9:27 A.M.
TOWER RIDGE OUTFLOW
FURNACE RIVER
Swain was pummeled, punched, and flipped end over end. The current tore into his rain jacket, sucked him under, spun him around and around; and for one heart-stopping moment he thought he might not reach the surface again. Then the flow arched around some invisible object deep in the river’s bed, and the physicist felt himself thrust up and out into the air and the pouring rain just in time to see the wall of the next haystack rushing at him. Chester was already flailing up and over its crest.
Rather than fight the river, Swain opted to go with it. He rolled over into the classic bodysurfing position—feet together, back arched, arms extended perpendicular to the body, hands cupped like a rudder. He coursed up the back of the wave, crested it, and saw that he had gained on his nephew, who was sputtering and thrashing his way down the wave’s face.
“Hold on, Chester!” Swain cried. “I’m coming!”
The river drowned the boy’s scream of reply. He went flying through the trough and up the side of the next haystack with his uncle twenty yards behind him. By the time the physicist reached the crest of that standing wave, he and his nephew were ten yards apart. Chester went down the front of the wave backward, his face a study in hysteria. He spun as he hit the trough at the bottom of the wave and was sucked under.
Swain knew that river kayakers called these sluicing pits “washing machines” because they could trap a man in an endless spin cycle and drown him.
“God, no!” he bellowed, throwing both arms straight out in front of him and ducking his head so he might accelerate down the wave’s face. Then he porpoise-kicked and dived.
The river whirled him around and around and around, forcing brackish water up his nose. Branches and other debris lashed his torso. Still tumbling he collided with a solid, padded object. Instinctively his fingers reached, found the nylon straps of Chester’s flotation vest, and held tight. Their combined mass was enough to counter the spinning action. In the next instant they were thrown to the surface far to the right of the fourth haystack. Chester had lost his glasses and his eyes were rolled back in his head. His skin was deathly gray and water drained from his nostrils.
“No,” Swain sobbed. “You’re not dying on me. Not now. Not now.”
He laced his fingers deeper into the webbing of his nephew’s vest and swam with all his might. The river grabbed at them and threatened to drag them under once more, but Swain kicked and fought with his free arm. They bounced off submerged boulders and twice were almost flattened by floating logs.
At last Swain got them almost to the far side of the river, but the shore was eroded and impossible to climb. They swept farther downstream. Ahead, along the bank Swain noticed an uprooted oak tree lying half submerged in the river. He aimed toward it and they crashed into its branches and became entangled there. The physicist knew he had to get his nephew up onto the shore to get his lungs cleared. He tried to hoist Chester up into the branches, but couldn’t. The tree began to shift as if it might break away under the flood’s insistent force. Then, above the roar of the river, came the grind of an outboard engine.
“Here!” Swain screamed and waved. “Boulter, we’re here!”
The state police captain brought the bow of the whaler in almost to the crown of the tree so that Swain could grab the rope hanging from the stern. Boulter revved the engine and dragged them toward shore. When the hull struck bottom, he jumped out and tied off the bow, then waded back to where Swain still foundered in the current.
“Help him,” the physicist sobbed. “Help him before it’s too late.”
Boulter took one look, yanked the unconscious teenager up onto the shore below the base of the cliff on Tower Ridge, and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the pouring rain. Swain stumbled to his knees next to the trooper and Chester, blubbering, “It was my idea to put him in college so young. He was always so goddamned brilliant It seemed the right thing to do. I never knew he couldn’t swim. How could I have not known? How could I have not taught him? How could I have not—?”
Chester coughed and puked up river water. He struggled and puked up more, then took a deep breath, choked, and vomited a third time. For a second there was no movement on his part, then he began coughing violently, but taking deep, raspy breaths between each cough.
“Thank God,” Swain sobbed. “Thank you, God, for saving my boy.”
Ten minutes later, Chester was weak but sitting up, his back resting against his uncle’s chest. “I’m sorry, Chester,” Swain said.
