by JC Ryan
“What is it, Ange?”
“LeClerc. He’s…he fell into a big hole. The others have all gone to rescue him. JR, you scared me! What were you yelling about?”
“Never mind, which way did the others go? Will I be able to catch them?”
“Yes,” she said, pointing out the correct passage. “But, be careful! Watch your feet.” With that, JR rushed off to catch the others, but Angela grabbed Cyndi before she could follow. “Tell me what he was yelling about!”
Cyndi stopped trying to follow JR and put her arms around her friend. “Ange, I think we found evidence of ancient humans! We’ve done it!”
The two were too worried about the others, even about LeClerc who had become persona non grata on the expedition, to think much further on what the discovery would mean for the expedition. Together they waited for word.
~~~
JR hurried along the passageway, guided by the rope and the faint sounds of voices ahead. His headlamp was beginning to flicker, a sign that he would need to stop and change the batteries soon. But, if possible, he would wait until he’d caught up with the group ahead. Within minutes, the voices were louder and he could make out fragments of what they were saying.
“Turned here. LeClerc was lagging behind.” That sounded like Carmen, definitely a woman, and JR knew Carmen had been with LeClerc.
“Look, he must’ve…disgusting. I told him…” Robert. What were they talking about?
“Never mind. Time enough to accuse him when we’ve rescued him. Carmen, where’s … oh!”
Rebecca’s startled cry galvanized JR, who began trotting through the corridor, every jolt making his headlamp go dark for a fraction of a second. With his left hand, he had hold of the rope as a guide, and from the sound of it the group was no more than seventy-five feet ahead. Suddenly, the rope snugged tight to the wall and caught him for a moment; they had turned. He slowed and, rounding the corner, saw everyone ringed around the outside of a small terminal room, looking down.
“JR!” said Carmen. “Glad you’re here.”
“Can you see him?” he responded.
“No, it’s too deep. He’s not answering, either. He’s unconscious.” Rebecca didn’t want to add the rest, ‘or dead.’ They still didn’t know how deep the hole was, nor what lay at the bottom. Whether ice or rock, it would have been a terrible thing to land on it, especially if LeClerc had gone in head first.
“Robert, do you reckon you can climb down there, with Summers and me to belay you?” JR’s question presented the only practical solution that he could see. He was taller and heavier than Cartwright, who was a big man himself. But, Summers’ visibly shaking body indicated he’d be useless, and neither of the women would be strong enough to get LeClerc in position to be hauled up. If Robert couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done. The implications staggered him, along with everyone else.
“All I can do is try, mate,” Robert answered confidently. “But, maybe someone should go and get Roosky to help bring us back up.”
“Too dangerous,” JR countered. “If something let go with him in here, then we’re trapped for good. We’ll go and get him only if we can’t get you back up. Fair enough?”
“No worries, mate. She’ll be apples.” JR correctly surmised that he had Robert’s agreement. Summers had gone completely silent.
While Robert checked his harness and the knot that connected it to the rope, JR consulted Summers about how far they could reasonably expect to pull the big Aussie up, assuming he couldn’t help for some reason. Summers wasn’t much help, but nodded when JR concluded that if he descended as far as fifty feet without result, they’d have to pull Roosky in before a second attempt could be made. JR looked for a sturdy and thick stalagmite around which to secure the rope, since he didn’t trust that pitons wouldn’t pull out of the shale stratum. Then Robert was ready, and without further drama, he dropped over the edge and began to rappel down with JR paying out rope as needed.
He’d gone about twenty feet when JR called down to get a report on what Robert could see.
“Nothing, mate. It’s dark as pitch down there. I can see maybe another twenty feet with my lamp on, but there’s no sign of the bottom.
Dismay among the others greeted that pronouncement. Rather than pull him up prematurely, JR called down for Robert to descend another twenty feet and look again. It had the same result. Rebecca stepped over to JR and put her hand on his arm.
