Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  “Looking lovely, Whit,” she told her reflection. “And why shouldn’t you? You haven’t slept well in months. Your daughter’s not talking to you. You and your husband haven’t made love in … who knows when? Tenure review’s coming in September and you haven’t written a paper in a year.”

  She paused on the precipice of a full-blown anxiety attack, then shook her head. “Go upstairs, get showered, and get your butt to the office. Cricket will be home tomorrow night. You’ll go out to dinner. Laugh and talk like you used to.”

  Fortified by those notions, Whitney made a goofy face, stuck her tongue out at her disheveled self in the mirror, pivoted, took a step toward the stairs, then stopped. The computer on the desk caught her attention. She crossed to it and jiggled the mouse. The screen activated to an Internet web page posted by the National Meteorological Service out of Memphis. The Kentucky forecast—largely clear skies with high, thin cloud cover predicted to move in over the next twenty-four hours.

  Whitney made one keystroke and the national weather map came up, revealing two cold fronts active in the west: one moving south-southeast out of Idaho, the other gathering momentum over southern Kansas and the panhandle of Texas. As of 11:00 A.M., the weather service was giving no clear indication of either front’s anticipated path.

  For a moment her mind whirled with possibilities, all of them adverse: If either of those storms came through when Cricket and Tom were in the cave … She felt herself begin to shake and once again had to talk herself down from the brink of a panic attack. They’ll be fine, she told herself. Everything will be fine.

  She forced herself away from the computer, trudged through the kitchen to lock the back door, and exhorted herself to go upstairs to shower. She flipped the dead bolt, then crossed back through the kitchen toward the family room and the staircase.

  Drip!

  Whitney froze at the sound. Her palms turned clammy. Drip! She turned, hunting for and fearing her quarry. From the kitchen faucet a bulge of water distended and fell. Drip! And a second bulge. Drip! And a third and fourth. Drip! Drip!

  Despite her every effort to remain in control, Whitney’s vision distorted, went kaleidoscopic, and she felt herself sucked away into a maze of memory. She saw a ridge rising fifteen hundred feet off a lime jungle of a valley floor, all choked with kudzu, and the nightmare of the accident seized her again.

  A muddy river called the Washoo rolled in from the east and disappeared under Ayers Ridge for several miles before popping up on the other side and continuing its torpid course toward the Gulf of Mexico. Ayers Ridge was four miles long, a half mile wide at its base, and occupied the geographical center of a region known as TAG, short for the Tennessee-Alabama-Georgia karst country, an area that contains some of the most formidable pit caves in North America.

  High on the side of Ayers Ridge lay a bench cut into the hillside by thousands of years of wind and rain. There, in the dappled early-morning light, the forest gave way to a gaping hole in the ground some twenty-five feet across—a darkened pit, the entrance to another world.

  Mist steamed up out of the hole. Mist blackened the oaks that clung to ledges above the entrance. Mist turned the red soil on the pit’s mantle as treacherous as watered ice.

  Whitney maneuvered her way along the rim with the concentrated agility of a city cat that has crept out an apartment window onto the narrow ledge of the thirtieth floor. She wore a yellow jumpsuit, a red helmet with headlamp, and a waist harness. A pack was slung bandolier-style across her left shoulder and cinched at her hip by a waist belt.

  She rocked her ankles into the slope so her boot treads bit the mud, then eased her way out over the exposed tree roots, focused, confident, and yet all too aware of how close she worked to the lip of the hole. It was more than three hundred feet to the bottom. One misstep and Whitney would suffer a four-and-half-second fall and certain death.

  She scrambled to a rope lashed to one of the oaks. The line disappeared over the rim. She straddled the rope and began the complicated task of rigging herself to it. She called over her shoulder, “ON ROPE!”

  “On rope!” answered a woman from somewhere far below.

  Whitney glanced back into the abyss and grinned in anticipation of the adrenaline rush that always accompanied her going over the edge in what cavers call a “pit drop.” Then she recited a cautionary principle Tom taught her years ago: Never, ever give the cave a chance. “On rappel!” Whitney yelled.

  “On rappel!” the woman hollered back.”

