Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Her father came out of the culvert behind her with a big smile on his face. “Isn’t it great that this will be the proving ground for the lunar miners, Crick?” he said. “Caves strip people to their essence, exposing their strengths and weaknesses as glaringly as an electron microscope reveals the inner workings of a molecule.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “You know why I love caves?”

  “No, but I suppose you’re going to tell me.”

  He frowned. “You’re right. I am going to tell you. I love caves because the silence is so complete you can listen clearly to your heart, which is not always a pleasant thing, but a necessary one now and then. You know?”

  Cricket looked up at her father and told herself that he was a nerd, but essentially a good nerd. “Yeah, I guess you’re probably right, Dad.”

  “Course I’m right,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

  She followed her dad under an overhang into a vast cavern shaped like an apse. At this setting her lamp was incapable of lighting the vast blackness; instead, she saw the place in shadowy slices. The floor was strewn with small blackish boulders. At the far end of the subterranean room, a towering pile of rubble reached nearly to the ceiling, some sixty feet above.

  A chill breeze turned against her cheeks, a steady wind her dad often called “the Labyrinth’s breath.” The scent of the cave wind usually had a calming effect on Cricket; it had always reminded her of fall nights after a gentle rain. But at that moment the underworld’s breath seemed to carry an odor that surprised her. Two years ago, she and her mom and dad had gone to visit relatives in Savannah, Georgia. They had gone to the famous Bonaventure Cemetery and toured some of the mausoleums. The Labyrinth’s breath now carried the same acrid mustiness she’d smelled in the crypts. That graveyard scent was not one she had ever associated with the Labyrinth before and its strange presence put her on edge.

  Her wariness heightened as she and her father crossed the cavern toward the large rubble pile. Her dad was always telling people in interviews that caves were living organisms composed of soluble rock, air, and water instead of flesh and blood. But she knew from English class that that was only a metaphor, a way of giving a geological formation a personality that people who’d never been in a cave might appreciate. Now, however, Cricket felt something weird about the cave; it seemed to be pressing in on her, as if the rock that surrounded her had indeed been changed into a living, dangerous force. In return she had the cutting thought that she and her dad should go back outside.

  Then she glanced over at her father moving so effortlessly through the cave, and she shook off those feelings, telling herself that she just hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before, that she was letting her mom and their family problems get to her.

  Her dad reached the rubble pile and began scrambling up. She hesitated for a moment, then went up after him. The pile was fifty feet high and it took her three minutes to reach the top. Then she followed her father down the steep backside of the pile, navigating her way over the rocks as if they were a pressurized jigsaw puzzle, using her headlamp to pick her way down over hundreds of stones all shifting and grumbling against one another. Below her, Cricket saw a narrow, cockeyed V of a gash in the rock at the cliff’s base. The prongs of an eighteen-foot aluminum ladder stuck up out of the hole at the bottom of the V.

  They reached it and her father said, “Young ladies first.”

  Cricket grabbed the ladder’s top rung, swung around to get her feet positioned, then pumped her way down, studied and focused in her every move. The floor she dropped through became, in turn, the ceiling of a lower cave passage. The base of the ladder was surrounded by what looked like a stand of frosted Christmas trees growing from the bottom of the cave. There were dozens of the stalagmites, all coated in powdery white gypsum crystals. Cricket had seen these speleological formations at least a hundred times and they still amazed her. When she reached the bottom, she called back up through the hole, “Clear!”

  In less than a minute, her dad reached the bottom. “They’ll be right along,” he said to her. Cricket went and sat next to one of the frosted cave formations.

  “You know, even after all these years, I’m still head over heels in love with all of this,” her dad said. “The grit, the adventure, the challenge, the beauty. But you know what I love most of all?”

  Cricket shook her head. Her dad was always talking like this, asking questions and then answering them before you could get a word in edgewise.

  “It’s the science and the possibility of new discovery,” he said. “It’s being the first, Crick. It’s being—” Something terrifying reverberated down through the hole in the ceiling above her dad’s head. From far back, toward the anteroom beyond the gate, Cricket heard the echo of Andy Swearingen yelling and then the unmistakable flat slap and roar of a gunshot.

