Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Lyons ignored the broadcast and squatted before the newspaper rack. The headline on the Louisville Courier-Journal read: FOUR ESCAPE EDDYVILLE. THREE GUARDS KILLED. FOURTH GUARD SUSPECTED AS ACCOMPLICE. Under the headline were mug shots of all of them. The guard put the paper back and then, with his head cast down, sidled over to Gregor. “We’re front page,” he muttered. “Pictures of all of us. Even you.”

  Gregor glanced at the paper. “We’ve got to get out of here. Pay and we’re gone.”

  Lyons nodded. Mann and Kelly arrived at the counter and put the food and beverages on the counter. The store owner said nothing as he rang up the purchases.

  “That’ll be twenty-seven fifty,” he said.

  Lyons handed the man a fifty and the store owner grimaced. “I’ll have to get you change for something that big.” He turned and disappeared into an office.

  “Let’s go,” Lyons whispered.

  “We leave that kind of change behind, he’ll remember us,” Kelly said.

  “Look,” Gregor said before Lyons could reply. The black guard turned and saw the pale scientist, frozen, shaking and staring up at the television screen where a photograph of the moon had appeared. Then, through computer animation, a large area of the photograph lifted and spun. The camera zoomed and slowed over a mountainous region of the lunar surface.

  “This is the Descartes Highlands,” Greidel was saying in voice-over, “where NASA hopes to have miners working within the next three years. The area is believed to contain dense concentrations of ores that scientists have determined are crucial to the field of so-called superconductors. Such ores allow energy to flow through them with almost zero resistance. Scientists say the ores will revolutionize technology here on Earth as well as ease America’s dependence on foreign oil.”

  “Those ba-bastards,” Gregor whispered. His sickly body began to quiver and sweat. “They’re trying to bury me!”

  “Let’s go!” Lyons insisted.

  But Gregor was frozen, staring at the screen. The picture had jumped to that aerial shot of the nine ridges again. The camera’s eye zoomed in on the northern end of the easternmost ridge, then hovered over a plume of thick mist belching up out of a gaping wound in the earth. At the sight of it, the breath caught in his throat. The snowy skin on his bald head furrowed and ticked as if he were suffering the remnants of a stroke.

  “Burke’s team will enter Labyrinth Cave here at the Orpheus Entrance within the hour,” Greidel was saying in voice-over. Then the camera pulled back again and zoomed toward the eighth ridge. “The original plan called for the team to eventually exit at the Virgil Entrance way out on Tower Ridge, the eighth of the nine. But a roof collapsed inside the cave six weeks ago and that entrance is now buried under at least one hundred fifty feet of rubble and Burke’s team now plans to leave the cave—”

  Gregor doubled over, racked by spasm. “No. No,” he moaned.

  “What’s the matter?” Lyons demanded.

  But Gregor was unable to speak. The air kept catching in his throat and Lyons was afraid he might have a stroke right there inside the old store.

  “Oh, shit,” Mann said.

  Lyons looked up to see that the local Lexington station had broken into the Today show broadcast. An earnest young man in a suit and tie sat before a desk. An electronic logo that read PRISON BREAK was splashed on the screen beside him

  “One of the largest manhunts in Kentucky history is under way this morning,” the local anchor began. “Four inmates from the state penitentiary at Eddyville escaped from a transfer van yesterday morning near Central City. One has been recaptured. Authorities say the inmates escaped with the help of one of their guards, who is believed to have killed three other corrections officers assigned to the transfer. If you see these men, contact the Kentucky State Police.”

  The screen jumped again and their mug shots appeared.

  Kelly elbowed Lyons in the ribs. The guard looked down to see the store owner standing in the doorway of his office. He slammed the door shut. Gregor stumbled toward the front door. Kelly jerked his pistol from his waist belt and started toward the office. Mann took off after Gregor.

  “We got no time for killing!” Lyons yelled at Kelly, who was stepping back as if he meant to shoot off the office door handle. “Gregor’s running for it!”

