They reached a dead-end wall in the passage. Tom paused to adjust the strength of his headlamp beam, then dropped his feet through the serrated cavity beneath him. The rims of the pinched canyon caught him under both armpits and for a moment he dangled there, his feet free in space above the long drop through the rock teeth to the water. Then he began to swing back and forth like a gymnast on the parallel bars until, on the fifth upstroke, his toes found an unseen ledge. He leaned way back, limboed his way under the rock face, and found himself in an oval-shaped chamber. Cave onyx—calcite deposits that looked like grape-sized pearls—lined the walls of the grotto.
“Clear,” Tom called back.
One by one, Gregor, Kelly, Cricket, Lyons, and then Mann accomplished the tricky maneuver. One by one, they collapsed against walls of the grotto, all of them gasping for breath, almost overcome by the particular horror of crawling a slick wall three miles underground.
Cricket went over to Tom and lay against him. They had stopped for only two forty-minute rests since entering the cave nearly twenty-four hours ago. She fell asleep immediately. Tom gazed down at her, sleeping so peacefully, and the whole cavern seemed to melt into the night she was born.
Whitney had been two weeks overdue. It was raining hard. He was still working on his doctoral thesis and had fallen asleep at his desk, so at first he didn’t hear Whitney calling him from the bedroom. Then a crack of thunder woke him and he heard her yelling. He ran into the bedroom and found her already in hard labor.
“I’ll get the car started!” he cried.
“I won’t make it,” Whitney screamed.
“I’ll call the paramedics!”
Twenty minutes later, a fire truck pulled up in front of the house, and Tom, for the first time in his life, lost his cool. He raced down the steps, yelling, “There’s no fire! Go back! I don’t need firemen! My wife’s having a baby.”
“Calm down,” the mustached chief told him. “We came with an ambulance.”
The ambulance pulled up a second later, followed by the local sheriff, a notorious hard-ass who’d given Tom several speeding tickets. Then the whole crew—firemen, paramedics, and sheriff—all marched in to find Whitney spread-eagled on the bed.
Whitney stared up at the crew of handsome men and moaned, “Oh, God, why me?”
A half hour later, with the paramedics holding her from behind, Whitney sat up and pushed, and Tom caught Cricket in his arms. All the firemen cheered. The hard-ass sheriff started crying.
“I’ll make sure she’s okay, Whitney,” Tom murmured. He had dozed and now he came awake and looked around. The three inmates were asleep. Lyons, the guard, sat just two feet away with his headlamp on low power. His dark skin glistened with grime. He was looking right at Tom.
“Be cool, Burke,” he whispered. “There’s a lot more at stake here than you know. Gregor may seem a nutcase, but he’s a genius. The rock’s for real. It’s the most valuable thing on the planet.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Tom replied evenly. “I just care about my daughter.”
“Like I said, you care about her, you be cool, we all get what we want.”
Cricket stirred. “Dad?”
“Right here, sweetheart,” Tom said, drawing his attention away from Lyons. “I know you want to sleep. But you need to eat to keep your strength and give your body enough fuel to ward off the cold.”
Cricket forced open her eyes, nodded, sat up groggily, then dug into her pack for food tubes. Lyons gave Tom one last look then began shaking Kelly, Gregor, and Mann awake.
As they ate, Gregor coursed up on one of his manic highs. He stood and tugged tight the straps of his pack. “How far is it to the next ridge?” he demanded.
“Four hundred yards, if we could go straight through the rock,” Tom replied. “But it gets tricky up ahead, there are lots of switchbacks and pits—”
“Whaddya mean, pits?” Kelly demanded. His swarthy face was caked with drying mud.
“Shafts,” Tom said. “Deep holes.”
“Hate this place,” Mann grumbled.
“Don’t think about the short-term pain, Mann,” Gregor said, waving his hands about. “It will be worth it. Soon the untold riches created by the stone will be yours.”
“Uh-huh,” Kelly grunted. “What I wanna know is, who gets the stone?”