  8:55 A.M.

  SOUTH OF HERMES FOUR CORNERS, KENTUCKY

  Nearly three-quarters of a mile below the Orpheus Entrance and one hundred feet in the air, Boulter flew the helicopter across the Furnace River roughly paralleling a narrow mountain road that led south from Hermes Four Corners. Finnerty and his two deputies were using binoculars to search for any sign of the escaped convicts.

  When they swept over the southern shoreline, the marshal dropped his glasses, adjusted his headset microphone, and said, “Two more minutes and we go try to find Gregor’s grandfather’s cabin out on that lake.”

  “No, we don’t,” Sanchez yelled suddenly over the thrum of the rotors. “I’ve got the panel van. Right there!”

  Finnerty raised his binoculars and saw the van pulled in under brush at the mouth of a ravine that cut into the mountainside. Ahead of the van he saw broken branches where someone had passed.

  “They’re climbing,” Finnerty yelled. “Get us up that hill. Try to spot them.”

  Seven hundred yards up the hill, Billy Lyons held his hand to his forehead and moaned at the sight of the young man lying just inside the metal gate to the cave. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose. His eyes were filmy and lifeless.

  “Goddammit,” Lyons murmured. “Another civilian dead.”

  All day, ever since LaValle Cox’s body had slumped to the sidewalk in front of that Laundromat, Lyons had promised himself that no more civilians would perish. But it had all happened so quickly that the guard had been powerless to intervene. Lyons and the inmates had been climbing up the brush-choked ravine with Gregor in the lead. They reached a steep lip and had to push the pale scientist, gasping and sweating, up and over onto a wide ledge that encircled the mountain. Lyons peeked over the top of the ledge just in time to see the young man in the red helmet and blue coveralls pick up a pack and start toward a stainless-steel gate that barred the way to a gash in the mountainside.

  For a moment, Gregor stood there wheezing and studying the young man and the opening to the cave as a nomad coming out of the desert might an oasis. The young man heard Gregor wheezing and turned, hesitating at the sight of the scientist eyeing him murderously. The young man pointed at Gregor and said, “This is a restricted area, sir. Turn around. Go back the way you came.”

  Gregor sneered and pulled his pistol. The young man panicked, spun, and ran toward the cave. Gregor tore after him. The young man got inside the mouth of the cave, pulled out a key, and tried to shut and lock the gate, yelling “Help! Someone help!” But even in his weakened physical state, Gregor was too quick; he reached the young man, raised his pistol, and shot him right in the throat. Then he kicked open the gate, flipped on his flashlight, jumped over the body, and disappeared into the cave.

  Lyons saw it all from the lip of the ravine and something expired inside of him. This was not the way it was all supposed to happen. Innocent civilians were not supposed to die. This was not part of the grand scheme. But before another thought passed through his mind, he heard the deep throb of a helicopter coming up the mountain behind him.

  They’re after us!” Kelly screamed as he vaul
ted by Lyons up onto the ledge, with Mann right behind him. The guard hesitated, then scrambled up after the escaping inmates.

  As he and Mann reached the cave entrance, the helicopter achieved altitude and was two hundred yards out from them, closing fast. The blade wash threw a storm of pebbles that pinged against the metal gate. Mann dived in beside the young man’s body, plucked the key from his lifeless hand, shoved the gate shut, and locked it. The helicopter swung sideways in space.

  “U.S. Marshals. Do not move!” Finnerty barked over a loudspeaker. “Lay down your weapons or we will use force.”

  The side door of the chopper opened. A Latino in a blue baseball cap was on one knee, bracing a woman who sat before him, legs crossed, elbows draped over her upper shins in the classic sniper position.

  “Fuck!” Lyons bellowed. For a second he didn’t know what to do. Then, overriding all other thoughts, came the absolute, inviolate conviction that he had to stay with Gregor no matter the circumstances. He had to get to that stone, no matter the cost to property or life.