“For what?” Chester managed to say.
“For everything,” Swain replied, his voice choked with emotion. “For pushing you so hard when you were a kid. For never taking the time to be there for you other than academically. For thinking that immortality is something that is achieved, rather than given. You were my immortality, Chester, and I just couldn’t see it. I couldn’t and I’m sorry. I feel like I stole your childhood from you.”
His nephew was silent for a long time, then he said, “No, Uncle Jeff, you didn’t steal it. Mom’s death was the real thief. You just tried to make me better in the only way you could. Yeah, I may have lost a childhood, but I’d have to say my late adolescence has been pretty exciting so far.”
Swain looked down at his nephew and almost chuckled.
“Think you can move now, kid?” Boulter asked.
Chester nodded. The trooper reached down and lifted him to his feet like a wet rag doll. Swain got up and together he and Boulter helped Chester toward the whaler. As they approached the riverbank, Boulter asked, “Where’s the sensor? We’ve still got to take those readings.”
Chester reached inside the neck of his now-tattered rain jacket, but his hand did not emerge with the device. “Must have torn free in the river,” he moaned. “I failed you guys.”
Swain was reaching out to pat his nephew on the back when out of his peripheral vision he caught sight of a bright yellow nylon cord tangled in the limbs of the half-submerged oak tree. He let go of Chester, waded out unsteadily into the water, and, at last, grabbed the cord and pulled up the sensor. The golden infinity symbol was swelling to ten times its normal size. The multicolored bar graph showed a huge data response. Swain stared at both of them as if he could not believe what he was seeing.
“We’ve got 7.5 megavolts with low photon surge, and incredible neutron exchange and quark decay,” the physicist screamed with joy, pointing up the face of the fog-obscured cliff. “You found it, Chester! Gregor’s stone’s right here! Right inside this goddamned beautiful hollow mountain!”
9:45 A.M.
SPAGHETTI WORKS
BAILEY’S-PARKER’S CONNECTION ROUTE
LABYRINTH CAVE
“Which way now?” Kelly growled. “And don’t you fuck with me, little girl.”
Cricket shrank from the swarthy inmate. For the past hour they’d been moving fast through flat, monotonous passages. Every moment since leaving her dad had seemed distorted by the harsh pyramidal glare of her headlamp beam. Now she looked at the fork in the passage, then down at her compass, which trembled in her right hand, trying to remember exactly what her father had said. “We go down this left passage,” she said.
“Better be right,” Kelly snarled. “I ain’t there to get my share, I’m gonna be a right angry man. You don’t want to see me when I get pissed, now, do you?”
“No.” Cricket turned away before he could see her chin quiver and set off to the north down a long oval tube floored with loose gravel. She squinted and stared about, trying to take it all in, trying to imagine what her dad would do in her place. But this was the first time that Cricket had ever tried to navigate alone in a cave she’d never been led through before. I’m only fourteen! Then, to her chagrin, she remembered herself saying, I’m not a child anymore, Dad. I’m a young woman.
She wished suddenly that her mother were there, to seek her advice, to tell her that she understood about the way life can
change in a brutal instant. Then, for a long panic-stricken moment, all she could think of was that she going to die. She had seen Kelly’s temper and she was going to die. She found herself wishing she could somehow whistle Kelly to death, then go rescue her dad from Gregor and Lyons.
They passed a slit in the cave wall where crystal-clear water bubbled and seeped into a basin before spilling out in a gossamer cascade that drained into cracks in the rock. Cricket caught sight of her reflection in the basin water and barely recognized herself. It was the same face. But older. For the past two years that’s all she’d wanted to be—a person everyone realized was old enough to take care of herself. Now she suddenly did not want to be older. She wanted to be a child snuggled tightly between her parents in the soft glow of fireflies.
