"Blind Descent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barr Nevada)6If two people know a secret, it is no longer a secret. On long car trips Anna and her sister used to amuse themselves by planning the perfect murder. The catch was always that you couldn't tell anyone, not a soul. And where's the fun in doing anything perfectly if no one else knows about it? Oscar was the first to pay his respects. McCarty, he said, felt duty bound to tell him and Holden of the change in the patient's condition. His tone left no doubt that he felt Anna had been remiss, as indeed she had. Extenuating circumstances, she told herself as she squirmed under his reproachful stare. In the way of runaway secrets, the tale spread without any traceable source-each person told one other, someone overheard, someone deduced. Within an amazingly short period of time, Frieda's lucidity went from secret to news. As the Stokes was moved up the incline, cavers greeted her, welcomed her back to the world of the living. Never comfortable with subterfuge, Dierkz dropped the pretense and answered as best the pain medication allowed until a squat clean-shaven caver from the outside, boasting EMT status, as if EMTs weren't a dime a dozen in this crew, got so officious Frieda became anxious. Then Holden asked the rescuers to dispense with their good cheer and let her get what rest she could, given she was being trundled up a steep slope. For reasons of his own, which were possibly sinister but more likely intended to save Frieda from embarrassment, Peter McCarty had left the gloved hand and the possible murder attempt out of his report. Anna had no idea if this boded good or ill. If someone wanted Frieda dead, perhaps not knowing she was aware of the attack would stay their hand. Then again, maybe if everyone knew, it would discourage a second attempt. The whole thing was too much for Anna's beleaguered mind; the ravings of a head injury patient and the paranoia of an admitted claustrophobe weren't much of a basis for a meaningful dialogue with reality. Shelving these vague possibilities, she put her back into carrying Frieda home. With each step taken, each rock climbed, they were that much closer to getting out. Left to herself, she knew she would set an underland speed record from Tinker's to the surface, but even the creeping gait of their human caterpillar was heartening. The passage out of Tinker's closed down so tightly a person couldn't walk upright. It narrowed until shoulders and hips brushed the sides. Well back on the balcony, between the Stokes and the cavers derigging the first haul, Anna felt fear rise in a freezing tide. To hold it at bay, she busied herself checking every knot, buckle, and hook on the Stokes. The stretcher couldn't be rigged and hauled through the passage. Given the horizontal as well as vertical twists and turns, it couldn't be passed from hand to hand. At every step of the way it would require lifting over rockfall, easing across crevices, working under projections of limestone. The stoop-walk in front of them would be impossible to rig; consequently Anna assumed Holden would be a while figuring out the logistics. She planned to use that time to compose herself for an interminable incarceration in a very small space. "Everybody listen up," Holden said, and she felt an icy poke in her innards followed by an irrational anger. Tillman had already worked out the carry. Did the man never sleep? The cavers, most of whom were crowded onto the balcony or perched like colorful crows on rocks nearby, fell quiet. Those who weren't actively engaged in derigging had their headlamps switched off. Holden moved the beam of his light from one face to the next, and they appeared like actors in the spotlight, each with his own bizarre tale to tell before the curtain came down. Counting his sheep, Anna realized, and she was put in mind of a long ago and long forgotten Sunday school. Fleetingly, she wondered if Jesus of Wherever counted his apostles with the same half-loving, half-annoyed, totally concerned look, reading people for fatigue, injury, fear-any weakness that could harm them or the cause. "This passage is one hundred sixty-two feet long. There are only two rooms big enough to stand up in, and there're not many flat enough to set the Stokes down. What we're going to do is turtle it." Judging by the intrigued looks that flickered from the darkness, "turtling" wasn't a classic maneuver culled from the most recent edition of the Deferring often to Frieda to make sure she knew that she was part of her own rescue and not just one hundred forty pounds of packaged meat, Holden talked them through the next leg of the journey. Turtling was evidently a process he'd learned from his predecessor at the BLM. Like many things that worked, it wasn't in the pages of any how-to book. Though to give credit where credit was due, the few books on cave rescue Anna had looked at agreed that the most important piece of equipment in an underground rescue is the rescuer's brain. One by one Holden sent them into the passage. Half a body length apart, they were to get on hands and knees and pass the Stokes along their backs, a shoulder-wrenching premise, but workable. When Frieda reached the head of the line, the trailing cavers would close ranks like an inchworm taking up its inch. The litter would be pushed to the last two backs, the leading fourteen would spread out farther up the passage, and Frieda would recommence travel over the soft shells of Holden's turtles. Of necessity, Anna would be separated from her patient. She tried to work up a good case of anxiety over that, but at the moment, she really didn't care. She was the third turtle sent in. Dr. McCarty and his wife were in front of her, Curt Schatz directly behind. Due to the congestion and the knowledge that large chunks of flesh and bone walled her in fore and aft, the passage felt much tighter than it had when she'd come through eight hours before. Eight hours. Anna marveled at the number. On a good night she could sleep that long. In Lechuguilla it seemed a