But the evening after that first cave trip, sitting on the front porch of the cabin where they were staying Whitney found herself talking easily with Tom Burke. She’d meant only to ask a question before turning in for the night, but their conversation had lasted four hours. One on one he was reserved, but he smelled fantastic, had a rock climber’s physique, and—she had noticed it before—was damn good-looking. Tom’s father was an engineer, as was hers. His mother had died in a car accident when he was twelve. They both had a burning desire to be great scientists. He seemed more than a bit lonely.
For Whitney, there was a flush of uneasiness as the hours wore on. She felt walls coming down, leaving her exposed and vulnerable to that tearing sensation she hated. She told herself to go to bed before Tom got too close. And she had done so.
But the next evening, after another incredible day belowground, she found herself on the front porch of the cabin again, watching the rain fall, listening raptly to his stories, and telling him more about herself than she’d ever told anyone. Approaching midnight, the rain stopped. In the moonlight they walked away from the cabin toward the stream, the comforting smell of wet woods surrounding them. Tom stopped her under a hemlock tree. “Can I tell you something?”
“Guess so,” Whitney said.
He stuck his hands in his back pockets and craned his neck around before blurting out, “I’ve never been scared of anything before, but I’m scared of you.”
“Me?” Whitney said, surprised. “But why?”
He looked at the ground. “It’s like I spend all this time in caves, you know, and I’m always right down there, never afraid of getting lost …”
“And?”
“I feel like I could get lost forever inside you and I’m petrified of that.”
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, turning up her lips to his.
This warm memory calmed Whitney in ways she hadn’t expected: the panic attack receded, and for the first time since entering the Labyrinth she felt herself begin to engage with the subterranean world. She still knew how caves worked. Each had its own personality. To move through them fluidly, you had to remold yourself to suit their personalities. All these familiar thoughts and instinctive movements returned in a flash.
Suddenly, the ceiling above her seemed to vanish. A dark, drab wall appeared at her back, abrupt and towering. Even on full power, the beam thrown by her headlamp could not reach the ceiling. The vast blackness simply swallowed the light. Only one known cavern in the world, the Sarawak Chamber in Malaysia, was thought to be larger than the one in which she now found herself. It was tall enough to hold an eighty-story building and long enough to let a bush pilot land a single-engine prop plane.
“This is creepy,” Two-Elk said.
“Like being in the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night,” Sanchez agreed.
Whitney took a compass reading, then set off into the great void, heading north-northeast across the lake.
Twenty minutes later, she felt it before she saw it, a looming presence there in the blackness before her. Whitney slowed and adjusted her headlamp to peak intensity. The light pierced the dark to reveal a thin beach just ahead of them and beyond it the base of a soaring, anarchic tower of shattered rock plate, block and pillar. It put her in mind of the two World Trade Center towers after the terrorist attacks, the buildings all fractured and collapsed onto each other in an almost incomprehensible ruin of cavity and harsh angle. The rubble pile looked friable and unstable, as if one false move might disturb the strange physics that held it together, bust it apart like one of those children’s games whose object was to remove as many pieces of a tower as possible before it fell apart and smashed to the ground.
“Son of a bitch,” Finnerty muttered.
“We’re gonna climb that?” Sanchez asked incredulously.
“Not without ropes,” Two-Elk said.
“We don’t have any ropes; you said you wanted to travel light, remember?” Whitney said, swallowing hard. “So, like it or not, we’re free climbing.”
NOON
WALKER RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
On the surface, halfway down the southwestern slope of the ninth ridge, Dr. Jeffrey Swain gasped for breath. The physicist had grown up in Southern California and been a competition body surfer while attending Cal Polytech. He still kept in shape by swimming a mile in a pool at the university every day. But he was not used to hiking in steep terrain, especially splattered with drizzle under a jungle-hot forest canopy.
