Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  “Could I get that in layman’s terms?” Vasquez asked.

  “We swim underwater,” Burgess said. “Below the water table. The cave continues on the other side.”

  “How far underwater?” Sykes asked.

  “Not that far,” Truitt said. “The first time, I didn’t know exactly where I was going. I probably had two or three seconds of air left before I found the pocket, but then, I was holding my breath. You guys have air, right?”

  Peggy Romano had supplied each of them with a fifty-cubic-inch tank, the kind of emergency supply used by pilots forced to ditch their aircraft in the sea. Each contained fifteen minutes of air.

  “How long can you hold your breath?” MacKenzie asked him.

  “Five minutes,” Truitt said. “But I got a bit disoriented.”

  “I thought you didn’t get disoriented?”

  “I accidentally kicked the sediment on the bottom with my foot,” Truitt said. “Ten million years’ worth of silt. The water turned cloudier than clam chowder, but by then I was past the point of no return. I never said luck doesn’t play a part.”

  “Are you nuts?” Sykes said. “This guy is insane. He dives into a pool past the point of no return because he thinks there’s air on the other side.”

  “I’m still here, aren’t I?” Truitt said. “I never break the first law of caving. Tomorrow, I’ll string a guideline for the rest of you to follow. Just don’t lose the line.”

  DeLuca wasn’t sure if he slept or not. He had vivid dreams of climbing through the darkness. The blackness he experienced when he opened his eyes was profound and absolute, a complete absence of visual data that magnified everything else. He heard the blood rushing in his ears. He felt his heart thumping in his chest. Surrounded by his team members, the way he’d been so many nights in their tent in Balad, he nevertheless felt an intense sense of solitude, and a strange sadness—it made little sense, but for a while, the sadness was overwhelming, until he reached for his helmet and turned on his headlight, briefly, just long enough for him to regain his bearings. He shut the light off again.

  “You, too?” he heard MacKenzie whisper from where she lay next to him.

  “Me, too,” he admitted.

  “I keep thinking this is what death is like,” MacKenzie whispered.

  There was a long silence.

  “Wanna spoon?” MacKenzie asked.

  “Love to,” DeLuca said. He felt MacKenzie back into him, and he threw his arm over her side, hugging her close. “Just don’t tell my wife.”

  “You know what I always say,” she whispered. “What happens at the center of the earth stays at the center of the earth.”

  They slept.

  Seemingly seconds later, though it was hours, he heard Truitt’s watch beeping. They ate a quick breakfast. While they ate, Truitt tied green Cyalume chemlites at ten-foot intervals along a length of rope, cracking each chemlite to make it glow before moving on to the next one, the line like a string of Christmas lights where it piled up on the sand.

  “Is everybody clear what we have to do?” he asked. “Any questions? I’ll go first and I’ll give a tug to tell you when I’m on the other side, but if for some reason you don’t feel the tug, wait two minutes and then follow. Come one at a time and keep your eye on the chemlites. If you bunch up, the chances of somebody silting it up increase. Put your pack under your stomach if you want—it’ll help you float. The total swim is going to be about a hundred feet.”

  “I do have a question,” Vasquez said. “What if the reason we don’t feel a tug is that you’ve drowned, and then we follow you and one by one, we drown, too?”

  “That would suck for all of us, wouldn’t it?” Truitt said. “And try not to touch the ceiling either because it’s white gypsum and the shit is nasty if you get any down your collar or in your shorts. So, see you on the other side.”

  “You don’t need one of these?” MacKenzie said, offering him a spare oxygen bottle.

  “Air is for pussies,” he said. “No offense. Personally, it makes me lose focus.”

  DeLuca watched as Truitt disappeared into the water, his headlamp illuminating the bottom, where DeLuca saw bright orange disks and gray mineral crusts that looked like seashells or broken crockery. Then Truitt’s headlamp was gone, the way illuminated only by the string of chemlites, which disappeared into the maw of the earth.