lifetime. To have something to think about other than the fact that the walls were going to close in, she wondered if her hair would have turned snow-white by the time she reached daylight, as was reported in old ghost stories. Not that it had that far to go. Since Cumberland Island, when she'd hacked it off short, the gray had become more evident, streaking both temples in the timeless fashion of the Bride of Frankenstein. Lechuguilla had been formed in a rather peculiar manner. It hadn't been carved out by underground rivers as many eastern caves had been. Surface water percolating downward had not dissolved the limestone as Anna once thought. Deep in the petroleum-rich land beneath New Mexico, hydrogen sulphide waters welled up to mix with the fresh water and oxygen at the water table, creating sulphuric acid. The acid ate away the stone. The result was a cave that was formed without the sobering influence of gravity. Corrosive acid burned along cracks and fissures, chewed away the softer places, and created intricate mazes, deep pits, shafts, and crevices that grew away from one another in a dizzying manner. The passage Anna and her fellow turtles traversed exhibited this lack of respect for rhyme and reason. In the skittering glow of her headlamp it resembled a seascape rolled in on itself. Stones were pale gray and pitted all over with holes of varying sizes, from the merest pinprick to sockets she could have stored a bowling ball in had she been a bowling ball kind of girl. Nothing had been worn smooth. Edges retained the razor sharpness they'd been honed to in their geological youth, some hundreds of thousands of years before. Rocks as capricious as clouds lowered down from the ceiling. Sharp-edged scythes, rude fingers poked from all directions, forcing her to one side then the other, pushing out at waist level in a dragon's head daring her to climb over or squeeze beneath. The floor rolled and buckled, spewing up till Anna skittered over on belly and elbows, dropping away in cracks she chose not to consider the depth of. All melded seamlessly together. The effect was exhausting, disorienting. Space-time relations taken for granted aboveground ceased to exist. In the roiling rock-filled chaos, distance couldn't be measured in feet or miles. Minutes and hours tangled until she felt as stoned as she had a hundred fifty feet below the surface of Lake Superior, suffering from nitrogen narcosis. "Nice butt." Curt Schatz's flat drawl filtered through from behind her. His tone was devoid of lasciviousness, malice, or condescension. She'd never heard the words without one or all of these accouterments. Clearly she'd misheard. She stopped and turned, bending down to push her helmet under a curtain of limestone. "Pardon?" she murmured politely. "Nice butt," Curt repeated. "I couldn't help but notice. Since I started caving I've become something of an expert. I've followed some of the finest butts in the business. Yours is up there. Better than Peter McCarty's. But don't tell him I said so. He prides himself on that sort of thing." He smiled showing small white teeth, perfectly even. In a fairy-tale princess, they might have been described as pearls. Peeking out from his thick beard they lent him the rakish charm of a wolf pup. Anna laughed. "Better than Dr. McCarty's?" "Yup," Schatz said. "And I know Pete's butt like the face of my own mother." Anna returned to the business of wending her way through New Mexico's lower intestine, but she felt cheered. No more airspace presented itself. The tonnage between her and the sky remained unchanged. Yet the anxiety squeezing the blood from her veins was momentarily lessened. Where there was humor there was a fighting chance of remaining sane. Such were the isolating influences of Lechuguilla's topography: a turn in a passage, a change in elevation, an upthrust of formations, and all light and sound was cut off. Smaller, more agile, Anna left Curt and was once again as alone as if the earth had buried each of them in their own personal grave. Dr. McCarty and Sondra were on the far side of two pincers of rock coming together under a wall of calcite drapery that folded down like velvet curtains to within sixteen inches of the bottom of the passage. Anna recognized the formation as the place she was to stop. The crawl was too tight to pass through except one at a time, but the floor beneath was uncharacteristically flat. Here she was to wait for Frieda to be brought across the backs of her fellows. Anna and Curt would set the Stokes onto the floor and feed it through to the McCartys. They would move it far enough up the passage that the cavers could congregate on the far side of the crawl and the mechanism of the turtle ferry would be started up again. Anna sat down, her fanny pleased with the smooth flooring, her body pleased with a rest. Sweat poured down the sides of her face, burned her eyes, and ran in a small river between her breasts. Mixing with the ubiquitous dirt, it formed a streaked layer of mud over skin and clothes. She pulled her helmet off and scratched at tickles creeping through her hair. No doubt this left her locks standing Medusa-like in snaky ire, but she could not have cared less. On some primitive level she was beginning to enjoy being dirty, to see each layer of crud as a testament to her undaunted perseverance. Maybe she'd turn into a caver yet. She switched off her headlamp to test out the idea. With the dousing of the light she became aware of a faint play of gold from beyond the crawl space: the McCartys. It was a comfort, and she watched it come and go, wishing Professor Schatz would hurry up. Even discussing the nether parts of Peter's anatomy was better than sitting alone with only her thoughts for company. A minute more passed in this lonely internment before she flicked her lamp back on and shone it down the way she had come. No sign of life. Perhaps Curt had stopped to wait for the turtle in his wake. Zeddie Dillard, Anna remembered. Lamp off again, she sat a few minutes more, drank water, and tried not to think about