Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Two-Elk turned off her headlamp and rested the muzzle of her machine pistol in the break in the rock wall. Even though Whitney had little experience with guns, she wanted to be armed herself, to be part of it, to do something concrete to end this nightmare once and for all. But all she could do was turn over the fate of her family to these two people. She bit at her upper lip and twisted the knob on her headlamp.

  Instantly, there fell a blackness so complete that she could not have seen her hand had it been an eighth of an inch in front of her face. Panic surged from deep in her stomach and it surprised her with its strength after so many hours, days now, inside the cave. Her throat seemed to close from the inside, as if she were going into some kind of allergic shock. She swore she could taste the water, the grainy liquid that had fouled her mouth when she had fallen into the flood with Jeannie’s body and lost her light.

  Then Whitney squeezed her hands into fists and shook her head violently in the darkness; she would not allow herself to come apart now, not when she was this close to Tom and Cricket. She summoned up pictures of them and pored over them in her mind. Over many minutes the panic gradually ebbed.

  After a while, after she became used to the absolute blackness, she noticed her senses of hearing and smell becoming more acute. She heard the river babbling below her. She heard the quick shallow rhythm of her breath, the deep, slow, monklike exhalations of Two-Elk, and the sonorous rasps of Finnerty right beside her. She smelled them and herself and the stale onion odor of the cave.

  It was dank above the rivers and she was glad for the heat packs she’d shoved down the back and front of her jumpsuit. The packs warmed her torso and gradually turned her drowsy. But every once in a while, one of the marshals would shift in the dark beside her and she’d jolt alert. At last, Whitney could stay awake no longer. Her head slumped onto her chest and she slept uneasily. In her dream she saw herself crouched on the ledge of the flooding belltower in Terror Hole Cave, the terra-cotta water brushing against the soles of her boots. Suddenly there was a bubbling in the current, as if an obstruction downstream had dislodged and the flood came up a quick three inches. Then up breached the body.

  Whitney sobbed and tried to back away from it. But she slipped and fell from the ledge into the water. The body bumped against her as she struggled to get back up on the dry outcropping, bumped her again and again. Whitney threw out her elbow to push the body away, but succeeded only in rolling it over. Only this time it was not Jeannie’s face on the drowned corpse. Or Cricket’s. Or Tom’s.

  It was her own.

  11:20 P.M.

  EAST FORK, NO RETURN RIVER

  NYRENS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  Mounds of sand banked the underground stream. The sand met a rough wall of limestone. The river did, too, and disappeared.

  “Shit,” Tom muttered. He flared his headlamp left and right along the seam of liquid, sediment, and stone, looking for a way forward. He sought a crack, a chink, some small hole, anything. But the water and sand filled every bit of opening in the rock.

  He turned to his captors and, trying to look each one of them in the eye, said, “I don’t understand it. The way is flooded. We’ll have to turn back.”

  “Fuck,” Lyons said, throwing down his pack and gun on the riverbank.

  Gregor’s entire body went rigid. “This isn’t the way,” he said. “Never was.”

  “It is the way, at least one of them,” Tom insisted. “This route is shorter, but it floods sometimes. We’ll just have to go back the way we came and take the higher, drier route into Tower Ridge.”

  “Liar!” Gregor said, the tendons in his neck vibrating. “We’ve been moving away from the stone ever since we started up this river. My body feels it.”

  “Double-cross,” Kelly snarled as he stepped forward, holding up the belly belt transmitter. “Told you not to fuck with us.”

  Tom braced himself for the hot, electric pain. Instead, Cricket keeled over, half in, half out of the underground stream, her arms and legs jerking, her eyes bulging out of their sockets. It looked like a dozen knives were stabbing into her at once.

  “No!” Tom cried. He splashed through the water, going after Kelly.

  Gregor tripped Tom and he sprawled in the stream. Gregor put a boot on his back. “Don’t you move, Burke,” Gregor said. Then he looked at Kelly. “Teach him a lesson. Hit her again.”

