Текст книги "Inca Gold"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

    Finally, he leveled out over the floor of the sacrificial pool. No firm sand or plant life, just one uneven patch of ugly brown silt broken by clusters of grayish rock. "I have the bottom at slightly over thirty-six meters. Still no sign of Kelsey or Rodgers."

    Far above the pool, Miller gave Giordino a dazed look. "They must be down there. Impossible for them to simply vanish."

    Far below, Pitt kicked slowly across the bottom, careful to stay a good meter above the rocks and especially the silt, which might billow into a blinding cloud and reduce his visibility to zero within seconds. Once disturbed, silt could remain suspended for several hours before settling back to the bottom. He gave an involuntary shudder. The water had turned uncomfortably cold as he passed into a cool layer suspended beneath the warmer water above. He slowed and drifted, adding enough lift from his compensator for slight buoyancy, achieving a slight head-down, fins-up swimming position.

    Cautiously, he reached down and gently sank his hands into the brown muck. They touched bedrock before the silt rose to his wrists. Pitt thought it strange the silt was so shallow. After countless centuries of erosion from the walls and runoff from the ground above, the rocky subsurface should have been covered with a layer at least 2 meters (over 6 feet) deep. He went motionless and floated over what looked like a field of bleached white tree limbs sprouting from the mud. Gripping one that was gnarled with small protrusions, he eased it out of the bed of silt. He found himself staring at a spinal column from an ancient sacrificial victim.

    Giordino's voice broke through his earphones. "Speak to me."

    "Depth thirty-seven meters," Pitt answered as he flung aside the spinal column. "The floor of the pool is a bone yard. There must be two hundred skeletons scattered around down here."

    "Still no sign of bodies?"

    "Not yet."

    Pitt began to feel an icy finger trail up the nape of his neck as he spotted a skeleton with a bony hand pointing into the gloom. Beside the rib cage was a rusty breastplate, while the skull was still encased in what he guessed was a sixteenth-century Spanish helmet.

    Pitt reported the sighting to Giordino. "Tell Doc Miller I've found a long-dead Spaniard complete with helmet and breastplate down here." Then, as if drawn by an unseen force, his eyes followed in the direction a curled finger of the hand pointed.

    There was another body, one that had died more recently. It appeared to be a male with the legs drawn up and the head tilted back. Decomposition had not had time to fully break down the flesh. The corpse was still in a state of saponification, where the meaty tissue and organs had turned into a firm soaplike substance.

    The expensive hiking boots, a red silk scarf knotted around the neck, and a Navajo silver belt buckle inlaid with turquoise stones made it easy for Pitt to recognize someone who was not a local peasant. Whoever he was, he was not young. Strands of long silver hair and beard swayed with the current from Pitt's movements. A wide gash in the neck also showed how he had died.

    A thick gold ring with a large yellow stone flashed under the beam of the dive light. The thought occurred to Pitt that the ring might come in handy for identifying the body. Fighting the bile rising in his throat, he easily pulled the ring over the knuckle of the dead man's rotting finger while half expecting a shadowy form to appear and accuse him of acting like a ghoul. Disagreeable as the job was, he swished the ring through the silt to clean off any remnant of its former owner, and then slipped it onto one of his own fingers so he wouldn't lose it.

    "I have another one," he notified Giordino.

    "One of the divers or an old Spaniard?"

    "Neither. This one looks to be a few months to a year old."

    Do you want to retrieve it?" asked Giordino.

    "Not yet. We'll wait until after we find Doc Miller's people-" Pitt suddenly broke off as he was struck by an enormous force of water that surged into the pool from an unseen passage on the opposite wall and churned up the silt like dust whirling around a tornado. He would have tumbled out of control like a leaf in the wind by the unexpected energy of the turbulence but for his safety line. As it was he barely kept a firm grip on his dive light.

    "That was a hell of a jerk," said Giordino with concern. "What's going on?"

    "I've been struck by a powerful surge from nowhere," Pitt replied, relaxing and allowing himself to go with the flow. "That explains why the silt layer is so shallow. It's periodically swept away by the turbulence."

    "Probably fed by an underground water system that builds up pressure and releases it as a surge across the floor of the sinkhole," Giordino speculated. "Shall we pull you out?"

