Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Whitney raised her head. A strong cool wind bathed her face and cleared the dust. Eight feet in front of her was an exit hole the size of a beach ball. She turned, looked back at Finnerty, and shook the knife in triumph. “We’re through!”

  Twenty minutes later, Finnerty and Two-Elk stormed into the supply cache while Whitney remained hidden outside. There was a long period of silence, followed by the sounds of their murmuring before she could not take it anymore and, despite their demand that she remain safely behind, she turned on her headlamp and went in after them. Two-Elk was on one knee, examining the tracks in the soft sand that covered the grotto floor. Finnerty stood beside her.

  “We must have spooked them out of here when those boulders fell,” Finnerty said. “They got here first.”

  Whitney rolled back her head. “How long ago?”

  “Minutes,” Two-Elk replied.

  “Where would they go from here?” Finnerty demanded.

  “Ah, shit, I don’t know,” Whitney said, throwing up her arms in frustration and disappointment. “In the next thirty miles of cave ahead of us, there are a half a dozen different ways you could go and still end up in the same place.”

  “One of them’s dead, boss,” Two-Elk suddenly announced.

  Whitney froze. “Who? How do you know that?”

  Two-Elk gestured at the pile of red waterproof bags. The NASA people said there were supposed to be ten of these bags at each supply dump. There are five left now. If the Burkes, Lyons, and the three inmates came through here, there would only be four left. One of them’s not with us.”

  Whitney fought a rumble in her stomach. “Which one?” she asked.

  “Can’t tell yet.” Two-Elk returned her attention to the footprints in the dust “I’m sure it’s not your husband. They could not have gotten this far without him.”

  Whitney went over next to Two-Elk and looked around the floor. She was searching for a small boot print. Instead, her attention locked on a circle about six inches in diameter that had been dug by a slender finger in the sandy cave bottom. In the middle of the circle was a rudely crafted cone.

  “Cricket’s alive,” Whitney whispered.

  “How do you know?” Finnerty asked.

  She pointed at the sand carving and tears welled in her eyes. “Cricket trap,” she said. “A family thing.”

  “Good,” Finnerty said, smiling. “Very good. Not only is your family still alive, but there’s one less of their captives. The odds are tilting in our favor.”

  Whitney nodded, smiling through her tears.

  “Where’s the next supply cache?” Two-Elk asked.

  “Nyrens Ridge,” Whitney replied. “Four ridges west of here. Forty miles of passage.”

  “Are there enough supplies in these bags for us to get there?” Finnerty asked.

  “Well, yes, but how do we know if that’s where they’re head—”

  Whitney stopped. She had noticed the faint blipping light showing under the loose cover of the blue box next to the cricket trap. She knelt and lifted the cover. The computer screen came to life. On it was a section of the vector grid map of the Labyrinth. Overlaying the map were the words TRANSMISSION ERROR.

  Whitney looked up, excited. “They tried to send a message to the surface, but it didn’t make it,” she said. “I think there’s a record here of what they tried to send.”

  She gave the computer another command. An orange bar appeared on the darkened screen followed by a grainy digital movie of Tom. His skin was blackened and streaked with grime. His eyes were sunken. Great strain showed everywhere about him.

  Whitney watched him talk to the screen, but barely heard his words because she was dumbfounded at the fact that minutes ago he had held the computer. The picture twisted suddenly. Cricket was there, too. The picture twisted again and she caught glimpses of Gregor, Lyons, and Kelly, all of them hangdog with fatigue.

  “They’re in worse shape than us,” Finnerty said. “We can catch these guys.”

  Two-Elk was already standing to follow him, but Whitney didn’t move. She was replaying the movie, listening to what Tom was saying.

  “Stop!” she yelled after the marshals. “Tom said they’d reach the confluence of the Forgotten and No Return Rivers at midnight tomorrow after they go through the rinky-dink.”

  “Rinky-dink?” the marshal said.

  “It’s an old-time caving term for giving someone the runaround.”

  The marshal looked at her, still puzzled. “What are you trying to say?”