anything. Without action it proved an impossible task, and she decided to belly down and investigate the crawl so she could better prepare Frieda for the experience when the litter arrived. The space allowed for a lizard-like creep using elbows and knees but little else. Trusting to the McCartys' light, Anna left her hard hat and lamp behind. From the forced march in, she knew the crawl wasn't long-maybe eleven feet-then it opened into a small chamber, one of the few places in the tunnel large enough that two or three people could stand upright with some degree of comfort. By the time she'd nearly wriggled through, her head a foot or less from the opening to the room, she was able to hear the doctor and his wife. Their voices had the unmistakable pitch of a marital squabble. Unable to resist the puerile temptation to eavesdrop, she lay still and listened. "You wanted to be blackmailed," Sondra was saying heatedly. "And at the time I thought I loved you." "You don't now?" The doctor's voice had lost its bedside bonhomie and rang cold in the closed chamber. A pretty darn good fight, Anna thought happily. Anybody else's troubles had to be a relief from her own. "I'm beginning to wonder if I ever did," Sondra snapped. "I'm sick to death of watching you play doctor, knowing everybody is laughing themselves sick at my expense." "Frieda's hurt," McCarty said mildly. "You can always manage to make yourself necessary, can't you? Is there anything you won't do to make yourself indispensable to women?" This was answered by silence, and Anna wished she could see their faces. She pictured anger and resentment on Sondra, maybe touched with that absolute disgust she'd noted earlier. Peter McCarty was harder. Would he look hurt? Reproachful? Arrogant or vain? "And maybe I wasn't talking about Frieda," Sondra went on when the silence began to lose its power. McCarty sighed, a theatrical gust that Anna could hear down in her rabbit hole. "You can always leave," he said. "Right." Sondra laughed without joy. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? What? You expect me to go back to being a secretary? Fetching coffee for editors, old fat white men who have less talent in their whole bodies than I've got in my little toe?" "If you ever got anybody coffee-which I doubt-I suspect they had the good sense not to drink it," Peter snapped. There was anger in his words this time; his pose of world-weary patience was slipping. Sondra must have scented weakness. When she spoke again, she redoubled her attack. "I'll leave all right. When I'm ready. Maybe sooner than you think. All I need is one good story. When I go I'll take everything but your toothbrush and your little black book. If you lift a finger to stop me, I'll see your license is jerked, "I wouldn't push your luck if I were you." The trite comeback was so laden with ice and threat that Sondra fell quiet. Anna decided this was not a good time to pop out of a hole in the floor and yell "surprise." Moving as quietly as possible, she squirmed backward, filling the cuffs of her trousers with dirt until, hind parts foremost, she regained her little patch of land on the inside of the crawl way. "What's it like?" Curt had arrived. He sat in inky darkness, his long legs and heavily booted feet sprawled over their tiny room. "Squishy," Anna said succinctly. "Could you not breathe for a bit? I think there's only enough air for me." "No problem." He was quiet while Anna clambered over his knees and settled herself on a rock bracketed by his boots. "Let me go through first," she said. "The crawl space is way too small for you. You're going to get wedged. I don't want to be stuck behind you." "Will you bring me sandwiches?" he asked. He seemed utterly imperturbable, his voice light and laconic for so bulky a man. "Nope. Once I'm out of here I'm never going to let anything between me and the sun again. I'll buy a convertible, sleep out of doors." "I won't get wedged," Curt said. "My father was a rodent. My mother says a rat, but after further research I'm inclined to believe he was a common field mouse. I inherited his bones, mouse bones. Mine can fold in on each other allowing me to pass through apertures too small for mortal men. Once, on a dare, I crawled through the pop-top hole in a Coors can." "Hah." Half a beat of silence followed, then he added this note of verisimilitude: "I did have to strip down to my shorts to do it." Darkness reclaimed them, and that total absence of sound that is peculiar to caves. Not a whisper of air, not a sound of the movement of grasses, birdsong, running water, the stars spinning in their orbits. Anna took it as long as she could. To break the silence before it solidified, she asked, "What brought you to Lechuguilla?" "You're not of the Minnesota connection? I'm surprised Frieda thinks so highly of you. Where are you from?" "Originally, California." A groan. "Northern California." "That's okay then. Not Minnesota, but you get snow, right? I used to teach at the University of Minnesota. I got my Ph.D. there. That's how I hooked up with Peter and Sondra. Met him at a grotto meeting. He married her. Caving is a small world. Especially in Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes. If there are any caves there, we call 'em aquifers." "Zeddie?" Anna asked. "Doubly connected. Frieda and her sister were pals. And she was an undergraduate. She had me for Leisure 101." "How did she do?" Anna asked for lack of anything better to say. "She was a vacant-eyed little snipe," Curt said as if this fact were obvious. "All students are vacant-eyed little snipes." Anna couldn't tell if he was joking or not. "Was Brent a student of yours? Adult ed," she added, realizing Roxbury was probably ten years Curt's senior. "Are you suggesting Brent is a vacant-eyed little snipe?" Curt asked innocently. Anna fumbled around for a minute, grateful for once for the darkness. Curt relented. "No. Brent's an outsider. Either From Schatz, Anna gathered this was high praise indeed. "Frieda's parents lived in Anoka," Anna remembered. "She used to be a patient