    "No, leave me be. Visibility is nil, but I don't seem to be in any immediate danger. Slowly release the safety line and let's see where the current carries me. There must be an outlet somewhere."

    "Too dangerous. You might get hung up and trapped."

    "Not if I keep from entangling my safety line," Pitt said easily.

    On the surface, Giordino studied his watch. "You've been down sixteen minutes. How's your air?"

    Pitt held his pressure gauge in front of his face mask. He could barely read the needle through the maelstrom of silt. "Good for another twenty minutes."

    "I'll give you ten. After that, at your present depth, you'll be looking at decompression stops."

    "You're the boss," Pitt came back agreeably.

    "What's your situation?"

    "Feels like I'm being pulled into a narrow tunnel feet first. I can touch the walls closing around me. Lucky I have a safety line. Impossible to swim against the surge."

    Giordino turned to Miller. "Sounds as if he may have a lead on what happened to your divers."

    Miller shook his head in anger. "I warned them. They could have avoided this tragedy by keeping their dive in shallow depths."

    Pitt felt as though he was being sucked through the narrow slot for an hour when it was only twenty seconds. The silt cloud had faded slightly, most of it remaining in the deep pool behind. He began to see his surroundings more clearly. His compass showed he was being carried in a southeasterly direction. Then the walls suddenly opened out into one enormous, flooded room. To his right and below he caught the momentary flash of something glinting in the murk. Something metallic vaguely reflecting the silt-dimmed beam of his dive light. It was an abandoned air tank. Nearby was a second one. He swam over and peered at their pressure gauges. The needles were pegged on empty. He angled his dive light around in a circle, expecting to see dead bodies floating in the darkness like phantom demons.

    The cool bottom water had drained away a measure of Pitt's strength and he could feel his motions becoming sluggish. Although Giordino's voice still came through the earphones as clearly as if Pitt was standing next to him, the words seemed less distinct. Pitt switched his mind off automatic and put it on full control, sending out instructions to check data gauges, safety line, and buoyancy compensator as if there were another Pitt inside his head.

    He mentally sharpened his senses and forced himself to be alert. If the bodies were swept into a side passage, he thought, he could easily pass them by and never notice. But a quick search turned up nothing but a pair of discarded swim fins. Pitt aimed the dive light upward and saw the reflective glitter of surface water that indicated the upper dome of the chamber contained an air pocket.

    He also glimpsed a pair of white feet.

    Trapped far from the outside world in a prison of perpetual silence, breathing in a small pocket of air millions of years old and lying smothered in total blackness deep under the earth is too alien, too terrible to imagine. The horror of dying under such terrifying conditions can provide nightmares on a par with being locked in a closet full of snakes.

    After initial panic had passed and a small degree of rationality was retrieved, any hope that Shannon and Rodgers had of surviving vanished when the air in their tanks became exhausted and the final spark of life in the batteries of their dive lights gave out. The air in the small pocket soon became foul and stale from their own breathing. Dazed and lightheaded from lack of oxygen, they knew their suffering would only end when the watery chamber became their tomb.

    The underground current had sucked them into the cavern after Shannon had excitedly dived to the bottom of the sinkhole after glimpsing the field of bones. Rodgers had faithfully followed and exhausted himself in a frantic effort to escape the surge. The last of their air had been used up in a vain attempt to find another passage leading out of the chamber. There was no exit, no escape. They could only drift in the blackness, held afloat by their buoyancy compensators, and wait to die.

    Rodgers, for all his guts, was in a bad way, and Shannon was just hanging on by a thread when suddenly she noticed a flickering light in the forbidding water below. Then it became a bright, yellow beam stabbing the blackness in her direction. Was her numbed mind playing tricks? Did she dare entertain a glimmer of hope?

    "They've found us," she finally gasped as the light moved toward her.

    Rodgers, his face etched and gray with fatigue and despair, stared blankly down at the approaching light beam without reaction. The lack of breathable air and the crushing blackness had left him in a near comatose state. His eyes were open and he was still breathing, and, incredibly, he still tightly grasped his camera. He felt a vague awareness that he was entering the tunnel of light described by people who returned from death.

