Текст книги "Plague Ship"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

He mentally filed away the incongruity and retreated back into the hallway.

With no visible cameras and no guards patrolling the corridors, Max had a sense that Kovac must feel pretty secure here. It was another fact that he tucked away as he sought an exit from the labyrinth.

He finally came to a door marked STAIRWELL, but, when he opened it, he discovered the stairs led only downward.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he muttered, and headed deeper into the facility.

The scissor-style stairs zigzagged four stories before coming to an end on a dimly lit landing. The only door led into an even-darker tunnel that ran perpendicular to the stairwell. Unlike the other areas Max had seen, the perfectly circular tunnel was of rough-hewn native rock and was just large enough for him to stand. He could see where some sort of machine, like a continuous miner or a tunnel borer, had left ragged toolmarks on the dark stone. There were no lights, so he had no way of knowing how long the tunnel was or what it was for. The only clues were thick copper wires strung along the ceiling from ceramic insulators. There had to have been a hundred of them, each carefully spaced from its neighbor.

His engineering background told him they could easily take the electrical load of the generators he’d seen on the upper level.

“What are you supposed to do, my beauty?” he mused aloud. But, of course, there was no answer.

He considered following the wire, blindly hoping it led to an exit, but the stillness of the air made him think that the tunnel had no outlet. He also hadn’t forgotten he was at least fifty feet underground, possibly more.

Max set himself the arduous task of climbing the stairs. His body protested every step, and, as the exertion deepened his breathing, it felt like a vise was clamped around his chest. Even if his ribs weren’t fully broken, he laid a silent wager that a couple of them sported hairline cracks.

He was panting when he reached the upper landing and had to clamp his elbows to the sides of his chest to ease away some of the pain.

Pressing his ear to the door, he heard muffled voices, and, as they faded, he thought he heard one person say to another, "... sky two days from now, so we’ll need ...” He waited another few moments before opening the door. The hallway was deserted. He couldn’t even hear the echo of their footfalls.

Padding silently, he renewed his search for a way out. He was halfway down one long hallway when he heard people approaching. Their movements were swift and sure, making him think it might be Kovac and his goons heading back to his cell for another go at him, although only a half hour had passed since they had left him. Knowing he couldn’t run even if he wanted to, Max had no choice but to duck through one of the metal doors lining the corridor.

He held the knob open as he closed the door so the lock couldn’t engage and stood pressed against it as the footfalls drew nearer. It was only after they strode past that Max glanced over his shoulder at the darkened room. By the glow of a small light plugged into an outlet, he saw six cots laid out in rows and the obvious outline of six people asleep on top of them. One person must have been the lightest sleeper in the world because he suddenly grunted and shot bolt upright, peering myopically into the gloom.

“Steve?” he called out.

“Yes,” Max answered at once. “Go back to sleep.”

The youngish man fell back onto his cot and rolled away from Max, his breathing relaxing in an instant.

Max couldn’t say the same about his own breathing. He felt certain his heart was going to hammer through his ribs at any moment, although he was grateful for the anesthetic effects of the adrenaline jolt his near discovery had sent into his veins. He gave it a few more moments before sliding back out of the dormitory room.

In all, Max skulked around for nearly an hour before finding a stairwell that led upward, confirming his suspicions that this was a subterranean base of some kind. Depending on the sizes of the rooms he hadn’t explored, he estimated the facility was at least a hundred thousand square feet. As to its purpose, he could only guess.

He climbed two stories before coming to yet another door. He waited with his ear pressed to the metal.

He heard sounds from the other side but was unable to identify anything. He eased the door open a crack, pressing his eye to the narrow slit. He saw a wedge of what looked like a garage. The metal trestle roof lofted twenty feet or more, and there was a ramp that led to a pair of industrial-sized garage doors. Embedded in the rock walls next to them were thick steel blast doors that could be swung closed.

They looked impregnable to nothing less than a nuclear bomb. Max heard a radio playing some music that, to him, sounded like cats fighting in a burlap bag but was doubtlessly something Mark Murphy had on his iPod.

He saw nobody, so he quickly dashed through the door and found shelter under a wooden workbench littered with greasy tools. Just as the door snicked closed, he realized with horror that it had a sophisticated electronic lock mechanism activated by a palm reader as well as a numeric keypad. There was no returning to his cell and hoping he could talk his way out of another beating.