  Before Kelly could turn, there was the roar of a shotgun and the store office door six inches to the left of his abdomen exploded outward. Kelly threw himself to the right just before a second shotgun blast blew another ragged hole in the door. Somewhere behind the door they could hear the store owner ramming another shell through the mechanism of a pump-action. Lyons got low and scrambled toward the front door. Kelly took two shots at the light streaming through the holes in the office door, then raced after the guard.

  Lyons burst out the front door with Kelly right behind him. Gregor was already in the driver’s seat The scientist jammed the vehicle in Drive, squealed forward ten feet, then slammed on the brakes. Mann slid open the side door. The old store owner appeared at an open window, aiming down the barrel of his shotgun.

  “Get down!” Mann yelled.

  Lyons and Kelly dived into the van. Gregor floored the accelerator. The store owner fired. The blast took out the passenger side window, spraying them all with glass. Kelly stuck his pistol out the window and took another shot, even as Gregor spun the wheel and the big utility vehicle heaved about like a yawl changing tack in a gale. The tires squealed and smoked. The van skidded onto the two-lane highway and roared off to the south. Blood trickled from cuts on Gregor’s face and scalp. He hunched over the wheel, his boot still jammed down on the accelerator, fighting for control of the vehicle around a tight curve in the forest.

  “Slow down,” Lyons yelled. “You’ll roll us.”

  “We’ve got to get up there before it’s too late,” Gregor bellowed back.

  “Get up where?” Lyons asked, looking at the dense forest that hemmed the road.

  Just then they crested a ridge in the road. The forest ended and the land fell away toward a wide plain of farmland leading to a lazy river. A ferry chugged across a ford in the river. On the other side, nine distinct ridges rose through the morning mist

  “Up there,” Gregor panted. “We’re going up there.”

  8:07 A.M.

  NEAR SOMERSET, KENTUCKY

  “National security, my ass!” Damian Finnerty shouted into his headset “That’s crap and you know it Jerry. I want that testimony from Gregor’s case unsealed ASAP! I want to know why the FBI took those bodies. And I want someone from the attorney general’s office to get on the phone with me or better yet to get their butts down here to tell me what the Christ it is I’m dealing with! Cut the crap, Jerry. And cut it now!”

  Finnerty angrily clicked off the radio link with his liaison in Washington. From the helicopter, he could see below him a line of honking cars, eighteen-wheelers, and pickup trucks that stretched more than a half mile from a police barricade back to the west along the Cumberland Parkway. The throughway ended at Somerset Beyond the town, to the east crisscrossed with serpentine two-lane highways and a vast network of dirt logging roads, lay the Daniel Boone National Forest as rugged a land as any in the Appalachians.

  “That line’s getting pretty long, boss,” Boulter said. “You still want them checking every car?”

  “Every damned one,” the marshal snapped. Then he gestured to the open file in his lap. “As a kid Gregor lived out in this area with his mother and then his grandfather. This forest is one of his comfort zones. He’s coming here. I can feel it in my gut.”

  The second Finnerty said it, he caught his reflection in the windshield of the helicopter and felt doubt surge through him. What if he was wrong? He’d always trusted his hunting instincts before. But somehow things were different now. He wasn’t the man he’d been the week before, was he? Even Natalie looked at him differently. If he didn’t have what it took to father a child, maybe he didn’t have what it took to be a marsha
l anymore. Maybe—

  A voice broke him from these depressing thoughts: “Fugitive one?”

  Finnerty put a hand to his headset. “Roger, dispatch.”

  “They’ve been spotted at a town called Hermes Four Corners about sixty miles from you. A store owner was in a gun battle with them about ten minutes ago.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Finnerty fumed. “I’m two steps behind these guys!”

  The marshal ripped open a map and found Hermes Four Corners just south of the Furnace River. Sanchez leaned over Finnerty’s shoulder from the backseat, looked at the map, then jabbed a finger just below the Hermes Reservoir.

  “Gregor lived with his grandfather in a shack at the west end of that lake!” Sanchez crowed. “That’s gotta be where he’s taking them!”

  “Get us to this road, one-eighty-eight—south of Hermes Four Corners,” Finnerty told Boulter. “Then we’ll swing over the lake.”