    Shannon felt a hand grab her foot, and then a head popped out of the water less than an arm's length away. The dive light was beamed into her eyes, momentarily blinding her. Then it moved onto Rodgers's face. Instantly recognizing who was the worse off, Pitt reached under one arm and took hold of an auxiliary air regulator that was connected to the dual valve manifold of his air tanks. He quickly slipped the mouthpiece of the regulator between Rodgers's lips. Then he passed Shannon a reserve pony bottle and air regulator that was attached to his waist belt.

    Several deep breaths later, the revival in mood and physical well-being was nothing short of miraculous. Shannon gave Pitt a big bear hug as a renewed Rodgers pumped his hand so vigorously he nearly sprained Pitt's wrist. There were moments of speechless joy as all three were swept away in a euphoria of relief and excitement.

    Only when Pitt realized that Giordino was shouting through his earphones, demanding a situation report, did he announce, "Tell Doc Miller I've found his lost lambs. They are alive, repeat, they are alive and well."

    "You have them?" Giordino burst through Pitt's earphones. "They're not dead?"

    "A little pale around the gills but otherwise in good shape."

    "How is it possible?" muttered a disbelieving Miller.

    Giordino nodded. "The Doc wants to know how they stayed alive."

    "The current swept them into a chamber with an air pocket in its dome. Lucky I arrived when I did. They were minutes away from using up the oxygen."

    The crowd grouped around the amplifier was stunned by the announcement. But as the news sank in, relief spread across every face, and the ancient stone city echoed with cheers and applause. Miller turned away as if wiping tears from his eyes while Giordino smiled and smiled.

    Down in the chamber Pitt motioned that he could not remove his full face mask and converse. He indicated they would have to communicate through hand signals. Shannon and Rodgers nodded, and then Pitt began to describe visually the procedure for their escape.

    Since the lost divers had dropped all of their useless dive gear, except for face masks and buoyancy compensators, Pitt felt confident the three of them could be pulled back through the narrow shaft against the current and into the main pool by his phone and safety line without complications. According to the manufacturers' specs, the nylon line and phone cable could support up to almost six thousand pounds.

    He signaled Shannon to wrap one leg and one arm around the line and lead off, breathing through her pony bottle. Rodgers would repeat the step and follow, with Pitt bringing up the rear close enough for the spare regulator to reach Rodgers's mouth. When Pitt was sure they were stable and breathing easy, he alerted Giordino.

    "We're positioned and ready for escape."

    Giordino paused and stared at the young archaeology students, their hands gripping the safety line, poised as if ready for a tug-of-war. He studied their impatient expressions and quickly realized he would have to keep their enthusiasm and excitement in check or they might haul the divers through the rock passageway like so much meat through a jagged pipe. "Stand by. Give me your depth."

    "I read slightly over seventeen meters. Much higher than the bottom of the sinkhole. We were sucked into a passage that sloped upward for twenty meters."

    "You're borderline," Giordino informed him, "but the others have exceeded their time and pressure limits. I'll compute and advise you of decompression stops."

    "Don't make them too long. Once the pony bottle is empty, it won't take long for the three of us to use up what air I have left in my twin tanks."

    "Perish the thought. If I don't hold these kids by the collar, they'll jerk you out of there so fast you'll feel like you were fired from a cannonball."

    "Try to keep it civilized."

    Giordino held up his hand as a signal for the students to begin pulling. "Here we go."

    "Bring on the jugglers and the clowns," Pitt answered in good humor.

    The safety line became taut and the long, slow haul began. The rush of the surge through the shaft was matched by the gurgling of their exhaust bubbles from the air regulators. With nothing to do now but grip the line, Pitt relaxed and went limp, allowing his body to be drawn against the flow of the underground current that gushed through the narrow slot like air through a venturi tube. The lighter silt-clouded water in the pool at the end of the passage seemed miles away. Time had no meaning, and he felt as if he'd been immersed for an age. Only Giordino's steady voice helped Pitt keep his grip on reality.

    "Cry out if we haul too fast," ordered Giordino.

    "Looking good," Pitt replied, hearing his air tanks grinding against the ceiling of the shaft.

    What is your estimate of the current's rate of speed?"

    "Close to eight knots."

    Small wonder your bodies are causing severe resistance. I've got ten kids up here, pulling their hearts out."

    "Six more meters and we're out of here," Pitt informed him.