  No one spoke. DeLuca looked at his watch. A minute passed. Then another. Sykes held the line, his head cocked as if he were listening for something. Three minutes passed, then four.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Sykes said. “Time to shove off then. I’ll go next…”

  “Wait a minute,” Vasquez said, his voice filled with a sudden urgency. “Hold on.”

  “What’s wrong?” DeLuca asked.

  “I’ve been testing my breather,” Hoolie said. “It’s empty. I mean, it had about tens seconds of air and then it ran out.” He looked at the gauge, tapping it against a rock. “The gauge says it’s full. Test yours.”

  Sykes put the regulator in his mouth and breathed, spitting the mouthpiece out a few moments later.

  “Mine’s empty, too,” he said. “Shit!” he shouted, his words echoing inside the cavity.

  “Hold on,” DeLuca commanded. “Nobody panics. Mack, how about you?”

  “Empty,” she said. “So’s the spare.”

  “The gauges must be faulty,” Vasquez said.

  “Stop,” DeLuca said, thinking. The mission was too important to abort. They had to try. “It doesn’t matter. We can do this. We just have to think a minute.”

  He looked to Penelope Burgess for ideas. She had none to offer.

  “Hoolie,” DeLuca said. “How many Ziploc bags do we have left?”

  “Half the box,” Hoolie said.

  “Everybody fill up three or four with air and tuck them inside your overalls. That should give us enough air to get to the other side if we need it. We used to do this when we were kids on Long Island—just remember when you open the bag to get underneath it, open it, stick your mouth in, and inhale. Don’t try to catch the bubbles from above—go like this,” he said, demonstrating. “Okay? We go as a team, buddy system. I don’t care what Truitt said—we’re stronger as a team than we are as individuals, right? So we help each other, buddy system. Move quickly but no panic. We can do this.”

  “I’m not saying we can’t,” MacKenzie said, steeling herself, “but if somehow we can’t… just on the off chance that we can’t—does anybody know where we are?”

  “LeDoux knows,” DeLuca said. “He’ll come and get us, even if he has to send the whole Third Army.”

  “But how will they know where to look?” MacKenzie asked. She had a point. DeLuca knelt and wrote in the sand with his finger, CI TEAM RED, then drew an arrow indicating the way they would go.

  “Thanks,” MacKenzie said.

  She went first with Sykes, followed by Hoolie, then Burgess, DeLuca bringing up the rear. They swam as far as they could on the surface, then collectively took deep breaths and dived at the count of three.

  The string of green lights led into a darkness that, because it was underwater, seemed even blacker and more complete than before. Burgess swam with a frog kick, while Vasquez chose a scissors kick. Sykes and MacKenzie were soon out of view. DeLuca held his breath, feeling the tightness in his chest increasing with every stroke. He swam down, keeping the green chemlites in view. He felt as if his eyes were going to burst from their sockets, his lungs aching, but he swam, until he needed air. He reached for a Ziploc bag, but it slipped from his fingers and was gone. He grabbed a second bag and inhaled from it. It was good, but it wasn’t enough. He swam quickly to catch up to the others as the string of chemlites turned to the right. He kept going. He needed air. He kept going.

  Then the water ahead of him turned cloudy. He reached up to grab the guideline just in time as the water around him turned opaque. Somebody had silted the pool. He wasn’t angry. He slowed his thoughts. It was somet
hing like a habit he had, when trouble loomed, telling himself, “If I’m going to die, I’m not going to die with fear in my heart…”

  He swam, pulling himself forward and holding on to the line, hand over hand, his headlamp illuminating only the water six inches ahead of him. He paused to pop his last air bag, inhaling.

  It wasn’t enough.

  He kept going. He could see nothing. He had to be close. How much farther? His lungs ached. Pain stabbed at his heart, and then he realized that the line was now slack in his hands.

  He slowed his thoughts. He slowed his thoughts. He slowed. Which way had he been heading? His muscles remembered which way the line had tugged, so he swam in that direction. Then, he had nothing left, could hold his breath no longer. He thought of his wife, and of his son, sorry that he’d never see them again.

