Tom looked at him, calculating whether to keep the pressure up. But he could see the dead certainty in Gregor’s expression. “Okay,” he said.
As soon as Gregor could walk, they began to trudge west through the dry portions of Hawkins Ridge. Cinnamon-colored crystal flakes, each no bigger than a fingernail, filled the floor of the cave. The granular silica was so deep, arid, and sifted that it seemed to have loft. As they set their boots into the exotic sand, they broke through pockets of air, releasing barking noises that resonated down the chamber. It was hard going and the sound of their passing was a din.
At one point, Lyons left Gregor’s side and fell in alongside Tom. “What’d you two have to go and kill him for?” the guard murmured. “You almost got your daughter snuffed. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m watching out for you and for Cricket.”
Tom looked up quizzically. For the first time he felt there was more to Lyons than met the eye. For some reason, that made him angrier than ever. “Yeah, you were doing such a sweet job of it,” Tom hissed. “That pervert was all over her.”
“He got ahead of me,” Lyons said. “I admit it. I screwed up.”
“Then we did what we had to do, didn’t we?” Tom said.
“You don’t understand what’s at stake here, Burke,” Lyons whispered. “If you can keep yourself under control I’ll make sure you and your daughter get out safely.”
Tom studied Lyons. He saw something conflicted in the man’s face. “You’re not like them. Why don’t you just help us get out now?”
At that, Lyons’s expression hardened. “You must think I’m a better man, Burke. Well, I’m not. My job is to get that stone. I’ll do whatever it takes to get it. Kill Kelly, kill Gregor. Kill you, too. But you stay out of my way, I’ll continue to watch over you and your daughter. But get in my way, keep me from the stone, I’ll make you and Cricket suffer.”
3:20 P.M.
MUNK’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Whitney, Finnerty, Two-Elk, and Sanchez clawed their way up over the massive rock slabs and stone rafters that jutted from the underground mountain’s chaotic core. There were fissures between the large pieces of fallen limestone that threatened to snap their ankles and buckle their knees. Pockets of rounded gravel on the slabs acted like ballbearings; whenever they stepped into one of these pockets, their boots skated toward the edge and the long fall to the subterranean lake.
Whitney talked herself through the climb, forcing her body and mind to work in ways they had not in nearly thirteen months. She was hardcore caving now. In the flow. Which is not to say that the anxiety of being there had left. But somehow the threat of panic had been transformed; when she had entered the Labyrinth nearly eight hours before, fear had been like a poisonous mist that saturated the air around her. Now it was a manageable weight she carried like a yoke across her shoulders.
She paused five hundred feet up the breakdown pile, so high that her headlamp beam no longer reached the lake surface and yet not high enough that her light could reach the ceiling. It was as if she were climbing a cliff at night in the fog and with that sensation came a blow to her equilibrium and a rattling of her sense of up and down. Her progress and the progress of the marshals behind her slowed to a crawl.
Whitney used memories of her family to help her forge on. One in particular kept coming back to her the higher she climbed. It was the image of an oddly shaped sand castle—a cone inside a circular wall. The simple formation, circle and cone, made up a symbol only Whitney, Tom, and Cricket understood. When Cricket was a little girl, no more than three, Whitney and Tom still called their daughter by her real name, Alexandra. On her first trip to the beach, however, Tom made a large version of the circle and cone in the sand. Alexandra asked what he was doing. Her father announced that he was building a cricket trap.
“Why?” the little girl asked.
“People all over the world, especially in Asia, believe all that is good follows a cricket,” Tom explained. “You build one of these and the cricket comes and brings luck and happiness to whoever traps it. My design, of course.”
She stared at the circle for the longest time. Then, without warning she jumped the barricade, landed inside the trap, and threw up her hands while letting loose a joyous smile. And so Alexandra had come to be called Cricket. And the circle with the cone had become the family’s private totem; when one of them was having a tough time, the others would make a cricket trap out of whatever was handy so that it might gather luck and happiness for whoever needed it.