Although the garage was dimly lit, there was a pool of light on the far side where two mechanics were working on a four-wheel-drive pickup. From the looks of it, they were replacing the radiator and doing some welding near the front of the vehicle. He could see the blue glow of an oxyacetylene torch and smelled the tang of seared metal. There were other vehicles parked in the garage. He spotted two larger trucks and several four-wheelers, like the one Juan had used to escape the Responsivists in Greece.

Max felt time slipping by and wished Cabrillo was with him now. Juan had an innate ability to form and execute a plan with the barest glance at the situation. Max, on the other hand, was more of a plodder, attacking a problem with brute force and dogged determination.

Kovac would be returning to the interrogation chamber shortly, and Hanley needed to get as far away from this place as he possibly could.

Moving cautiously, he realized the garage doors were the only exit and was certain the radio wouldn’t mask the sound of one of them rattling open. There was really only one avenue open to him.

Brute force it is, he thought.

The wrench he grabbed was at least eighteen inches long and weighed ten pounds. He hefted it like a surgeon taking up a scalpel, fully knowing his capabilities with the instrument. He had gotten into his first real fight as a teenager when a strung-out junky brandishing a knife had tried to rob his uncle’s gas station. Max had knocked out eight of the would-be thief’s teeth with a wrench identical to the one he carried now.

He moved cautiously across the garage, finding cover where he could and stalking slowly because the human eye’s peripheral vision is adept at picking up movement. Any sound he made was drowned out by the radio.

One of the mechanics had his face covered by a darkened welder’s shield to protect his eyes, so Max concentrated on the second, a tall, lanky man in his thirties with a bushy beard and greasy hair tied in a ponytail. He was bent over the engine compartment, running his hands over a bundle of hoses, so he never felt Max’s presence behind him until Max brought the wrench down with a measured swing.

The blow dropped the mechanic as if he’d been poleaxed, and the egg it left on his skull would last him weeks.

Max turned. The welder had sensed motion and was just straightening, reaching to pull off his mask, when Hanley stepped forward and, like a batter in the all-star game, swung the wrench. At the perfect moment in his swing, Max let the wrench fly. The case-hardened tool smashed the plastic visor, which saved the welder from having his face torn off, while the power of the throw tossed the man bodily into a nearby rolling toolbox. The blowtorch, on its long rubber lines, dropped at Max’s feet, the blue jet flame making him step back when he felt the heat on his bare feet.

A third mechanic who had been hidden on the far side of the truck suddenly appeared around the front bumper, drawn by the commotion. He stared at the unconscious welder sprawled against the toolbox before turning toward Max.

Max watched as confusion became understanding and then anger, but before the man could give in to his flight-or-fight reflex Max scooped up the still-burning torch and tossed it in an easy underarm throw.

Another instinct took over, and the mechanic automatically grabbed for it as it came at him.

At over six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the tongue of burning oxygen and acetylene needed the briefest contact to char flesh. The mechanic caught the torch with the nozzle pointed directly at his chest. A smoldering hole opened in his overalls instantly, and skin and muscle sizzled away to reveal the white of his rib cage. The bones blackened before the massive load of shock made him drop the brass torch.

His expression didn’t change in the seconds it took his brain to realize his heart had stopped beating. He collapsed slowly to the concrete floor. The smell made Max want to retch. He hadn’t intended to kill the hapless mechanic, but he steeled himself. He had to save his son, and, unfortunately, this man stood in his way.

The welder was the closest to his size, so he took a moment to strip him out of his coveralls. He had to take the third mechanic’s boots because the others were hopelessly small. He did so without looking up from the man’s feet.

With a pair of wire cutters, he moved to the two trucks and opened the hoods, cutting the wires that sprouted from the distributor caps like black tentacles. As he started for the quad bikes, he saw a coffee machine set up on a workbench. Apart from filters, mugs, and a plastic container of creamer powder, there was a box of sugar. Max grabbed it, and, rather than waste time messing with the Kawasakis’

electronics, he unscrewed their fuel caps and dumped sugar into their tanks. The bikes wouldn’t run for more than a quarter mile, and it would take hours to clean out their fuel lines and cylinders.

