She grimaced, handed it to him, then ran to her father and held on to him, tears dripping down her cheeks.
“Belt her, too,” the swarthy one said. “Gives us more control.”
“Do it and then we move,” the pale man said. “Those fucks in the helicopter will be coming for us. Leave the others. They’re useless to us now.”
The swarthy man held up what looked like the transmitter to an electronic dog collar and snarled, “Now get moving. Like Gregor said. Take us west.”
Tom looked at Cricket the horror of what had just transpired unfolding through him like fire catching wind He flashed on an image of Whitney the day before, begging him not to take Cricket into the cave.
“Do what they say, sweetheart,” he said. “No matter what. Do what they say.”
10:20 A.M.
NASA ENCAMPMENT
JENKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
IN THE FIELD OPPOSITE the Mission Control tent, Helen Greidel pressed her earphone to her head, then nodded into a camera lens with a studied expression of shock and concern.
“We interrupt your normal programming to bring you an update on an unfolding crisis at the site of NASA’s initial efforts to return man to the moon,” she began. “What started out earlier this morning as an intriguing experiment designed to give NASA crucial insight into the potential rigors of moon mining has turned into a deadly hostage situation here near rural Hermes, Kentucky, site of the largest cave in the world.
“As members of a NASA expeditionary force entered Labyrinth Cave, they were attacked by four armed and dangerous inmates who made a daring and bloody escape from a state prison hospital transport van yesterday morning,” she went on. “The four fugitives have killed one member of the cave team, taken hostage Artemis Project leader Tom Burke and his daughter, Cricket, and appear to have disappeared into the bowels of the Labyrinth.”
Greidel glanced down at a piece of paper she clutched in her left hand, which was visibly trembling.
“Six other members of the NASA team were rescued from the cave about an hour after the attack,” she continued. “But my sources have just confirmed a stunning piece of the story. U.S. marshals were engaged in a pitched gun battle with the escaped inmates right outside the cave entrance. But before the marshals could enter the cave to recapture the fugitives, and possibly save the Burkes, NASA security forces intervened.”
“You fuck-ups!” Finnerty yelled. “We had them. We were right there and we had them and you stopped us.”
Jim Angelis, the NASA chief, looked as though he wanted to bite the marshal’s face off. Instead, he jabbed Finnerty in the chest. “You entered NASA restricted airspace and opened fire with high-powered weapons!” Angelis shouted. “One of my people was lying there dead inside the gate to the cave. What’d you want my men to do, lay down the red carpet? Who the hell do you think you are, buddy?”
The two men, six Air Force security personnel, and Finnerty’s entire team were gathered in what passed for a conference tent just off the Mission Control pavilion.
Finnerty stood there, shaking from head to toe, aware of Boulter, Sanchez, and Two-Elk watching him, aware of feeling the way he had when the doctor had broken the news to him that there was a problem with the mobility of his sperm—emasculated, a shell of the man he’d always believed himself to be.
“I’m the U.S. Marshal for eastern Kentucky,” Finnerty said, doing everything in his power to regain control of the situation. “And all I wanted was for your people to let me do my job. I’d appreciate it if you let me do it now.”
“This is a NASA show,” Angelis retorted. “Our people will take it from here.”
“This is not a NASA installation,” Finnerty snapped. “This is a cave under public land that you just happen to be using for your experiment. I am going after those fugitives, Mr. Angelis.”
“Bullshit,” Angelis said.
Finnerty took a step closer to the NASA chief. “My team trains to deal with hostage situations. Does yours? You’ve got two dozen reporters outside and I guarantee there are dozens more on the way. Do you want to be the one, after the Burkes turn up dead, who has to explain why an inexperienced team was sent in while my people, trained in hostage rescues, stayed above ground?”
Angelis’s hands gathered into fists and for a second Finnerty thought the Mission Control chief would strike him. But Angelis just walked away and sank into a chair behind a small desk in the corner of the tent, ashen-faced. He ripped open a cigarette package and fished one out. “What a goddamned mess,” he said wearily. “Why’s this happening? What the hell do they want to be in this cave for?”