Ahead of him, Captain Boulter was almost sprinting down through the bracken-choked hardwoods, using his combat shotgun to push aside the vines and branches that got in his way. The state trooper had been going at this possessed pace for nearly seven hours now and showed no signs of slowing.
Thirty yards behind Swain, his nephew staggered along. Chester’s white polo shirt was soaked with sweat and smeared with blotches of red clay and bits of vegetation. Mosquito bites pocked his face.
“Slow down!” Chester called. “I can’t keep up.”
The physicist turned. “If you’d started exercising last year as I’d asked, you’d be able to keep up.”
Chester stopped and glared at his uncle. “Do I do anything that pleases you?”
Swain set his jaw and crossed his arms. “I’m trying to make you into the person your mother would have wanted you to be, Chester. You’ll thank me for it someday.”
“You’re doing fine, kid,” Boulter called back. “We’re not far from the truck now. Just one foot in front of the other.”
“I don’t have feet anymore,” Chester snapped as he limped by his uncle. “I have two pieces of meat-loaf attached to my ankles.”
After placing guards around the Nautilus Entrance, Boulter and the physicist, his nephew, and a second group of snipers went to the Orpheus Entrance. As they had done earlier in the day at the Nautilus Entrance, while the state police captain positioned the snipers, Swain and Chester ran the sensors at the cave’s mouth. The electromagnetic readings emanating from inside Jenkins Ridge were similar in magnitude to those found coming out of Munk’s—distinct, but weak.
Midmorning had found them high on the side of Tower Ridge, the eighth of the labyrinth’s nine hogbacks and site of the collapsed Virgil Entrance. Due to the 150 feet of rubble that sealed the ingress, the sensors had not registered a reading. Boulter had not bothered to leave a guard.
Now they were on their way down off Walker Ridge, which contained the westernmost portion of the cave. Boulter had placed a third band of snipers up there around the Paradisio Entrance. The sensors had picked up an electromagnetic deviation at that ingress strong enough to indicate that the stone was probably somewhere within the last five ridges of the Labyrinth. But the reading was not potent enough to position the moon rock exactly.
Swain felt the frustration swell inside him as the thick woods they’d been traveling through opened suddenly to reveal a cliff top that offered a panoramic view of the sinkhole plain. Towering thunderheads darkened the southwestern horizon. A bolt of lightning ripped the sky about three miles out in front of them, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder that vibrated through his chest. The wind gusted again, tearing leaves from the oaks overhead and sending a cloud of pollen up into his nose. He sneezed, then steady rain began to splatter down.
“Storm’s coming right at us!” Boulter yelled. “We’d better get off this hill fast.”
Swain saw agony course through his nephew’s face. “Mind over matter, Chester.”
His nephew turned without a word and staggered after Boulter. For a second Swain felt he should go and comfort the boy. But empathy was not an emotion that came easy for the physicist. Even in the months after Chester’s mother had died, he’d been unable to go into the boy’s bedroom when he heard him crying at night. Swain was used to bucking up when things got tough. That was the way the world demanded he be. Why should it be any different for Chester? These thoughts did battle within him fo
r the next quarter mile until they reached Boulter’s four-wheel-drive vehicle. They got in just as the rain started to pelt
Swain climbed into the passenger seat Chester got in back, took off his sneakers, and rubbed his blistered feet. Swain was aware of him brooding as they began to drive back toward Jenkins Ridge. Finally, the silence got to be too much for the physicist
“Chester, for these sensors to help us, we simply need to find other openings into this cave,” he said. “Another two or three and I think we could have that stone’s position positively triangulated.”
Chester acted as if he hadn’t heard.
“Chester?”
“I heard you,” he grumbled. “But that’s easier said than done, Uncle Jeff. Mrs. Burke said she and her husband looked for years and hadn’t found any but the four ways in. And one of those is now collapsed.”
“I know what she said,” Swain replied, trying to restrain the testiness he felt. “She also said she was sure there were others that haven’t been found yet I was wondering if you had any ideas.”
Chester sat there stunned, then blinked and looked up. “You’re asking me?”