A minute later, he was astride the one idling four-wheeler he hadn’t tampered with and pressed the button that opened the garage door. It was night, and wind-ripped rain lashed through the opening. Max couldn’t have asked for better conditions. There was no point closing the door. Kovac would know he was gone and how he was making his escape.

Slitting his eyes against the rain, he twisted the throttle and shot out into the unknown.

CHAPTER 24

KOVAC’S ORDERS HAD BEEN SPECIFIC TO THE FIVE men he’d dispatched to watch over the dismantled Responsivist facility in the Philippines. They weren’t to interfere with people investigating the building unless it became apparent that they were going to breach the underground sections. In the weeks they had observed the site, the only interest shown had been a couple of Filipinos on a well-used motorcycle. They had remained only a few minutes, looking over the building to see if there was anything worth looting. When they realized everything had been stripped, they had roared off down the road in a cloud of blue exhaust.

The way the two approached today had put the guards on immediate alert, and when the blast echoed across the open field they knew their caution had been well founded.

AMID THE TUMULT of crashing cement, Juan fell through the hole Linc had created, landing solidly on his feet on a flight of steep stairs. The air was an impenetrable wall of dust, forcing Cabrillo to run blindly down the steps, trusting that Linc had cleared out of the way. A piece of cement the size of his head hit his shoulder with a glancing blow, but it was enough to throw him off his feet. He tumbled the last few steps and lay dazed on the landing, as more debris rained down all around him.

A powerful hand groped for the back of his bush shirt and drew him into an antechamber and out of what was becoming an avalanche.

“Thanks,” Juan panted as Linc helped him to his feet.

Both men’s faces and clothes were a uniform shade of pale gray from the dust.

The timber scaffolding that supported the weight of the concrete plug gave way entirely, and tons of cement and broken wood crashed onto the staircase, completely filling the entrance to the antechamber with rubble. The darkness inside the chamber was absolute.

Linc pulled a flashlight from his haversack. The beam was as bright as a car’s xenon headlamp, but all it revealed were clouds of concrete dust.

“Remind you of anything?” Linc asked with a dry chuckle.

“Little like Zurich when we sprang that banker awhile back,” Juan answered with a cough.

“What do you think of our reception committee?”

“I feel like an idiot for thinking it was going to be that easy.”

“Amen, brother.” Linc flashed the beam across the choked-off doorway. Some of the concrete slabs had to weigh half a ton or more. “It’s going to take a couple of hours to dig our way out of here.”

“As soon as we open even a small hole, they’re going to gun us down like fish in a barrel.” Juan purposefully engaged his pistol’s safety and slid it into his waistband at the small of his back. “Outgunned and most likely outnumbered. I don’t fancy clawing our way into an ambush.”

“Wait them out?”

“Won’t work. We’ve got one canteen and a couple of protein bars. They could sit out there from now until doomsday.” As he spoke, Juan was fiddling with his satellite phone.

“Then we can call in the cavalry. Eddie can have an assault force here inside of forty-eight hours.”

“I’m not getting a signal.” Cabrillo turned the phone off to conserve its battery.

“All right, you’ve shot down all of my suggestions, what’s up your sleeve?” Juan took the light from Linc’s hand and played it along the downward-sloping tunnel that had been bored into the earth decades ago. “We see where this leads.”

“What happens if they come in after us?”

“Hope we have enough warning so we can lay an ambush.”

“Why not wait for them right here?”

“If I was leading that team, I would lob in a bunch of grenades before committing my men. We’d be mincemeat before they needed to fire a single shot. If we hung back out of grenade range, we’d be too exposed in this tunnel. Better to find a more defensible position. On the bright side, if they do bother to come after us it most likely means there’s another way out of here.” Linc considered their options, and with a broad sweep of his arm indicated they should proceed down the subterranean passageway.

One wall of the tunnel was a long, continuous slab of stone, while the other showed signs that it had been worked by tools. The two men could walk comfortably side by side, and there was at least ten feet of headroom.

“This is a natural fissure the Japanese expanded during their occupation,” Cabrillo said as he studied the rock.

“Most likely split open by an earthquake,” Linc agreed. “They built their factory, or whatever the hell it was, where the hole reached the surface.”

Juan pointed out dark splatters on the stone floor. The spray pattern indicated it was blood—copious amounts of blood. “Gunshot.”

