The Blue Hole
In the early morning darkness, Vikki shook John. “Get up,” she whispered. “I want to take a bath in the blue hole.”
“Are you kidding me? In front of all these horny men?” John desperately tried to wake up.
Vikki dug around in her pack and found a small camp towel and a light weight blanket. She grabbed her change of clothes and unzipped the front of the tent. Since she and John slept commando style, they were naked as they exited the tent, but John stumbled into a pair of shorts that included his utility belt. Vikki wrapped the blanket around as much of her body as she could. As they walked toward the blue hole, few people were stirring. The guards on the wall were changing shifts on the wall, and the two men climbing down the new ladders were expected to go to their tents for some sleep. The main fire was burning a distance from the cottage and blue hole. John noticed one of the men putting branches on the burning pile of wood.
Vikki walked to the front of the cottage and placed her change of clothes near the steps that led into the water. Quickly she pulled off the blanket, slowly walked down, and put her feet in the water. The light from the distant fire flickered across the compound, and revealed a lovely silhouette of her perfect body. Her long slender legs disappeared under the water, followed by curvaceous hips that melted into a slim waist. He could barely see the outline of her firm breasts.
“John, would you hand me the camp soap?” she asked, as she came back up the steps to take it from him. “Are you coming in?”
“I am standing guard so a bunch of hard dicks don’t jump in and screw you to death.”
“Well, you have already tried that with little success.”
“I felt it was a noble effort on my part,” he said, laughing.
Through the water, Vikki noticed a dark object coming towards her and yelled, “John there is something in the water!”
“Get out! Get out!” John pulled his machete from his belt, and dove into the water behind Vikki.
The object preferred Vikki, and angled for the attack. Suddenly a giant snake raised his head a couple of yards from Vikki, and exposed a mouth full of curved teeth. She realized she couldn’t get up the steps before it struck, so she grabbed the huge snake directly behind its head. The snake instantly started to move his enormous coils around her. Before the snake could complete the first phase of constriction, John had his hand next to Vikki’s on the giant snake’s throat, and made his first full strike with his machete on the spine of the creature. The snake reacted by quietly wrapping death coils around John. He could feel the breath leaving his body, and knew that once he breathed out the snake would compress more and more until he died. To make the situation worse, he was being pulled into deep water. He might drown before all the bones in his body were crushed.
The explosion of a bullet fired through the skull of the huge snake was a sweet noise for both John and Vikki. A second, and then a third shot caused the snake to go limp.
“John…Miss Vikki? Me hopes you okay. Did snake bite you?” Zuka said. The tall Zulu warrior was genuinely concerned.
“No Zuka. We are fine,” Vikki said.
“Speak for yourself—my ribs will never be the same,” John said, uncoiling the snake. Several people had joined them in the water with hands on the snake, pulling it to shore. John and Vikki both thanked Zuka profusely, who had just climbed down from the wall when he heard Vikki scream.
Jan checked for injuries. Vikki got examined first and it appeared to John for way too long. A naked blonde lady really needs to have everything checked out. Several members of the expedition looked at her with a perverted concern for her injuries. Vikki began to protest, so Jan turned his attention to John’s ribs. Some may have been cracked or at least bruised, so Jan wrapped them and told him to take it easy for a few days.
Vikki pulled the blanket around her and began the walk back to her tent. Laid out next to the cottage was the snake. Marc declared the creature was a twenty-one foot long African rock python sebae. Its den must have been close by the cottage, and after further investigation Marc said it was a very old female that had not laid eggs in a while.
Vikki and John went back to the tent. After both were dressed, Vikki looked at John and with tears in her eyes she said, “John, thanks for saving my life. You were almost killed, and I don’t know what I would do without you.” She started crying and pulled John close to her. John felt it was a release of emotions from the terror that she had just gone through, and let her cry. He felt that the sex later would be really intense.
Once she had her composure, they both headed for the stone building to see about opening the second airlock. Jan met them there and explained they had to be extremely careful once they were sealed off below.
“John, I believe that you and Vikki are certified scuba divers—is that correct?” he asked.
“Yes we are, but we have not been diving together,” John said.
“I don’t know how deep this tunnel might be, but we must treat it like a dive. We believe that air has been forced into the lower parts of the tunnel not only to keep the water out, but also to provide the air for you to breathe as though you had on a scuba tank, since the air has been pumped in at pressure. I will bring a tape measure and you guys will have to remember your no-decompression dive limits as we go down,” Jan said.