  He spun on his knees and began scrambling toward the plastic culvert into which Gregor and Kelly had already disappeared.

  From the helicopter, Finnerty saw the dead body and Lyons moving. In his headset he heard Two-Elk, calm, controlled: “Target acquired. Permission to fire.”

  “Fire!” the marshal yelled.

  The black guard was now halfway into the culvert. Two-Elk touched the trigger on her .270. There was a roar, then a clang and a whine as the 130-grain bullet ricocheted off the bars of the gate. Lyons disappeared. Then the marshal saw the flash of a pistol in the shadows of the cave entrance and heard two flat cracks above the thumping of the chopper. The window beside him shattered. The marshal jerked away from the shower of glass then came back up just in time to see Two-Elk swing the muzzle of her rifle toward another of the inmates running for the culvert.

  “He’s going for the hole!” Finnerty cried.

  Mann, pistol in hand, dived into the culvert just as Two-Elk fired again. Her shot struck rock right next to the escaped inmate’s boots and then he was gone, too.

  “Son of a bitch!” Finnerty bellowed. “She missed them both! Put us down. We’re losing them!”

  Boulter’s massive hands pulled back and to the left on the helicopter’s flight stick. The bird swung into space over the ravine, the wind howling in the shattered window, then did a 360-degree loop back toward the narrow ledge. The blades scalped the tips of pine branches that overhung the cave entrance.

  “Goddammit, Captain, put me on the ground!” Finnerty yelled

  “Ledge isn’t wide enough!” Boulter yelled back. “I’ll shear a blade!”

  “We’ll drop in by rope. Climbing gear on!”

  The chopper rose twenty feet and hovered. Two-Elk and Sanchez slung ropes out the side door. Finnerty unbuckled his safety harness and was trying to get into the backseat of the chopper when he heard Boulter whisper over the headset, “Holy mother.”

  The marshal froze, then looked back over his shoulder. Rising over the spine of Jenkins Ridge was a second helicopter and then a third, both of them military gunships with bold black lettering on their flanks: U.S. AIR FORCE/NASA SECURITY.

  An unfamiliar voice crackled in the marshal’s ear: “Unidentified aircraft, you have entered restricted NASA airspace. Identify yourself and withdraw immediately or you will be fired upon.”

  9:10 A.M.

  ANTEROOM

  JENKINS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Tom heard two more gunshots as he scrambled off the ladder and began to climb the backside of the rubble pile. Cricket was right behind him. He turned and whispered, “You stay here.”

  “No, Dad,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  He hesitated, then said, “Stay behind me and get ready to run.”

  Ahead he heard the clash of voices in the cave on the other side of the rubble pile. Tom turned off his headlamp and motioned to Cricket to do the same. He eased up behind jutting rock slabs that in the glow of the gathered headlamps below looked like chunks of melting ice.

  “Move,” a sickly-looking man carrying a flashlight ordered. He was waving his pistol at six of Tom’s NASA cavers, who were now stripping as fast as they could.

  There were three other men, one black, with the sickly-looking man, and as each piece of caving gear hit the ground, one of them swooped in to put it on. Marie LaCroix, the petite, redheaded French woman and longtime friend of Tom and Whitney’s, sniffled, as she kicked off her boots and zipped down her coverall. The colorless man slapped on knee pads, elbow pads, and helmet like a seasoned caving veteran. The others were more hesitant, following his lead.

  “What do we do?” Cricket asked in a voice that hovered on the verge of hysteria.

  Tom shook his head, bewildered. The men had guns. Where was Andy? “Don’t move,” he commanded.

  Now the ashen-skinned man was dressed and standing before the members of Tom’s team, all kneeling on the cave floor in their underwear. He shone his headlamp in each of their faces. “Where’s Burke?” he demanded. “The guy who was on television?”

  The cavers glanced furtively at one another.

  “Where the hell is he!” shouted a swarthy-looking man beside the sick one.