  “The next few ridges are so riddled with passages that there are literally dozens of places you could lead someone in circles and come back on course and eventually make it to Nyrens Ridge, the seventh of the cave’s nine, where two underground rivers converge.”

  “Okay?” Two-Elk said.

  Whitney felt hope surge through her at the audacity of Tom’s plan. He was still fighting for his life. For Cricket’s life, too. How could she have doubted him? How could she have doubted his love?

  “Tom’s going to run these men in circles for the next thirty hours,” she explained, excitement giving a quiver to her voice. “He’s going to try to completely break them down before leading them to the confluence of those two rivers at midnight tomorrow. If you’re still intent on an ambush, Marshal, there’s no place in this entire cave that would be better.”

  DEEP CAVE

  June 17, 2007

  7:00 A.M.

  NASA ENCAMPMENT

  JENKINS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  FOR THE THIRD MORNING in a row, Helen Greidel reported live from the Artemis Project. Wearing a bright red rain parka, she hunched under her umbrella before the wreckage of the old Jenkins homestead. Rain pelted her face.

  “A story that has gripped the world in the past few days has now turned grimmer,” she began. “In the wake of the powerful earthquake that struck eastern Kentucky yesterday afternoon, NASA now admits that it has lost all signals from the electronic location beacons carried by those still trapped in Labyrinth Cave—escaped prison inmates, two hostages, and a team sent in to rescue them.”

  The screen cut away to Angelis, the Mission Control chief, standing before a bank of microphones, the effects of the ordeal showing everywhere in his face.

  “NASA has lost the signal being emitted from the beacons carried by Tom and Cricket Burke and the four men we believe are holding them hostage,” Angelis shouted over the calls of reporters. “We have also lost contact with the rescue team—Burke’s wife and three U.S. marshals.”

  “Are they dead?” a reporter yelled.

  Angelis stopped, sobered. “We are proceeding on the assumption that they are alive.”

  The screen switched to a still shot of what looked like a gigantic drill mounted on the back of a flatbed truck Greidel spoke in voice-over: “Angelis also announced that the U.S. Bureau of Mines is rushing a rescue boring machine to the site. The machine will be used to reopen the entrances to the cave that collapsed during the earthquake and perhaps allow a second rescue team to enter the cave in search of survivors.”

  The picture jumped a third time, to a black-and-white newsreel film showing filthy men working on mining equipment, over which Greidel spoke: “The effort under way here appears to be the largest and most complex underground rescue attempt since the one undertaken back in 1925 to save Floyd Collins, the famous Kentucky cave explorer who was trapped in a cave about one hundred miles to our southwest.

  “Rescuers managed to reach Collins and kept him alive with food and heat for five days before a landslide blocked the passage to him,” Greidel went on. “It took twelve more days for engineers to sink a shaft and reach Collins a second time. All they found was his body.”

  The camera returned to Greidel huddled under her umbrella. She opened her eyes wide in sympathy. “We can only pray that the rescue efforts now under way here at Labyrinth Cave prove more successful than those undertaken on behalf of poor Floyd Collins.”

  Two
miles north, the Furnace River had turned into a boiling maelstrom replete with whirlpools and the sort of standing waves big western rivers spawn at the height of the spring runoff.

  Swain stood on the bank above the ferry, hunched over against a gale that drove the rain in sheets so thick that the Furnace’s north shore was but a dim gray line. He wore a yellow rain slicker, bib pants, and high rubber boots.

  Boulter came up behind the physicist, wearing a similar outfit. “The kid just checked the USGS web site,” he said. “River’s running fifty thousand cubic feet per second and rising.”

  “And I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it,” Swain agreed.

  Indeed, before leaving the Mission Control pavilion, the physicist had seen the latest satellite imagery, which showed the freak storm moving northeast across southern Appalachia and gathering enormous strength. Rain was already falling at one and a quarter inches per hour. Wind speeds were roughly fifty-two miles per hour, with gusts approaching sixty-five. The front was some two hundred twenty miles in breadth. Its center was rotating over northern Mississippi while its southern edge sucked moisture from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Barometric pressure readings at dawn were 28.5 and falling. Over the next fifteen hours, the barometric pressure was predicted to drop at more than a millibar an hour. Hurricane statistics.

