the musty odor of the labyrinth. He gazed through the rectangles between the bars and his spirits soared at the sight of the stars blinking in the sky. Back in the winding passageways he had left like a dead man in a casket It seemed like an eternity since he saw the outside world.
He pulled himself to his feet and shook the bars. There was no movement. The lock on the massive gate had recently been welded closed.
He checked the width between each bar, searching for the largest opening. The third space from the left, held the greatest spread; about eight and one-half inches. He laboriously stripped off all his clothes and set them on the other side of the barrier. Next he smeared his blood into the sweat and exhaled until his lungs ached in protest. Then, slipping his bead between the bars, he strained to push one hundred and ninety pounds into the outside landscape. The rust from the bars flaked off against his slippery skin and stuck to the glue-like blood. A racking moan of pain escaped his mouth as his genitals scraped over the ragged edge of one bar. He desperately clawed at the ground and gave a final heave. His body came free.
Pitt grasped his scraped crotch and sat up, ignoring the stabbing pain and unable to believe his success.
He was out, but was he in the clear? His eyes, now acutely used to the dark, darted around the immediate area.
The vaulted bars of the labyrinth faced onto the stage entrance of a great amphitheatre. The ponderous structure reflected a vaguely unearthly glow from the
white light of the stars and the moon, whose imperfect circle peeped over a shadowed mountain summit.
The architecture was Grecian but the massiveness of the construction signified Roman hands. The edge of the round stage was separated from the theatre’s upper rim by almost forty rows of steeply banked seats. Except for the invisible flight of nocturnal insects, the entire amphitheatre was deserted.
Pitt slipped into the remains of his uniform. Knotting the damp sticky cloth of his shirt, he stiffly wrapped his chest with a crude bandage.
Just to be able to walk and breathe in the warm evening air gave him a new surge of strength. He had gambled back there in the labyrinth and without Theseus’ string to guide him had beat the immense odds and won. Laughter rang from his lips and traveled in loud echoes to the last row of the amphitheatre and back. The pain and the exhaustion was forgotten as he visualized von Till’s face at their next meeting.
“How would you like a ticket to see that?” Pitt shouted at his nonattendant gallery. He waited, caught in the mood of the eerie setting. There was no reply, no applause, only the silence of the warm Thasos night. For a moment he thought he saw a ghostly Roman audience cheering him on, but the toga clad figures faded mutely away into the white marble, leaving Pitt with no answer to his lonely invitation.
He looked up at the maze of stars in the diamond clear air to get his bearings. Polaris blinked its friendly light in return and advertised approximate north. Pitt’s eyes scanned a full three hundred and sixty degree circle of sky. Something was wrong. Taurus and the Pleiades should have been overhead. Instead, they were far to the east.
“Goddamn,” Pitt cursed aloud, looking at his watch. It was 3:22. Only an hour and eighteen minutes before dawn. Somehow he had lost nearly five hours.
What happened, he asked himself, where was the time lost? Then he realized that he must have passed out after colliding with the stairway.
There was no time to lose. He hurriedly walked across the stone paved stage and presently discovered, in the little available light, a small path leading down the mountainside. He took it and set out on a race to beat the sun.
8
A quarter of a mile down the steep slope the pathway turned into a road — no road, really, but two parallel tire-worn indentations in the ground cover. The tracks meandered downward in a tortuous series of hairpin curves. Pitt stumbled along at half trot, his heart pounding viciously under the taxing strain. He was hurt, not badly, but he had lost much blood. Any doctor who might have encountered him would have immediately confined his torn body to a hospital bed.
Over and over, since his escape from the labyrinth, pictures of the defenseless scientists and crew of the First Attempt being strafed by the Albatros flashed through Pitt’s mind. He could see in perfect detail the bullets tearing into flesh and bone, leaving heavy red blotches on the white paint of the oceanographic research ship. The carnage would all be over before the new interceptor jets at Brady Field could scramble, providing of course the replacement aircraft had arrived from the North Africa depot before dawn. These visions and others drove Pitt on to efforts beyond his normal capacity.
He halted abruptly. Something moved in the shadows ahead. He left the vague trail and circled wanly around a thick growth of chestnut trees, creeping closer to the unexpected obstacle. Then he raised up and peered over a fallen, decaying tree-trunk. Even in the dim light there was no mistaking the shape of a well-fed donkey that was tethered to a solitary boulder. The unattended little animal cocked one ear at Pitt’s approach and brayed softly, almost pathetically.