After an hour of working their way along the underground watercourse, counting crayfish as they went, they reached a broad, shallow pool. Mud slicked the sides of the pool. Gravel and stones that looked like polished marbles covered the bottom. On top of the stones, blind crayfish milled about. “I count seven,” Whitney said.
“Same here,” Jeannie replied.
“Twenty-eight pools. A solid sampling.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Me too,” Whitney said. “Lets eat something before we head out.”
Jeannie nodded and slumped against the wall of the cave. Whitney took a seat on the other side of the pool, against the wall opposite her assistant. She stowed her notes in a Ziploc bag, then fished in her pack for tins of boneless cooked chicken and fruit cocktail, a commercially manufactured energy bar, and a water bottle filled with Gatorade. As she ate, she let her light wander about the little grotto. More of those amber-colored stalactites clung to the ceiling. Beyond them, the passage drifted to the northeast, shrouded itself in shadow, then disappeared into perpetual night.
Oddly, Whitney took solace from the solemn environment. She never got tired of being in caves. As her late father-in-law always used to say, “Where else can you go these days, other than the bottom of the sea or another planet, where you have the chance to walk where no human has been before?”
That notion caused Whitney to think about Tom. She and her husband had planned an evening out after Cricket’s track meet. Whitney’s thoughts wandered to the black negligee she’d bought on impulse the other day. She imagined herself appearing before Tom wearing it and couldn’t help but grin.
“Hey, check this out,” Jeannie said, breaking Whitney’s reverie. Her assistant was on her hands and knees, the flame of her carbide lamp inches above the surface of the pool.
“What’s going on?” Whitney asked. Jeannie looked up, puzzled, worried. “I’ve never seen the trogs act like this.”
Whitney came over and aimed her headlamp at the placid cave lagoon. Twenty minutes ago the crayfish had been gathered at the pool’s center. Now three of them were crawling at a frantic clip across the streambed. Two were already at the banks, clawing into the smooth brown muck.
For a moment, Whitney seemed suspended in time. No future. No past. Sheer inertia. Then she felt disbelief followed by gut-wrenching fear. Blind crayfish are usually as active as tortoises. One of their odd characteristics is that they will bury themselves in mud. They do it to survive being washed away in the rushing waters of early spring. But even then their pace is sluggish. These crayfish were acting as if they sensed a tidal wave roaring at them.
“Oh, Jesus, no,” Whitney whispered.
“What?” Jeannie demanded. “Why are they doing that?”
“Flash flood!” Whitney cried, leaping across the pool, going for her gear.
Lying there on her kitchen floor, Whitney held her hands over her head and moaned, “No. I don’t have to go back in the cave anymore.” She forced open her eyes, took deep breaths, and twisted the stray lock of hair that hung in her eyes. “I don’t have to go back in the cave anymore.”
Whitney sat up, breathing and telling herself to imagine azure skies over prairie grass kissed by a summer’s wind. She conjured up the pungent smell of summer fields and the clicking sound of grasshoppers in flight
To her relief, the waking nightmare of the cave gradually faded and the familiar objects of her kitchen took on clearer focus. The pine table Tom had built her for their fifth wedding anniversary; the framed photograph of Tom crawling through a deep tube inside the Labyrinth on the cover of National Geographic; the snapshot of the family on vacation at the beach off Nag’s Head; the watercolor painting of the magical place where they had honeymooned in Jamaica.
Looking around at the relics of her past, it was as if Whitney could see her husband right in front of her. Then she realized with a gasp that she was seeing him. There on the muted television on the kitchen counter, Tom was walking through the woods holding a helmet.
Whitney sat up, fumbled in her robe pocket, and hit the Mute button on the remote. Another video clip of Tom showed now, this one somewhere deep in a cave, his headlamp glowing, his face grimy, his big toothy grin flashing. And the announcer was saying, “Coverage of NASA’s Artemis Project will begin on the Today show tomorrow seven A.M. Eastern Standard Time.”
