Two-Elk said, “Materials science and superconductors. But his Ph.D. dissertation was on the geological composition of moon rocks.”
“Moon rocks!” Finnerty groaned, as the helicopter banked east toward the full moon glowing high in the night sky. “Someone get on the horn to the duty officer at the A.G.’s office in D.C. Tell that son of a bitch I want that testimony in Gregor’s case unsealed and I want it unsealed now!”
June 15,2007
6:55 A.M.
14 VALLEY LANE TARRINGTON, KENTUCKY
“Flash flood!”
Jeannie dove to her knees and shoved gear into her pack, muttering, “Fucking weathermen! Fucking weathermen!”
Whitney ignored her assistant, leaping across the pool, going for her own things.
In less than thirty seconds, both women were tightening their packs into position. Then they heard it: a distant, guttural bubbling noise. Somewhere outside the ridge, the Washoo, the surface river into which the underground stream flowed, was breaching its banks and backing up into its tributaries.
“Run!” Whitney screamed.
Their headlamps sliced the gloom as they tore back down the passage toward the chimneys. Their footfalls splashed against the sound curtain of water rising behind them. Two hundred yards down the passage, a mound of sediment blocked their way and they had to crawl around it. The handprints and knee prints they’d left in the sand earlier in the day were almost washed away. “It’s up four inches!” Jeannie shouted.
They scrambled up the bank and raced on. In fifteen minutes they reached the bottom of the first chimney. The water in the channel was up eleven inches.
Whitney grabbed at a crack in the wall, hoisted herself up into the first shaft, and started to climb.
“C’mon,” Jeannie urged. “C’mon.”
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
“It’s up twenty inches, “Jeannie yelled after her. “We’re ten minutes from pipe-full. I’m not waiting for you to clear. I’m coming up.”
“Do it,” Whitney said, then clenched her jaw and forced herself to go faster, to try not to focus on the extraordinary pace at which the water was rising. But it made no sense. For Terror Hole Cave to flood this fast, the storm outside had to be a deluge of at least five inches an hour and it had to have been raining that way from the moment they had entered the first horizontal shaft of the cave. Impossible. She had checked the meteorological data herself. But there was no denying the facts—this was a hundred-year flood, maybe a thousand-year flood. And she and Jeannie were in the worst possible place to survive it.
Whitney reached the top of the chimney with Jeannie right behind her.
“You think it can come up and flood the next level?” Jeannie panted. The water roiling up into the chimney below them had a reddish tint. The lower passage in which they had counted crayfish was pipe-full, flooded to a sump.
“We’re not waiting around to find out,” Whitney said.
With that, she ripped off her pack and darted into the 225-foot crawlway. The second chimney beckoned at the far end, the only way to higher ground. They got on their sides and dragged themselves into the tube. The cave floor was covered with ridges like thousands of scallop shells, which caught on their clothes and boots.
After fifteen minutes of dragging herself against the scalloped floor, Whitney collapsed and lay gasping on her side. Sweat gushed off her brow, seeped into her eyes, stung, and turned the world a hazy yellow. “Give me a sec.”
Jeannie was still right behind her, puffing hard. “Take a minute,” she said. “We’re a third of the way there already. We’re gonna make it.”
Here, some hundred feet down the crawlway, the cave roof was barely four inches over their heads and the walls pressed in a mere six inches from their torsos. The light of the headlamp in that confined place seemed hypnotic. Whitney stared into the light and realized that she had let Cricket go to sleep last night without telling her daughter she loved her. And Tom had been away at meetings in Houston all week; they’d barely spoken.
Then Whitney noticed something out of the corner of her eye, something that erased all thoughts of family and home. There were two of those scallop-shell formations on the floor right in front of her. Muddy dollops of water filled each of the stone divots, which were separated by a fringe of limestone. The water in the rear scallop was lapping hard against the rock separation.
“Jeannie, are you moving back there?” Whitney demanded.
“Give me a break,” Jeannie replied, still breathless.