Vikki had been certified a year ago with a PADI instructor. “I don’t have the tables memorized, but I do recall that anything over one hundred feet deep would only allow for a 5 to 15 minute dive without decompression.”
“That’s correct plus, you must consider our altitude and compute that figure in with the table readings,” John added, not really knowing much but wanting to sound smart.
“As I recall, you would need to make an adjustment from an eighteen meter dive to that of a twenty one meter dive at 5000 feet. We may be 1000 feet above sea level so it wouldn’t require much of an adjustment—maybe a slight one for diving in fresh water instead of sea water,” Vikki said, giving more information than John wanted.
“We ain’t diving anyway,” John said.
“John, we don’t have to be diving if that damn tunnel is pressurized. We will have to follow the same rules as if we had tanks on our back,” she reminded him.
“We’ll have to get that antique to…what the hell!” As he spoke, he heard the hit and miss of the steam air compressor come to life.
“These old things are simple as hell. Don’t take much to fix,” Sony said, who had a huge grin on his face. “Hope it’s powerful enough to pump some good air.”
Hoses were attached and air began flowing into the airlock and the lower tunnel. The airlock wasn’t keeping the air pumped in since the hatch was open, but the lower tunnel was doing fine. The gauges were crude with no pressure per square inch markings. The crew decided to let the pump run for an hour, put six people into the airlock, and run air for thirty minutes. Next, they would open the hatch into the lower tunnel and four would go in, two staying at the top near the hatch. John and Vikki had elected to hurry to the bottom of the tunnel, scout around and come back to the hatch where they would perform a safety stop. They would wait about ten minutes to release any stored up nitrogen in their system. After that, they would go into the airlock for a few minutes, sealing the lower tunnel below them. They would measure the distance with a long tape Jan had. Everyone knew there wasn’t a decompression chamber in the Congo and very few in South Africa. Any mistake and they could color themselves dead.
Six of the crew went into the airlock. After thirty minutes, the group placed a metal rod through the screw mechanism and four strong men started turning the wheel of the hatch cover. The oiled cover opened more easily than the airlock hatch. Hissing air and a really foul smell caused Vikki to cover her mouth and almost vomit.
John wanted to go first. He used a ladder attached just below the hatch. As he climbed down on the tunnel floor and shined his flash light around, he saw two skeletons lying next to each other, partially clothed.
“Vikki, don’t be alarmed by the skeletons in the tunnel,” he said, dreading her reaction.
“What the hell are you saying…oh my god!” She had seen them.
“Jan, will you check to see if you can find a cause of death,” John said.
“Unless there is a knife stuck in the bones that will be damn hard to determine,” Jan said.
“We are headed down and won’t stay long,” Jon said. He and Vikki followed a winding path that included steps and gouged out areas where mining had taken place. They fed out the tape and hurried as fast as the passageway would allow. The air was dank, smelled horrible, but was breathable. After about fifteen minutes they spotted a pool of water they assumed would join up eventually with the blue hole. Lying next to the pool were two full diving suits with helmets. Two skulls stared into the glass port holes. Vikki screamed but didn’t back away.
“Vikki, we have about three minutes to take these off and start back.”
John removed one helmet with the skull inside. He helped Vikki unscrew the one from her unfortunate diver.
“We are at 127 feet from the bottom of the lower hatch and about 137 to the ground level. We are going to be cooked if we don’t move fast.” John studied Jan’s tape as he spoke.
They arrived at the hatch exhausted from carrying the heavy brass diving helmets. Jan’s eyes opened wide when he saw the skulls. Ernie, the other member of the crew, let out a yell when it was his turn to examine the helmets. They looked at the clothing left on the other skeletons, and created wild theories about what happened to the people in the tunnel. An easy theory stated that something happened to the men topside who were running the compressor, that in turn caused the divers to die first and the others later. Maybe someone jammed the hatch so they couldn’t get out. Maybe a methane gas leak or the whole expedition may have been attacked by natives and all were killed, with those below left to die.
“If any of those theories were true, then who stacked the equipment so neatly, and sealed the stone building so securely? And why didn’t they go get the people below and bury them?” John asked.
“Survivors may have come back after a few days just to seal the place out of respect and had no time to recover the dead. Probably got killed later, left no records—no survivors,” Jan said.
“Whatever occurred, they never got the chance to come back down here. I’ll tell you why,” Vikki said. She held up an old leather sack. “Wait till you see what’s inside.”