    And then a minute, probably a minute and a half, struggling to hold on to the safety line as they were buffeted by the diminishing force of the torrent, and they broke free of the shaft into the cloud of silt swirling around the floor of the sacrificial pool. Another minute and they were pulled upward and clear from the drag of the current and into transparent, unclouded water. Pitt looked up, saw the light filtering through the green slime, and felt a wondrous sense of relief.

    Giordino knew they were free of the suction when the tension on the safety line suddenly diminished. He ordered a halt to the ascent operation as he rechecked his decompression data on a laptop computer. One stop of eight minutes would take Pitt out of any danger of decompression sickness, but the archaeology project divers would need stops of far longer duration. They had been down over two hours at depths ranging from 17 to 37 meters (67 to 122 feet). They would require at least two stops lasting over an hour. How much air was left in Pitt's tanks to sustain them? That was the life-or-death dilemma. Enough for ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty?

    At sea level, or one atmosphere, the normal human body contains about one liter of dissolved nitrogen. Breathing larger quantities of air under the pressure of water depth increases the absorption of nitrogen to two liters at two atmospheres (10 meters, or 30 feet of water depth), three liters at three atmospheres (30 meters, or 90 feet), and so on. During diving the excess nitrogen is rapidly dissolved in the blood, carried throughout the body, and stored in the tissues. When a diver begins to ascend, the situation is reversed, only this time far more slowly. As the water pressure decreases, the overabundance of nitrogen travels to the lungs and is eliminated by respiration. If the diver rises too quickly, normal breathing can't cope and bubbles of nitrogen form in the blood, body tissue, and joints, causing decompression sickness, better known as the bends, a condition that has crippled or killed thousands of divers over the past century.

    Finally, Giordino set aside the computer and called Pitt. "Dirk?"

    "I hear you."

    "Bad news. There isn't enough air left in your tanks for the lady and her friend to make the necessary decompression stops."

    "Tell me something I don't know," Pitt came back. "What about backup tanks in the chopper?"

    "No such luck," moaned Giordino. "In our rush to leave the ship the crew threw on an air compressor but forgot to load extra air tanks."

    Pitt stared through his face mask at Rodgers, still clutching his camera and shooting pictures. The photographer gave him a thumbs up sign as though he'd just cleared the pool table at the neighborhood saloon. Pitt's gaze moved to Shannon. Her hazel eyes stared back at him through her face mask, wide and content as if she thought the nightmare was over and her hero was going to sweep her off to his castle. She had not realized the worst was far from over. For the first time he noticed that she had blond hair, and Pitt found himself wondering what she looked like in only her swim suit without the diving equipment.

    The daydream was over almost as soon as it was begun. His mind came back on an even keel and he spoke into his face mask receiver. "Al, you said the compressor is on board the chopper."

    "I did."

    "Send down the tool kit. You'll find it in the storage locker of the chopper."

    "Make sense," Giordino urged.

    "The manifold valves on my air tanks," Pitt explained hastily. "They're the new prototypes NUMA is testing. I can shut off one independently of the other and then remove it from the manifold without expelling air from the opposite tank."

    "I read you, pal," said an enlightened Giordino. "You disconnect one of your twin tanks and breathe off the other. I pull up the empty and refill it with the compressor. Then we repeat the process until we satisfy the decompression schedule."

    "A glittering concept, don't you think?" asked Pitt with dark sarcasm.

    "Fundamental at best," grunted Giordino, artfully concealing his elation. "Hang at six-point-five meters for seventeen minutes. I'll send the tool kit down to you on the safety line. I just hope your plan works."

    "Never a doubt." Pitt's confidence seemed genuine. "When I step onto firm ground again, I'll expect a Dixieland band playing `Waiting for the Robert E. Lee'."

    "Spare me," Giordino groaned.

    As he ran toward the helicopter, he was confronted by Miller.

    "Why did you stop?" the anthropologist demanded. "Good God, man, what are you waiting for? Pull them up!"

    Giordino fixed the anthropologist with an icy stare. "Pull them to the surface now and they die."

    Miller looked blank. "Die?"

    "The bends, Doc, ever hear of it?"

    A look of understanding crossed Miller's face, and he slowly nodded. "I'm sorry. Please forgive an excitable old bone monger. I won't trouble you again."