  Whitney had dropped down ropes into scores of such shafts in the past. Still her heart beat faster. But that, she knew, was a good thing: it meant she understood the consequences of her actions. The experts she had known who died caving became accustomed to the danger, grew dull in their perceptions, and gave the cave a chance.

  Whitney created slack on the rope in order to arch her body backward until it was almost horizontal above the three-hundred-foot pit. Then she squatted, blew all her breath out in a burst, and kicked free. She dropped ten feet before the stiff soles of her leather boots contacted rock again.

  Luscious ferns sprouted from the ledges around her. Small white flowers with magenta seeds grew from cracks in the wall. The place smelled like freshly crushed nutmeg. She made a second kick and dropped another ten feet and a third ten feet. She bounced off the wall a fourth time and dropped into the cave’s expanse, where the walls become underhung and she could no longer maintain contact with the rock.

  Whitney slowed herself to a stop and leaned back, twisting lazily in space. The morning sun angled into the top of the shaft, cutting through the swirling mist, creating clouds of rose-tinted glitter. Her mouth hung agape and she yelled, “God, I love this! Where’s my camera when I need it?”

  “Down here, where you should be by now!” the woman below answered.

  High in the Alabama sky, a small cloud passed into view. Whitney’s delighted expression sobered as she inspected it. A powerful spring storm, not uncommon in this part of the south, could flood the lower reaches of the cave. But she had searched the Web on her laptop only moments before leaving her truck. The latest forecast called for blue skies with occasional fair-weather clouds.

  Whitney eased the tension on her rappelling rack, a rectangular metal device, the bars of which interlaced with the rope. She began to slide, spinning around and around in long, descending spirals that allowed her a panoramic view of the cave’s interior. Narrow, limpid waterfalls plunged fifty feet, splattered off rock outcroppings, then plunged again and again in a series of shimmering cascades. Moss covered much of the pewter-colored rock, which appeared carved by the hand of a genius.

  Twelve seconds and one hundred feet down, the sunlight splintered into three shafts that shone weakly against the west wall of the pit. The vegetation dwindled. At a half minute and two hundred feet, Whitney spun down the rope into what cavers call the twilight, and the mist cleared. At three hundred feet, Whitney shivered; the cave air was a constant fifty-six degrees and saturated with moisture. She was twenty feet off the bottom now and her headlamp revealed a brackish brown floor littered with boulders, scree, and moldering logs. In the left wall of the cave was a black six-foot-high slot of an opening.

  A young Asian woman stood next to the opening, adjusting the flame of a carbide lamp, the kind miners used to wear. Jeannie Yung was Whitney’s research assistant. Jeannie was eight years Whitney’s junior, strikingly beautiful, with flawless skin, shiny black hair, and a constant expression of bemusement on her face.

  “Fancy meeting you here!” Whitney said as her boots reached the floor.

  “Well, it is the best place to meet confirmed troglodytes,” Jeannie replied, snapping her helmet in place. And you know I have this thing for slimy blind creatures.”

  “Think they’ll mind us crashing the party?”

  “Are you kidding? They’ll be thrilled to have a couple of babes like us show up.”

  Whitney laughed as Jeannie came across the wet stone to help
her.

  “Great ride, huh?” Jeannie asked.

  Whitney leaned back to stare at haw, way, way up in the tube, the mist seemed to create a backlit opaque ceiling separating the world above from the world below.

  “Absolutely beautiful,” she said, unfastening her rack from the rope, then unhitching her climbing harness. “What moron named this place Terror Hole?”

  Jeannie shrugged. “Cavers love melodrama. What do you figure for time inside?”

  “Why, you got a hot date?”

  Jeannie blushed. “Well, Jim’s coming in from Purdue for the weekend. I wanted to be at the Nashville airport by four.”

  Whitney smiled. Jeannie had been working for her for nearly three years and was just a thesis away from her doctorate in environmental science. Her assistant was as devoted a young scientist as she had ever known, but, in Whitney’s opinion, Jeannie paid too little attention to her personal life. A weekend with Jim was a step in the right direction.

  “No problem,” Whitney said. “I promised Cricket I’d be there for her track meet. We’ll be in and out in four hours, tops.”

  “Great,” Jeannie said. “Now what do you say we go crash that crayfish orgy!”

