Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  A short, barrel-chested officer in his late forties with a scar that reached from his chin across his cheek to his ear strode up the hill. His epaulets carried two gold stars.

  “I’m Major General Lyman Hayes,” he barked. “I’m taking over this operation at the direct order of the President of the United States.”

  FINAL CONNECTION

  8:30 P.M.

  CONFLUENCE OF FORGOTTEN AND NO RETURN RIVERS

  NYRENS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  FILTHY, BRUISED, REELING FROM lack of sleep, able to go on solely because of the energy his reunion with Cricket had generated, Tom trudged out onto a terrace above a crescent-shaped plaza through which sluiced a river some fifteen feet in breadth. The river was flanked on the north by a bulwark of pillar and cleaved block that supported the terrace. Dazzling salt crystals coated the buttress all the way to the rock flat that banked the river. At the southern end of the cavern, the river split east and southwest under an archway with several feet of headroom. Cricket limped behind him, locked once again in the belly belt.

  Tom glanced at her. He knew she was battered with fatigue and pain, but not once in the last five hours had she complained. She had the right to feel defeated being back in the belt, but instead she seemed so filled with resolve that he studied her for a moment. There was something different about her; she was firmer and yet more resilient. He’d always known she was a tough kid. How many children raised in a family like hers, in this environment could fail to be physically rugged? But it was something more, something he just could not place at first other than the fact that right then she reminded him so much of Whitney. Then it hit him. He was looking at her the way he would an adult. As someone he could depend on: as a peer, as an ally.

  Lyons eased alongside, followed by Kelly, who kept glaring Cricket’s way. Gregor brought up the rear. Despite his waxen skin and his gaunt, crooked build, the physicist was acting as if he’d been up for an hour with two cups of coffee under his belt after a long night’s sleep. Nervously alert.

  Tom blinked and yawned. Then he realized where he was and shook himself alert. The message he’d left on the computer at the first cache said to expect him here, at the confluence of Forgotten and No Return Rivers, at midnight tonight. It dawned on him that if the message had reached the surface, a second rescue team, apart from the one they’d heard back in Munk’s Ridge, could have entered the cave from the west. He began to crane his head, peering into the shadows, trying to make out human forms among the rocks and crevices of the bulwark below him. But there was nothing.

  “Where now?” Gregor asked.

  “Cricket needs to rest awhile,” Tom said, trying to stall in case the first rescue team was still somewhere behind them. “I need to rest, too.”

  “Need twenty myself,” Lyons said. The large man climbed down over the pillars to the floor of the lower hallway. He threw his sack on the floor about ten feet from the riverbank and laid his head down on it, resting his shotgun beside him. “Everyone take five.”

  “How can you even think of sleeping, Lyons?” Gregor cried. The hairless man’s bearing fairly sizzled now. “We’re getting close. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “You’ve been giving us that crap the past two days,” Kelly retorted dully.

  “So you had a rough go with the girl,” Gregor sneered at him. “None of your suffering matters. None of my suffering matters. Some of the greatest minds of the ages have sought the stone—Aristotle, Magnus, Aquinas, Bacon, even Jung. Don’t you understand? We’re only hours away from beholding its magnificence.”

  “I just wanna see the gold,” Kelly said.

  Lyons said nothing. He closed his eyes and in seconds his breathing turned deep and raspy. Tom watched him, thinking that people who have the ability to just shut down like that had to be accustomed to stress. He wondered if he’d been in the military before becoming a prison guard. Or was he just so exhausted that sleep was the only thing that mattered right now?

  Cricket sat down next to her father and laid her head on his shoulder. “So tired, Daddy,” she said.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

  She snuggled into his arms and closed her eyes.

  Tom looked around. Still no sign of their would-be rescuers. He had to give them time to get here. With the high ground above the rivers, this cavern was the best possible place for an ambush in the entire cave system. If he led his captors away from this cavern, he would have to lead them back. He glanced downstream toward the second cache site and the connection route through Pluto’s River into Tower Ridge. Then he turned his attention to that overhang from which the tributaries of the No Return River flowed. He’d run several sonar soundings up the hole over the years but had never explored that part of the cave. Could he take the chance of leading them off that way? What if they hit a dead end?