Whitney’s lamp revealed the top of the breakdown mountain some hundred feet above her. The sight broke her from her thoughts. Another twenty feet of climbing and she could make out the coffered roof of the cavern itself. There was an outcropping above her as well, about thirty vertical feet above her position and eighty feet below the ceiling. Seeing it, she called down to Finnerty, “We’re gonna get on that ledge up there, then traverse it. At the other end, we’ll enter a chimney that’ll take us to the top.”
The marshal looked up at her. He was covered in grit and there was a gauntness about him that she had not seen before. “Make it quick. We’re losing time.”
Whitney glanced at her watch and felt sick to her stomach. They were supposed to have reached the supply dump by now. What if Tom and Cricket got there first?
She climbed hand over hand and finally reached a spot where she could stand upright beneath the ledge. Then she cut to her left, out from under the rock balcony, toward a series of handholds that would allow her to get around and up onto the ledge itself. She was reaching for the first of those handholds when it began.
A quiver at first. Then a distinct vibration that fluxed through the entire breakdown pile. Accompanying the vibration was a noise like the distant caterwauling of rusty train wheels forced to roll across bent rails. The wailing immediately deepened into the locomotive grind of boxcars unbuckling their hitches. Then the entire breakdown pile pulsed and shifted. The grinding noise became a deafening primordial bellow of things elemental giving way. Far above Whitney, the ceiling coughed out boulders.
“Rock!” she screamed. She threw herself back under the ledge, just as the first chunk of rock smacked off the craggy exterior of the outcropping. The boulder burst in two, scoring her with BB-sized pebbles. Another boulder struck, disintegrating a slab on the slope just below her. Shards of the slab ricocheted downslope.
Finnerty and Two-Elk dived for cover. But Sanchez was caught in a tricky place and was helpless to react. The barrage of tumbling debris caught him flush in the chest. The deputy flung his arms up and out then he flew backward off the face of the breakdown pile. His throaty scream and the arc of his headlamp swept through the hollow darkness above the lake.
2:25 P.M.
HAWKINS-MUNK CONNECTION ROUTE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Lyons, Gregor, and Kelly were all pressed back against the cave wall, stricken with vertigo. Cricket was beside them, equally unnerved. She had never been to this part of the cave before and had to fight the urge to crawl back into the passage behind her.
“Welcome to Dante’s Tubes,” her father said. “You’ve each got a harness in your pack. Put them on.”
He stood ten feet from them, near the edge of a crescent-shaped projection of rock that jutted out above black emptiness. With rock bolts, carabiners, and bowline knots, a rope had been rigged to the ledge behind him. The rope disappeared over the side. A strong wind blew up out of the hole. Somewhere far, far below, over the sound of the wind, came the crash of water falling.
“Is this the only way?” Kelly demanded. “You better not be dicking with us.”
“It’s the only way into Munk’s Ridge,” Tom insisted. “We either go down, or we go back. Your call.”
Before Kelly could reply, Gregor said, “We go down.” In the hours since his collapse, Cricket had noticed, the physicist seemed to get stronger with every step.
One by one, the men reached into their packs, got out
the harnesses, and, following her father’s directions, closed the screw links that held the legs of the device together.
Cricket did the same. Her sweaty hair hung in her eyes. Her cheeks were splotched with grime. Her legs felt as if she were dragging chains. Every muscle, sinew, and bone in the young teenager’s body cried out for more sleep, but she forced herself to listen to her dad’s explanation of what they had to do to get into Munk’s Ridge and reach the supply cache.
The vertical shaft before them dropped 340 feet, roughly twice the height of Niagara Falls. A waterfall that had gone dry about two thousand years ago created the tube. About 200 feet down, it connected through a horizontal passage to a second shaft, in which a second torrential waterfall still ran. Viewed in profile, the system of joined vertical caves had roughly the shape of an off-kilter H where the right leg was longer than the other and the connecting rock sagged steeply to the left. The challenge was to descend 170 feet down the first tube, then switch to a second rope that traversed the crossbar of the H, then switch to a third rope and drop 400 feet down the second shaft.