    Giordino smiled sympathetically. He continued to the helicopter and climbed inside, never suspecting that Miller's words were as prophetic as a lead dime.

    The tool kit, consisting of several metric wrenches, a pair of pliers, two screwdrivers, and a geologist's hammer with a small pick on one end, was tied loosely to the safety line by a bowline knot and lowered by a small cord. Once the tools were in Pitt's hands he gripped the air tank pack between his knees. Next he adroitly shut off one valve and unthreaded it from the manifold with a wrench. When one air tank came free, he attached it to the cord.

    "Cargo up," Pitt announced.

    In less than four minutes, the tank was raised by willing hands on the secondary cord, connected to the throbbing gas-engine compressor and taking on purified air. Giordino was cursing, sweet talking, and begging the compressor to pump 3500 pounds of air per square inch into the 100-cubic-foot steel tank in record time. The needle on the pressure gauge was just shy of 1800 pounds when Pitt warned him that Shannon's pony bottle was dry and his lone tank had only 400 pounds left. With three of them sucking on one tank, that did not leave a comfortable safety margin. Giordino cut off the compressor when the pressure reached 2500 and wasted no time in sending the tank back down into the sinkhole. The process was repeated three more times after Pitt and the other divers moved to their next decompression stop at three meters, which meant they had to endure several minutes in the slime. The whole procedure went off without a hitch.

    Giordino allowed an ample safety margin. He let nearly forty minutes pass before he pronounced it safe for Shannon and Rodgers to surface and be lifted to the brink of the sacrificial pool. It was a measure of his complete confidence in his friend that Pitt didn't even bother to question the accuracy of Giordino's calculations. Ladies went first as Pitt encircled Shannon's waist with the strap and buckle that was attached to the safety and communications line. He waved to the faces peering over the edge and Shannon was on her way to dry land.

    Rodgers was next. His utter exhaustion after his narrow brush with death was forgotten at the sheer exhilaration of being lifted out of the godforsaken pool of death and slime, never, he swore, to return. A gnawing hunger and a great thirst mushroomed inside him. He remembered a bottle of vodka that he kept in his tent and he began to think of reaching for it as though it were the holy grail. He was high enough now to see the faces of Dr. Miller and the Peruvian archaeology students. He had never been as happy to see anyone in his life. He was too overjoyed to notice that none of them was smiling.

    Then, as he was hoisted over the edge of the sinkhole, he saw to his astonishment and horror a sight that was completely unexpected.

    Dr. Miller, Shannon, and the Peruvian university students stepped back once Rodgers was on solid ground. As soon as he had unbuckled the safety line he saw that they all stood somberly with their hands clasped behind their necks.

    There were six in all, Chinese-manufactured Type 56-1 assault rifles gripped ominously by six pairs of steady hands. The six men were strung out in a rough semicircle around the archaeologists, small, blank-faced, silent men dressed in wool ponchos, sandals, and felt hats. Their furtive dark eyes darted from the captured group to Rodgers.

    To Shannon, these men were not simple hill-folk bandits supplementing their meager incomes by robbing visitors of food and material goods that could be hawked in public markets, they had to be hardened killers of the Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"), a Maoist revolutionary group that had terrorized Peru since 1981 by murdering thousands of innocent victims, including political leaders, policemen, and army soldiers. She was suddenly gripped by terror. The Shining Path killers were notorious for attaching explosives to their victims and blasting them to pieces.

    After their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured in September 1992, the guerrilla movement had split into unorganized splinter groups that carried out haphazard car bombings and assassinations by bloodcrazed death squads that achieved nothing for the people of Peru but tragedy and grief. The guerrillas stood around their captives, alert and watchful, with sadistic anticipation in their eyes.

    One of them, an older man with an immense sweeping moustache, motioned for Rodgers to join the other captives. "Are there more people down there?" he asked in English with the barest trace of a Spanish accent.

    Miller hesitated and cast a side glance at Giordino.

    Giordino nodded at Rodgers. "That man is the last," he snapped in a tone filled with defiance. "He and the lady were the only divers."

    The rebel guerrilla gazed at Giordino through lifeless, carbon black eyes. Then he stepped to the sheer drop of the sacrificial pool and peered downward. He saw a head floating in the middle of green slime. "That is good," he said in a sinister tone.