  The nose of the chopper dipped, then they arced with gathering speed northeast across the meadow and out over the long exit ramp that led off the parkway and the troopers who were already pulling the barricades.

  8:22 A.M.

  NASA ENCAMPMENT JENKINS RIDGE LABYRINTH CAVE

  Sixty-seven air miles away, the sound was deafening and the klieg lights were blinding as Tom Burke, Cricket, and the rest of the NASA team entered the cave.

  Behind him, Tom heard Helen Greidel announce: “The United States of America prepares to return to mine the moon, the most expensive and ambitious project ever undertaken by man. And the early fate of the program rests on the shoulders of these men and women.”

  The cave that Tom and his team entered for the cameras had no known connection to the Labyrinth complex. The entire thing was staged. A media charade. The little grotto in the woods just beyond the pasture of the old Jenkins farm was no more than one hundred feet long, with entrances at both ends, similar in layout to the tunnels pedestrians use under busy urban streets.

  Tom thought the entire thing was ridiculous, but he had agreed to it in order to placate a media horde turned testy by his refusal to let them accompany his team to the real entrance site. The ingress his cavers would actually use, the Orpheus Entrance, lay at the far end of a footpath that coursed two miles north out the spine of Jenkins Ridge before slabbing off the steep east face in a curved descent toward the Furnace River

  Tom had reasons for having his people walk to the cave alone. He wanted the clear separation from civilization to have its effects on the team. Moon miners would face the same sort of physical and psychological disconnection when they left the safety of their lunar stations.

  Indeed, a mile into their hike, Tom noticed with satisfaction that the five male and two female cavers he had chosen for the traverse were quieting, checking their equipment, turning subdued in anticipation of the rigors to come.

  Now that they were under way, Tom allowed himself a gloomy recollection. Before leaving the Mission Control grounds, he and Cricket had tried to call Whitney twice at home and then on her cell phone, but there’d been no response. It was almost like Whitney was a completely different person now. When they’d met in college, all she’d talked about was her dream to do great science. For years they’d been partners in that effort. And now? He shook his head and wondered whether Cricket was right: Were they heading for divorce?

  They crossed through an opening in the forest, and, to get his mind off the travails of his marriage, Tom once again turned a critical eye toward his gear. The subject had been an obsession with him the past three months as he’d tried to winnow out the things they carried.

  Each of Tom’s team members wore a blue or yellow ballistic-cloth coverall adorned with red and white NASA mission patches. Their red helmets had been retrofitted to handle a powerful headlamp system called a SuperGlo 5000, which could run a solid fourteen hours on a slim battery roughly the size of a baseball card. Underneath their coveralls they sported polypropylene shirts and midweight leggings that fit into thin wool-poly-weave socks. Over the socks they wore Gore-Tex booties. Rubberized padding protected their shins, elbows, and knees.

  In their packs, his cavers carried three backup sources of light—small electric headlamps, mini-flashlights, and several fluorescent loops. They also toted replacement batteries for the SuperGlo, an ingenious dry suit NASA had developed for the wetter portions of the cave, a silk bandana to use as a filter should they encounter dust, and packets of electrolytic salts. Each caver also carried a tube of fluorescein dye, which scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey had asked them to carry and dump into the water as part of an experiment to determine how long it took for water to leave the interior of Labyrinth Cave and reach the Furnace River. Every pack also contained a one-liter plastic bottle equipped with a built-in filtration system, emergency heat packs that activated when exposed to air, and a Leatherman tool.

  NASA had provided food packaged in plastic tubes. At two thousand calories per tube, each ration was designed to provide a third of the cavers’ daily nutrition.

  In addition, each caver wore a small micro-processor attached below the left collarbone. The processor would gather and store basic physiological data—heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, temperature, and glucose and adrenaline levels. The NASA engineers planned to download Cricket’s and Andy’s data when they emerged from the cave later that afternoon. Tom and the rest of the team would transmit their physiological information into the computer links at the two supply dumps.

  As they entered a glen of mature pin oaks, Tom was jolted from his thoughts by the sight of Cricket trudging along with her head down. He frowned and hurried up to her side. “C’mon, kiddo,” he said. “You’d think you were carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. You’re famous now. Every kid in America knows you. Helen Greidel wants to talk to you when you come out this afternoon. You’re going to be our spokesgirl … er … spokes-young-lady … on the world’s most widely watched news show.”