Cricket wondered whether she knew who she was anymore. She’d never in her life thought about hurting someone and here she was wanting to kill the man behind her, the second man she’d wanted to kill in the span of less than two days. She swallowed hard at what felt like a smooth stone lodged in her throat
Then she heard that strange voice in her head again, that voice that she recognized as her own, but more mature, tougher, certain. The voice was telling her that sometimes, to survive, humans had to act in ways that weren’t human. She had a right to live—a right that trumped all others. In the end, what mattered was that she and her dad emerge from the cave and find her mom. Kelly did not matter. Neither did Gregor or Lyons. She told herself she had to accept the strangeness of her reflection in the basin water; like it or not, she was no longer little Cricket Burke, gifted athlete, struggling student, still aching to be taken seriously. Orphaned from one parent and then the other, these past few days had somehow christened her into a different person, someone acutely aware of love and evil and loss. For a second, she almost broke under the weight of it all.
She flashed hard on images of her parents, then shrugged under the load and found she could bear it. Play to your strengths, she thought. The cave was hers, not Kelly’s. She moved better than he did. He was strong no doubt, but she was faster; she could see that just from the way he was built—no real top-end speed.
A moment passed and then an idea blazed through her mind. Her breath caught at the brazenness of it. She looked down her legs to her boots, then glanced back at Kelly. He was rolling along behind her. His pistol was shoved in the band of his pack. The belly belt transmitter dangled at the end of his simian right arm.
“I need some privacy,” she said.
“You peed back there half an hour ago,” Kelly retorted.
“I’m getting my period,” Cricket replied, shoving her jaw out at him.
Kelly’s eyes narrowed and his lip curled. “You’re shitting me.”
“No,” she said, pulling out a tampon from the top flap of her pack. “I have to put this in or I’m going to be bleeding everywhere.”
“Ah, Jesus Christ, spare me the details,” Kelly groaned, then his face hardened and he gestured ahead. “Go. Do it then. Up around the bend there.”
“You’ll need to unlock the belt,” she said.
Kelly studied her. “You better not be messing with me, kid.”
She remembered something a friend of hers had said when she got her period for the first time. “I’m soaking through my panties,” Cricket said.
“Oh, what the fuck!” Kelly groused. He brought out a key and unlocked the belt. “You keep your headlamp pointed back in this direction and you talk to me, hear?”
Cricket nodded, then slowly, her heart beating in her throat, she turned and walked away from Kelly. The belly belt was still buckled but hung loose on her hips. She rounded the curve in the passage.
“Keep talking!” Kelly yelled. “Point your headlamp back this way.”
Cricket thought quickly. She reached deep into her pack and tugged out her spare flashlight. She dimmed her headlamp and shone the flashlight’s beam back toward the curve in the tunnel.
“I’m stopping,” Cricket said, easing back another twenty yards. Trying hard not to tremble, she put the flashlight on top of a two-inch outcropping of the cave wall and aimed it back toward Kelly. “I’m taking off the belt. I’m unzipping my jumpsuit.”
She kept walking backward, unloosening the straps of the belt as she went. It fell to her ankles and dragged in the sand. She stepped out of the electronic constraint. She could breathe fully now without the belt digging at her waist. She took a second to look around for somewhere to throw the device, somewhere Kelly wouldn’t find it. But the passage was smooth and void of broken rock; there wasn’t anyplace Kelly wouldn’t see it. She would have to take it with her. She picked it up by one of the fabric loops that hung off the back near the energy supply.
“One more minute,” she called.
For a second, Cricket hesitated. She remembered how she’d felt going to the starting line at the Kentucky State 400 finals. All the older girls had tried to intimidate her with their looks. She’d ignored them, done what her father had said—focused on the moment and believed in herself—and darn near won the race. That’s what she had to do now—focus on the moment and believe in herself. She looked down at her compass. Trend north-northwest. That’s what her father said. North-northwest.
“Zipping up my suit,” she yelled. She eased off a few more gentle steps, turned, and took one last look back in Kelly’s direction.
The flashlight rolled off the ledge and clattered across the cave floor.