“Josh,” she said, using the family nickname, “I doubt LeClerc could have survived a sixty-foot fall. Do you think we should risk anyone else’s life to retrieve his body?”
JR stared at her. Never leave a man behind was his mantra, as it was every Marine’s. But these weren’t Marines around him. They were civilians, and he couldn’t force them to comply with his standards. He looked around at the other faces, all looking to him for leadership, since Summers had apparently abdicated. They looked stunned, frightened and weary. It was time to cut their losses.
“We’re pulling you up, Robert. Give us what help you can.”
“Will do.”
Even the normally cheerful and optimistic Robert was subdued as the party made its way back to the main room to join Angie and Cyndi. Rebecca detained JR to bring up the rear as they coiled the rope. “JR, do you think you can persuade Summers to pack it in, now? We need to get back to the base, and this has affected everyone, even those who didn’t like LeClerc.”
“Did anyone actually like LeClerc?” JR inquired.
“Are you speaking ill of the dead?” she retorted.
JR shivered, a superstitious dread overcoming him. “Man, I hope he’s dead. I can’t imagine being down there alive and knowing no one’s coming after me.”
Rebecca dropped her head. She was all but certain that LeClerc couldn’t have survived, but JR’s exhibition of vulnerability affected her. A glimpse of what tortures he must have gone through, mentally at least, had opened up to her, and found a crack in her defenses.
~~~
Back in the main room, an anxious pair of young women were relieved to see the party emerge from the passageway. Angela was the first to realize that LeClerc wasn’t with them.
“Paul?” she asked. Rebecca shook her head mournfully. “Oh,” said Angela, covering her mouth with her gloved hand. “Oh, no.”
Cyndi put her arm around her friend. “What now?” she asked the group in general.
JR waited a beat for Summers or Robert to respond. When neither said anything, he spoke up. “Cyn and I found something that we think is important for you to see, Summers. It’s almost certainly man-made.” At his signal, Cyndi showed the photos on her phone, which were disappointingly unable to adequately convey what he and Cyndi had seen.
Are you up to a short trek into another passage?” His suspicions were confirmed when Summers began to shake again, and Robert made it certain.
“He’s got a bad case of claustrophobia, mate. Is the passage a wide one?”
“It isn’t bad. Look, if he can’t go, he can’t. Rebecca thinks we should head back to camp anyway, and I have pictures. Let’s just get out of here.”
His last couple of words were drowned by a massive whump! that shook the ground where they stood. More than one of the girls screamed, along with Summers. Robert widened his stance, and JR dove to the ground, his arms covering his head. When the noise died down and the ground stabilized, a fearful female voice asked timidly, “What was that?”
JR stood, a little abashed at his instinctive action. He looked at Robert, who shrugged, then said, “You’re the Marine. You tell them.”
Everyone looked to JR. “It sounded like explosives. Everyone stay here while Robert and I check it out. Come on, Robert, you’re with me.”
Cartwright fell into step side by side with JR when possible, dropping back a step when the cave floor was too cluttered with stalagmites to walk abreast. “What do you reckon Roosky was doing?” he asked.
JR shook his head. “No idea, but I don’t like it. H
ey, where’s the entrance?”
The men had followed the guide rope to a wall, which, come to think of it, was jumbled rock, unlike the surrounding walls.
“Shit,” said Robert, fear coming into his eyes. “JR, this is the entrance. Only that blast must have brought down the overhang. We’re trapped.”
“Roosky will get us out, no need to panic,” JR responded. He sounded puzzled, though, even to himself. It was definitely a blast that they’d heard before, not simply a rockslide. He’d know the sound of heavy explosives anywhere; probably wouldn’t forget that sound until the day he died. Who would have been blasting?
Robert was regarding him steadily as the realization came to him slowly. Roosky had been blasting. He must have deliberately… Could that be right? Could his drinking buddy really have brought that overhang down deliberately, trapping them there to die? Why?