“More than one victim, too.”

Juan jerked the light away from the grisly tableau. His mouth was a thin, grim line.

The air temperature dropped and the humidity built as they descended deeper into the earth. It was thinking about the misery that had occurred here rather than the plummeting temperature that made Cabrillo shiver.

The tunnel wasn’t straight, but rather corkscrewed and twisted as it fell away at a gentle angle. After twenty-five minutes and more than two miles, the cave floor leveled out, and they discovered the first side chamber. The entrance was partially blocked by a minor cave-in, and the tunnel’s ceiling was a fractured mess of stone ready to collapse at any moment. This cavern, too, had been a natural geologic feature that the Japanese had expanded. The room was roughly circular, fifty feet across, with a ceiling that was at least fifteen feet high. There was nothing in the cavern except some bolts along the walls that had once carried electrical wiring.

“Administration area?” Linc wondered aloud.

“Makes sense, being the closest room to the surface.” They found two smaller side caves before discovering a fourth in which the Japanese had left artifacts behind. This chamber had a dozen iron bunks bolted to the floor and several flimsy pressed-metal cabinets along one wall. As Juan checked the drawers, Linc examined the bedsteads.

“You wouldn’t think they would have bothered giving their prisoners beds,” Linc said.

“There’s nothing in any of these drawers.” Juan looked at Lincoln. “They needed the beds because they had to restrain their victims. Someone intentionally infected with typhus, cholera, or some type of poison gas is going to thrash around.”

Franklin snapped his hands away from the metal bunk as though he’d been burned.

They found four more side chambers like this one, some large enough to hold forty beds. They also found a small, waist-high cave entrance in the main tunnel. Juan wriggled his head and shoulders into the aperture and saw that the cave beyond dropped precipitously. At the extreme end of his light’s range, he could see the floor of the cavern littered with all sorts of unidentifiable junk. This had been a communal dump, and amid the rubbish were human bones. They had become disjointed over the decades, so Cabrillo couldn’t tell how many there were. Five hundred would be a conservative estimate.

“This place is like a slaughterhouse,” he said when he pulled himself free. “A death factory.”

“And they kept it running for eighteen months.”

“I think the surface facility was used solely to maintain the secret laboratories down here, where they experimented with the really nasty stuff. Using a cave system meant they could isolate it in a hurry if they ever had a viral outbreak.”

“Ruthless and efficient.” There was no admiration in Linc’s voice. “The Japanese could have taught the Nazis a thing or two.”

“I’m sure they did,” Juan said, still a little unsettled by what he’d just seen. “Unit 731 has its roots going back to 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. Just before war’s end, information and technology transfers went the other way. Germany supplied Imperial Japan with jet and rocket engines for suicide aircraft, as well as nuclear materials.”

Linc’s next comment died on his lips.

Deadened by distance and the surrounding rock, they couldn’t hear the explosion at the cave’s entrance.

Rather, both men felt a jolt of air pressure against their bodies, like the windblast of a passing truck. The Responsivists had breached the pile of debris and were now in the tunnel system hunting them.

“They probably know the tunnels and will be coming on fast,” Cabrillo said grimly. “We have maybe a half hour to either find a way out of here or someplace we can defend with a pair of pistols and eleven rounds of ammunition.”

The next medical chamber hadn’t been stripped as much as the others. There were thin mattresses on the beds, and the cabinets were stocked with jars of chemicals. The labels were in German. Juan pointed this out to Linc, as it proved his earlier point.

Linc studied the labels, then read aloud in English: “Chlorine. Distilled alcohol. Hydrogen peroxide. Sulfur dioxide. Hydrochloric acid.”

Cabrillo had forgotten Linc spoke German. “I’ve got an idea. Find me some sodium bicarbonate.”

“I don’t think this is the time to worry about a bellyache.” Linc remarked blandly as he scanned the bottles and jars.

“High school chemistry lessons. I don’t remember too much about the safe stuff, but my teacher delighted in showing us how to make chemical weapons.”

“Lovely.”

“He was this aging hippie who thought we needed to defend ourselves when the government eventually came to seize all private property,” Juan explained. Linc threw him an odd look and passed over the appropriate glass container. “What can I say?” Cabrillo shrugged. “I grew up in California.” Juan asked Linc to find one other jar of chemicals.

