LITMIR.BIZ

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response was a noncommittal grunt. She turned her head to point nose down again as she tried to flatten and relax her body and wriggle back another few millimetres. The tip of her nose touched the icy runnel of water and she jerked up, only to crack her helmet on the unyielding ceiling.

      ‘Does it ever occur to you, Alex,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘that we might be nuts?’

      A deep chuckle was amplified by the confined space. ‘All the time, mate.’

      He was still enjoying himself, though, wasn’t he? Getting a kick out of overcoming the odds to render assistance to someone in trouble. More than one person in this case. The reminder of why they were here was enough to make Sam try again. And try harder. The effort and pain of a scraped elbow elicited a grunt this time.

      ‘You’ve got your elbows too far behind your shoulders.’ The light from the lamp on the front of Alex’s helmet was reflecting off wet rock as he peered back at Sam. ‘Wriggle back and extend one arm in front of you.’

      Sam resisted the impulse to tell him he wasn’t saying anything she didn’t already know. It would only provide justification for some smart rejoinder that underlined the fact she hadn’t been focussed enough. That she wasn’t firing on all cylinders right now. It could well come back to haunt her for weeks, too. As the only female member of an exclusive team, Sam had to make sure she kept up. The incentive to try to get one step ahead at least occasionally was always strong but the extra adrenaline that always kept her thinking fast enough and capable of physical feats that had long since made her ‘one of the boys’ was just…gone.

      Why now?

      The painfully slow backward movement finally reached a successful turning point. Sam eased her arm free and then pushed it forward, finding she now had plenty of space to move in the desired direction. There was room to get onto all fours after the short squeeze and Sam found herself crawling, like some overgrown infant, with the light from her helmet illuminating the shape ahead of her.

      ‘How on earth did you fit through that gap, Alex?’

      ‘Sheer skill,’ he responded easily. ‘I’m just too good.’

      ‘Huh!’ Sam’s snort was not without an element of affection. Alex Henry might well be the best in their team of elite paramedics but she wasn’t about to encourage any personal trumpet blowing here. ‘I suspect you’re some kind of shape-shifter,’ she told him. ‘You can turn into a snake any time you like.’

      Another chuckle. ‘Funny you should say that. My last girlfriend said something rather similar.’

      The corner of Sam’s mouth lifted into a private, wry smile. Sonia must have tried too hard to pin Alex down, then. She must have been given the brush-off, probably in the nicest possible way, but women did tend to get rather passionate about staking a claim on Alex Henry.

      Hardly surprising given the combination of dark, good looks, a very sharp intelligence, humour and a career that was dramatic enough to make most females go at least a little weak in the knees.

      Funny that it had the opposite effect the other way around. The same skills Sam possessed in the way of courage, assertiveness and determination were always enough to scare men away remarkably fast.

      ‘You guys OK?’ The shout came from well ahead. From one of those strange people who actually did this sort of underground thing as a sport. He was the member of the group who had been left uninjured by the passage collapse and had been able to return to the surface and summon help.

      ‘We’re fine,’ Alex called back. ‘Minor hold-up in that last stretch.’

      ‘Yeah. Bit tight, isn’t it? You can see why the other teams need to go the long way with their gear.’

      The skills and tools needed to deal with people buried under rock were being brought in by the team of Urban Search and Rescue technicians whose helicopter had landed in this remote part of the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island only minutes after the SERT team’s arrival.

      ‘You’ve got a bit of deeper water coming up and then the pit’s round the next bend after that.’

      ‘How deep’s the water?’ Sam tried to sound casual but there was no way she was in the mood for any underground diving.

      ‘Only a couple of inches. No big deal.’

      It felt like a big deal for Sam. The water was running swiftly enough to splash continuously into her face. The volume was enough to make the waterproofing of her overalls inadequate and within seconds the leather gloves she wore felt like concrete mittens. In a few minutes she was going to have to negotiate a tricky climb down a narrow, flexible aluminium ladder that was a permanent fixture on this caving route. Doing it with frozen hands and wet boot soles was not going to be fun.

      But who’d ever promised that her chosen profession would always contain elements of pleasure, anyway? And had she ever really enjoyed pushing herself to such limits or had it simply evolved into a way of life? With three older brothers competing for the attention of a father who’d been a legend in the police force, achieving something beyond expectations had been the only way to get noticed.

      Sam had been far too young when her mother had died and not being noticed had made for a lonely existence. Maybe the real pleasure to come from testing herself had been in the approval of others and she had merely swapped one tribe of males for another in adulthood.

      It was not a pleasant revelation. If the thrill had come from chasing that approval and for some reason that was suddenly no longer enough, then Sam was about to face a major life crisis comparable to the childhood trauma of losing her mother. What did she have to show for her thirty-four years on earth apart from an impressive array of pre-hospital emergency medical skills and a passion for practising them under the most difficult conditions imaginable?

      Nothing, that’s what.

      It was her life. And for the last five years, since leaving a road-based ambulance job, Sam had lived and breathed SERT. Her friends were her fellow team members and their partners, so her social life revolved around people who shared her passion. Her sport and recreation consisted of training in whatever area of skill was deemed useful and any spare time was taken up with minimal attention to life’s chores in order to gain opportunities to improve her knowledge base.

      She was a SERT geek!

      Proud of her status as the only female to make the grade. Happy to be one of the boys and eager to hurl herself into whatever dangerous mission she was lucky enough to score on her shifts.

      The appreciative whistle from Alex broke the downward spiral of Sam’s thoughts that were trickling beneath what she needed to focus on as she carefully made her way down the ladder. Sadly, it wasn’t her skill in managing to keep the ladder so steady during her descent that he was admiring.

      ‘Will you look at that?’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m beginning to understand why you guys do this stuff.’

      ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ But the agreement from their guide was perfunctory. ‘Come on, we need to go this way.’

      Sam had only a few seconds to scan what had impressed Alex so much. The vertical drop from the higher-level tunnel ended in a huge cave festooned with stalactites over a black pool of water where massive stalagmites protruded like islands in an alien seascape. Shadows from her lamp cast shadows that accentuated the eerie scene but there was no time to do any more than register and file away the new experience. Not far into the tunnel leading away from the other side of the pool was where the accident had occurred. One man lay unable to move, thanks to a badly fractured leg. Two other men lay either beyond, or beneath, the rockfall, which had been caused by a minor earth tremor. It was fortunate there was no time to dwell on the possibility of another earthquake.

      ‘Bruce! How’re you doing, buddy?’

      ‘Thought you were never coming back, Mike.’

      ‘Sorry, mate. I had to wait for the chopper to get here so I could show them where

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