  Suddenly, he felt a tug on his sleeve as Josh Truitt grabbed his arm and pulled him the last ten feet.

  He gasped as he broke the surface, supported on all sides by his team, their hands holding him up.

  “Are you all right?” Truitt asked.

  “I’m fine,” DeLuca said, shaking the water from his eyes. “Where to from here?”

  “Straight up,” Truitt said. “Maybe two hundred feet.” DeLuca looked up to see a narrow slit between two vertical walls, close enough, Truitt said, that they could chimney up without using ascenders.

  “Terrific,” DeLuca said. “Let’s go.”

  “You didn’t really do that when you were kids in Long Island, did you?” Burgess asked him when they had a private moment, after the others had begun the ascent.

  “No,” DeLuca said. “But it’s exactly the stupid kind of thing we would have tried.”

  They rested at the top, everyone but Truitt exhausted, then pushed forward down what Truitt had dubbed the Northeastern Borehole. They passed one spectacular chamber after the next, scrambling over chockblocks and talus fields, drop passages, an open traverse across a place Josh called the Bottomless Pit, and judging from how long it took for a tossed rock to reach the bottom, he was nearly right. They walked, climbed, and roped until they came to the edge of a precipice where their combined headlights revealed nothing in front of them. When Truitt took a pocket laser and projected it into the void, a beam that should have been visible from up to half a mile revealed nothing ahead.

  “I call this Gram’s Canyon, after Gram Parsons,” Truitt said. “I think it could be the largest underground canyon in the world. Some day I’m going to photograph it if I can figure out how to light it. The left wall is lagoon limestone and the right wall is reef limestone and I think the ceiling is the base plate of the Yates formation.”

  “It’s strange to think there’s so much beauty in front of us and we can’t see any of it,” MacKenzie said.

  “Sort of like sitting in a bathroom stall next to Catherine Zeta-Jones,” Hoolie said. “Not that I’ve ever done that. To my knowledge.”

  “That’s gross,” Mack said.

  They made good progress, moving through forests of stalactites, stalagmites, towers, and columns, past haystack-shaped mounds of flowstone, balancing on steppingstones that shifted underfoot as they crossed shallow ponds and deep water-filled crevasses. Here the ground was red with iron, there it was a curried yellow color from sulfur, until it turned white with gypsum forming carpets of cauliflower, then a prairie of straw crystals, dropping off into an inky void.

  DeLuca stopped beneath an arch to catch his breath. His legs felt as if they were turning to rubber. He let the others go on ahead while he cracked a power bar for energy. He chewed slowly, watching the headlamps of his teammates bobbing in the darkness, strung out along a relatively easy uphill trail. He turned off his own light for a moment, to save on batteries.

  Then he thought he heard something, but the sound came from behind him instead of in front of him.

  He froze, listening.

  He heard it again, the sound of gravel falling on rock. He’d thought he’d sensed that someone was following them an hour earlier but wrote it off to his imagination. Who could possibly be following them? And if someone was, why didn’t DeLuca see his lights?

  From his backpack, he quietly opened a Ziploc bag and took out his NVGs. The batteries powering the goggles were only good for a few hours, and without peripheral vision or depth perception, they weren’t the tool of choice for caving, but whoever was following them was evidently using them, for when DeLuca donned his, he saw a man approaching, an infrared lamp glowing from his helmet.

  DeLuca took a second Ziploc bag from his pack and drew from it his Beretta, chambering a round before taking position to the side of the trail behind an outcrop. He waited. He heard footsteps, drawing closer. When the man passed him, DeLuca stepped out and put the gun to the base of the man’s skull.

  “Not another step,” DeLuca said.

  “Don’t shoot,” the man said, raising his hands in the air. “Please…”

  DeLuca put the gun down.

  “I hope you called your father before you came here,” DeLuca said. “He doesn’t know where you are.”

  “Agent DeLuca?” Marvin Yutahay said. He was wearing jeans, a denim workshirt and canvas high-top sneakers, a red bandana around his neck and a coil of rope over one shoulder.