At that Gregor’s entire being went on high alert. “The stone is m-m-mine,” he said. “I discovered its power. I alone understand it.”
“Sure,” Lyons said, his eyes sweeping the other inmates. “We wouldn’t even know what to do with it, now, would we? How to handle it, I mean. That’s all yours, Gregor. Let’s just get there and get the gold, right?”
Gregor eyed them all distrustfully, especially Kelly. “Right,” he said at last.
Cricket watched the men who held her and her father hostage with growing despair. They didn’t care about her or her dad. She was sure of that. They’d do anything to get the gold and this stone they were talking about. Gregor had said he’d kill her if her father tried to fight back again. Then she thought, But he didn’t think about me trying to fight back. The thought startled her and then filled her with dread. What would happen if she did fight back? Wouldn’t they just kill her anyway?
Before she could continue in this vein, her father began to move into a dismal crawlway that led off the western end of the onyx grotto. Gregor followed Tom, then Cricket followed the pale scientist. It was dank in that closed space. Ahead somewhere she heard the echoes of water falling. She crawled toward the sound on all fours, trying to keep pace with the soles of Gregor’s boots. A headlamp lit up her lower torso from behind. During the first hundred yards or so, Cricket thought Lyons was directly behind her. Then they reached a tight spot where Gregor had to wait for her father to move through.
She lay there, head down, focusing on the dust. She was thinking how tired she was and how much she’d love to be held by her mother right then. A whistle began in the crawlway behind her. A softly blown, jaunty whistle that gave over to murmured singing. “When there’s too much to do, don’t let it bother you, forget your troubles…do, do, do.”
The singing turned to menacing laughter. It was Mann. He was singing “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Coming out of the oval chamber where they’d eaten and rested, he had somehow gotten behind her in line.
Gregor began crawling again. Cricket scurried after him around the curve in the cave passage and out of Mann’s reach. But his murmured singing did not stop even when they reached the first pit and she heard Gregor grunt with alarm.
Cricket saw Gregor’s torso sticking out of the wall near the top of a hollow, prism-shaped pipe that drilled thirty feet deeper into the earth. She knew from experience that the right side of the tubular grotto was perhaps twelve feet across. On the left, nine feet from Gregor’s position, it cinched to a black crack in the wall. Water bubbled and dribbled down the rift. The sides of the pit and the floor three stories below were spiked with slanted formations that looked like the upturned heads of giant axes. It was known as the Turbine Blade Shaft because when you looked down into it, under the glare of a headlamp beam, you got the sickening impression of peering into the throat of a revving jet engine.
Crossing the shaft demanded an icy will, Cricket knew, especially for the first caver in line. She craned her head to watch her dad ease onto a narrow ledge at his right, then stand and brace one arm against the ceiling, ever mindful of the glistening blades below. He leaned out over the void to grab a nylon loop anchored in the ceiling many years ago. Then he inched his way to a balcony at the far side of the pit, turned, and looked back.
“Get out on the ledge, then reach for the loop,” her dad called to Gregor.
With excruciating slowness, Gregor crept out onto the narrow rock outcropping. There was a moment of distress and then he leaned out into space, caught the loop, and made it to the far side.
A gloved hand reached up and cupped Cricket between her le
gs. Mann’s thumb began to rub at her as he sang, “I know we’ll be alone sometime soon, Cricket, and when we do … Imagine that the broom is someone you love…where hearts are high the time will fly, do, do, do, do.”
A scream choked in her throat and she kicked back at him, but couldn’t get loose of his grip. She scrambled forward, finally freeing herself from Mann’s grasp, and got out onto the ledge. She looked over at her dad, tears streaming down her face. She was shuddering, barely holding on to the side of the pit. Mann’s face was at her feet. He was whistling again.
“Make him stop!” Cricket screamed.
“Knock it off, you asshole!” Tom yelled. “You’ll kill her!”
Cricket looked down at Mann. He stopped whistling but still smirked.
“Calm yourself down,” she heard her dad say. “Then look for the loop. You’ve done this before.”