  In the area surrounding Labyrinth Cave, thirteen hours of rain had all but liquefied the thin soil atop the limestone substructure. Trees whose root systems had been weakened by shock belowground toppled in the gusting wind. Others snapped halfway up their trunks. The fierce weather had made flight in the area all but impossible. Helicopters had been grounded, slowing the final medevacs of the earthquake’s wounded. The dirt road approach from the south had been turned into a trough of red clay gumbo. Ferry traffic had halted at midnight. The only thing preventing a full-scale flood was the damaged rammed-earth dam at Hermes Reservoir, twenty miles upstream of the cave, where repair crews were working around the clock.

  “You sure we want to be doing this?” Chester asked.

  Swain turned to see his nephew peering out from under the hood of his rain suit, a look of pure terror on his face. He held on to a life preserver. “Couldn’t we wait for the storm to die down a little?”

  “Your call, Dr. Swain,” Boulter said.

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Swain replied. “The sooner we locate that stone, the better.”

  “Let’s do it, then,” Boulter said. He climbed down the bank and into the cab of a pickup truck. He backed it and the boat trailer it was towing toward the river. The boat was a seventeen-foot whaler normally used by state police scuba divers when searching for drowning victims. The raging current slammed into the boat’s stern and threw it off the trailer. Swain ran into the shallows, grabbed the bow rope, and held on for dear life.

  “Give me a hand, Chester!” the physicist yelled at his nephew. But the teen did not move. He seemed transfixed by the whitecaps in the middle of the river.

  Boulter pulled his rig up to dry ground, then ran to Chester and Swain. “Get in!” He splashed out into the muddy water and jumped aboard. Swain was right behind him. He turned and saw Chester just standing there.

  “C’mon, Chester!” Swain yelled.

  “I can’t swim.”

  “What?” the physicist said, bewildered. “Impossible.”

  Now Chester got furious. “No it’s not! You and Mom had me in school every day since I was two. I never learned, Uncle Jeff. I never learned. You were always in the pool, but you never gave me lessons.”

  At that, Swain felt as if everything he’d done in the past ten years had been for naught. Body surfing and swimming had been his refuge, his solace, the thing that kept him sane in the insane world of big-time physics. And he’d never even thought to give Chester swimming lessons.

  “Chester, I …” Swain called from the boat. “You’ve got the life preserver. You’ll be fine.”

  Boulter fired up the 120-horsepower outboard. “He’s right, kid. That’s the best preserver on the market.”

  The chunky teenager still did not move. “Please, Chester,” Swain said.

  Reluctantly, the young man at last waded out, hoisted himself onto the lunging craft, then threw himself into the passenger chair, shaking like a fish thrown on the sand. Swain helped him tighten the straps on the orange life preserver. “You’re gonna be okay.”

  “No, I won’t,” he grumbled. “I’m going to drown because of you and some stinking moon rock.”

  Before Swain could reply, the trooper turned on the depth finder and loran unit and yelled, “You got those coordinates, Doc?”

  Swain tore himself away from his nephew, unzipped the top of his yellow rain suit, and peered inside at a list of longitude and latitude measurements, then called out the first. Boulter typed the numbers into the loran, jammed the prop in Reverse, and backed the boat into the current. The small craft was flung sideways. A wave burst over the gunwales.

  Boulter spun the wheel of the whaler and gunned the engine. The boat pitched and threatened to roll abeam before the big outboard caught and they moved upriver, tentatively at first, then with more authority. The hull slammed off the roiling surface of the river. At each lift and fall, geysers of spray broke across the bow.

  “Help me watch for debris,” Boulter shouted.

  Swain got up on one foot, was thrown hard to the side, then managed to get both feet under him, legs spread wide, hands grasping the windshield struts. The rain was falling so fast that it seemed not to have motion, only sound, color, and temperature. The river writhed like thousands of copperhead snakes dumped in a pit. Tree trunks, broken branches, and pieces of crushed lumber from destroyed buildings upstream flashed by in the cataracts. So did a washing machine, a derelict car, and what appeared to he the spar of a windmill. But with Swain’s help, Boulter managed to avoid them all and ten minutes later the shrouded mausoleum of Jenkins Ridge came into view.

