Blind Descent Page 2

  “Head injury,” Anna said. “Bad news.”

  “Bad news,” Iverson agreed. “Peter McCarty, a member of Dierkz’s team, is an M.D. in real life. That’s the good news. She’s got a doctor with her. McCarty recommended we get Ms. Dierkz what she wants. She’s agitated, and it is not helping her medical condition any. He feels it would soothe her if she could have a friend there.”

  “A lady-in-waiting?”

  “Exactly.”

  A chilling image filled Anna’s mind: herself crouched and whimpering, fear pouring like poison through her limbs, shutting down her brain as the cave closed in around her. Adrenaline spurted into her bloodstream, and she could feel the numbness in her fingertips and a tingling as of ice water drizzling on her scalp. To hide her thoughts she rubbed her face.

  “Will you go?” Iverson asked.

  Anna scrubbed the crawling sensation from her hair with her knuckles. “Just deciding what to wear.”

  Oscar looked at her shrewdly, the long, narrow eyes turning the color of bleached lichen. “Let me rephrase that: can you?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna answered truthfully. “Can I?”

  “Caving?”

  “None.”

  “Climbing?”

  “Some.”

  “Rappels sixty to a hundred fifty feet. Ascents ditto, naturally. Rope climbs with ascenders.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Crawl on your belly like a reptile?”

  Jesus. “How much?”

  Oscar laughed, a huffing noise concentrated in the back of his throat and his nostrils. “Not much where we’re going. Lechuguilla is a big place. Huge. It’s where the NPS stores Monument Valley during the off-season.”

  It was Anna’s turn to laugh, but she didn’t. “The crawls,” she said. “How much is ‘not much’?”

  “Three or four good crawls.”

  “An oxymoron.”

  Iverson sat, letting her absorb the information. His heel rang its dull music from the side of the desk. Anna quashed an urge to grab his ankle, stop the pendulum. She tried to think of Frieda, alone and confused, hurt and afraid. She tried to think of friendship and honor and courage and duty. Cowardly thoughts of a way out pushed these higher musings aside: claims of a bad heart, a dying mother’s call, or, if all else failed, “accidentally” shooting herself in the foot.

  “Can you?” Iverson asked finally. Her time had run out.

  Over the cringing claustrophobia, her mind had begun to chant the Little Engine That Could’s mantra. She gave the cave specialist the edited version. “Sure.”

  OSCAR IVERSON HAD vanished into what in any other law enforcement organization might have been gloriously termed a council of war. Under the civilizing influence of the NPS it was called a “team briefing.” In an attempt to feel unity and coherence during cuts and downsizings, the Park Service had begun to overuse comforting words: team, group, symposium, cluster. Words to keep from feeling alone and, if necessary, to diffuse the blame.

  Anna had been handed over to two cavers from Palo Alto, California. Timmy, a man who when aboveground was actually employed as a bona fide rocket scientist, though he preferred a less incendiary title, and his wife, Lisa, a New Zealander who had caved all over the world, enjoying photographic junkets in places with such alluring names as the Grim Crawl of Death.

  Had Anna been able to focus on anything other than not getting the shakes, she might have enjoyed the transformation process. Like an ugly duckling in an old movie, she was made over from head to toe. She was fitted with a brim-less helmet and a battery-powered lamp strapped on with elastic. The batteries, three C-cells, resided in a black plastic case at the back of the helmet. The pack Timmy and Lisa put together for her was unlike anything she had used before. An elongated sack with a drawstring top, it was worn on the hip, with the strap over the opposite shoulder, like a woman’s purse. A second strap secured it loosely around the waist.

  “It’s a sidepack,” Lisa explained as Anna fussed with the unfamiliar equipment, unable to get comfortable. “In tight squeezes you can slip it off easily and shove it ahead. Or tie it to your foot and drag it behind.”

  Dumbly, Anna nodded. The image gave her the willies.