Whitney looked back at the cave floor. The two pools had become one pool now, a pool that was eating up the bottom of the crawlspace with every second that passed.
“It’s in the tube!” she screamed.
“For God’s sake, go!” Jeannie shrieked. “Go!”
“NO!” Whitney shouted.
She jumped out of bed and ran into the hallway before she knew she was even awake. The scent of the flooding cave, that mud stench, filled her nostrils and threatened to gag her. She clutched the banister. “You don’t have to go in the cave again,” she whispered through her tears. “You don’t!”
She suddenly realized that morning sunlight was streaming through the window above the staircase and shook her head in confusion. She had lain down for a nap around five after coming home from yet another fruitless day in her office. What time was it?
Whitney tore downstairs into the family room, saw the grandfather clock, and was shocked to see it was nearly 7:00 A.M. She’d slept nearly fourteen hours.
She noticed the television still running in the family room, still muted on split screen, NBC on the right, the Weather Channel on the left. The meteorologist gestured excitedly at large swirls of cloud cover over the Rocky Mountains. Whitney found the remote and smashed her thumb down to release the mute. The sound blared on just as the Weather Channel cut away to commercials. She threw down the remote in disgust, inadvertently switching the sound to NBC.
Whitney went to the computer, shook the mouse. The National Meteorological Service web page appeared. The two storm fronts had moved significantly since she’d last checked; the northern storm now coursed over Wyoming tracking southeast on a path that made it seem as if it would collide somewhere over Arkansas, with the second storm gathering strength over the Texas panhandle. The local forecast read: High pressure giving way as unstable masses forming over the plains move east. Possibility of severe weather for eastern Kentucky rising toward week’s end.
In her mind, Whitney heard the rush of water. She grabbed the phone and punched in the number for Tom’s cellular. It rang several times, then—
“Hello?” Tom yelled over the background noise of people talking.
“Thank God I got you!”
“Whitney?”
“Yes, Tom, I …”
“Cricket and I were going to call you in about fifteen minutes.”
“The weather stations are warning about severe rain in eastern Kentucky.”
“There isn’t a cloud in the sky up here.”
“It’s not supposed to hit until later in the week.”
“Well … what do you want me to do?”
“Postpone the experiment.”
A long pause, and then in an angry, exasperated voice Tom said, “Look, those meteorological models only say what might happen and … I can’t call off a twenty-five-million-dollar experiment on the basis of a ‘might’.”
“Tom, it could be a huge storm—”
“I’ve got to do an interview right now. We’ll call back in half an hour, tops, okay?” He hung up.
“Tom? … Tom! You shit!” She slammed the phone down, then slouched forward on the desk, pissed off and unsure of what to do. Suddenly she was aware of the grating of stones in a vast and resonant chamber. Then she heard it: Drip! Whitney looked up at the television and saw the image of water slipping off the tip of a cave stalactite. She crammed the forearm of her terry robe into her mouth but could not take her eyes off the i
mage, which jumped to Helen Greidel, a stylish blonde in her midthirties. Greidel strolled out the mouth of a cave, wearing a shiny new helmet and headlamp.
“Welcome to a special edition of Today,” she began. “We’re here in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky, a landscape dominated by dense woods, high, steep ridges, and caves—lots of caves. Not exactly the kind of environment where you’d expect to find NASA scientists researching the potential rigors of mining the moon, is it?”
The camera angle widened and there was Tom wearing a navy-blue jumpsuit with a gold waist belt. Under his arm he held a red helmet. He had a caver’s pack slung across his shoulder. Greidel removed her helmet to reveal a fashionable hairdo.
“Say hello to Tom Burke,” she said, “a spelunking scientist as it were, who has convinced NASA that a cave is indeed the ideal location to prepare for moon mining. Tom, why a cave?”
The camera zoomed in on Tom’s face as he replied, “Moon miners will face some of the most unforgiving terrain imaginable, Helen. Endurance caving—long, uninterrupted subterranean trips with little or no support—is the closest we can come to precreating the lunar mining experience here on Earth. Let me show you what I mean.”