“We didn’t chase them in there, if that’s what you’re asking,” Finnerty replied. “And frankly, we don’t care why they’re in there. We just want to capture them and rescue Burke and his daughter.”
Angelis nodded in resignation. “How can we help you?”
The marshal gestured toward a computer screen atop Angelis’s desk that showed a smaller version of the grid representation of the cave that hung in the main pavilion. A blob of bright yellow pulsed inside the horizontal and vertical lines. “I assume that’s some kind of locator map.”
Angelis nodded. “Linked to low-frequency transponders in all the cave packs.”
Finnerty leaned over, peering at the electronic chart. “They seem to be heading toward the next ridge west. Is there a way I can get in there and cut them off?”
“The next entrance is out on Munk’s, the third of the nine that make up the cave,” Angelis replied. “Then you’d have to backtrack.”
“Fine,” Finnerty said. “I’ll need someone to lead me in there.”
Angelis grimaced, took a deep drag off his cigarette, then kneaded the back of his bullish neck. “Gonna be a problem.”
“Why?” Finnerty demanded.
“There are people here who know sections of the cave, but not all of it,” Angelis replied. “That’s part of the reason we sent cavers on this first traverse rather than potential moon miners—we needed to train guides for future training missions.”
Boulter, who had been standing by quietly, piped up. “You’re saying there’s no one else who knows Labyrinth Cave as well as this guy Burke?”
“Well, there’s one, but …”
“But what?” Finnerty demanded.
At that very moment, a commotion erupted outside the tent. “Ma’am? Ma’am!” a woman’s voice cried. “This is a restricted area, ma’am! You can’t go—”
Finnerty spun in his tracks to see a disheveled woman with strawberry-blond hair and wild eyes bursting into the tent. Her denim shirt was soaked with sweat. Blades of grass and dandelion stalks hung from the laces of her boots. She was gulping air as if she’d been running a very, very long way.
“Thank God I got here in time!” she gasped in Angelis’s direction. “Bad storm coming. You’ve got to send in a team to pull Tom and Cricket before they get in too deep. How long have they been in? Three? Three and a half hours?”
The woman strode by Finnerty as if he weren’t there, going straight to the computer screen on Angelis’s desk and put her fingers on the gathering of blinking yellow icons. “See! That puts them maximum in the passages near Monroe’s Slide, maybe almost to the Orchid Grower’s Way. Level two. Still dry cave. No problem.”
Finnerty glowered at Angelis. “Who the hell is this woman?”
Angelis cuffed his hand around the back of his neck again. “Damian Finnerty, meet Whitney Burke, Tom Burke’s wife,” he said. “The only one who knows Labyrinth Cave well enough to guide you.”
DESCENT
NOON
MONROE’S SLIDE
JENKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
THE BELLY BELT HAD metal nubs that dug into Cricket’s sides and back. She stumbled along, wincing at the pain, still stunned and benumbed by what had happened. Andy Swearingen was dead. Really dead. These men had taken her and her dad hostage. And they would not tell her fath
er where they were going.
“Take us west into the second ridge,” the sick-looking man, the one they called Gregor, kept saying. “I’ll tell you where to go from there.”
“How far are we, Gregor?” the dark-featured one, the man called Kelly, said behind her.
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“How can you not know?” the large black man called out. “You’ve been here before, right?”
Gregor shook his head. “I came into the cave a different way, Lyons, a way that can’t be used anymore. So we’re going to have to come at it from a different angle.”
“But you know where the stone is, right?” Lyons asked.
“Trust me,” Gregor said. “I know.”