of McCarty's," Curt said. "Or maybe it was her mother. I can't remember. I met her on an expedition in Mexico." "Peter is a GP?" Anna asked. "Gynecologist." "Jesus. Why is that funny?" Curt said, "If you're going to talk about stirrups and things, I'm going to leave the room. I'm very shallow. It's one of the things I like most about myself." "Turtling!" was shouted down the insulating passage behind them. They buckled on their hard hats, dragged Frieda over three more spines, set the Stokes on the floor, then pushed it through the crawl space to the waiting hands of the McCartys. One more inching of their sixteen-bodied worm, and Frieda was delivered from the cramped passage. The tunnel opened into a low-ceilinged room studded with formations and ending in a lip ten or twelve feet across and a couple of feet deep. A yard below was a second step of like dimensions, then a ninety-foot drop into a pit. The opening where they emerged marked the pit's halfway point. It continued upward, smooth as poured cement, for another forty feet. On the far side, going out of the top, was a black hole, shaped like a keyhole, about nine feet high, wide at the bottom then narrowing in to a wasp-waist of rock to open again in a slit no more than a foot and a half wide and half again that long. The pit, Anna remembered, was dubbed the Cocktail Lounge. At one time it had been partially filled with water. Formations shaped like giant golf tees-or cocktail tables, if one hailed from New York City-had formed in the bottom. There were seven in all, made of stone coming out of solution as it dripped from above over the millennia. Beneath the water, it had built up in slender columns. When it reached the surface, the stone spread out in ever-widening circles, floating like petrified lily pads on the lake. At some point the water had drained away or dried up and left only the pit and the nine-foot-high tables looking as if they were made of alabaster and inlaid with gold. Every square inch of the formations was covered in decorations. Small puff excrescences called popcorn studded the columns. Tiny stalactites dripped by the thousands from the undersides of the tabletops. Layer after layer of stone had formed with such delicacy and infinite variety that the formations presented larger-than-life sculptures by a mad, genius god fascinated with rococo baroque. They made Anna nervous. They were so beautiful, a testament to the sanctity of the deep caverns; she knew she was doomed to stumble over her bootlaces and take them all down like a row of priceless dominoes. Infamy would dog her to the grave and beyond as it would the man who had smashed Michelangelo's Schatz, Dillard, Tillman, and Roxbury were rigging the descent. The others rested and kept out of the way. Anna edged over to where Frieda lay in the Stokes. "I've got to sit up," Frieda said. Anna understood. Too long on one's back was disorienting. She left Frieda and returned with McCarty's permission to let her sit as long as she had help, wasn't left alone, and the cervical collar remained in place. "God, that feels good," Frieda said as she gently worked her arms and shoulders. "Have you ever had a tooth crowned? Lain in the dentist's chair till you felt you were going to La La Land or bite the next finger that came into your mouth?" Anna nodded. "Like that." She drank from the water bottle secured in the Stokes near her hand. "Are we alone?" she asked. Anna looked over her shoulder. They were on the end of the ledge. The others seemed occupied; no one listened. "As alone as we'll ever be down here," she said sourly. "Good. I'm tired of being a good sport, a real trooper. This sucks. I hate it. I hate everybody and everything, and I especially hate this blasted cave and sincerely hope all caves the world over fill with bat shit. God," she said with a deep-seated sigh. Anna and Frieda were in the midst of a repast consisting of Beanie Wienies, granola bars, and cold Chef Boyardee ravioli; treats Anna packed in, unable to face a diet of MREs, government-issue meals ready to eat. A caver Anna'd seen but not spoken to invaded their picnic. Irritation, always close to the surface in an enclosed world, prickled under her skin. This was the guy who had badgered Frieda on the haul out of Tinker's. Despite the confined space, he managed a swagger. Munk, Kelly Munk. Anna fished his name out of the fog of conversational fragments she'd swum through during the past eight hours. Munk was young but not young enough to be excused, early thirties. Muscles bulged from hours at the gym. Flat, tiny ears were stuck on a square head. Muscle ridged the points of his jaws. Anna recognized the type. The only description the Hodags would approve of was egomaniac. Every EMT class had one; the world was a TV show, and he was the star. "Since we've got a minute, I thought I'd check your packaging," he said. "You're putting a lot of strain on this group. What do you weigh? One fifty? One sixty?" Frieda's mouth crumpled at the corners. Confidence and courage leached away. Munk reached to rearrange the patient's catheter tubing. "Don't." Anna grabbed a meaty wrist. Munk sat back on his heels, his eyes small, carplike. "She's not packaged properly. Holden may be an okay caver, but he's no EMT." A number of arguments came to mind, but Anna knew she'd be wasting her breath. "Go away," she said. "I think Frieda-" "Away. Far, far away." "Ahoy!" rang out from across the void. A dozen lamps switched on, beams crisscrossing like searchlights at a mall opening, to center on two figures waving from a narrow aperture on the opposite side and near the top of the chamber that opened into Razor Blade Run. The response from the cavers in the lounge was exuberant. Everyone, including Anna, shouted and hullabalooed like castaways sighting a ship. The energy of the rescue, the quest, the cause, made them all brothers, tied them together in a way they would miss when the littles of the workaday world pried them apart again. "Landline!" came the shout. "Good work," Holden called back. Energized by the sight of