Tunnel of Secrets by Franklin W. Dixon

Author:Franklin W. Dixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

11

THE CAVERN OF DOOM

FRANK

I THINK I WAS MORE nervous just watching Joe climb than he was actually climbing. I was letting my brother risk his life, and I was pretty much helpless if anything went wrong.

Despite his confident act, I could tell he was scared. But I guess that’s a good thing. I know from experience that a little bit of fear can sharpen your focus during life-or-death situations. Like our dad says, even heroes feel frightened sometimes; they just don’t let it stop them from doing what needs to be done.

And Joe was handling it like a hero. Or a gecko. The way he was flying up the wall, you’d think he’d been born with sticky lizard feet. He was halfway up the wall and I was finally starting to relax when . . .

“Uh-oh,” I heard him say.

“Joe, are you . . . ,” I started to ask, when a whooshing sound cut me off. I barely had time to register the stone spike barreling down from the ceiling.

The wall was booby-trapped!

“WATCH OUT!” I yelled.

Joe let go with his right hand and swung away from the wall as the spike whistled past, leaving him hanging by his left hand. The spike shattered into a million pieces on the floor below, showering me with stone shrapnel.

I dove out of the way. When I looked back up, Joe was dangling from one handhold with both hands, struggling to regain his footing.

“Make sure to put your foot back on the same stone as before!” I yelled. “Any of the others could be booby-trapped too!”

It took an excruciating few seconds before Joe managed to steady himself.

“That was way too close,” he called down. “So much for an easy climb.”

“Stay where you are,” I warned. “We have to assume the rest of them are rigged as well.”

“Sure, I’ll just hang here and read a comic book,” Joe said sarcastically.

“Give me a second to think,” I said.

Whoever had engineered this was serious about keeping people out (as if the Admiral’s corpse hadn’t been enough evidence of that). They’d made the climb look simple for a reason: Lure you in until you’re too far up to drop safely and then—wham! Spikes start dropping, either skewering you like a kabob or plunging you to your death when you try to get out of the way. It was also possible that certain handholds had been rigged all the way up and Joe had just been lucky enough to avoid them. Either way, we had to figure out something quick, before his muscles gave out.

“I could try to follow the same path down that I took up,” Joe called.

“It’s too dangerous,” I said. Even I knew that climbing down is a lot harder than climbing up. You can’t see where you’re going, for one. And Joe was already fatigued from the climb up, making his chances of falling a lot higher. I looked around the chamber, hoping something would spark a solution. There had to be a safe

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