  Kelly grinned, raised the transmitter, then doubled over. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he grimaced at the convulsion in his abdomen. In the last hour, he’d been stricken four times with bouts of diarrhea. With each attack he had grown progressively weaker and now the cramping appeared to threaten even his ability to stand.

  Tom watched Cricket rise up on one elbow and look at Kelly through electrically glazed eyes. “Whatsamatter, Kelly, feel like you’re gonna poop your pants again?” she whispered.

  Kelly twisted his head so that the beam of his lamp reached her. Another cramp racked his body, but he fought against it and at last righted himself and said, “You put something in my water back there, you bitch.”

  Cricket glanced at her father, then back at Kelly, the fright showing everywhere about her. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No?” Kelly said. He rammed his thumb down on the red button.

  To Tom’s horror, veins all along Cricket’s hairline stood out and her tongue sought the back of her throat. Kelly hit the button a third time and she convulsed backward in a trembling arch.

  “You’ll kill her!” Tom screamed. He fought out from under Gregor’s boot, trying to get up. But Gregor kicked him in the ribs and he fell onto the stream bank.

  Lyons splashed forward as if to grab Kelly, but his foot snagged on something under the water and he went to his knees on the bank. Gregor pointed his gun at the guard. “Don’t interfere, Lyons. We’re not done with her yet.”

  A malevolent grin crossed Kelly’s face as he prepared to hit Cricket with a fourth shock. Tom spun toward Gregor, desperate to get the attention off of Cricket. “Lyons isn’t interested in the gold at all,” he blurted. “He wants the stone. He told me he’ll kill Kelly and you—he’ll kill all of us once you’ve shown him where the stone is.”

  The guard’s focus darted to the shotgun, then back to Kelly and Gregor. “Be cool now, boys,” Lyons said, curling his fingers into the sediment along the stream bank. “Burke’s trying to turn us on each other. He’s been trying to do it all along.”

  But Gregor crouched and aimed the muzzle of his pistol toward Lyons’s chest. “When did he say all this?” he asked Tom.

  “Day before yesterday, after Mann died. He said the stone was what was important, not the gold.”

  Cricket rolled over, her body still shaking, and laughed bitterly. “And I heard Kelly trying to convince Gregor to kill you, Lyons. Why don’t you all just kill yourselves and get it over with?”

  “You two don’t know what you’re doing,” Lyons yelled. “I’m the only hope you’ve got.”

  “Fuck you,” Tom replied, then he looked back at Gregor. “He said as long as he got out of here with the stone, he’d make sure Cricket and I would be safe. He said you and Kelly wouldn’t matter at that point.”

  Gregor went cold and lethal, like a snake about to strike. He cocked the hammer of his pistol. “Is that so?” he muttered. “‘Wouldn’t matter’?”

  The slightest twitch rippled through Lyons’s normally impassive face. Then he rolled sideways, whipping his hands up and out. Sediment flew threw the air. The grit cloud got into Gregor’s eyes. The physicist shot wildly, dropping the gun and staggering in the water. The blast and ricochet in that bound place made him dizzy and sick to his stomach. But he scrambled forward and dived onto Cricket to shield her body with his.

  Lyons was up on his feet, rushing Kelly, who swung a beefy right arm in an arcing hook toward his attacker. The guard flung out his left hand, blocking Kelly on the inside of his elbow. Then he rammed his great shoulder into K
elly’s solar plexus. Together they flew off the bank and into the water.

  Lyons knelt on top of Kelly, holding him under. The guard was so caught up in the frenzy of it all that he didn’t notice Gregor stagger to his feet with a football-sized rock from the streambed in his hands.

  “Lyons!” Tom cried. “Watch out!”

  But the guard got only half turned before Gregor brought the rock smashing down on the back of his helmet. Lyons crumpled, then collapsed to his right his lower torso in the stream, his chest and head sideways on the bank. Blood ran from his ears and nose. He spasmed, coughed, then lay deathly still.

  JUNE 18, 2007

  12:59 A.M.