“I’m asking you,” Swain said. “I saw you studying the electronic cave map last night and talking with the engineers and—”
“It’s too crude,” Chester said.
“What is?” Boulter asked. The state trooper was hunched over the wheel, peering through windshield wipers that were doing a poor job.
“The digital grid map NASA’s using to track everyone’s position,” the teen replied. “It’s crude, Uncle Jeff, just a vector graphics bit-map—you know, a line drawing.”
“Okay?” Swain said.
“But one of the engineers said it was based on more complicated measurements Tom Burke made using a sonar emitter and an accelerometer.”
“What’s an accelerometer?” Boulter asked as he turned the rig left down the two-lane country road that paralleled the southern base of the nine ridges.
“It’s a fist-sized device originally used in the inertial guidance systems of missiles,” Chester replied. “It has the ability to measure three-dimensional displacement from a specific reference point, such as the entrance to a cave. The sonar emitter has the ability to gauge the distance from its holder to walls, ceiling, and floor.”
“I still don’t see your point,” Swain said.
Chester rolled his eyes. “The point is, Uncle Jeff, that the data that created the map of the cave we’re looking at is much richer than the end product I bet if we can remanipulate the raw data to create a raster graphic—a three-dimensional version of what’s underground here—we’d find the other entrances.”
Swain wanted to grin but would not allow himself. “The idea has some merit” he said at last “With refinements—”
“Kid,” Boulter said impatiently. “Ignore the old man. What the hell’s a new map gonna do us?”
Chester looked away from his uncle and said, “If I’m right Captain, it might put us on top of that rock.”
1:00 P.M.
HAWKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
“Take them out,” Kelly said, going for his pistol. “That’s what I say, Lyons. They killed Mann, they’ll try to kill us all. Take ‘em both out.”
Kelly, Lyons, and Gregor were crowded in around Tom and Cricket, their faces frescoed in grime. The flesh under their bloodshot eyes drooped and showed darkened sockets. They were way up inside Hawkins Ridge now, the second of the Labyrinth’s nine. Cricket knew they were in terrible danger, but her mind would not release her from that memory—that instant when Mann wavered in space, shocked by their whistling, his fingers slipping past the nylon loop, the comprehension of his own doom erupting across his smug face.
The exhilaration that had exploded through Cricket was different from anything she’d ever felt before. She and her dad hadn’t just beaten the filthy bastard. They’d outwitted him. They had defeated him. They had killed Mann. And part of Cricket was very glad he was dead.
But now it seemed that the whole thing might backfire and get them killed.
“Go ahead, big guy, pull the trigger,” Tom suddenly told Kelly. “And I guarantee you’ll have absolutely zero chance of getting out of here alive.”
Lyons knocked Kelly’s gun aside. “He’s right. Don’t be an idiot. He’s the only one who knows the way.”
Kelly’s face screwed up in anger. “Bullshit. Gregor must know where we are by now. Don’t you?”
Gregor shook his head. “Not in the least. Lyons is right. We need Burke. But we don’t need the girl.”
That’s more like it,” Kelly said, grinning as he cocked the hammer on the pistol and began to raise it toward Cricket.
Cricket shrank back against the wall, sure she was about to die, only to see her father step in front of the gun. “Kill her and I don’t care what you do to me,” he said. “Shock me, beat me, torture me. I won’t move another inch. I’ll sit here until we all die.”
Kelly’s face contorted and for a moment Cricket was sure he would shoot or strike her dad or zap him again with the belly belt. Then Lyons put one of his huge hands on Kelly’s arm. “Don’t forget what we’re really after, Kelly,” he said. “That stone means more than your lust for revenge right now.”
Kelly scowled. “Who made you honcho, Lyons?”
Lyons stuck his face in Kelly’s. “Just speaking common sense for the sake of the partnership. Am I right Gregor?”
Gregor’s attention flashed between Cricket’s father and the large, dark man. Then he shrugged. “He’s right. We need him to get to the other end of the cave.”