The anchorman stopped and pressed his hand to his earpiece, frowned, then looked up at the cameras. “We have late-breaking news. Four prisoners have escaped from a maximum security prison in western Kentucky. Three guards were killed during the daring daylight escape and—”
Whitney punched the Mute button again. She looked up at a framed photograph of herself with Jeannie Yung on a research project in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy three summers ago. Her assistant had her arms spread wide before a huge pink stalagmite, throwing the camera her contagious smile. Whitney crossed the room and looked out the window into the morning sky.
“I know I don’t deserve it after what happened,” she whispered, “but watch over them for me, Jeannie. Please?”
11:40 A.M.
PEABODY WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT AREA, KENTUCKY
The U.S. marshal for eastern Kentucky climbed from a helicopter that squatted like a dragonfly in the middle of state road sixty-two. The fog had burned off and the sun’s glare and the incessant blue flashes from the police cruiser cast the scene in an unsettling metallic tone. A tow truck pulled the chase cruiser out of the woods.
For a second, Damian Finnerty stood there, feeling strangely impotent. Low sperm count. His life up to now had been all about testosterone. How the hell had this happened? Then he shook his head, took a deep breath and told himself to focus. He could not allow his mind to be back there in the bedroom with his wife. He had to catch bad guys. At least that was something he still knew how to do, right?
Sheriff Michael Arnet, a pudgy man in his early fifties, came up and shook the marshal’s hand but would not look him in the eye. “What a mess, huh?” Arnet asked.
“Looks it,” Finnerty agreed. “Where are the bodies?”
Arnet hesitated, swallowed, then shrugged. “Gone, Marshal. FBI took ’em out of here half an hour ago.”
“The FBI?” Finnerty replied, puzzled. “What’s their jurisdiction?”
“Hell if I know,” Arnet said, throwing up his hands, still unwilling to look directly at Finnerty. “They were feds, they had documents, and they said they were taking control of the bodies. Who am I to argue? They loaded ’em in ambulances and skeedaddled.”
The marshal shook his head and made a note to himself to figure out what the FBI wanted with this case. Then he took off his aviator sunglasses and wiped the sweat that beaded his brow and made his black polo shirt stick to his back.
An evidence technician walked up to them. “Not much here, Sheriff. Footprints coming out of the woods. No bullet casings. And we got partial prints on the steering wheel of the chase vehicle, but most of them were smudged by someone wearing gloves.”
“Gloves, huh?” Arnet said, and he spat out a wad of snuff on the ground. “Now why would them guards be wearing gloves in the heat like that?”
“You figure that one out, Sheriff,” Finnerty said. “My job’s just to catch them.”
The marshal turned away and went to the hood of the nearest cruiser. He opened a map of the area, then picked up a handheld radio.
“This is Finnerty,” he began. “I want roadblocks at Lewisburg, Elizabethtown, Rockfield, and Owensboro. If we get no sightings in two hours, I want the circle widened. Put them up at Corydon, Mumford, Burksville, and Somerset. And I want the media to have their pictures. It’s too late for the papers, but I want their mugs on every television station from Cairo, Illinois, to Cincinnati and out into Huntington, West Virginia. The Clarksville, Bowling Green, and Nashville stations, too.”
Finnerty paused, his jaw set hard as he studied the map. Even with the dragnet he was erecting he could see hundreds of ba
ck roads that the escaped convicts might take.
“Got those bios, boss,” a deep male voice called. “Preliminary stuff from the warden’s office at Eddyville. Just came in over the computer.”
Finnerty snapped his head up to find Kentucky State Police Captain Mark Boulter striding toward him. Blond, buzz-cut, a square-jawed brute of a man, six-foot-four, 230 pounds, Boulter wore dark clothes and a badge on a lanyard around his neck just like Finnerty. The state police captain was one of the best fugitive-response men in the Midatlantic. Finnerty had tried several times to get him to join the U.S. Marshals Service, but the trooper was a Kentucky boy through and through, played four years at defensive end for the university, was married to his high-school sweetheart, and did not want to risk being transferred out of his beloved home state.