the others, the rigging team returned to work with redoubled vigor. Holden came over to where Anna and Frieda rested. An uncompromising look from the mild blue eyes relieved them of Munk's presence. "How're ya doing?" Holden asked as he straddled a rock and made himself at home. "I'm good," Frieda said firmly. "You guys are doing all the work. I get a free ride." "You'd do it for any one of us," he reminded her. "And will probably have to this year or next." Frieda didn't say anything, but it was clear she appreciated the thought. "Are you up to being famous for a minute? Now that they've brought the phone line down you can bet there's going to be a newspaper guy on the other end wanting to talk to the heroine." Frieda looked pained. "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted. "You don't have to do it. You don't even have to make any excuses. If it bothers you, we'll just make like static and hang up. That equipment is left over from the Korean War. Who's to say it's not going to break down?" He smiled what he probably thought was a wicked smile, but on his worn and weathered face it was so sweetly mischievous, Anna could have kissed him. Knowing she had an out gave Frieda courage. "I'll talk," she said. "My folks are probably glued to the television, sweating bullets. They're old. I was Mom's midlife crisis. If I don't call for three days they think I've been carried off by white slavers. I can imagine what they're going through with this mess. They'll feel better if they hear from me that I'm still alive." "Don't worry," Holden said. "It won't be just you yakking. As soon as a phone shows up, all of a sudden everybody's got somebody they've just got to talk to. We'll probably take a half-hour break for the doggone gabfest." He glanced at his watch. "Not so bad, I guess. By the time we get up that other side we'll have been truckin' for nearly seven hours, and Razor Blade Run is going to be a fun one to rig. Be good to have everybody fresh." The three of them looked across the pit to the keyhole in black on the ceiling. Razor Blade was rimed with a miniature forest in glittering aragonite crystals, a winter wonderland in snow white that stretched for nearly twenty yards. Some of the flowers were of a size and intricacy seldom seen before and never in such abundance. Aragonite bloomed in wild snowflake patterns, crystals growing from white root-like bulbs of the same substance. Lechuguilla's treasure was its formations and the wonder they created in the too-often jaded imagination of man. Tears started in Frieda's eyes. The first Anna had seen. "No way," she said. "I won't do it. This litter will go through there like a bulldozer. What I don't ruin, you guys will, manhandling me. Get me out." She began to fight the straps that held the lower half of her body in the Stokes. "I'll walk it. Get me a stick." She fell back, tears streaking the mud on her cheeks. "There's not a stick for a day's travel in any direction," she said. "Lean on me," Anna offered lamely, at a loss how to comfort her. "It can't be done," Frieda said. Holden smiled. It was inoffensive. The smile of a child. He started to lay a hand on Frieda's arm but didn't, and Anna sensed for the first time what an essentially shy man he was. "I got it covered. Remember who you're talking to here: Mr. Leave Nothing. Not Even Footprints. Lookie." With his light he pointed to the narrow top of the keyhole. "We're gonna rig you through there. No decorations. Straight line, like thread through the eye of a needle. Bad climb, good haul. You've got to go by your lonesome. There's just room for the litter. Not even a place for your scrawny little lady." He winked at Anna. "Good. Okay." Frieda was so relieved she would have agreed to be shot through the keyhole by a cannon. Holden stayed a minute longer to give her a chance for second thoughts. "Really," she said at last. "Alone is fine." "I didn't doubt it," Holden said. When he'd moved out of earshot, Anna asked, "Why didn't you tell him about the glove on the rock? Both he and Oscar should know." Anna's only reason for not reporting it was Frieda's return to consciousness. In regaining her mental powers, she had regained the right to make her own decisions. "Do you want me to call him back?" "No. Don't," Frieda said. "Life is too embarrassing as it is. An attempt on my life. Who'd believe it? Even I don't believe it. I can't remember anything that makes sense. Let's leave well enough alone. Please." It didn't feel "well enough" to Anna, and it went against the grain to leave it alone. She'd ever been one to give sleeping dogs For the descent to the floor of the Lounge and the haul up the other side, Anna was rigged along with the Stokes. A spider, a confluence of lines attached to the litter, met several feet above Frieda's midsection. Anna was tied into this spider, the Stokes cutting across her at waist level. Thus secured, she was always with her patient, there to reassure, to push the litter out from the wall when necessary, to handle any problems that came up en route. Frieda was in good spirits, and it was contagious. They made it through the magnificent tables without destroying a single formation. On the ascent Anna found herself actually having a good time. As promised, phone service awaited them at the top. Twelve or fifteen cavers were scattered around the low-ceilinged room that connected the Cocktail Lounge with Razor Blade. The space resembled the inside of a giant clam shell. Elliptically shaped, the floor and ceiling of bedrock, it came out in a concentric circle from the keyhole to a wide slot. At its highest point, the ceiling was five feet from the floor. There was little that human impact could destroy, making it the ideal place for the teams to congregate. All of the core group, including Oscar and Holden, had made the ascent. The other cavers were a mix of the rescuers from the first team and the three men responsible for providing the phone line. Frieda was sequestered near the back of the clam shell, Holden's pack and helmet laid down like sentinels