The screen cut to an aerial shot of a broad green valley. The farms that dotted the foreground adjoined a dense forest bisected by the Furnace River. The watercourse was perhaps fifty yards wide, a silted green color and lazy in its current. On the far side of the river, nine distinct ridges rose steeply out of the mist. All the ridges were laid out perpendicular to long bends in the river. Upstream, the river met a low earthen dam, beyond which lay a lake some five miles long and two miles wide.
“What you’re seeing here is the northern approach to the Labyrinth Cave system,” Tom said. “What makes this cave perfect for NASA’s purposes is that the known entrances are so far apart—about twenty-three miles as the proverbial crow flies, more like one hundred twenty miles underground.”
A computer graphic of the Labyrinth area replaced the aerial shot. One of the animated ridges split to reveal a maze. “Inside,” Tom explained, “are level after level of tubes, tunnels, pits, canyons, and great underground halls, places just as unforgiving as the surface of the moon. Negotiating these obstacles will be fantastic training.”
“What about food and water?” Greidel asked as the camera returned to them.
“We’ll carry enough for thirty hours,” Tom said, patting his hip pack. “And we can resupply at two different cache sites we’ve set up inside the cave.”
Greidel smiled, then shot him a perplexed look. “I understand your young daughter will make the first part of the trip. Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
Tom shook his head. “Cricket may be just fourteen, but she’s already one of the most experienced cavers in the world. And she’ll only be accompanying us for the first six hours. Besides, we—and by that I mean NASA—wanted the youth of America to get behind NASA’s new mission. What better way than to bring along someone like Cricket?”
His answer seemed to satisfy the anchorwoman because she smiled again, then looked offstage and made come-here motions. Cricket shuffled out. The sleeves of her cave suit were tied around her waist She carried her helmet and wore a white long-sleeved polypropylene undershirt.
Whitney’s hands sought her lips; seeing her daughter this way, through the separating lens of the television camera, forced her to realize that her beautiful daughter was on the cusp of womanhood. She felt a terrible throb over the time they had not spent together the past year.
“You really like it in there?” Greidel asked Cricket “I get the heebie-jeebies in a closet.”
“Caves are great,” Cricket replied, swatting at the strand of hair that dangled in her eyes. “I mean, it’s like my granddad always used to say: ‘Where else can you go, other than the moon or some other planet, where you could be the first person to ever walk there?’ ”
Greidel laughed. “You’re a natural, Cricket,” she said, delighted. “Will you come back and share your experiences with us when you come out of the cave this afternoon?”
Cricket looked at her father, who nodded. “Okay,” she said.
Greidel turned and threw the camera one of her patented expressions of concern and sincerity. “Today will return to its coverage of NASA’s first efforts toward putting man back on the moon, after a station break.”
Whitney continued to hold her hand over her mouth as the image of her family faded. In her mind she saw Tom, not as the ruggedly handsome man on her television set, but as the dead man in her recurring nightmare, floating in a muddy, headlamp-lighted chamber, faceup, water draining from his mouth. Cricket’s body floated beside his.
Fingers of pressure formed around Whitney’s throat She glanced over to see the gray swirling clouds spinning on the computer weather map. The fingers tightened. Her hands flew to her temples. Then the panic became overwhelming and she began to choke. Whitney understood she was being irrational, but she knew she had to act or the pressure around her throat would throttle her.
She grabbed her car keys and went tearing out the back door. A moment later, she burst back into the kitchen and skidded to a halt in front of the dryer. She ripped off her nightgown, then hopped into jeans, hiking boots, and a T-shirt In seconds she was behind the wheel of her beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser, had the four-wheel-drive vehicle rammed in reverse, and was squealing backward down the driveway.
7:20 A.M.
NORTHWEST OF HERMES FOUR CORNERS, KENTUCKY
The laundry truck careened up a dirt road through a forest that the rising sun had cast in shades of copper. Inside, Billy Lyons pounded his fist on the steering wheel.
“You didn’t have to kill her!”