Cricket made a break for it, still holding the belly belt. Her legs drove up and forward. The treads of her boots dug into the hard, dry sediment. In seconds, she was a hundred yards down the tunnel and opening her stride, reaching for her helmet and the light. She snapped it on highest power and chased the beam up a slight rise, accelerating the whole time.
Behind her, Kelly roared with fury.
10:02 A.M.
ENDLESS CRAWL
BAILEY’S-PARKER’S CONNECTION ROUTE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Tom came down a slope crowded with boulders like a skier bouncing in moguls, launching himself from one to the next, a dancer on the edge of ruin. He was using every athletic instinct, every last bit of cave skill, and every ounce of energy to one end: to get to the dry passages high in Parker’s Ridge as fast as possible so he could begin backtracking toward Cricket.
He jumped off one last boulder into a bowl of moist black sand, then went to his knees before a horizontal gash in the stone wall. His headlamp shone into a crack about twelve inches high and so long and wide that he could not grasp its dimensions. The ceiling was blackish. The floor as far as he could see was that same black sand. It was like looking out into a vast desert landscape where the night sky was clouded.
He steeled himself for the grueling nature of what lay ahead, then immediately splayed his legs and stretched out on his belly and elbows. He stuck his head in the crack and began to wriggle his way in. Lyons grabbed Tom by the ankles and yanked him back.
“Slow the fuck down, you’re gonna kill him,” he snarled, gesturing at Gregor, who was bent over and gasping with exertion.
“He said he wanted to get to his stone fast,” Tom said. “I’m taking him there, fast enough for me to get my daughter back.”
Lyons grabbed Tom by the collar. “You don’t get it, do you, man? Without him there is no stone.”
“I don’t care,” Tom said struggling.
Lyons cuffed him across the side of his helmet, shook him, and hissed into his face, “There’s a lot of people a lot more important than you who do care about that stone. So you understand this: You keep pulling this shit, you’re never gonna see your daughter again.”
“You need me a lot more than I need you,” Tom roared back. “Without me, you and Gregor are lost. That’s my only child up there. My only link with a life I once had, and I’m not losing her, for you, for him, or for that fucking stone.”
At that, Gregor and the pall he cast grew larger, as if his anger were a shadow that enveloped
him like a cowl. “Go as fast as you want, Burke. I’ll stay right behind you.”
Tom shook himself free of Lyons, then ducked down, splayed his arms and knees, cocked back his head, and drove forward into the crawlway, scrambling, pulling, kicking, and spitting his way through that gritty place. He told himself that now was the moment he’d been waiting for. A chance to exhaust Lyons and Gregor, to destroy them physically and mentally.
The crawlway went on for nearly six hundred yards, dark, oppressive, a vast wafer of an opening in the rock with very little peripheral information. Negotiating these kinds of passages seemingly without horizon struck Tom as similar to what ancient sailors must have done on cloudy nights in a stormy sea; they navigated by dead reckoning.
The enormity of his situation fell in around him then. What if he never saw Cricket or Whitney again? He felt for a moment as if the interior of his rib cage no longer contained lungs or heart, and his thoughts sprayed at him like the wake of a power boat, so fast, so final, and tinged with so many regrets, so many things left unsaid and undone. He was stunned at just how much his family—not science, not the cave, not NASA, not the whole scope of his career—meant to him. Everyone thought Whitney and Cricket relied on him. The truth was they were his supports, the arches of stone on which he leaned. He realized how abandoned he would be without them. Part of him wanted to lie down and cry, but he would not let himself. He looked back. Lyons and Gregor were gasping and fighting their way along behind him. Gregor gripped the belly belt transmitter in one hand. Lyons pushed along his shotgun.
Tom kept thinking about the belt. It dawned on him that he knew more than they did about the way radio waves traveled in caves. Without a repeater, the belly belt would be rendered useless if it was separated from the transmitter by more than a quarter mile. That’s all he needed—to somehow put a quarter mile between himself and his captors. If he could do it, he’d be free to find and rescue Cricket. Together they could reach the surface.
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