The answer hit him faster than the question had. “OS,” he snarled. “The fucking Orion Society. That must have been who Misty was contacting. Roosky’s part of it, too. Robert, buddy, we’re SOL.”
“Does that mean something like buggered?” Robert asked.
“Shit out of luck,” JR responded. “Screwed, fucked, dead.”
“None of us found another way out, right?” Robert asked. There was no use in giving way to panic. From the look of it, they weren’t going to be able to dig themselves out, certainly not with the meager food and water supplies they had with them. But, most cave systems had more than one entrance. It only remained to find another one, and they’d be fine. At least, they would be if they found it quickly enough and it wasn’t too far away from the Sno-Cat to make it back in the worsening weather. He said as much.
“We’ll worry about where the Sno-Cat is when we get out. We turned back because we found the script on the wall, didn’t go any further to find an exit. Maybe Summers can read the script and it will show the way. What about you and Rebecca? Why did you turn back?”
“We were at the end of our rope,” Robert said, with a sharp bark of laughter at the irony. There may be a way out through that passage, but Summers will never make it through there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s a squeeze. He’d probably have a heart attack.”
“Is a squeeze what I think it is?”
“Right, mate. A tight spot. Very tight. I barely made it through.”
“Okay, let’s get our story and our strategy straight. I say we tell the others that it will be easier to see if there’s another opening than to dig out, but we won’t say it’s impossible to dig out. Agreed?”
“Sounds all right.”
I’ll take Cyndi and Summers and go look at that script first. If Summers can read it, great. If not, we’ll keep going until we either find another exit or reach a dead end. You and the others rest. If we don’t find anything, you take Angela and Rebecca and explore what’s beyond that squeeze. We need to ration what’s left of the food and water starting now. Anything else you can think of?”
“That about covers it, mate. Say, glad you’re along, JR.”
JR wasn’t so sure he was glad to be along, but the other man’s implied praise felt good. He hadn’t felt competent to lead anyone since his squad went amok in Afghanistan. Now, it seemed he must.
~~~
In respect of Summers’ mental condition, the two men played down the nature of the rock fall, leaving the impression that they could dig out if necessary. In reality, they knew it would take heavy equipment to clear the original entrance to the cave. Since that was impossible, they kept up a front for Summers and the women, though Rebecca eyed JR suspiciously now and then. When he had led a reluctant Summers and his fellow passage explorer, Cyndi, to retrace their steps toward the script on the cave wall, Rebecca buttonholed Robert.
“What aren’t you telling us?”
“I won’t bullshit you, it’s not good. We didn’t want to panic Summers any worse than he already is, but there’ll be no digging out. Our only hope is to find another way out, but that’s almost guaranteed.”
“Almost?” Rebecca was internally reeling at the blunt way Robert spoke, but she maintained her air of outer calm. She was the doctor, she was supposed to be unflappable. There was something about being told you were buried alive that tended to flap you, though, she thought.
“Look, there’s almost always a second aperture. That’s in over ninety percent of the caves I know of. But, some are too small for a person to get out, some could be behind squeezes that we can’t get through, like the one you and I found but even smaller. And finally, it could be one that leads upward and it could be under a thick sheet of ice. So, almost is the best I can do for you, love.”
“Thanks for the optimism,” Rebecca replied, with as much irony as she could muster. So. They were likely trapped and likely to die. Well, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it. “How big do you think this cave system is?”
“No idea, why?”
“We’ve got at most three more days to find a way out. After that, we won’t be able to get back to base for over six months. I don’t think our food and water will hold out, do you?”
“Shit,” was all he had to say.
Meanwhile, JR, Cyndi and Summers had made their way to the wall of script. JR had to guide and support Summers, who seemed zombie-like as they made their way further into the cave. He reckoned that Summers had weathered too many shocks in too short a time. His mental processes had shut down. If they got any use of him for reading the script, it would be an unexpected miracle.