“How we gonna change ropes fourteen stories in the air?” Lyons demanded.
“Very carefully,” Tom said.
“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” Kelly grumbled.
Tom went over to Cricket and kissed her on the cheek. “Be smart now on rope,” he said. “Don’t give the cave a chance.”
Cricket studied her dad. His beard was coming in. All salt and pepper. Despite the fatigue in his eyes, there was still such a solidness about him that she smiled and said, “Never do, Dad.”
He nodded, tickled her under the chin, got on his knees, and rigged his rappel rack to the line. Then he worked his way over the sharp cliff edge. “You won’t be able to see me stop at one seventy, honey, so keep your hand on the rope until you feel me unload, then send the next person.”
Before Cricket could reply, her father disappeared. She heard a zinging noise above the moan of the wind and the distant roar of the waterfall. She lay down and peered over the lip, watching his helmet and shoulders drop away. The rope quavered in the parasol of light thrown by his headlamp. Lit that way, the bore hole of the cave below her dad seemed to collapse in dizzying, concentric circles that diminished toward a vanishing point. Within seconds, he became a fingernail of light that eclipsed into darkness. It was the first time Cricket had been alone with the men and she felt a pang of unease wash through her.
“Show us again how you thread the rope,” Gregor demanded.
Cricket did not want to take her fingers off the nylon line her father rode deeper into the earth, but she forced herself to stand, turn, and use a safety line on her harness called a cat’s tail to demonstrate how to feed the rope through the three bars of the micro-rappel rack. She did it quickly, hoping that at least one of her captors would miss the intricacies of the lesson and make a deadly mistake. Out of the corner of her eye, Cricket saw the tension in the rope ease.
“You’re next,” she said to Lyons.
Lyons, oddly, seemed familiar with the principles of rope rigging and performed it flawlessly. He went over the side and disappeared. Gregor soon followed And Cricket was left with Kelly. “Your turn,” she said
“Ladies first,” Kelly replied, shaking one of the belly belt transmitters at her. “I wouldn’t want you running on us.”
“I wouldn’t leave my father,” she said.
“Just the same.”
Cricket let her hatred of Kelly show openly as she attached herself to the rope. Then she willed herself to go over the side; she had been rappelling into caves since she was a little girl, but never in a place as scary as Dante’s Tubes. In fits and starts she slid down the rope. The deeper she descended, the louder the waterfall in the parallel chamber became until it rumbled like kettle drums. Soon there was a drizzle all around her that made the ropes slick. And the gusting wind kept pushing her toward the walls.
At last the rope turned a solid red. Cricket braked to a halt and tied off. The shaft fell away into dim light between her legs. Behind and below her about eighty feet, Cricket could make out the jagged floor of the crossbar that connected the two vertical tubes together into that lopsided H.
“Good job,” she heard her father say.
Cricket spun herself around to see him about twenty feet away, hanging from the wall near the ceiling of the horizontal passage where it met the western rampart of the first vertical tube. He was clipped by a safety line to a metal carabiner bolted into the stone wall. His boots were snugged into the rungs of a nylon webbed ladder called an etrier that was also bolted into the wall. Beyond him, interconnected arcs of rope were draped horizontally along the wall of the crossbar passage heading west. At each point that the rope tied into the wall, there was another carabiner hanging from a bolt and another one of those webbed etrier ladders. Lyons and Gregor were already well out along that spider’s web, heading toward what looked like one of those wind-eroded spires of reddish sandstone she’d seen in pictures of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. And beyond the spire, the glimmer of the waterfall.
“Get your feet on the wall there, squat, kick off, and swing like a pendulum across to me,” her dad said. “It may take you a couple of kicks. When you get close, I’m going to catch you so you can switch to this traverse rope.”
Cricket felt her stomach turn over at the fact that she was hanging 150 feet in the air, 500 feet underground. But she had no choice. “Okay,” she said.