“So what do you want to do with this stuff?” Linc handed over a jar containing an amber liquid.

“Chemical warfare.”

They agreed on a spot to lay their ambush in one of the smaller medical wards. Linc bundled up some blankets and mattresses, in the shape of two men huddled under the farthest bedstead. Juan rigged a booby trap using a roll of electrical tape from Linc’s bag, the chemicals, and his canteen. In the uncertain glow of a flashlight, the mannequins were more than sufficient to lure the Responsivists. He placed Linc’s cell phone on walkie-talkie mode between the two inert figures.

Linc and Juan backed off into a room opposite and a little farther down the tunnel to wait.

If Juan had any difficulty with what they were about to do, he only had to think about the victims aboard the Golden Dawnto harden his resolve. The minutes trickled by, the luminous second hand of Cabrillo’s watch moving as if the battery was nearly spent. But he and Linc had lain in countless ambushes, and they remained perfectly still, their eyes open, although they could see nothing in the stygian tunnel. Each leaned against the stone wall with his head cocked, his ears straining to pick up the slightest sound.

After only twenty minutes, they heard them. Juan picked out two, then three distinct footfalls, as the Responsivist gunmen rushed headlong down the tunnel. There were no lights, so he reasoned they carried an infrared lamp and night vision goggles capable of seeing in that spectrum.

The gunmen slowed well before they came to the side cave, as if expecting an ambush. Although Juan couldn’t see the guards, he could tell by the sounds what they were doing. They had gone almost silent as they approached the entrance, advancing only when they knew they were covered by their teammates.

Metal clattered against stone, and almost immediately a voice called out.

“I see you there. Give yourselves up and you won’t be harmed.” The sound had been one of the guards leaning his weapon against the cave entrance to steady his aim as he pointed his assault rifle at the bundles of mattresses at the far end of the chamber.

Standing behind Linc so the big man’s bulk shielded his voice, Juan triggered his cell phone and said, “Go to hell.”

With the volume of the phone left inside the medical ward set to maximum, it must have sounded like a defiant shout. Two guns opened fire at once, and, in the burst of the muzzle flashes, Juan could see all three figures. These men were no rank amateurs. Two were right outside the cave while the third held back, watching the tunnel for a flanking attack.

In such an enclosed space, the sound was an assault on all Cabrillo’s senses.

When the firing stopped, he waited to see what they would do. They had poured enough rounds into the chamber to kill a pair of men a dozen times over. The cover man snapped on a flashlight, as all three stripped off their goggles, their optics temporarily overwhelmed by the barrage. The two who had fired moved cautiously across the threshold while the third remained vigilant for a trap.

And Cabrillo didn’t let them down.

The trip wire he’d rigged was near the bedstead where he and Linc had supposedly made their last stand, and the lead guard was so intent on his victims he never saw it.

The electrical tape was tied to the bottles of chlorine and sodium bicarbonate, and when the gunman brushed against it they fell. The glass shattered in a pool of water from the canteen and one other chemical that Juan had poured on the floor.

At the sound of the bottle breaking, Juan and Linc fired. The third guard had reacted to the sound of the smashing glass, but he didn’t stand a chance. One bullet caught him under the arm and tore apart his internal organs while the second hit him squarely in the windpipe. His corpse spun to the ground, never relinquishing its grip on the flashlight or assault rifle. The beam came to rest on the cave entrance, where tendrils of a sickly greenish cloud were just beginning to emerge.

Inside the chamber, the chemical reaction had produced a small lake of hydrochloric and hypochlorous acids. In the seconds it took for the two men to realize something was wrong, their throats and lungs were burning. The fumes attacked the delicate tissues lining their airways, making even the shallowest breath a torture beyond pain.

Forced to cough from the irritant, they drew more of the toxin into their bodies, so that by the time they staggered out of the room they had gone into convulsions. They hacked blood mixed with sputum from deep inside their lungs.

The exposure had been brief, but without immediate medical attention the two gunmen were living corpses, and their deaths would be slow and agonizing. One of them must have realized it, and before Cabrillo could stop him he had pulled the pin on a hand grenade.