When they came to the area, Cyndi and JR stepped back to allow Summers free access to the wall. He stepped up to it willingly enough, but almost as soon as he saw it, Summers began to shake his head.
“What is it?” JR asked.
“This looks nothing like anything I’ve ever seen,” Summers responded. “Not even the 10th Cycle script. But it is definitely man-made. ”
JR risked saying what was on his mind, hoping to shock Charles out of his stupor. “So, it’s probably evidence of those 9th Cyclers you were looking for, eh, Charles? Too bad we can’t get out to announce your discovery.”
“What?” Charles said, simultaneously with Cyndi. “We can’t get out?”
“Not unless you figure that out and it points the way. Or unless Robert can find something beyond where he’d been before.” JR was tired of pretending, tired of protecting the nominal leader of the expedition and tired of being in this cave. He needed a way out almost as desperately as Summers did. Surprisingly, the truth did rally Summers.
“There’s no other way out of this room?”
“Not that we’ve found, but as soon as we saw this, we hightailed it back. Could be we missed something.”
“All right, I vote we make sure this is a dead end before going back. What’s the deal with Robert and Rebecca’s passage?”
“Narrow part, and then they ran out of rope,” JR answered succinctly.
Summers paled, and for a moment JR thought he’d lost the man again. But, he stiffened and pulled a bit of courage from somewhere deep within him. “Let’s go, then.”
After a thorough search of the perimeter of the room, no way out was evident. The three returned to the main room and reported their findings.
“The good news,” JR started, “is that we’ve succeeded in our mission. We didn’t find a way out, but the script is definitely man-made, although it’s something Charles doesn’t recognize. He surmises that it’s 9th Cycle. We’ve found evidence that Antarctica was once inhabited by humans before our time.”
The two who had been with him had already had time to absorb the news, exciting as it was. The other three, however, reacted in different ways. Carmen, whose demeanor had remained strangely unemotional since LeClerc’s loss, smiled faintly. Angela could barely contain herself, knowing what it meant to Summers, whom she admired and now felt responsible for given his claustrophobia. Robert, though he was glad, was more interested in the cave and in finding a w
ay out of it than in the fact that they’d found what they were looking for.
“Great,” said Robert. “But before we get too excited, we need to find a way out of here, so we can tell the world. Ready, ladies?” He turned without another word, leading Rebecca and Angela toward the passage he’d explored earlier.
At JR’s direction, everyone had left all food and unopened water containers with the group in the main room, carrying just enough water to take a sip every hour. The good news was that the remaining team were all responsible people, not defiant or given to hoarding against the interest of the group as a whole. JR now carefully divided the food into packets of about four hundred calories each. If each person consumed one packet per day, they had enough for three more days. It wasn’t enough to sustain health, nor even life for very long. Beyond that, there would be no point in prolonging their lives anyway, because they would certainly die on the ice if they did manage to get out of the cave.
In a way, it was a relief to know that he’d done all he could and that he would no longer be responsible for them after the next week or so. JR had just one regret, and that was that he wouldn’t see Roosky or Misty again. He’d like to have some choice words with both of them. But, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except doing his damnedest to get his people out of this mess, and if he failed, well, they wouldn’t suffer for long.
With nothing more to do until they heard back from the other half of the team, JR and Cyndi left Summers resting and combed the other half of the main room for another passage. Several depressions seemed promising, but each petered out much quicker than the one leading to what they were now calling the library, because of the script on the wall. It was up to Robert now, but JR wasn’t looking forward to guiding Summers through the squeeze. The man seemed to be burning his last reserves of courage now. What effect would it have on him, crawling through a six-foot passage that was tighter than a coffin according to Robert? Nothing good, JR was certain. Too bad there was no more scotch and no more vodka, nothing alcoholic as far as he knew. Half a bottle of the good stuff and anyone would find enough courage to get through a six-foot tight spot.