Cricket blinked back her tears, swallowed, and nodded. Then she looked down again at Mann’s face leering up at her. She got very pissed off and told herself she was not going to fall, not because of a sicko like him. She got herself turned just enough to see the nylon loop dangling from the ceiling. A small piece of ledge under her foot crumbled.
Cricket threw her body flat against the wall, listening for the entire edge to give way. It held. She raised her head. She squinted at her father’s headlamp shining at her from the other side of the pit.
“You can do this,” he said.
“The ledge. It’s weak.”
“I can see that. But the loop is what really matters.”
Cricket nodded, adjusted her footing, took a breath of faith, and went for it. She caught the anchored webbing and in fifteen seconds was at her dad’s side, sobbing, “He grabbed me, Dad. Between the legs.”
From the slot on the opposite wall, Mann’s face was splotched with grit. His helmet was cocked to one side. He grinned across the shaft, then let his headlamp aim down into the gloom toward the turbine blades and his expression sobered.
“I hate him,” Cricket whispered. “I want him to die.”
Tom looked at her, then back at Mann. He waved his hand in the direction of the sling dangling from the piton. “Get out on the ledge. Get the loop.”
Mann hesitated, then the chamber was filled with voices issuing from the passage behind him—Kelly and Lyons—urging him on. At last he forced his body out into the tube and up onto the narrow outcropping of rock. He smeared his trembling body into the wall.
“Reach for it,” Gregor yelled. “It’s not that bad.”
“I’ll fall,” Mann said.
“Do it,” said Kelly, whose face was now poking out the far end of the cave passage.
Mann hesitated, then shuffled left. More of the ledge crumbled. Fragments of stone careened away, pinging off the sharp rocks that jutted off the shaft wall.
“Break off,” Cricket muttered. “Break off.”
But Mann made it across the rotted worst of it and onto a stronger section of ledge. He grinned at his success, then twisted his upper body, his eyes searching for the nylon loop. Cricket knew with certainty then that Mann would make it across to torment her in the hours to come, rape her if he had the chance. She experienced a moment of internal blindness, of no possibility, of shrinking inward. Then a voice she had never heard before began talking in her head, an angry voice, a woman’s voice that she recognized as her mother’s, then strangely as her own, commanding her to act.
Mann arched his body, readying his fingers to cross through space. Cricket puckered her lips. She began whistling that melody he’d been taunting her with. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her father startle, look at her, then begin whistling along with her.
By the time Mann registered their whistling, he had already committed himself. His legs were uncoiling and his upper body was crossing out over the shaft, his hand lifting toward the loop, two feet away. For a split second Mann’s attention left the loop and sought Cricket and her dad. Their eyes met. Then a look of panic flashed across Mann’s face and he jerked his head back toward the loop.
It was too late. He had leaned too far at the wrong angle. He batted impotently at the bottom of the nylon loop. He made frantic swimming motions with his arms, then screamed and pitched headlong after his headlamp beam.
A blade along the wall caught Mann’s outstretched right forearm, causing him to list to one side before falling again. He glanced off two more wall blades, then rolled in space. He struck the floor sideways with a nauseating thud. Mann shuddered a moment, impaled on the spikes of angular rock, then he crumpled and lay perfectly still. Blood poured out on the wet limestone, and Cricket felt triumph pulse through her.
11:30 A.M.
MUNK’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Whitney, Finnerty, Two-Elk, and Sanchez emerged into a cavern with a low ceiling and walls thirty yards to either side. The floor looked like a deep lake of oil, shimmering against the cave’s breath. The ceiling appeared rippled.
They were six hours into the Labyrinth now and all of them were covered in a fine gray dust. Despite their superb physical conditioning, Whitney could see that the marshals’ confidence had been shaken during the time they’d been maneuvering in the harsh, rocky environment. They had not anticipated the cave’s unforgiving nature. They had not expected to be mountain climbing underground.
“Disturbed leading the blind, huh?” Sanchez said to Two-Elk.