    He picked up the safety line that descended into the water, took a machete from his belt and brought it down in a deft swing, severing the line from the reel. Then the expressionless face smiled a morbid smile as he casually held the end of the line over the edge for a moment before dropping it into the unescapable sinkhole.

    Pitt felt like the chump in a Laurel and Hardy movie who yells to be saved from drowning and is thrown both ends of a rope. Holding up the severed end of the safety and communications line, he stared at it, incredulous. Besides having his means of escape dropped around his head, he had lost all contact with Giordino. He floated in the slime in total ignorance of the hostile events occurring above the sinkhole. He unbuckled the head straps holding the full face mask securely around his head, pulled it off, and stared up at the rim expectantly. Nobody stared back.

    Pitt was half a second away from shouting for help when a roaring blast of gunfire reverberated around the limestone walls of the sinkhole for a solid sixty seconds. The acoustics of the stone amplified the sound deafeningly. Then, as abruptly as the automatic weapons' fire cut the quiet jungle, the harsh clatter faded and all went strangely silent. Pitt's thoughts were hurtling around in an unbreakable circle. To say he was mystified was a vast understatement. What was happening up there? Who was doing the shooting, and at whom? He became increasingly apprehensive with each passing moment. He had to get out of this death pit. But how? He didn't need a manual on mountain climbing to tell him it was impossible to climb the sheer ninety-degree walls without proper equipment or help from above.

    Giordino would never have deserted him, he thought bleakly. Never-unless his friend was injured or unconscious. He didn't allow himself to dwell on the unthinkable possibility that Giordino was dead. Heartsick and mad from the desperation welling up inside him, Pitt shouted to the open sky, his voice echoing in the deep chamber. His only answer was a deathly stillness. He couldn't conceive why any of this was happening. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he would have to climb out alone. He looked up at the sky. There was less than two hours of daylight left. If he was to save himself, he had to start now. But what of the unseen intruders with guns? The nagging question was would they wait until he was as exposed as a fly on a windowpane before they blew him away? Or did they figure he was as good as dead? He decided not to wait to find out. Nothing short of the threat of being thrown in molten lava could keep him in that hot, scummy-layered water through the night.

    He floated on his back and examined the walls that seemed to reach to a passing cloud, and tried to recall what he'd read about limestone in what seemed a centuries-old geology course in college. Limestone: a sedimentary rock composed of calcium carbonate, a sort of blend of crystalline calcite and carbonate mud, produced by lime-secreting organisms from ancient coral reefs. Limestones vary in texture and color. Not bad, Pitt thought, for a student who pulled a B – in the course. His old teacher would be proud of him.

    He was lucky he wasn't facing granite or basalt. The limestone was pockmarked with small hollow cavities and lined with tiny edges. He swam around the circular walls until he was under a small outcropping that protruded from the side about halfway to the top. He removed his air tank pack and the rest of his diving gear, except for the accessory belt, and let it drop to the floor of the sinkhole. All he kept were the pliers and the geologist's pick hammer from the tool kit. If for some unfathomable reason his best friend and the archaeologists above the ledge had been killed or wounded, and Pitt had been left to die in the sacrificial pool with only the ghosts of previous victims for company, he was damned well going to find out why.

    First, he pulled a dive knife from a sheath strapped to his leg and cut off two lengths of safety line. He tied one section of the line tightly to the narrow section of the pick hammer's handle close to the head so it wouldn't slip over the wider base. Then he tied a step-in loop at the free end of the line.

    Next he rigged a hook from the buckle of his accessory belt, bending it with the pliers until it resembled a C. He then fastened the second section of line to the hook with another step-in loop. When he was finished, he had functional, though rudimentary, climbing tools.

    Now came the tough part.

    Pitt's climbing technique was not exactly that of a veteran mountaineer. The sad truth was that he had never climbed any mountain except on a beaten trail by foot. What little he'd seen of experts scaling vertical rock walls came from public service television or magazine articles. Water was his element. His only contact with mountains was an occasional ski trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. He didn't know a piton (a metal spike with a ring in one end) from a carabiner (an oblong metal ring with a springloaded closing latch that hooks the climbing rope to the piton). He vaguely knew rappelling had something to do with descending a rope that wrapped under a thigh, across the body, and over the opposite shoulder.