  Marie LaCroix began to sob. “We do not know this! Tom, he goes on first into the cave, then he waits for us to come up and we was to begin!”

  The pale man cocked the pistol and aimed it at the woman’s forehead. “Please, no, I am just married,” she said, her voice shaking.

  “Then your life will be as much a tragedy as mine,” he replied. He looked from the begging woman into the shadows and rocks where Tom and Cricket hid. “Come out, Burke!”

  “How does he know who you are, Dad?” Cricket whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Tom replied, shaken.

  “Come out or she dies!” the feeble-looking man roared.

  Tom grabbed Cricket by the upper arm and whispered, “You stay hidden, you hear? Whatever happens, you stay right here.”

  “No, Daddy!”

  But Tom was already up and stepping out of the shadows. He raised his hands. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Excellent decision, Burke,” the pale man said.

  Tom eased down the slope, his attention passing over the members of his team, who shivered in the chill, humid air. When he reached the bottom of the rubble pile he looked at the pale man. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded. “You’re ruining one of the greatest science experiments of all time.”

  A spasm of mirth crossed the man’s face. “You wouldn’t understand greatness if it stared you in the face. Now, you’re going to guide us into this maze.”

  “Hell I will,” Tom said, defiantly.

  His tormentor’s face went flat and ugly and he swung the pistol toward the kneeling cavers. “Shall I shoot another like the one at the gate?”

  “Andy?” Tom mumbled in shock.

  The black man stepped from the shadows, holding a shotgun leveled at the pale man’s stomach. “Don’t do it, Gregor,” he said. “Too many folks died for that stone already.”

  Gregor’s eyes narrowed and the hand that held the pistol tensed.

  The swarthy man stepped between the black one and the sick-looking one. He held a burlap sack in one hand. “Be cool now, Lyons, Gregor,” he said to them. “What we need is a more subtle form of bending him to our will, hear?”

  From the sack, the swarthy man drew out what looked like the sort of belt that weight lifters wear, only this one had a narrow black box attached to the back. The swarthy man faced Tom.

  “Put it on, fucker, or they all die right now.”

  Tom hesitated, then saw the tears streaming down Marie LaCroix’s face, and passed the belt around his waist. The fourth man, the one who looked like he’d just walked in from a country club, stepped up to Tom and snapped shut a lock on the belt

  “Do as he says now,” Pretty Boy said. “This sucker’ll give you fifty
thousand volts through the tummy.”

  Tom blanched. He understood that he was facing not men but animals. That understanding triggered the survivor instinct in him, an instinct honed over years spent navigating the bowels of the Earth. He felt himself turn to iron inside. He looked around at them all. “You sick bastards. I promise you, you’ll pay—”

  Gregor backhanded Tom across the mouth. “I’m coming to get what’s mine. I don’t pay for that.”

  A stone zinged out of the darkness and caught the pale man flush in the rib cage. He grunted at the blow, lurched sideways, and almost dropped his pistol. A second stone caught Swarthy in the kidneys and he dropped the belly-belt transmitter. The third rock found its mark on Pretty Boy’s shoulder; he spun and wailed with pain.

  “Run!” Cricket screamed. “Daddy! Run!”

  There was a flash of movement high in the rocks atop the slope and the men all swung their headlamps toward it. Cricket was rising from her hiding place to launch a fourth salvo when Gregor found her with his light and raised his gun.

  Tom panicked and shouted, “Don’t! She’s only a girl.”

  “She called him Daddy,” Swarthy mused, his expression curving into a smile. “Tell her to come down, now, Burke, or she might suffer a serious mishap.”

  Tom gazed up the rock pile toward Cricket, who stood with her arm cocked behind her, ready to throw. “Drop the rock, honey,” he called out

  “I won’t,” Cricket cried, shaking the rock

  “It’s over,” Tom insisted. “Come down.”

  Cricket hesitated, then started down, still gripping the rock, her headlamp bobbing, slicing the gloomy interior of the cave. The black man stepped out when she got close. “Give me the rock, kid,” he said softly.