  Cricket trembled and jerked in his arms. Tom watched her for the longest while, taking hope from the fact that she had been returned to him as a sign that they might indeed survive this trial. Then he thought of Whitney that first time they’d kissed in the hemlock glen below the cabin. He remembered the moonlight in her hair. The sweet smell of her skin as he nuzzled her. The soft brush of her lips. The rush up his spine as they molded to each other.

  He reached up and turned off his headlamp, seeing Whitney as if she were in front of him in the moment after they’d broken their first embrace. “I promise you we will get back to you,” he mumbled as his head began to droop toward sleep. “I promise.”

  Twenty minutes later, Gregor kicked Cricket’s boots and then her father’s. “Get up. We’ve delayed enough.”

  Cricket yawned, stretched, and groaned at the ache in every muscle in her body.

  “Loosen your splint, then tighten it,” Tom said. “And eat something. We’ve got another long walk ahead of us.”

  Cricket nodded, then unwrapped the splint and let her fingers dig into the swollen flesh around her knee. She found the tender spot and cringed. It was so sore she almost teared. Then she closed her eyes and told herself she could go on. She had to go on. There was no choice. If she collapsed now, they would leave her. She rewrapped the strips around her leg, then dug out a food bar from her pack. It was a dry chocolate raspberry that made her aware of how parched she was. Her water bottles were empty. She got up and limped toward the river, water bottles in hand. Kelly sat with his back against the stone buttress, his legs sprawled before him, his upper lip twisting at the sight of her. He threw his own water bottles at her. “Fill mine first,” he ordered.

  Cricket bent down and picked up the bottles, avoiding his glowering stare. She turned, doing everything she could not to let him see the shaking of her hands. Every time he looked at her it was clear he intended to kill her when this was all over. That thought kept cycling through her head as she opened the top of Kelly’s water bottle. She glanced at her feet and saw on the rock beside them the shards of what had been a plate of delicate salt crystals. She remembered her mother telling her that Native Americans had used the salts as laxatives and purgatives.

  Cricket leaned forward, dipping Kelly’s bottle into the cold water. Then she picked up a handful of the crystals and crushed them over the mouth of the bottle. There was a filter in the lid of the bottle designed to extract bacteria and other impurities. Cricket tore out the rubber gaskets that made the filters work.

  “Where’s my fucking water?” Kelly yelled.

  “Leave the girl alone,” Lyons growled.

  “No,” Kelly said. “I won’t.”

  She screwed the top on, turned, and tossed it to Kelly. He snatched the bottle out of the air, regarded her for a second, then drank greedily.

  It was nine-thirty by the time they had all eaten, drunk, and reshouldered their packs. Cricket turned to head north and downstream. She had never been to this part of the cave, but she had spent hours upon hours looking at the maps her parents had made of the Labyrinth. The way to
Tower Ridge lay in this direction.

  But her father grabbed her gently by her upper arm, then made as if to kiss her temples and whispered in her ear, “We need time for that rescue team to catch up with us. Rinky-dink, okay?”

  Cricket nodded, but her heart began to slam. Her father was taking a big chance, but she followed him without hesitation toward the southern end of the cavern, then entered the water, wading forward toward the overhang that marked the passage into the unexplored regions of Nyrens Ridge. Her dad reached the overhang and started to duck. Gregor climbed into the water after Cricket, then halted as if an invisible cord were lashed to his chest.

  “You’re sure this is the way, Burke?” Gregor called out.

  “Do you want to lead?” Tom replied, his face betraying nothing but confidence. “You seem to know something about this place.”

  Cricket watched doubt course through Gregor as he looked back downstream, then he studied Tom. “No. Go on then.”