The tough little woman tugged off her helmet to ring out the blue bandana she wore, then glanced at Whitney. “Sorry about giving you a hard time back there at the entrance, Mrs. Burke.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Whitney said. “I wouldn’t have trusted me either. I’m still not sure if I do.”
“Where are we?” Finnerty demanded. “How far to the dump?”
Whitney knelt on the sediment and with her finger drew three overlapping ovals. Around these she drew a single elliptical ring.
“We’re at the southern end of three interconnected caverns,” she said. “The entire complex is known as the Halls of the Mountain King. We’re here at the outlet of the Lake of the King; next one north is King’s Castle, and the last one’s The Keep. The supply dump’s in the northeastern corner of the Castle, just beyond the breakdown pile.”
Finnerty adjusted his machine pistol and said, “What’s a breakdown pile?”
“Huge caverns like these are created over tens of thousands of years of having water cut tunnels this way and that, searching for a way down to what’s called master base level—the water table, effectively,” Whitney explained. “Eventually the honeycomb becomes too fragile and the whole thing collapses. Water normally flushes out the sediment leaving these big caverns. But in certain places, the rubble stays and builds up in crazy jumbles called breakdown piles. The one we’re going to climb is a good eight hundred vertical feet, the biggest I’ve ever heard of, a subterranean mountain, really.”
Two-Elk eyed the lake. “How far we gotta swim to get to this mountain?”
“Who said anything about swimming?” Whitney said. She picked up her pack, slung it over her shoulder, bent low, and took two steps across the sediment before stopping and looking queasily at the water.
Don’t think, she told herself. Just go. She stepped out onto the surface of the lake. It was something of an illusion, a film of near-stagnant water spread over pitch-black sediment in a way that gave the perception of inky depths. The lake held barely five inches of water at its deepest point. Most of it was less than two inches deep.
The marshals followed Whitney. The sounds of their splashing footsteps echoed from the rock overhead to the water and back again. Their boots kicked up dregs of sediment that boiled up to the surface and scented the air with a stale, hoary odor. The ceiling lowered and she had to duck to keep her helmet from scraping. She swore she could feel the thousands of feet of stone above her and the tens of thousands below her like opposing grindstone wheels ready to reduce her to chaff. As that image became paramount in her m
ind, slowly, inexorably, the panic began to reassert itself.
Her calves cramped, her joints began to ache, and she felt the urge to lie down in the shallow water, to curl up in a ball and close her eyes to the nightmare. But Whitney knew that if she stopped, dread would freeze her solid and she might never move again. So she forced herself on at a frantic pace, arms extended in front of her, legs wide, hips shifting side to side, her attention centered within the cone of light cast by her headlamp. She would not allow herself to look into the shadows beyond the light for fear of what her imagination might conjure.
Think good thoughts, she kept telling herself. Positive thoughts.
Whitney’s mind leaped to her sophomore year at Emory University. On a lark one autumn weekend she decided to go on an outing-club trip—an introduction to caving and the caves of TAG, led by Tom Burke, who was, at the time, a second-year graduate student in geology.
When she followed Tom underground that first time, the beauty, power, and complexity of the subterranean world had stunned her with its possibilities. There, stripped of the sensory overload of the surface world, Whitney had felt as if, at every corner, she was heading into the core of something. Shy and retiring on the surface, below ground Tom was confident to the point of cockiness, willing to take terrible risks while climbing, descending and crawling through the dark passages. By the end of the day, some of her fellow neophyte cavers had nicknamed him Batman. Others were calling him Tommy Death, as in “Tommy will be the death of us.”
Whether by nature or nurture, Whitney was not a person who opened up easily to other people, especially men. An only child, her mother had died of ovarian cancer when Whitney was ten. In his grief, her father, a taciturn aeronautics engineer to begin with, had shut himself off from her and retreated into his work. There’d been a succession of nannies and long stretches spent with various relatives. She could remember every time she had to leave someone to whom she’d grown attached. At each parting, there was that tearing, that feeling of once again being made alone in the world. And so Whitney had taught herself to keep others at arm’s length, to barricade herself with the knowledge of books and the rhythms of athletics.
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