Finnerty took the printouts. “Do me a favor. Talk to dispatch. Make sure they’re getting these pics in the hands of every cop in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. West Virginia, too.”
“You got it,” Boulter replied, then he jogged back to the helicopter.
Finnerty opened the printouts. At first glance, the most dangerous of the escaped inmates appeared to be Edward Kelly. He had enlisted in the army as a medical corpsman at seventeen. The day before his twenty-first birthday, he was court-martialed and served two years at Leavenworth for his part in the sale of contraband Demerol and codeine stolen from the base hospital at Fort Bragg. Upon his release, Kelly returned home to the backwoods of Kentucky and busied himself bringing organization to a group of marijuana growers, many of whom were his relatives. After two years under Kelly’s ruthless leadership they became one of the major pot distributors on the middle eastern seaboard. When Kelly learned that four members of his organization, including two of his cousins, were attempting to craft their own network and cut him out of the profits, he knelt them down on a remote Kentucky hill, tied them up, and strangled each one to death with his bare hands.
“Wonderful,” Finnerty said, turning to the next printout.
Quentin Mann: twenty-four, the son of a Lexington newspaper editor and a domineering socialite mother. Raped nine coeds in and around the University of Kentucky campus. Prior to his attacks, Mann had made phone calls in which he hummed and sang children’s songs to each of his intended victims.
“Psychopath,” Finnerty murmured. “Good. He’ll make a mistake.”
Then the marshal turned to the next page and frowned. A brief biography of the missing guard, William Lyons: thirty-seven, divorced, father of two, prison guard in Mississippi for ten years before joining the Kentucky Department of Corrections as a supervising lieutenant fourteen months ago. Lived alone outside Eddyville on the lake. Liked to fish for bass in his off hours.
Finnerty glanced over at the bloodstains on the highway and found himself praying that he would not find Lyons’s body somewhere down the road. He couldn’t stand the idea of having to explain the death of their father to the guard’s children. Then he looked at the next biography and remembered the case from the newspapers.
Robert L. Gregor: a promising young physicist who’d become a cold-blooded murderer. No known father, mother died when he was eight. For much of the next four years, Gregor was raised by Elvin Loring, his maternal grandfather, a petty criminal and alcoholic who lived in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. When Gregor was twelve, the grandfather died and the boy was turned over to the state. He was shy, sullen, and saddled with an extreme stammer.
A court-appointed psychologist discovered, however, that Gregor had a remarkable aptitude for mathematics and science. The psychologist had him placed in a foster home run by the wife of a physicist at Bowling Green State. For the first time in his life, Gregor was challenged, and he excelled at academics, finishing high school a year early. He completed his undergraduate degree at twenty and was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Tennessee that same year. He got his Ph.D. with distinction in less than five years and was awarded a prestigious postdoctoral research position at the university’s Center for Applied Materials Research.
Two years ago, a Kentucky state trooper pulled Gregor over on a routine traffic stop and discovered the corpse of Carson MacPherson, Gregor’s research supervisor, stuffed in the trunk of his car. The subsequent investigation revealed that MacPherson had been garroted into unconsciousness in his lab, then taken across the state line into Kentucky, bludgeoned to death, and left in the car trunk to rot.
“Damian!”
The marshal looked up. Boulter was hanging out the side of the helicopter.
“We’ve got one of them,” the big man yelled. “Pate. The arsonist”
“Where?” The marshal was already weaving in and out of the cruisers and ambulances, running back toward the chopper.
“In an ambulance en route to the hospital at Madisonville.”
“Shit, what happened?” Finnerty asked, climbing into the passenger seat.