  “You could probably take a regular pack where you’re going. Tons of room,” Timmy said, and Anna wondered what had given her away, the bloodless lips or the slight trembling in her knees. She doubted Timmy’s words were meant kindly. There was a coldness in him that she suspected was born of contempt. In the narrow world of a specialty—diving, climbing, caving—cliques formed, egos became wrapped in layer after layer of shared hype, of the glamour of overcoming real and imagined dangers, of feeling the exquisite pleasure of keeping secrets denied the uninitiated. Devotees ran the risk of becoming intoxicated by their own differences. Finally they came to resemble the stereotypical Parisian; if one couldn’t speak his language, and flawlessly, the conversation was over.

  Screw him, Anna thought uncharitably.

  “How about Razor Blade Run?” Lisa asked her husband. Lisa was in her forties and wore her hair in two long plaits that reached to the back of her knees. Her face was round and gave the impression of being lumpy, but her eyes were fine, and Anna’d seen a smile transform her into an exotic kind of beauty.

  “Okay, you’ll need a sidepack at Razor Blade,” Timmy conceded. He was a spare man, shorter than his wife and leaner, with pale wisps of hair defining upper lip and chin. His eyes, colorless behind tinted glasses, took on a faraway look as his hands continued buckling the web gear girdling Anna. “And the Wormhole,” he said finally.

  “And coming out of Tinker’s,” his wife added.

  “I get the picture,” Anna snapped.

  Chastened, the two cavers stopped talking. It was clear they were sensitive individuals, aware they’d offended. Equally clear was the fact that they hadn’t a clue as to why. The few cavers with whom Anna had ever conversed insisted that they, better than anyone, understood claustrophobia because, when wedged in some tight Floyd Collinsian crack with the very real possibility of never getting out, they felt fear.

  They understood nothing. That was not claustrophobia. That was logic, survival instinct, an IQ test. Anna sniffed, an exclamation remarkably close to “harumph.”

  Lisa looked up with limpid gray eyes, the tails of her braids brushing Anna’s boot tops. “Too tight?” she asked, and reached to adjust the buckle that cinched the webbing around Anna’s upper thigh and under her buttock.

  “No,” Anna said, and, with an effort, “Sorry.”

  Again the acceptance. Again the total lack of understanding. Apparently idiosyncratic behaviors were not cause for comment in the caving community.

  “You’ll want it tight,” Timmy said. “Once you get your weight on it things loosen up considerably.”

  Anna knew that. But for the pack, the gear was familiar. Climbing equipment: seat and chest harness, locking carabiners, rappel rack, Gibbs ascenders, D-ring, JUMAR safety. All the chunks of metal and rope intended to keep a caver in one piece on the way down and on the way back up. From a lifetime’s habit of safety, Anna watched as each link was forged in the chain of devices designed to defy gravity.

  Letting Timmy and Lisa tell her things she knew, dress her as if she were a baby, she contributed little. Much of her brain was given over to a jumble of dangerous thoughts, dangerous because a preoccupied climber can very easily become a dead climber. A moment’s inattention, an unclosed D-ring, an improperly threaded rack, an unlocked carabiner, and suddenly the whole house of cards—and the climber—comes tumbling down.

  Anna longed to call her sister, Molly, to talk about friendship and irrational fears, duty and human frailty. Since there was no time for a chat with her personal shrink, she went through her mental files and pulled out everything she could remember her sister having said about coping with phobic reactions. Desensitization, the slow increasing of exposure to the feared situation; no time. Relaxation exercises. Anna snorted, and
Lisa and Timmy stopped what they were doing to look at her expectantly.

  “It’s good,” Anna said. “Perfect. Thanks.” Lisa beamed her transforming smile. The gear was hers, lent to Anna for the duration. Anna smiled back, appreciating the woman’s generosity. By rights Lisa should be the one going in. She was a strong and experienced caver. She hadn’t been to Tinker’s Hell, the part of Lechuguilla where Frieda had been injured, but she’d been on three survey expeditions into the cave, trips of five days each. Anna knew that at times of high drama, along with concern for the injured and the desire to be of help, there was an overpowering need to be a part of the adventure. In a way she’d cheated Lisa out of that.