Kelly kneeled next to Gregor in the back of the van, taking his pulse and blood pressure. “Said it twenty times, bitch saw us,” he replied. “And when our pictures appear in the papers and on the TV, she’d call the troopers.”
They’ll know anyway,” Lyons fumed. “These people aren’t stupid, you know.”
“What’s your problem?” Gregor asked in a raspy voice. “You killed to get here.”
“That was different,” Lyons said.
“Yeah, you tell yourself that,” Kelly snorted.
Lyons glared out the windshield at the road and the rolling forested terrain they passed through. All the men had changed their clothes. The guard’s uniform and the orange transfer jumpsuits had been stuffed away in the laundry bags, replaced by jeans and work shirts. For a second, Lyons thought of stopping the van and going after Kelly. Then he took a deep breath and told himself to be calm. Killing Kelly now could throw his whole plan into jeopardy. Getting to Gregor’s stone was what was important—the only thing that was important. A stone that could amplify energy and alter molecular structures was more valuable than anything on Earth. He had to get it. Nothing could stop that. Nothing. But deep inside himself he made a promise: At some point Kelly would pay for killing that poor woman. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Gregor looking at him.
“How you feeling?” he asked.
“I’ll live,” Gregor replied. “I’ve got a reason to now.”
Mann, meanwhile, leaned over the passenger seat. “C’mon, Lyons,” he complained. “You said there’d be food when we broke into that army-navy store. We got boots, clothes, flashlights, but nothing to eat. Now, dammit, when we going to stop?”
“He’s right,” Gregor said. “We’ll need food and water. I’ll need painkillers in addition to my normal meds to endure the long walk ahead of us. There’s a store just up the road a mile or two. Stop there.”
“ ’Bout time,” Mann said.
“I don’t give a shit about food or water, hear?” Kelly said. “I want that gold and that platinum. There’ll be enough for everyone; right, Gregor?”
Gregor smiled weakly at Kelly and said, “If my calculations regarding the energy input and subsequent amplification were correct and you could carry it all, you might give old Bill Gat
es a run for his money.”
Mann slapped his thigh and chortled. “I’ll tell you where this dog’s going—Bora Bora. Rum. Hammocks. Palm trees. Beaches. Polynesian babes with big old cinnamon-brown butts and silver-dollar-sized nipples.”
Gregor got up on his knees and looked out through the windshield. “That’s the store, Lyons. Pull in there.”
Lyons hesitated. The last thing he wanted now was for some civilian to catch sight of them. Not now, when he felt they were close. But Gregor had said they needed supplies. It went against the plan, but he had to take the chance.
He slowed and turned into the parking lot of the Hermes General Store, which occupied the intersection of two rough roads that wound through a mountainous, unincorporated area hard by the border of the Daniel Boone National Forest. It was a two-story, white-clapboard affair with rocking chairs and a porch overlooking the gas pumps. An old bloodhound slept on the stoop.
“Everyone stays here,” Lyons said. “I’ll get the food and anything else we need.”
“No way,” Mann replied, yanking open the side door of the van. “I haven’t been in a store in four long years. I’m going in.”
“Me too,” Kelly said. “I want orange juice, fresh squeezed.”
Gregor did not say a word but climbed out after the inmates.
“Fuck,” the guard said, then jumped out and jogged to catch up behind them.
They went through a screen door and Lyons found himself in a low-ceilinged room with rows of goods and a wide-planked floor. An older man with slicked-back gray hair sat on a stool behind the cash register, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, sipping coffee, and watching a television bracketed to the ceiling.
Mann moved down the center aisle, grabbing cracker boxes, doughnuts, and tins of meat. Kelly went straight to the upright cooler and pulled out a carton of orange juice and several bottles of water. Gregor walked toward the front counter and a rack of nonprescription medicines. Up on the television screen, Lyons noticed Helen Greidel sitting in a director’s chair on a stage erected before a pair of large white tents.
“Welcome back to a special edition of Today live from the site of the Artemis Project,” she was saying.
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