  In the early going, the cave that contained the No Return River ran a serpentine course under a low ceiling that forced them to crouch to avoid hitting their helmets. They were in and out of the chilly water constantly. The cold actually made Cricket’s knee feel better and she moved along quite well between Gregor and Lyons.

  But what she was seeing all around her made her increasingly agitated. She knew that no one had ever been in this part of the cave before. Her dad could predict how a cave might open up before him as well as any man alive. But she understood a thing or two about caves herself, and the silt in the water, the muddy banks, and the wet ceilings did not bode well for navigation.

  Forty minutes into the soggy march, Kelly got a desperate look on his face, then began to race back along the bank of the river the way they had come, tearing at his coveralls. It’s working, Cricket told herself. The laxatives are working.

  When Kelly returned, he’d lost all color and complained of thirst. He sucked down a third of the second contaminated bottle. They started moving again.

  Ten minutes later, Gregor cried out, “The water’s glowing!”

  All their headlamp beams flared down on the surface of the underground river. Cricket saw it, too: tendrils of glimmering greenish yellow against the steel-colored limestone streambed, a flow within a flow. It reminded her of a fishing trip she’d taken with her parents off Cape Hatteras when she’d seen the warm turquoise waters of the Gulf Stream against the cold gray Atlantic. Seeing the Gulf Stream had given her great pleasure, but Cricket tensed at the sight of the brackish green plume in the cave water. She knew its source and braced herself for trouble.

  Ahead she saw her dad squatting as if to more closely examine the phenomenon.

  “Huh,” he said as if he were puzzled. “Must be microbial.”

  “Whaddya mean, microbial?” Kelly asked.

  “Cave bacteria that give off their own light, like underwater fireflies,” Tom replied. “Bring your light close to the surface and the bacteria should glow even brighter.”

  Cricket’s attention darted among the men staring suspiciously at the river water. One by one, they lowered their headlamps toward the surface. Shaking, she lowered her lamp as well. The stream seemed to turn almost iridescent, the plume of each tendril mushrooming as it moved with the current between her legs.

  Cricket knew the phenomenon was not microbial but man-made, caused by a fluorescein dye. Each of the NASA cavers had carried ten grams of the dye in their packs. It was supposed to have been dumped back inside Smith’s Ridge as part of a U.S. Geological Survey experiment to trace the cave’s water transit time. Her father must have tossed it in the water as a signal to whoever might be following them.

  Gregor’s lip curled with distaste. “These microbes aren’t poisonous, are they? I mean, we won’t get sick by being in the water, will we?”

  “Not that I’ve ever heard of, though I wouldn’t want to drink it unfiltered,” Tom said.

  Kelly cringed and Lyons asked, “How much further to dry ground?”

  Tom hesitated at the question. It was obvious to Cricket that he’d hoped to reach solid footing long before now. “The river’s running higher than normal, but we can’t be far now,” he said.

  Tom turned and began wading again through the glowing blue cloud. Cricket followed, watching as the plume became longer and wider, filling the channel bank to bank before passing around a curve behind them.

  She prayed her father was right, that there were rescuers still following them, that the rescuers would see the dye and wait for them back there in the salt cavern.

  10:00 P.M.

  CONFLUENCE OF FORGOTTEN AND NO RETURN RIVERS

  NYRENS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  “Which way did they go?” Finnerty called from the terrace above the joining of the two rivers.

  Whitney watched impatiently as Two-Elk worked the sides of the underground streams. The tracker squatted and ran her good hand along the embankments, and then stood and shook her head, the beam from her headlamp whipping back and forth.

  “There’s disturbance here where someone broke off salt crystals,” she said, “and over there on that spit of ground between the two streams and again down the common river a ways. Problem is, it’s all flat hard rock. No gravel, no sediment, no sand, no mud.”

  “Which means what?” Whitney demanded.

  “They could have headed in any of three directions—downstream or up either of those two tributaries,” Two-Elk replied before turning to Finnerty. “Your call on whether we take the chance on waiting them out here.”

  The U.S. marshal’s cheeks puffed. “I need more information.”