They were 350 vertical feet down inside the hollow core of Jenkins Ridge now, hugging the right side of a curving slope, creeping ever deeper into the earth. Cricket followed Gregor, who followed her father. The soft-faced one, Mann, she thought they called him, was right behind her. Kelly and Lyons brought up the rear. Their headlamps bobbed and sliced the gloom, revealing water dripping from the ceiling high over Cricket’s head and, forty yards ahead, a spot where the curving slope they walked met a cliff and fell away into darkness. Tom slowed and crept sideways across the slope. Every few minutes he turned to seek her out and nod in encouragement. Cricket smiled grimly back at her father. Every negative thing she’d thought about him in the past few weeks had disappeared. Now she looked to him at every chance for support.
As she inched her way along the slope after her dad, she remembered the blinking green liquid display of her location transponder deep inside her pack. Someone on the surface had to be tracking them. A rescue effort had to be under way. Someone had to be coming. Didn’t they? And who were these men? She knew from the newspaper coverage of the Artemis Project that there had been threats from ecological activists opposed to mining the moon. Were these men terrorists? No, she decided. They kept mentioning a stone, which they obviously believed was hidden somewhere in the cave.
“Pay attention now, Cricket,” Tom called out, breaking her from her thoughts. They had reached a spot on the thirty-degree incline covered with dozens of rock plates. Most of the slabs were the size and shape of medieval castle doors, she thought; they lay loosely one on top of the other at odd directions.
Cricket watched as her father crawled out onto the stones first, making his way slowly down and at an angle over the plates of rock toward the edge of the cliff. Ten yards shy of the edge, he scrambled to his left and stood on a flat spot. Gregor went next. Cricket waited until Gregor stood next to her dad, then began to move. She got low and eased out onto the first slab, then hopped to a second, which rocked up under her weight. She crouched for a moment to regain her balance and swallow her fear.
Behind her Cricket heard someone climb out onto the first plate. She turned and saw Mann leering at her. “Hey,” she said. “One at a time. Wait until I get down.”
“Screw that,” Mann said, and he took another step and immediately lost his balance. He lurched forward. The sole of his boot slammed hard on the edge of the plate where Cricket crouched. Whatever wedge had held the tablet in place the last couple of thousand years cracked free. Cricket felt herself thrown on her back. The slab took off beneath her, shrieking, grinding, and clanking like an imbalanced bobsled. She looked up and almost vomited. She was zooming toward the cliff.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
Downslope, Tom knocked Gregor aside, took two strides uphill, and lunged toward Cricket with his arm outstretched. As the front edge of the slab cleared the rim, he saw Cricket throw herself toward him and reach. There was a sickening moment of inertia, when Tom was sure his daughter was doomed. Then her fingers caught his. The slab sailed off into the inky darkness and crashed to the bottom, sixty feet below.
Cricket dangled from his hand off the edge of the cliff. “Don’t drop me!” she cried.
“Never,” Tom said. He reached down with his other hand, got her wrist, and hauled her back up onto the slope. He stared at her for a second, struck by how much she looked like her mother, then crushed her in a hug.
“God, that was close,” he whispered. “Can’t lose you. Ever.”
It was taking everything Tom had to beat back the hysteria that threatened to cripple him. His thoughts kept jumping all over the place, and then, strangely, to the memory of yellow buttercups in a meadow one early summer afternoon a long, long time ago. Cricket had been no more than four that day, running barefoot into the wildflowers. Whitney had chased her, laughing. Their strawberry-blond hair shone gloriously in the June sun. Whitney scooped up Cricket, laid her in the grass, and tickled her under the chin with one of the flowers. For a few moments, the memory and the feeling of Cricket safe in his arms filled Tom with a sense that somehow everything was going to be all right. But then the feelings of well-being mutated into a startling awareness that he might never see his wife again.
“Let’s go,” Gregor said, pushing at Tom with the barrel of his gun. “She’s fine.”
Kelly, Lyons, and Mann stood behind him now.
Tom’s initial reaction was to go after Gregor. Instead, he forced himself to look down at Cricket and contain his rage. In the three hours they’d been held hostage, Tom had come to the conclusion that although these men needed him, they would kill his daughter without a second thought. Cricket’s safety was all that mattered to him right now. He had to play it smart to make sure she survived. That meant giving them whatever they wanted. At least until the opportunity for escape came.