  Whitney was still laughing as she turned on her headlamp and entered the black slot in the wall of the pit.

  Immediately, her visibility was reduced to a cone of soft light. The cave walls turned slick, close, and mottled gray. Her helmet bumped against the smooth ceiling and she slowed, casting her beam forward into inky darkness. The cave ahead was becoming smaller, tighter, wetter, a place saturated with the threat of claustrophobia.

  10:24 A.M.

  LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

  The bedroom phone in the suburban home of Damian Finnerty, the U.S. marshal for eastern Kentucky, jangled.

  “No,” Finnerty groaned.

  At that moment, the marshal and his wife, Natalie, a nurse-anesthesiologist who had just ended her overnight shift at a local hospital, were engaged in a bout of vigorous midmorning love-making, both of them sweating and building toward climax.

  “Don’t answer it,” Natalie pleaded. “God, don’t answer it.”

  The couple had been trying desperately to have children for the past two years. A simple test taken an hour before had shown she was ovulating. She had called her husband at the office and ordered him home.

  “I’ve got to,” the marshal moaned, rolling off his wife. “I said only call in an emergency.”

  He sat up on the edge of the bed, noting how remarkably sexy he found his wife even after seven years of marriage, and snatched up the phone. “This better be good.”

  “The opposite, I’m afraid,” replied Mark Boulter, a Kentucky State Police captain.

  Finnerty was a good-looking Irishman, six feet tall with reddish brown hair, fair, freckled skin, and a hard build. Relaxed, he could be an engaging man with a quick wit, an easy social manner, and an appreciation for books. But Finnerty was not relaxed. Not now. He stood up beside the bed, listening intently.

  “Around forty-five minutes ago, a woman named Margaret Afton came on duty with Kentucky State Police central dispatch,” Boulter went on. “She noticed a Post-it the prior shift worker left on her computer screen. The note said that the Eddyville Penitentiary inmate transfer van was scheduled to arrive at the prison hospital at Louisville at 9:45 A.M. and that the guards had promised to confirm their arrival with the dispatch office.

  “When Afton still hadn’t heard from the transfer van at quarter past ten, she attempted to raise them on the state police frequency they were supposed to be monitoring, but got no reply. She placed a call to the prison hospital and was informed by the admitting officer that the van had not come in yet. She called Eddyville and was told there had been no contact with the van or the chase vehicle for more than three hours.

  “Afton pulled up a computer log that detailed the previous dispatcher’s radio transmissions and found a record of the last communication with the van, somewhere east of Central City.”

  “Get to the point,” Finnerty said, ignoring the scowl developing on his wife’s pretty face.

  “Afton patched herself through to the Central City sheriff’s office, which in turn contacted Sheriff Michael Arnet, who was having breakfast at a truck-stop,” Boulter continued. “Afton told Arnet she had no troopers in the area and asked if he would cruise the fifteen-mile stretch of state highway sixty-two that would have served as the natural detour around the flaming tanker truck. Arnet entered the Peabody Wildlife Management Area at 10:24 A.M., crested a ridge, and noticed fresh skid marks leading to dark, pool-like stains near the side of the road. Arnet left his cruiser to inspect the splotches and discovered blood. He followed the blood into a deep ditch and saw the bodies of three guards. Bugs were already swarming.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Finnerty said. “How many are loose?”

  “Four inmates,” he said. “They’ve got a guard with them.”

  “Hostage?”

  “We assume so.”

  Finnerty moved away from his wife, going for his pants. Natalie picked up a pillow, pressed it to her mouth, and screamed in frustration. In the mirror, he saw why. He had that expression on his face, the expression that said he was going hunting.

  The marshal had grown up the son of a dentist in a small town outside the Adirondack Park in northern New York State. His father and grandfather were white-tail-deer hunters and they had taught him that to hunt well, you had to think like your quarry.

  He was a good student and an excellent athlete, playing lacrosse at Dartmouth. Upon graduation, he accepted a commission with the Marine Corps and served six years, the last two as a military police captain, where he employed the hunting philosophy his father had handed down to him to establish a reputation for tracking down young Marines who’d gone absent without leave. The U.S. Marshals Service have made a specialty of manhunting since the midnineteenth century and enthusiastically recruited Finnerty. During stints as deputy U.S. marshal in Kansas City, Dallas, and Baltimore, he further established his reputation as a man who would absolutely not quit when it came to pursuing fugitives.