  “What about the sensor those physicist guys gave us?” Two-Elk suggested. “If they’re going for the rock, they’ll be heading in whatever direction the signal’s strongest.”

  “Makes sense,” Finnerty said.

  The deputy unzipped the top of her jumpsuit and brought out the slender handheld instrument. She went to each of the upriver passages and triggered the device. The golden infinity symbol on the cobalt screen throbbed at each outflow. But when she aimed the device downstream the amplitude of the pulses was noticeably larger.

  “The stone’s that way,” Finnerty said, clearly frustrated. He thought for a moment, then said, “Ultimately, Two-Elk’s right—that’s where Gregor’s going, to this stone of his. Why don’t we try to find it and wait for them there, Whitney?”

  “Because I know my husband,” Whitney replied firmly. “He risked his life to leave that message. He said he’d be through here around midnight. He’ll be here.”

  Finnerty unsnapped his helmet squatted, and rinsed it in the river. “But what if they forced Tom and Cricket downstream?” he asked. “If we wait here until midnight we could find ourselves hours behind. I think we should at least make a reconnaissance in that direction. If we don’t find their tracks, we’ll come back.”

  He stood and put the helmet back on. The strain of the constant darkness and lack of sleep was carved around his eyes.

  “What if Tom returns before we do?” Whitney asked. “We could end up running into them and having the uncontrolled firefight you keep saying you want to avoid.”

  “I guess I’ll have to take that chance,” Finnerty replied moodily. “We’re heading that way, at least until the tracking conditions improve.”

  The marshal turned up the intensity of his headlamp beam as if emphasizing that his decision was final. Whitney felt her stomach sink. She turned, looking for something, anything, that would give them a clue as to where Tom and Cricket had gone.

  “Let’s go,” Finnerty said. “We’re going downstream.”

  Whitney took a deep breath and was turning to follow the marshal and his deputy when she caught sight of a glimmering blue-green cloud billowing in the water near the outflow of the east fork of the No Return River.

  “The hell we are,” she said.

  They built a semicircular cairn of rocks along the northern rim of the terrace som
e thirty-five yards back from and forty feet above the confluence of the two rivers. The top of the cairn was arranged in the manner of a fortress wall with low points through which the marshal and his deputy could shoot. Finished, they sat on their packs behind the wall atop piles of flat stones. Finnerty and Two-Elk removed their helmets, set them on the ground, then tugged on gray balaclava hoods. The machine pistols rested in their laps.

  “Just like sitting in the woods, waiting for deer,” Finnerty said, satisfied.

  Two-Elk rolled her eyes. Whitney felt herself coil with frustration, expectancy, and dread. From her angle, she could look through the port directly in front of Finnerty and see the overhang above the outflow of the No Return River. She realized that although she might see Tom and Cricket climb free of the water, she would lose sight of them as soon as they had taken several steps downstream. But by then, she thought, it would all be over.

  “Kill the lights,” Finnerty said.

  Whitney looked at him. “I need to ask you something first.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I asked Two-Elk this already, so I know you’re married, but it’s important—do you have children?”

  At that she saw a cloud of sadness and uncertainty settle over the marshal. “Not yet,” he said. “We’re trying, but there have been—complications.”

  Two-Elk cocked her head at him. “You never said anything about that”

  Finnerty reddened. “Aren’t Natalie and I allowed some privacy?”

  “Sure, boss,” Two-Elk replied. “Sorry.”

  Whitney reached out and touched the marshal’s sleeve. “Don’t give up. Never give up on the idea of family.”

  Finnerty’s eyes moistened, then he turned his head and looked away. “I won’t,” he said. “You don’t either, okay? We’re going to do everything in our power get Cricket and Tom back for you, Whitney.” Then he reached down between his boots to where his helmet lay and twisted off his headlamp. “Total silence now. When you see their lights coming, Whitney, don’t move. Don’t make the slightest noise. Hold your breath if you have to. Let us handle it. This is what we’re trained to do.”