There was a split second to make a decision, but with the roof already so unstable there was only one thing to do. Cabrillo grabbed at Linc’s arm and took off running, not wasting a moment even to turn on his flashlight. He ran with his fingers brushing the tunnel wall. He could feel Linc’s towering presence behind him. They had both been counting the seconds and, at the same moment, threw themselves flat just as the grenade exploded.

Shrapnel peppered the tunnel all around them, and the overpressure wave hit in a wall of light and sound that felt like a sledgehammer blow. They scrambled to their feet as a new sound grew, seeming to fill the tunnel. The roar became deafening, as slabs of rock dislodged by the blast crashed to the tunnel floor in a cascading avalanche that threatened to engulf them. Dust and bits of rock fell on their heads and shoulders as more of the ceiling gave way. Juan flicked on the flashlight just as a chunk of stone the size of a truck engine slammed into the ground in front of him. He leapt over it like a hurdler and kept running.

Overhead, cracks appeared in the roof, jagged lines that branched and forked like black lightning, while behind them the din of collapsing rock rose to a crescendo.

And then it began to subside. The roar petered out until only a few stones plinked and clattered. Juan finally slowed, his chest sucking in draughts of dust-laden air. He aimed the light toward the tunnel behind them. It was choked floor to ceiling with rubble.

“You okay?” he gasped.

Linc touched the back of his leg where a shard of stone had hit him. There was no blood when he looked at his fingers.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ll be better when we get out of all this dust. Come on.”

“Look on the bright side,” Linc said as they started walking again. “We don’t have to worry about them coming up behind us anymore.”

“I always had you pegged for a Pollyanna.”

They spent another two hours exploring the underground facility. They found bunks for one hundred and eighty prisoners, rooms that had once been laboratories, and a piece of equipment Linc recognized as an atmospheric chamber.

“Probably to test the effects of explosive decompression,” he’d remarked.

At last, they came to the end of the long tunnel. It didn’t peter out or pinch off. Rather, a section of the roof had collapsed, and both men recognized that it had been blasted free. Juan inhaled next to the mound of rubble, noting that a faint trace of explosive lingered.

“This was brought down recently.”

“When the Responsivists pulled out?”

Juan nodded, not giving in to his disappointment just yet. He scrambled up the sloping pile of loose rocks, his feet dislodging debris as he neared the top. He pressed himself flat, and ran the light along the seam where the shattered stone met the ceiling. He called down for Linc to join him.

“There was nothing in this catacomb that the Responsivists would care that we see. It’s all just old junk left by the Japanese Army.”

“So whatever they’re hiding is beyond this.”

“Stands to reason,” Juan said. “And since they risked coming down here after us, I bet that our exit is on the other side, too.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

With the water used up to improvise the gas attack, an hour of backbreaking work left Juan’s tongue a sticky swollen mass, as if some scaly reptile had curled up and gone to sleep in his mouth. His fingers were raw and bleeding from shifting the jagged stones, and his muscles ached from the cramped position.

At his side, Linc worked with the efficiency of an indefatigable machine. It looked as if nothing fazed him, but Juan knew even Lincoln’s vast reserves of strength weren’t inexhaustible.

Bit by bit, they burrowed their way into the rubble, moving carefully, testing the ceiling to ensure their actions didn’t bring down more of the shattered stone. They changed positions every thirty minutes. First Juan attacked the debris and passed stones back to Linc’s waiting hands, and then Linc would take point, loosening boulders and handing them back to the Chairman. Because Linc was so broad in the shoulders and chest, the passageway had to be expanded to almost twice Juan’s size.

Juan was back at the rock face and reached for a handhold on a particularly large stone, but, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t loosen it from the rest. It seemed to have been locked into place. He shifted some smaller, fist-sized stones, hoping to get leverage, and pulled with everything he had. The rock didn’t so much as wiggle.

Above the lump of stone, the ceiling was rife with cracks and fissures, as unstable as the area the Responsivists brought down with their grenade. Miners called such a ceiling a bunch of hanging grapes, and Juan knew that a chunk could dislodge without warning. He’d never felt the chilling effects of claustrophobia before, but he could feel the icy fingers of panic trying to worm their way into his mind.

“What’s the problem?” Linc panted behind him.

Juan had to work his tongue around his mouth to loosen his jaw enough to speak. “There’s a stone here I can’t move.”