  “Get those sensors ready, kid,” Boulter yelled at Chester. But the physicist’s nephew clung, catatonic, in the passenger chair.

  “Chester, for God’s sake, the sensors,” Swain yelled. “We’ve got to do the readings!”

  The teen’s eyes focused, but his hands shook as if with palsy as he unzipped the top of his rain suit and brought out the handheld device. Boulter began shouting out the river’s depth: “Twenty-two feet … twenty … Forty-five feet! That’s gotta be your outflow! Do your reading, kid. I can’t hold her here for long.”

  7:20 A.M.

  EASTERN CAVERNS

  BAILEY’S RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Deep within Bailey’s Ridge, the fifth of the Labyrinth’s nine, the passages were like hallways in an opera house, with high arched ceilings and dripping chandelier formations. The sediment that lined the floor was firm but had a bounce to it, like packed sand or padded carpet. Off the side of one of these grand hallways was a grotto roughly the shape of an igloo with a long entrance tunnel leading into a rotunda, where Cricket lay snuggled deep in the cocoon of her NASA sleeping bag.

  As grumbling and shuffling noises echoed in the darkness around her, Cricket came to the edge of consciousness. A light flashed against her closed eyelids and then died. She heard fading footsteps. Two days in the cave had destroyed her sense of night and day. She had no real understanding of how long she’d been sleeping, only that it felt like a long, dreamless time. It was so warm and cozy inside the bag, she started to drift off. Then whispers began somewhere behind her.

  “Once we get the rock we don’t need Puff Daddy, hear?” Kelly whispered. “We won’t need any of ’em.”

  “Who says I even need you?” Gregor replied.

  “You need someone,” Kelly insisted. “Last time you ran it alone, you ended up in The Castle. Besides, you’re sick. I know more about medicine than Lyons.”

  “I won’t be sick much longer,” Gregor said.

  Cricket came wide awake, eyes open. She strained to se
e her father beside her. She could hear his rhythmic breathing, but didn’t dare move to wake him. There was a long silence and then Gregor murmured, “Lyons and the two of them?”

  “After we get to the rock what do you need any of ’em for?” Kelly said.

  Light flared out of the darkness and the two men fell quiet. Cricket saw Lyons approach, carrying his shotgun. She closed her eyes. The guard kicked at her sleeping bag and then at her dad’s. “Get up,” he said, then called out, “Gregor. Kelly. It’s time.”

  Cricket made a show of waking, then looked around. Gregor and Kelly were only yards away, climbing from their bags. Her father sat up, his eyes filmy with sleep. She wanted to tell him what she’d heard, but didn’t dare. Not with Lyons standing right there, watching them. She’d have to wait until they got a chance to be alone.

  Minutes later, she crept out of the side passage into the grand hallway. The inmates were on alert, pistols drawn, looking for the source of the noise they had heard back in Munk’s Ridge and fled from all the way through Smith’s and Bailey’s, until Lyons had thought it safe to stop and sleep. Gregor led, keeping his back to one wall of the cave, shielding himself behind Tom from what might be hiding in the shadows. Kelly moved the same way behind Cricket. Lyons brought up the rear, toting his shotgun.

  After a half hour of walking with no encounters, Cricket noticed that Gregor, Kelly, and Lyons gradually dropped their guard and the way they moved ahead through the caverns became less restricted. They reached the end of the series of grand hallways, proceeded under a low vault and through a stooped passage, and found themselves overlooking a canyon about twenty feet across. Some sixty feet deep, the bottom of the canyon looked like a western creek bed with eroded brownish walls and water sluicing over a narrow track of smooth cobbled stones. The gorge curved away from them to the north. The bank that formed the east side of the chasm was level and wide, almost a road. Forty yards out that byway was a stout arched bridge of stone that spanned the canyon. Beyond the arch, on the western wall, loomed a gaping wound of passageway. Her dad halted at the foot of the bridge. He pointed across and then again up the road.