“Can you keep going?” he asked Cricket.
She looked ready to dissolve, but nodded. “As long as I’m with you, I can keep going, Daddy.”
Tom kissed her on the forehead and then pulled away from her and set off again, climbing down through the pitch-black hall, going deeper and deeper into the bowels of Jenkins Ridge.
He noticed a musty, vinegar odor in the air, the sweat scent of the men who held him captive. The sound of their footfalls slapped and echoed all around him, a constant reminder of his predicament. Now the passage leveled and increased to the size of a subway tunnel.
Despite the danger he was in, Tom’s mind whirled. Like most of Labyrinth Cave, he knew, the ancient subterranean byway had started hundreds of centuries ago as a crack in the rock through which seeped a dribble of water tainted by humic acid. Over the aeons, the mildly corrosive water poured through the crack, acting like a chainsaw, cutting, smoothing, and flushing the opening until it became a streambed and eventually a river. All along the walls Tom could see where thousands of years of water flow had created large, shell-like depressions in the limestone. These were the landmarks he was constantly reading, using them to navigate through the cave.
On the cave ceiling he was suddenly aware of curled petals of pallid gypsum mineral brushed by hints of rose. Within the petals, the white crystals grew into tendrils shaped like flower stamens, both ribboned and straight. Drifting from the tips of the most stunning orchid stamen were wisps of blond minerals so fine they stirred in the breeze like pollen threatening to take flight.
Kelly reached up and snapped off one of the formations just behind the flower. He sniffed it, then flicked it against a wall, where it shattered into a hundred pieces.
Tom couldn’t help himself. “Stop that,” he yelled. Those are some of the rarest formations in the world!”
Kelly’s swarthy face tensed at being challenged. He snapped off another orchid and smashed that one, too. “Tell it to someone who gives a flying fuck,” he said.
Behind Kelly, Tom saw Cricket shake her head, fear twisting her face. Once again, Tom was forced to swallow his anger. He moved them quickly forward to where the ceiling rose to almost twelve feet and the gypsum orchids grew out of reach.
“What about those guys in the helicopter?” Mann demanded. “How are we going to get out of here without being caught?”
“It’s all taken care of,” Gregor replied. “Let’s just get t
o the stone first. If I get there, everything will be all right.”
Tom’s mind spun at the conversation. They kept talking about a stone. He wanted to know more, to understand what these men really wanted inside the Labyrinth, but decided the best thing he could do right now was keep quiet and make discoveries about them passively. Once he knew exactly why he and Cricket were being held, he might be able to use that information to help them get away.
For Tom, the next two hours were characterized only by the dull thud of boots on bedrock and the squeak and swish of packs against nylon suits and the clashing swords of light from helmet lamps; and the shadows in his peripheral vision, the dripping of water off the ceilings, and the constant, overriding thought that he had to save Cricket.
Then, somewhere in the line behind him, Tom became aware of one of the men humming. It was a tune he’d heard before but could not place exactly. Then he understood that it was a children’s melody, one Cricket used to hum, but it was being delivered not with joy but with such understated menace that Tom stopped and turned.
The pretty boy, the one they called Mann, was ambling along behind Cricket His helmet hung off to one side of his head. Mann was humming and leering at his daughter. His hand was rubbing at his crotch.
“Get the fuck away from my daughter, you sick bastard,” Tom roared as he weaved by Gregor, Kelly, and Cricket going for Mann.
But before he could get there, a girdle of electricity cinched itself around Tom’s abdomen. Spikes of heat sliced inward from the girdle where they joined at his back, then twisted and ran up and down his spinal column, chopping him down. The last thing he remembered before the blackness took him were his fingers lashing the air as if he were keying an invisible piano.
12:22 P.M.
NASA ENCAMPMENT
JENKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Jeannie’s body kept bumping against Whitney in the darkness. The gritty water dripped down Whitney’s throat, making her gag. She had to get back up on the ledge, out of the water. Her only chance. The water was robbing her of heat. She had to get out of the water.
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