Cricket knew that the danger of penduluming on a high rope presents itself when riders fail to commit to the move. They thrust halfheartedly and come off the wall at an angle, which can lead to a broadside collision with rock, a possible loss of contact with the rope, and a fall to certain death. But Cricket went for it 100 percent and in two big kicks she’d traveled far enough that her dad was able to grab the rope and haul her in.
“Way to go,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Now you’re going to slide yourself sideways across these arcs of rope. When you get to that tower of rock out there, clip your harness to the anchors so you don’t pitch off the other side into the waterfall. Send Lyons and Gregor down to the bottom. I’ll be along after Kelly.”
Cricket hesitated for a moment, then gestured into the abyss below. “Why don’t we just drop down this rope and escape that way, Dad?”
“There’s no way out down there, sweetheart. I know. I’ve looked. So has your mother. Besides, we’re in these electric belts, remember?”
“Is it bad?” she asked. “The shock, I mean?”
“Godawful,” he replied.
Twenty-five minutes later, Cricket reached the next to the last arc on the spider’s web. Lyons and Gregor lay panting atop the tan, flat-topped tower of rock. The waterfall on the other side was a thick column of emerald and white. There was a steady shower of droplets in the air. The noise made her ears hurt
Cricket fought her way up onto the ledge, clipped herself to a safety anchor, then lay back and closed her eyes, enjoying the way the mist cooled her face and the way the waterfall created a cocoon of sound around her.
“What now?” Lyons asked.
Cricket opened her eyes and scowled at him. “You go down the next rope and try to stay out of the water.”
A half hour later, Lyons reached the bottom of the second shaft and yelled, “Clear!”
Gregor rigged himself to the rope and went over the side. Kelly rested against the back wall of the outcropping. Her father had just climbed up onto the ledge. Cricket was getting herself organized to begin her descent, doing her best to avoid eye contact with Kelly, who had been watching her constantly ever since they’d whistled Mann to death.
She glanced down the shaft and saw that Gregor had reached the first directional, a contraption designed to keep the rope out of the waterfall. She was turning back to tell her dad of Gregor’s progress when the entire steeple of stone beneath her lurched sideways as if bludgeoned by some monstrous hammer. A tremendous grinding noise filled
the cave. The jolting and milling jumped in amplitude. She was thrown backward into the waterfall shaft, the rim of the cliff flashing by her head and her father’s face twisted in horror as he flung himself after her, screaming, “Cricket!”
3:54 P.M.
NASA ENCAMPMENT
JENKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Jeffrey Swain stood in the open entrance to the Mission Control tent. Bolt after bolt of lightning scribed the sky over the nine ridges of Labyrinth Cave. The wind gusted at sixty miles an hour, causing the tent canopy above the physicist to cavitate and strain at its braces. The rain sweeping across the encampment looked like hundreds of gray full-bellied sails.
Just behind Swain, Boulter, Angelis, and the NASA mission commander were hunched over a computer that showed the digital grid map of the cave.
“Still transmitting strong,” Angelis noted with satisfaction. “See there? Whitney Burke and Finnerty’s team are no more than six hundred yards from the supply dump now. Gregor’s people are still at least a half mile away in Dante’s Tubes. One of the toughest parts of the cave.”
“Damian’s gonna get there first,” the trooper agreed, slapping Angelis’s back.
Swain turned and looked beyond the trooper and the NASA official. Chester sat at a second computer terminal typing furiously. An open Diet Coke and a half-eaten doughnut lay on the table beside the keyboard. The physicist told himself he might speed up the process of transforming Burke’s data into a better map if he guided Chester. Swain believed, however, that isolating people brought out their creativity. The crucible was where great scientists were forged and he was leaving Chester to face the fire alone. But what Swain could not bring himself to admit to was the simple fact that his nephew knew far more about computer programming than he ever would.
Suddenly, Chester leaned in closer to the computer, then typed in several more commands and sat back, picked up the soda, drained it, and grinned. He picked up the doughnut and stuffed the rest into his mouth, then looked over at his uncle.
Labyrinth Page 17