  Now, struggling into his clothes, the telephone smeared against his ear, Finnerty finished listening to a description of the murder scene and brief biographies of the four inmates at large.

  “Okay,” Finnerty said at last. “I’ll meet you at Louisville International in twenty-five minutes. We’ll take the chopper. In the meantime I want an all-points bulletin put out for Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee. These men should be considered armed and dangerous. Treat this guard, Lyons, as a hostage for now. Contact the prison. Have them transmit whatever they can on the inmates. Call Sanchez and Two-Elk. I want complete workups on these guys.”

  Finnerty hung up the phone and looked over at his wife, who was sitting upright, sulking, her arms folded across her breasts. “Sorry, Nat,” he said softly. “Gotta go.”

  “What about our baby?” she asked. “What about us?”

  Finnerty hesitated. Natalie was the smartest, most beautiful woman he’d ever known, and now she looked defeated. They’d been through so many disappointments in the past year, so many tests, so many different fertility methods. The toll of it all showed clearly on his wife’s face and it made him feel helpless, a feeling deepened by the fact that the doctors had told them the week before that he was the problem. His sperm count was 60 percent of the norm. He’d been ordered to wear boxers, placed on a regimen of Chinese herbs, and told to keep trying. Now it seemed he couldn’t even do the trying when it really counted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “We’ll give it a go again next month, okay?”

  For a moment, Natalie looked ready to explode. Then she seemed to catch something in her husband’s face, something besides that hunting expression she knew only too well.

  “This is a bad one, isn’t it, Damian?” she asked.

  “Very,” the marshal replied, nodding grimly
. “And I have the feeling it’s only going to get worse.”

  10:37 A.M.

  14 VALLEY LANE

  TARRINGTON, KENTUCKY

  Whitney paused ten yards inside the entrance to the horizontal part of Terror Hole Cave, remembering how tight the way ahead would soon become, then she shrugged off the looming claustrophobia. Caves had forced her to deal with the fear of narrow places a thousand times before. It never went away completely, but she knew it could usually be managed.

  She went ahead and within a minute the ceiling got lower. She and Jeannie got down on all fours and crawled their way deeper into Ayers Ridge. One hundred yards farther on, the floor disappeared into a chimney some twenty feet deep and about half the width of an elevator shaft. They descended it by bracing their feet and backs against either wall and shimmy-sliding down.

  At the bottom of the chimney, for nearly seventy-five yards, the cave became a twisting, muddy crawlway about twenty inches high. The tube was so small that Whitney and Jeannie could not crawl; they had to lie on their sides and slither like snakes, pushing their packs along in front of them. It was exhausting work made worse by little nubs of rock that grabbed at their boots, ankles, and knee pads, making them think for an instant that they had finally been thrust into every caver’s worst fantasy—getting stuck.

  It took thirty minutes to negotiate the tube, then descend another fifteen-foot chimney and emerge into an oval-shaped passage. Water dripped off stalactites into an easy-flowing stream that ran down the center of the passage. Whitney and Jeannie moved down the rivulet looking for blind crayfish.

  With two claws, a segmented tail, and long antennae, the crayfish looked like lobsters. But their skin was without color. And their eyes were pupilless, like freshwater pearls set on either side of their beaks. At each pool where they found crayfish, the women inserted a triangular orange flag to mark the spot. They planned to return to the same lagoons in a week to count and observe the crayfish again.

  Whitney was a marine biologist as well as a speleologist, a specialist in cave ecology. More specifically, she was an expert on how pollution, especially agricultural pollution, affected life in underground rivers. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the ecology of subterranean rivers. She believed the delicate health of such ecosystems was as much an indicator of man’s effect on Earth’s environment as the size of the hole in the ionosphere above the South Pole. She and Jeannie were in the bot-torn of Terror Hole Cave because this was the breeding season for Cambarus aculambrum, blind crayfish, and she was trying to determine whether chemicals from irrigated fields upstream were disrupting the reproductive cycles of the endangered species.