guarding her from all but Anna, Sondra, and the doctor. Peter McCarty was with her, taking advantage of the flat bit of earth to perform central nervous system tests he had been unable to when his patient was comatose. Anna had done those tests she was familiar with. Frieda's limbs responded, she had feeling in her extremities, and there were no palpable deformations along her first eight vertebrae. Beyond these simple reassurances, Anna was out of her league and relieved to have someone with training double-check her work. Though it surprised her somewhat, she was also relieved to be given a respite from her duties as chief lady-in-waiting. Physically it was no more demanding than the jobs of any of the others. Often it proved less strenuous. When Frieda rested, Anna rested. It was the caring that sapped her strength. For Frieda she had to be strong, optimistic, unafraid. When she thirsted, she asked Frieda if she wanted a drink. When rope cut through her clothing to rub raw her flesh, she checked her patient to see if she suffered like discomforts. It was good simply to sit and be selfish. The "phone booth" had been established up near the keyhole, where those using it would be afforded at least the illusion of privacy. Always needing to be near the spotlight, Sondra squatted close by, sitting on her helmet, a notebook on her lap. Playing at being a journalist, Anna thought uncharitably. Maybe Frieda's rescue was the one big story she thought would give her the financial freedom to abandon what was apparently a loveless marriage. Schatz sprawled nearby, looking for all intents and purposes dead to the world. Oscar used the phone, then Brent Roxbury, and finally Holden. After he'd been on the line for maybe three minutes, Sondra slammed her notebook shut like an angry schoolgirl and huffed over to where Anna was sitting. Anna was too tired. "You'll have the first-person I-was-there angle," she said consolingly. "Who'll care? By the time we get out of this hellhole it'll be old news." "I guess." Anna concentrated on unwrapping a Jolly Rancher Holden had given her at the last rest stop. She wished Sondra would go away. Petty concerns in the face of disaster irritated her. She remembered a self-important tour guide from one of the many buses that plagued Mesa Verde during the tourist season. An elderly man in her group had collapsed on the porch of the museum, dead of a massive coronary. They'd practically had to pry the guide's grasping fingers from the corpse's wrist so they could shock him in an attempt to restart his heart. The woman was livid, spouting New Age bullshit about how she needed to say good-bye to his spirit. Later, when Anna was tying up the loose ends, it turned out the guide didn't even know the man's name. She'd traveled with the group for three days and had never been interested enough to remember it. That was about as close as Anna had ever come to taking her baton to a visitor who wasn't actually breaking any laws. "I told Holden I'd talk to the Holden Tillman's race would be pretty hard to discern over the phone, but Anna didn't say anything. Maybe the newspaper business was as sexist as Sondra believed. It wasn't a circle Anna had ever moved in, or ever wanted to. "Anna," Dr. McCarty called, and she looked over to where he sat with Frieda. "Frieda's going to do her phone interview now. Want to come keep her company?" Grasping at any excuse to leave, Anna pushed herself to her feet. As she stoop-walked toward the back of this cave-within-a-cave, she could hear Sondra grumbling, "Anna. Of course. Anna. Now I suppose there's only "It's Katie Couric," Peter called. Sondra gasped. Or hissed. Anna couldn't tell with her back turned. In spite of herself, she laughed. She didn't much care if Sondra heard or not. The woman was beyond help. Frieda did splendidly. Dr. McCarty's central nervous system exam had freed her from the cervical collar, and she was in excellent spirits. Whether she liked it or not, she was both a good sport and a trooper. She was charming and gracious and brave and funny, lots of good stuff to quote on the six o'clock news. Or the ten o'clock news. Anna no longer had any sense of time. The little numbers the hands of her watch pointed at, then passed, had ceased to have meaning. Phone calls finally at an end, Holden delivered the good news. At least it was good to everyone but Anna and possibly the doctor's wife. For the past five minutes he had closeted himself in a cranny near the keyhole with Peter McCarty. When the two men emerged it was to tell the rescue party that their hellish pace could be relaxed. Frieda was stable and alert. The break in her tibia was in no way life-threatening. With this fortuitous development they could afford to move more slowly, take greater care not to harm any of the natural resources of the cave. Like a good citizen, Anna joined in the cheer, but her heart was creating a bizarre sensation in her chest by racing and sinking simultaneously. Thirty hours had seemed an eternity. Forty-eight rang in her ears like a death sentence. Get a grip, she told herself coldly. Pretend you are in a movie theater, a mall. The strategy was transparent; movie theaters and malls had doors. Holden went on to tell them anyone feeling the need to could rotate out. A cave rescue made special demands. Those unaccustomed to it, not in perfect health, or "off their feed" for any reason were to go and Godspeed. They'd already given several lifetimes' worth. "That's me," Sondra said, and her husband pretended not to hear. Anna wanted to go. Like a drowning woman wants air, she wanted space and sunlight. In an act of mind-bending courage, she put temptation from her and said nothing. Holden's rigging through the high slit above the aragonite forest of Razor Blade was a work of artistry. He edged through, a line tied into a carabiner at the back of his belt. A rig and tag line were pulled through using that first line as a tow. Pulleys were anchored at either end by running webbing around a boulder on the Lounge side and a formidable stalagmite on the far