  CONFLUENCE OF FORGOTTEN AND NO RETURN RIVERS

  NYRENS RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  “Quiet now,” Finnerty whispered. “They’re coming.” Muddled, still suffering from the effects of her nightmare an hour before, Whitney strained her eyes in the direction of the confluence of the two cave streams. It was faint at first, but unmistakable—a faraway light shining off the surface of the subterranean watercourse, growing stronger with every moment.

  The light became a definable beam. Above the low gurgle of the streams, Whitney heard splashing then a figure appeared behind one of the headlamps, a heartbreakingly familiar form backlit by other headlamps. Her breath caught hard; she had imagined this so many times in the past few days that she wondered whether she was still in her dreams.

  Tom waded out from under the overhang and stepped up onto the triangular spit of rock that separated the two rivers before their final joining. Whitney’s hand flew to her mouth. Seen this way, at a remove of sixty yards and framed in the chromatic, elliptical shadow cast below his headlamp, her husband looked like a picture she’d seen of Marines near the end of the Bataan death march. His cheeks were sunken and filthy. Bags of skin hung below his eyes, which seemed to slump back in their hollows. But it was his posture that rattled her: shoulders forward, spine curved, legs without spring, a posture of being witness and victim to things so indelibly brutish that your body cannot help but be bent by it. A busted-down stance Whitney knew only too well. It was the way you handled yourself when you were on the verge of a breakdown.

  Tom’s lamp was now joined by that of a skeleton of a man Whitney recognized as Gregor from photos Finnerty had shown her. Despite the torn-up state of his body, he radiated force and menace. Finnerty slipped off the safety of his machine pistol. Two-Elk did the same. Then Cricket appeared behind Gregor, so ragged and befuddled that if Whitney had not recognized that lock of hair hanging down out of her helmet, she would not have known her. Cricket stumbled and splashed forward. Kelly came out from under the overhang and jerked her to her feet by the neck of her cave suit

  “Keep moving,” he said, dragging her with his right hand.

  “Fuck you!” Cricket yelled, struggling against his grip.

  “You want it again, kid?” he demanded furiously, waving the transmitter in her face. “I’ll give it to you, that’s what you want. Gregor says you get to live awhile longer. But it don’t matter to me if I do it here or down the road. So keep moving or die.”

  Animals, Whitney thought. These men are total animals. Then she noticed Two-Elk holding a pair of fingers up for Finnerty to see and the marshal nodding. She understood. Four men had taken Cricket and Tom hostage. One had disappeared before reaching the first supply cache. Now a second was gone. What had happened?

  She turned her head back toward the marshals. In the dim light given off by the headlamps below, she saw them using glowing green irradiated tritium sights to aim down the barrels of their automatic weapons. The scene was so unnerving, she wanted to hide her head between her knees. Tom swung his headlamp around the cavern, as if he anticipated the ambush. Whitney’s fingers clenched in prayer, then her thoughts turned savage. Shoot them she thought. Blow them away. Tear their bodies apart if it will save my family.

  “Burke’s blocking me,” Finnerty murmured.

  “The girl’s in the way for me,” Two-Elk whispered.

  For a beat Whitney was baffled. Then she snapped her attention back to the drama unfolding below her and saw what they were talking about: Gregor and Kelly stood behind Tom and Cricket. A clean shot was impossible.

  “Keep moving,” Gregor ordered. “Not one detour. Straight to Tower Ridge.”

  Tom’s headlamp arced around the room one last time. Then, reluctantly, he put one foot in front of the other, leading them north toward Whitney and the marshals. Cricket limped along behind her father, a tight stoic expression on her face. The convicts kept their positions on the far side of Whitney’s family. For an instant she lost sight of Tom. Then, through the shooting holes Two-Elk and Finnerty had constructed, she caught fleeting glimpses of him and Cricket. The marshals’ guns swung after them.

  Tom stepped clearly into the frame of her peephole in the rock wall, flanked by Gregor, both men right there in front of her at thirty yards, and then they were gone. Cricket came into her direct line of vision, paralleled by Kelly. And then they were gone, too, and there was only the slap and shuffle and echo of their footsteps.