  “What are you doing here, Marvin?” DeLuca asked. “Your old man thinks you went over the cliff at Koenig’s ranch.”

  “The bike did, but I got off,” Marvin said. “Koenig was trying to kill me. He killed Cheryl.”

  “I know,” DeLuca said. “That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here?”

  “Cheryl said Koenig had a second place near Carlsbad,” Marvin said. “Some sort of control center. She wouldn’t tell me any more, and she said she didn’t know where, exactly, so after he tried to kill me, I went to Carlsbad to ask around. When I heard on the caver grapevine that a government team was coming to do survey work, I went to the airport and then I followed you, but I didn’t know it was you. When I saw the sign you left at the water trap, I wasn’t sure if you knew I was here or what, but by then I’d come too far to turn around.”

  “You thought we were Koenig?” DeLuca said. Marvin shrugged. “And if we were, you were going to kill him?”

  “He killed Cheryl,” Marvin said. “Somebody needs to kill him to make it even.”

  “Come on,” DeLuca said. “The others are probably waiting for me to catch up. Where’d you get the NVGs?”

  “E-Bay,” Marvin said. “Tricks of the trade. I was down to my last set of batteries.”

  Marvin explained himself again when they reached the expedition party. Vasquez offered him a power bar, which he devoured. Marvin hadn’t been prepared for such an undertaking, evidently, but his determination made up for it.

  They rested again at the head of the canyon, pausing for a second round of MREs, during which Marvin told them how he’d navigated the water trap, using the snorkel he’d brought along, standard equipment among experienced gem hunters. Truitt, who’d described gem hunters with the less polite term “cave robbers,” held his tongue. Marvin had followed the string of chemlites until he reached the end, then saw in the distance, using his NVGs, three that had floated to the top of the pool on the far side, the image faint but enough to lead him to safety.

  “How’d you get through the hatch?” Sykes asked him.

  “I was hiding in the entrance pit,” he said. “Halfway up the wall. I was watching over your shoulder when you punched in the code.”

  While the others rested, Josh Truitt searched for the mark he’d made at the edge of a region he called the Bone Yard, a massive limestone maze resembling a large pile of porous bones. He returned a few minutes later to say he’d found it. The team seemed reenergized. Josh led the way, through an erratic three-dimensional webbing of shapes and forms, bridges and arches, keyholes and windows, slots and grooves. They climbed up and forward, angling this way, then that. Occasionally Truitt stopped to get his bearings. Midway through, they paused to r
est.

  “What exactly are you basing your decisions on?” Sykes said. “You change course but it all looks exactly the same.”

  “Humidity,” Truitt said. “Where we’re going is wetter than where we came from. The water percolates from above. We’re looking for the source.”

  “You can sense that?” Sykes said. “Changes in humidity?”

  “You can’t?” Truitt said.

  “My hair gets frizzy,” MacKenzie said. “That’s how I know. I’d kill for a shower.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Truitt said, “because you’re going to get one.”

  True to his word, they stopped where the Bone Yard met the ceiling, the air getting wetter and wetter until they could hear the sound of running water. Illumination showed a stream of water pouring out of a hole in the wall, falling through a narrow pit into a plunge pool Truitt said was five hundred meters down. By the look on his face, he seemed dismayed.

  “What is it?” DeLuca asked.

  “I was afraid of this,” Truitt said.

  “Of what?”

  “We want to go through there,” he said, pointing to the hole from which the water poured. “The stream is free surfaced on the other side, but with all the rain we’ve been having, the hydrostatic pressure might be more than we can handle. In midsummer, this thing would be dry. We’d just traverse across and zoop-zoop. It’s only about six feet, but against this kind of current, that’s a lot.”

  “You can’t do it?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, thinking. “I could bring a rope with me and then once I’m on the other side, I’ll pull whoever’s next through. Actually, I’ll bring two ropes and anchor one for the next person to climb on, and they can tie off on the second rope. The traverse across the pit is a little tricky. Penny, think you can handle that?”