end. As he had promised, Frieda went through as neatly as silken thread through a needle's eye. It took considerably longer for the rescuers, now nineteen in number, to creep and contort through the lower, decorated passage. They went on the buddy system, two at a time, with orders to take it slow, warn each other of endangered formations, and never, under any circumstances, stray from the existing trail. In Holden, Lechuguilla had a staunch protector. Razor Blade opened on Lake Rapunzel, so named, Oscar said, because the only way to the lake was across fifty-five feet of flowstone, a stunning formation created by eons of trickles leaking down the side of the basin to leave behind golden locks that cascaded as enticingly as the imaginary damsel's tresses. Traveling in, they had passed through the chamber, but Anna had seen it only fleetingly via scraps of light that served more to irritate her exhausted retinae than to illuminate the room. Now, as it turned out, her lucent fantasy of earlier in the day had come true. Along with the rigging team working from Rapunzel to the cave's entrance came two newspaper photographers, sent by the The chamber was made of magic. From where she stood on the lip of the run, liquid gold poured down to a lake as crystalline and blue as a summer sky. Beneath the water's surface floated great clouds of white stone, appearing as ethereal as any she'd watched forming over the mountains of southern Colorado. This jewel was in a setting befitting its splendor. Flowing draperies ringed the water in a delicate golden tracery. It staggered the imagination to know this was all made of solid rock. That it had remained hidden from human eyes for the short eternity of its existence lent it a mystical aura. Anna was transfixed. In short order, bustling humanity compromised the beauty. Zeddie hovered at the drop, checking anchors as the teams began rigging the descent to the water from Razor Blade Run and the shorter climb up a second golden fall to a bleak section of the cave dubbed Katie's Pigtail. Sublime became surreal as a giant alligator flopped into the diamond waters. "What in the heck…" Anna heard Oscar whispering beside her. "It's Frieda's ride." Anna turned to see Holden looking particularly delighted at the gray-green amphibian. "It's Andrew's favorite. The boy has a deeply generous heart." Andrew, Anna recalled, was Tillman's four-year-old son. Oscar shook his head. Fatigue robbed him of his sense of humor. "Somehow I think the Park Service could have come up with a few inner tubes that would have done the job." "Oscar, Oscar, Oscar," Holden said sadly, a man lamenting the failure of a promising protégé. "Inner tubes are Even in whimsy, Tillman had a plan. The alligator was ideal. Anna was sorry when he commanded a moratorium on photographs of the actual crossing. It would have made a picture worth having, but Holden wanted his people to keep their minds on their work and not on how their naked hind ends were going to look on the front page of the Sunday paper. Every caver to cross Lake Rapunzel stripped down to helmets and rubber water socks, then sponged off with water brought up from the lake in plastic pitchers. Their clothes and packs would be ferried over on the alligator as soon as Frieda no longer needed it. Once they had climbed the opposite wall to the entrance of the Pigtail, they would dress and put their boots back on. Frieda was the only one to remain clothed. The Stokes was wrapped in plastic and a second float put on top of Andrew's alligator to keep her out of the water. Again Anna was hooked into the spider on the Stokes. This time she was joined by Oscar and Peter. Her job was to watch Frieda, theirs to keep the litter away from the flowstone so the formation would not be scarred. Naked people of all shapes and sizes dangling from ropes over a pint-sized paradise; the picture so tickled Anna she had to think dark thoughts to keep from giggling. Katie's Pigtail was a miniature version of the North Rift. A jagged crack bordered by breakdown, it cut upward for close to thirty yards, ending in a choked crawl that led into the Distributor Cap-the Swiss cheese room where Anna had waited on the way in while Oscar and Holden negotiated the Wormhole. The Pigtail wasn't as impressive as the Rift. At its deepest it was forty-two feet, and at no place was it more than ten or twelve feet across. As at the Rift, a litter could not be carried along the breakdown on either side of the drop. A team from the outer world worked from the far end stringing a traverse so the litter could travel in a more or less straight line. Because of the emergency situation, a power drill and pitons had been okayed by the superintendent, saving the rescuers the time required to find natural anchors: jug handles, arches, stalagmites, knobs, boulders. Near the end of the Pigtail a pile of breakdown created a wall that continued down to clog the end of the slot. It was this mountain of rock and scree they would climb to reach the exit. Forming the base of this sliding heap of earth was a wedge-shaped boulder fifteen feet across at the top and six feet at the foot. It was lassoed with webbing secured with locking carabiners. The traverse rope was attached to the webbing and so to the boulder. Faces, arms, and legs burnished bronze by sweat and dirt, cavers crawled everywhere. Cracks were crammed with bodies wrapped in various colored ropes. Ledges held packs, water carriers, and those with no immediate task. Shadows scurried over surfaces to be swallowed by the canyon below and the crevice above. Instructions, questions, and remarks hollered by workers caromed off the walls till conversation was broken down into meaningless words. In the cacophony of sight and sound, no one was easily recognizable. Like ants, they all looked the same. Sitting at the mouth of the Pigtail with Frieda, Anna had to close her ears and shut her mind to escape the suffocating congestion. Within two hours the rigging was complete. All personnel not needed for the traverse went on ahead. Noise abated. Once