  “Climbing I’m comfortable with,” Anna said. “Let’s go over the rest of it.”

  The three of them were in a largish room outside the chief of resource management’s office in a building down the hill from Oscar’s office. It was of the same soft-hued native stone as the other buildings. The inside was clean and open with a beautiful old fireplace filling one wall. The grate was cold, seldom, if ever, used. The air was warmed to a uniform seventy degrees by modern methods. Anna would have welcomed the comfort of living fire. Through the window, opening onto stairs leading up the hill to the other buildings, Anna could see that a thin drizzle had started. Cold, gray, winter rain, falling on concrete. Soft, lifeless rain. Ray Bradbury rain.

  Drama queen, Anna cursed herself, and turned abruptly to the pile of debris on the chief’s blond wood conference table, the guts of her sidepack waiting to be inventoried.

  “How much do you know?” Timmy asked.

  “Pretend I don’t know anything and you’ll be pretty close,” Anna said.

  His manner might have warmed a degree or two. Her admission of total ignorance took him off guard. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll start from the beginning.” His thin voice took on a pedantic drone, and Anna felt a vague stab of pity for all the Stanford undergrads sitting through whatever classes fledgling rocket scientists were required to sit through.

  “Three sources of light,” he intoned. “Light is more important than food or water. Your headlamp.” He pointed with a long pale digit that looked well suited to a creature living deep underground. He waited. Apparently he wouldn’t continue the lecture without classroom participation, so Anna nodded obediently.

  “With spare batteries and bulbs. A flashlight.” He pointed to a neat blue Maglite, brand-new and jewel-toned. “And what’s your third source?” The tinted lenses winked at Anna, and she wondered if she should raise her hand before speaking.

  “A candle?” she ventured, thinking of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.

  That was the wrong answer Timmy had been fishing for. “Anachronism,” he said triumphantly. “A candle in Lechuguilla is akin to a firefly in a whale’s gullet, charming but not illuminating.”

  “We carried candles for years,” Lisa volunteered. “When we switched out we noticed neither one of us had thought to bring matches.” She laughed, a high whiffling sound. Her husband was not amused.

  “Third source: another flashlight. More batteries.” He stowed the lot away in the bottom of the pack.

  Anna picked up a wide-mouthed plastic bottle from the pile. The top was a white screw-on cap with the letter “P” written on it with a Sharpie permanent marker. “What’s this?”

  “Just what it says,” Timmy replied. “You pack it in, you pack it out.”

  “There’s one urine dump near the permanent camp on the way out,” Lisa added helpfully. “If you need to you can dump it there.”

  “Don’t use it,” Timmy said. “Pack it out.”

  From her brief exposure to caving literature, Anna half remembered discussions on how the salts and sugars of human wastewater could, over time, alter the cave environment significantly. A filtering system to remove these components from the waste so only pure water would be left behind was in the works but was yet to be realized.

  “Number two,” Lisa said.

  Anna’s mind snapped back to the lesson at hand. Evidently she had missed number one.

  “Feces,” Timmy said succinctly. Anna had not missed number one. He held up a pile of zipper plastic bags. “In the bag. Zip it. Double bag. Zip it.” Fleetingly Anna thought this would make a heck of a commercial for Glad-lock green-seal bags. “Wrap it all in tinfoil. Pack it out.”

  “Burrito bags,” Lisa said, and Anna detected a hint of mischief in the guileless eyes.

  Caving, deep, serious caving, was beginning to take on the trappings of an expedition into outer space.

  THINGS MOVED QUICKLY, and for that Anna was grateful. This was not a time she would welcome interludes for deep introspection. Shortly before four P.M. Oscar Iverson and a man he introduced as Holden Tillman picked her and her gear up at the resource management office. She was unceremoniously stuffed into the back of a covered pickup truck along with packs, ropes, helmets, and other assorted paraphernalia. She would have preferred the distraction of conversation to being left alone with her thoughts. That option denied, she stared resolutely out through the scratched Plexiglas over the tailgate.

