Blind Descent Read online

  “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 Pietà.

  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. “God, but I needed that. Now I can be cheerful and grateful and optimistic for another hour or so.”

  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 workday 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 yak-king. 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 o
f 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 rootlike 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. “Au contraire,” he said. Anna could almost see the miles of rope and rigging stringing through his brain like the solution to a complex trigonometry problem.

  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 a good poke just to see if they were faking it. But she would go along with Frieda because she didn’t want to upset her. And she had no proof, not of malfeasance, or even of negligence. Thirty hours—give or take—and they would be out. Thirty hours in a crowd all looking after Frieda’s well-being. She would probably be safe.

  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 sentinals 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.

  “The New York Times.” She spit out the words. “They’re onto this story. Like they can know anything.” She flopped down, glaring at Anna as if waiting for her to take up the cause and fume with her.

  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 Times,” Sondra said. “He said they declined. Those sons of bitches have no interest if you’re female. Screw the truth. White male only wants to talk to white male. Big surprise.”

  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 cou
ld hear Sondra grumbling, “Anna. Of course. Anna. Now I suppose there’s only one lady-in-waiting . . .”

  “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.