the Pigtail was behind them, the team would break up, most of them leaving for the surface. The core group would remain to set up camp in the Distributor Cap. Since escape was beyond the realm of possibility as far as Anna was concerned, she found herself looking forward to the departure of the others. As welcome as they had been hours earlier, they were coming to seem an absolute crush of humanity, a veritable horde of interlopers. And she wasn't dreading camp as much as she thought she would. Movement toward the surface was a balm to her soul that allowed her to go on with some show of equanimity, but fatigue was overriding paranoia. Every cell in her body cried out for rest. Regardless of personal demons, she had little doubt that she would sleep like a log. When all was in readiness, Holden came back to the ledge where Anna and the Stokes roosted. He'd had less sleep than she. No one had worked harder; no one had taken fewer rests, yet aside from a miner's tan of filth, he looked none the worse for wear. "How do you do it?" Anna asked in admiration. "Coffee breaks," Holden said simply. Coffee. Anna would have given a year of her life for a good hot cup of coffee. "Where?" she almost wailed. Holden tapped the pocket on the front of his tee-shirt. "Next to my heart." He pulled out a small foil envelope of Taster's Choice instant, ripped off a corner, and tapped the contents expertly into his bottom lip like a farmer taking chaw. "Good to the last crystal." Frieda was as tired as any of them. Without the concealing mask of dirt, her face showed it. Her skin was drawn and pale and her eyes were staring, too much of the whites showing. For the hauls, Holden needed her awake and moderately alert so she could tell them if she was in any distress and needed to stop. There was a limit to the amount of pain medication Dr. McCarty could give her and still leave her with enough brain power to work on her own behalf. Though no one but Anna was permitted to hear a word of complaint from her lips, Frieda was not the best of patients. Anna suspected she hurt a good deal more than she would admit and took less pain medicine than she needed, as if by suffering she was somehow paying her way. "Ready for a last push?" Tillman asked Frieda. "Ready whenever you are. I'm the one's been napping all day." "This is rigged like a dream," he promised. "You'll be in camp in no time. I got a special room in the Swiss cheese earmarked. You two can have it all to yourselves to do lady things." When this was over Anna wanted to meet Holden's wife and his little boy. A man as fine as Tillman didn't just spring into being all of a piece like Venus on the half shell. Somewhere along the line he had been shaped. Anna had the feeling she would be right at home with those sculpting influences. Anna and Frieda were tied into the web of ropes. Two pulleys, anodized in red, white, and blue, were set to roll down the main traverse, a thick lavender rope. The Stokes was tied into the system with webbing, two lines through each of the four carabiners locked onto the frame of the litter and running up to locking 'biners connected to the bottom of the rollers. A gray line attached at the same point. This would be used to pull the Stokes and Anna along the crevasse. A second, purple rope, lighter than the traverse line, was connected as well, but with its own carabiners, a tag line so the Stokes and its dependants could be retrieved in the event of a malfunction. Each system had a backup, and each connection had been checked by Holden, then rechecked by Oscar and, apparently on her own agenda, by Zeddie as well. Neither Anna nor Frieda had any compunction about trusting their lives to the cat's cradle of ropes. Nothing in Lechuguilla was designed for the easy access of humans. Katie's Pigtail was no exception. The crack was irregular; the sides of jutting rock looked as if they had only recently been torn from the opposing wall. The stones were white overlaid with dirt that sifted from above. Below, all was darkness, a band of unrelenting night cutting raggedly away from the farthest reach of the lamps. The right side of the Pigtail was concave, gaping holes where chunks of rock had fallen away. On the left was a fractured ledge, a footpath for mountain goats. It was here the remaining rescuers would make their way. Three-quarters of the way to the exit, the crevasse was crossed by breakdown, immense slabs forming a natural bridge. Five yards beyond was the landing where they would start the climb to camp. Katie's Pigtail couldn't be rigged in the neat in-line haul that Holden had managed above Razor Blade. For most of the way the rigging was tucked up close to the left-hand wall. The ledge was too fragmented to hand-carry the Stokes. It would be suspended over the drop and moved along by pulleys and haul lines. Anna hooked into the spider, she and Frieda were lowered over the edge of the drop. Anna's feet were flat against the wall, her fanny over thin air. The Stokes was held several inches above her airborne lap. By using the strength of the muscles in her thighs, she would be able to "walk" the Stokes over the rough patches along the edge. The haul line did the work of moving the litter forward. Wherever on the goat track cavers could find perches, they waited to help her manipulate the litter around obstacles. Knowing this was the last work of the day gave strength to Anna's flagging spirits as she began the long crab-walk to the exit with Frieda. Ropes slid, pulleys rolled. Muscles in her thighs and butt burned, but the Stokes slipped and bumped along without mishap. At Holden's order, no one talked. His voice, light and clear as he supervised from the false floor of stone bridging the canyon, issued commands and encouragement. Foot by foot they passed through the maw of the Pigtail. Anna could see her own exhaustion and elation mirrored in the faces of the others; a dance, a symphony, a poem of human effort and mind. The first hint that something had gone wrong was the call |
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