  Cricket shrugged. “I’ll probably make a total baboon of myself.”

  Before he could reply, the terrain dropped off steeply, forcing Tom to concentrate on his footing. Far to the north, he could see the ferry that took cars across the Furnace River at Cronin’s Landing. The barge was at midstream, its side wheel cranking madly.

  The trail turned west toward the edge of a brush-choked ravine. On the far side of the ravine, a hole gaped in the mountainside. Thick steam belched from the hole. Tom felt a surge of energy pulse up his spine. This was the original entrance to Labyrinth Cave, the one Cricket had discovered all those years ago. He quickened his pace and soon they reached the gated entrance. He tossed his pack to the ground and struggled into the sleeves of his cave suit. Cricket did the same, but with little enthusiasm.

  Tom got a key from his pack, set it into the lock, then swung open the stainless-steel gate. The rest of the caving team scrambled now, snapping on helmets, darting into the woods for last-minute urination.

  “Everybody check that their locator units are transmitting,” Tom called out. “You should see a green LED light flashing on the upper left corner. Cricket?”

  Cricket rolled her eyes, then looked in her pack and cupped her hand around the device. “Mine’s on,” she said.

  “I think you should go in first,” Tom said. Your cave.”

  She stood there for a moment, then shrugged, picked up her pack, and slung it over her shoulder. Tom felt a wave of frustration and anger toward her. If this was her attitude, he didn’t know if he wanted her inside the cave. Going underground demanded focus and eagerness. It was the only way you survived. Then he thought, She’ll be better once she gets inside. Caves are in her blood.

  He turned to his assistant “I’m going in right after her,” he told Andy. “We’ll head straight through the anteroom, then down the ladder into Christmas Tree. Send the others on in as they get ready. Don’t help them. I want to see where their caving heads are at, whether they can read the place yet Lock up when the last
one enters.”

  “These guys are good,” Andy boasted. “They’ll be right behind you.”

  Cricket, meanwhile, was already moving toward the gate and the mouth of the cave. Usually, she felt a great deal of anticipation heading underground. And she knew she should be excited at the honor of entering first on such a historic mission. But all she felt was tired and left out somehow.

  As she went by Andy, he reached out and squeezed her arm. “Hey, Miss Happy. I’m looking forward to coming out together. It’ll be fun.”

  A week ago, having Andy say he was looking forward to spending time with her would have induced a bout of the giggles and a reddening of the skin, but all she did was nod. “Yeah,” she said. “Fun.”

  She went inside the mouth of the cave. It was cool here, midfifties, and very humid. The floor slanted at a steep angle down and to the right before it disappeared into blackness. A layer of dried black guano covered the floor and when she stepped on it, there was a crushing noise. A sour smell filled the air. Several hundred bats clung in the crevices of the cave’s ceiling. The bats rustled and shifted at her passing. The walls around the bats were discolored by mineral seepage, iron most likely, from the rusty quality it gave the limestone. Long-legged cave insects, creatures the color of sand, crawled across every plane of the rock

  Cricket reached around to the padded neoprene belt that fit snugly at the small of her back and snapped on the SuperGlo. A boulevard of light flared out from the powerful electric headlamp attached to her helmet. Then she turned down the lamp’s power to approximately half its capacity, got on her hands and knees, and crawled into a black plastic culvert placed there to allow access to the greater cave. The culvert was thirty feet long and tilted down into the earth at a twenty-degree angle. She slid through the culvert into a world of complete and total darkness, a world where she immediately sensed the weight and pressure of tens of thousands of tons of rock all around her.

  Cricket had spent so much of her young life underground that the closest she could come to describing the experience was that it was similar to what she felt during summer vacations when she donned a mask and snorkel and went skin diving in the ocean—she immediately found her senses altered and muffled. Sight became crucial but was limited by the power of the headlamp. Sound was thrown by the ever-changing acoustics. And touch was buffered by the heavy gloves and coveralls she was forced to wear.