“Chicken farmer about twelve miles north of here heard noises in his yard about forty minutes ago, thought it was foxes, and Went out with a shotgun,” Boulter said, firing the engine. “Caught Pate trying to hotwire his truck. Pate shot at him twice at close range and missed. Farmer didn’t miss. Hit him with two rounds of number sixes. They’re taking him into the OR.”
“I want to be there when he wakes up,” Finnerty said.
They lifted off. Finnerty pulled out his map as they gained altitude and headed west. He studied it for a moment, then said, “Relay dispatch to change my order on those blockades. Let’s put them at Roundhill, Hadley, and keep that one at Mumford. And tell Sanchez we need more information on all these guys. Those bios the prison sent were worth shit.”
9:00 P.M.
JENKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Tom Burke stifled a yawn and set a bulging file folder on the table beside the computer.
“I think that’s everything,” he said. “We all clear on tomorrow’s schedule?”
Andy Swearingen, Cricket, and seven other men and women gathered in chairs in a corner of the NASA Mission Control tent before him nodded. Beyond them were row after row of tables covered with computers. A giant glowing screen hung from light stancheons near the front of the tent. On the screen a confusing series of lines showed—a map of the internal passages of Labyrinth Cave’s nine ridges.
“Everyone’s gear set?” he asked.
They all nodded again. “We’re ready, Tom,” said a pretty redheaded woman with a French accent.
“Then get some sleep,” he ordered. “You’re going to need all you can get for the next five days.”
One by one the men and women gathered notebooks and packs and shuffled out through the tent flaps into the night. Cricket hesitated. “You coming, Dad?”
“In a minute, sweetheart. I just want to go over a couple more things with Jim. Andy? You take her to our tent?”
Tom’s assistant nodded and led his daughter outside. Tom turned to a man with a thick torso, muscular neck, and flattened face that made him resemble a pit bull puppy. “We got it all covered, Jim?”
“That’s what we’re about to find out,” replied the man, lighting a cigarette. “The tracking system’s a go. Burst transmitters and relays from the supply dumps are all functioning. Guess it’s time to see if it all works.”
Jim Angelis’s formal title was Director of Adaptivity and Training, Artemis Project, NASA. He was charged with figuring out which earth-mining technologies might best be adapted to the lunar model as well as how to train future astrominers. Using a cave as a physical and psychological proving ground had been his idea. Thirty years earlier, Apollo astronauts had prepared for their missions by enduring brutal survival trips in the California and Idaho deserts. It had been Angelis’s conviction that a similar challenge in an underground maze would reveal which candidates were tough enough to burrow into the surface of the moon. He’d approached Tom with the idea nearly fifteen months before and found the cave scientist wildly enthusiastic. Indeed, aside from
the time he’d spent with Whitney after the accident, Tom’s every waking moment since that first meeting in Houston had been dedicated to the details of the mission.
Most of their time had been spent designing and implementing a system that would allow NASA scientists aboveground to track the caving team as it negotiated its way through the nine ridges of Labyrinth Cave. All of Tom’s cavers would carry electronic beacons about the size of a candy bar inside their packs. The beacons would emit a location signal that would be relayed through a series of burst transmitters set up throughout the cave complex. Because rock is a powerful insulator and therefore limits the passage of radio waves, NASA scientists believed that the future astrominers would have very little direct communication with their surface support teams. Tom’s cavers, Angelis believed, should face the same limitations. Indeed, the only way they’d be able to contact the surface was via computer link from one of two supply dumps deep inside the cave. Other than that, once inside, they’d be on their own. Angelis and the rest of the NASA scientists gathered on Jenkins Ridge would act essentially as observers.
“This is it, then,” Tom said.
“Get some sleep, Tom,” Angelis replied. “You’ve done everything you can to prepare. Now it’s show time.”
“Country’s counting on us,” Tom said. “The President’s counting on us.”
“We’re ready,” Angelis said. “Get some sleep.”
“My wife’s not happy about Cricket going in the cave tomorrow.”
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