Kelly raised his eyebrows in confusion. “Other end of the cave? That’s seven more ridges! You never said nothing about that!”
“I’m saying it now,” Gregor replied.
“We’re goners,” Kelly said.
“Take that attitude and you—you’ll never achieve greatness,” Gregor replied, his eyes flaring. “My grandfather was a drunken lout, but he always said you have to fight for what’s yours because there’ll always be someone trying to take it. Considering what’s at the other end of this cave, Kelly, you should be willing to suffer. I know I am. I can see Lyons is, too.”
Gregor suddenly began to cough and choke from the effort the speech had taken out of him. He swayed for a second, then dropped to his knees, his breathing shallow and forced.
Lyons jumped forward. “What’s going on?”
Kelly ripped off his pack and pulled out a blood pressure kit and strapped it around the pale scientist’s arms. Gregor slumped to one side and his eyes rolled back in his head. “Shit, he’s one eighty-five over ninety, pulse one thirty,” Kelly said. “We’ve got to get those meds in him or he’ll stroke out.”
“He’s gonna die, Dad,” Cricket whispered in Tom’s ear. “Two down. Two to go.”
For a single, wonderful moment, Tom thought Cricket was right and they had succeeded in eliminating another of their captors. Then Lyons dug into his pack and came out with a syringe and a vial. Kelly drew five ccs from one vial and shot the liquid into Gregor’s arm. Gradually, the emaciated man’s breathing came back and he opened his eyes, but he looked lethargic.
“We should rest here awhile,” Lyons said. “Let him sleep a couple of hours.”
Tom’s thoughts raced. Letting Gregor or any of them recover was the last thing he wanted. “We sleep now, we all die from hypothermia,” he blurted. “The cave’s a constant fifty-six degrees with one-hundred-percent humidity. It’ll have us chattering in less than an hour. You want to rest, you’ve got to reach the cache inside Munk’s Ridge. There are sleeping bags there, dry clothes, more food. It’s set up as a bivouac.”
Lyons studied him. “You better not be fucking with us.”
“It’s true,” Cricket said. “They even talked about it on television.”
“How far?” Lyons demanded.
Tom hesitated before answering. NASA had to know they’d go to the cache eventually.
He wanted to keep the pressure on Gregor, on all of them. On the other hand, he wanted to give any rescue operation enough time to get into position. “Three hours,” he said at last.
“And how long to the other end of this shithole cave?” Kelly demanded.
“Eighty miles of passage. Three days minimum.”
“Three days!” Kelly looked at Gregor, whose breathing was stronger now. “Why the hell didn’t we go in the way you did? It couldn’t have been this far.”
“Because,” Gregor gasped, “according to Burke, that entrance collapsed six weeks ago.”
Gregor had been in the Virgil Entrance out on the eighth ridge? Tom thought. How was that possible? It had been gated for years. Then he remembered an incident a couple of years before when he and Whitney had discovered that someone had dug underneath the old iron gate and they’d been forced to replace it with a stainless-steel version that was sunk deep in the dirt. They had figured that whoever broke into the cave was out to steal rock formations. Could it have been Gregor?
“Then how are we going to get out of here if the way you went in is collapsed?” Kelly demanded. “They’ve got to be guarding the other entrances.”
“My grandfather showed me a secret way out,” Gregor said. A tinge of color had returned to his cheeks.
Tom looked at him sharply. “What secret way? There aren’t any other ways in.”
Gregor snorted. “You think you know everything about this cave, Burke. Guess what? You don’t. Others had been in here long before you found it.”
“Why didn’t we just go in your secret way?” Lyons asked, annoyed.
“Because I’ve never used it from the outside, I just know where it starts inside the cave,” Gregor replied testily, then he turned his attention to Tom. “Keep your daughter in line, Burke. I know we need you. But sooner or later we’ll come to the end of the line. And there’ll be either mercy or hell to pay.”
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