  The ceiling of clouds had fractured. An ever-widening strip of blue pried open by the last rays of the sun shone on the western horizon. Rain and the season had leached the desert of color, leaving a palette of gray to be painted by the sunset. Drops of water clinging to the catclaw and sotol soaked up the light and refracted it in glittering facets of gold. The stones and black-fingered brush dripped with molten finery. Faint rainbows bent over the desert, where rain still fell through veils of light.

  Anna mocked herself for feeling like a woman in a tumbrel, jouncing through her last glorious moments toward the guillotine and the vast unknown. Still, she rather wished the day had closed without this final hurrah of heavenly fireworks. A sunless world would have been that much easier to leave behind.

  After too short a ride, the pickup pulled off the rutted dirt road into a wilderness parking lot incongruously marked off with concrete curbs. Anna’d been too engrossed in morbid imaginings to recollect the twists and turns they’d made through the wrinkled landscape, but she guessed they were only three or four miles from the headquarters buildings. The discovery of Lechuguilla in the backyard had put Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the odd position of having doubled in size overnight. Oscar had likened the experience to “finding Yellowstone in your basement.”

  Holden Tillman opened the tailgate, and the three of them divided up the gear. As they started the hike to the mouth of Lechuguilla, Oscar filled Anna in on the team briefing. Holden Tillman was officially titled Underground Rescue Coordinator. He was in charge of all activities subterranean. The NPS had borrowed him from the local Bureau of Land Management office because of his expertise in caves and cave rescues. Oscar assured Anna he was, in caving circles, known as the Holden Tillman.

  A quiet person with an aw-shucks drawl, Tillman seemed half embarrassed and half amused by Oscar’s effusions. “Oscar’s going to write my eulogy,” he told Anna, a slow smile blooming beneath a brown brush of mustache. “He just wants to get some practicing in before I’m dead.”

  Anna liked Holden right off. She hoped nothing happened to change that. Experience taught her her first impression of people was dead wrong as often as not. This time she had a gut feeling it wasn’t. Tillman was of an age with Iverson—in his forties—but there the resemblance ended. He was a small man, maybe five-foot-eight and a hundred thirty pounds with skin that looked shrunk to fit a wiry, muscled frame. Crow’s-feet radiated from the corners of his eyes to curve down in unbroken lines along the sides of his face. His forehead, wide and slightly sloping, was cut by horizontal lines as sharp as old scars. The effect of this network of time was a wizened soul, blessed with wisdom and, possibly, “the sight.” At least that was the fanciful image that floated up from an old fairy-tale illustration buried in Anna’s memory.

  Despite narrow shoulders and small frame, Holden carried a prodigious amount of equipment. Th
ough half a foot shorter than Oscar, arms and shoulders were corded with muscle where Iverson’s were mapped in bone. Anna guessed his pack was seventy or eighty pounds but it didn’t bow his back or take the spring from his step. As he walked ahead of her along the trail Anna heard sotto-voce snatches of song. She laughed. Holden sang the digging song Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs sang on their way down into the mine.

  Anna saw the cavern sparkling with a million lights and peopled with benevolent spirits. Despite herself she felt better than she had since Iverson had brought her the news of Frieda’s head injury.

  Holden and Oscar, along with CACA’s superintendent and the chief of resource management for the caverns, had organized a four-person team that would follow the two men Anna was with. The second team would carry a stretcher for the evacuation, medical supplies Dr. McCarty had requested, and a Korean War-vintage field phone with spools of wire so Holden would have telephone communications with the surface during the carry-out. The logistics were staggering, and Anna was duly impressed that the details had been hammered out in such a short time. There were people for every aspect of the rescue: cavers who would do nothing but rig the drops for hauling Frieda up the long vertical and near-vertical ascents; cavers to schlep water, packs, garbage, batteries, and food.

  Anna listened to the plans being rehashed by Holden and Oscar as they walked single file along a ridge above a dry creek bed, and she began to wonder what would undo her first: her fear of enclosed spaces or her fear of crowds. The sheer absurdity freed her mind, and for a time she was able to shut out the human murmurings and enjoy the hike.