  Whitney listened in disbelief as the sound of their footsteps faded. They had to be yards from leaving the cavern now. She jumped up from her hiding position and, for a split second, saw them as distant and shadowed outlines silhouetted by the collective bloom of their headlamps. She opened her mouth to scream to Tom and Cricket to run.

  A strong gloved hand clamped across her mouth. A forearm wrapped around her neck. Whitney threw back her elbows and felt them hit Finnerty in the ribs. The marshal grunted in pain but did not relax his grip, and Whitney felt herself being hauled backward and down.

  She began to whimper into the glove, to whimper and whine like a child taken from its mother.

  “Shhhh, Whitney,” Finnerty whispered softly in her ear. “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  7:00 A.M.

  TOWER RIDGE

  LABYRINTH CAVE

  By dawn that day, the torrential rains had been falling on the highlands above the Furnace River for nearly three solid days. A data recorder, maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, pegged total precipitation at nearly fourteen inches, with three more expected in association with violent thunderstorms throughout the day. The river, which normally ran at fifteen thousand cubic feet per second at this time of year, was now roaring at nearly ninety-five thousand cubic feet per second.

  Shortly after seven o’clock, despite hundreds of man-hours of effort to shore up the dike, the waters of the Hermes Reservoir began to spill over the rammed-earth dam. Workers were evacuated to high ground and the warnings went out downriver—the Corps of Engineers expected the dam to be breached within the hour. FEMA was already declaring the region a disaster area.

  Thirteen miles away, from a position nearly five hundred yards downslope from the Virgil Entrance to Tower Ridge, Helen Greidel was back on the job, doing a live report for the Today show, her back to two tanks and a company of soldiers guarding the road.

  “In a stunning development in the ongoing Labyrinth Cave saga,” she began, “an entire division of the Sixteenth Armored Cavalry based at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was deployed around Labyrinth Cave last night. Military spokesmen are telling us that the move came at the direct order of the President of the United States, but are giving us little information as to why the army has been called in.

  “At the same time, federal earthquake researchers out of Memphis say they are being kept out of the area, known to be the epicenter of a massive temblor three days ago. The researchers say that the army is citing national security as their justification for not allowing them in to examine the fault lines. The army, NASA, and the White House have all refused to elaborate to the media gathered here and turning increasingly testy, but I can tell you that security and tension outside the largest cave in the world is the highest I’ve ever seen outside the Middle East.”

  From high behind
the news anchor came a metallic shrieking noise that caused her to squint and shake her head before turning to point up the mist-shrouded ridge. “That noise you hear is a giant tunnel borer, which has been biting its way into the mountainside for the past several hours, trying to reopen a way into the cave so rescue workers can attempt to find those trapped and held hostage.”

  Up near the entrance to the cave, Swain stuffed cotton into his ears. Huge diesel engines mounted behind the massive drilling head of the shaft-boring machine powered a series of hydraulic arms that rotated a monolith of hardened steel bits against the solid caprock of the ridge. Chunks of rock splintered and broke up under the assault. Robotic arms shot down from behind the drilling head and cleared the rubble to a conveyor belt that led downslope to dump trucks waiting to haul.

  “How long till we break through?” Major General Hayes shouted at Angelis and Boulter over the shrieking of the borer. “The President’s orders are that we can absolutely not let this Gregor character get to that moon rock first. The President says failure is not an option here, gentlemen.”

  The NASA mission commander looked at Swain, who tapped Chester on the shoulder. The teenager was studying his three-dimensional map on a laptop set on a folding table under a tent awning that had been set up during the night.

  “What do you think, Chester?”

  “If my calculations are correct, Uncle Jeff, we’ve got to cut through another thirty meters of rock before we hit open cave. The Army Corps of Engineers said the borer cuts at nine meters an hour.”

  “So three more hours,” Swain replied.

  “Give or take,” Chester said.

  “What’s the position of the people inside?” the general asked.

  Swain looked over Chester’s shoulder at the computer, then out into the mist toward the foggy silhouette of Nyren’s Ridge. “They’re still split up, two groups, no more than ten minutes apart, descending toward Pluto’s River—the connection into this ridge.”

  “Can they get to the rock before us?” the general demanded, pounding his fist into his open hand.