Authors: David DeBatto
“If it was two degrees colder, this would be snow and you wouldn’t have made it up here,” Burgess said from the porch, grabbing
an armful of logs. “I put some Mexican cocoa on the stove when you called, if you’d care for some.”
DeLuca said he would. The cabin was roomy inside, decorated in Navaho rugs and artifacts from Burgess’s travels, jade carvings
from China, a ceremonial headdress from Sumatra, as well as crystals unlike anything DeLuca had ever seen before, gypsum blossoms
and selenite claws, cave pearls, dripstone fragments, aragonite straws and frostwork, coralloids that looked like popcorn,
each protected in a glass globe and labeled in Penelope Burgess’s handwriting. On a wall, he saw a poster-sized photograph
of a domed chamber in Oman with a shaft of light streaming in through the entrance in the ceiling, and the dome looked like
it was maybe twenty feet high, until the eye fell to a person in yellow overalls and a red helmet, standing on a debris pile
at the bottom of the shaft of light, the figure about a millimeter high, which only then revealed the chamber to be perhaps
five hundred feet high.
“Josh Truitt took that. Apparently the poor guy had to lug in a couple thousand old-fashioned flash bulbs to get that shot.
You said when you called you wanted to talk about Sinkhole?”
“When was the last time you were there?” DeLuca asked her.
“Hmm,” she said, handing him his cocoa and throwing a fresh log on the fire. “Seven or eight years ago, I guess. They pulled
the funding long before that, but since I was a geologist and not a physicist, I got to stay longer. I think they closed the
neutrino observatory a few years before that. They were already draining the bubble tank when I got there. The whole place
smelled like dry-cleaning fluid. Of course, we were allowed in that part of it. Why?”
“There was a section of the laboratory that was restricted?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “What we heard was that it was part of NASA’s backup system. Someone else said NORAD. The big rumor
that it was the Apocalypse White House. We weren’t even allowed to use the elevator at the same time as those guys. We knew
they weren’t military because of the uniforms, but that’s about it. They basically kicked us out to expand whatever it was
they were doing into our space. After that, our own scientists had to go to Sudbury or Kamiokande if they wanted to finish
their projects.”
“And access was via an elevator shaft?” DeLuca said. “No other way in or out?”
“Most caves only have one way in or out, and few have elevators,” she said. “It wasn’t as scary as it sounds. If the elevator
failed, you could always climb out. Though it would have been a helluva climb, even up a ladder. The place was a mile underground.”
“What’s at the top of the shaft?” DeLuca asked.
“The entrance is adjacent to the visitors’ area at Carlsbad Caverns. You’re already a thousand feet underground. There’s a
door that just says ‘Authorized Personnel Only,’ with a guard, and behind that are the blast doors. They were designed out
of steel and lead to keep out cosmic rays, but what we were told was that any one of them could withstand a direct hit from
the biggest bombs we had.”
“And how many of them were there?”
“Three.”
“So if you wanted to lock yourselves in, there’d be no way anybody could gain access without you letting them?”
She shook her head.
“And Gary worked on the Army side?”
She nodded.
“I met him in the parking lot. He thought my Saab was cute.”
“I don’t want to hear your Saab story,” DeLuca said. “I talked to him, by the way.”
“I thought you might,” she said. “Where did you find him?”
“He’s not far,” DeLuca said. “Do you want an address?”
“Not just yet, I think,” she said. “I guess I sort of feel like it’s up to him to contact me. But he’s all right?”
“He’s all right,” DeLuca said. “I think he’s going to call you.”
“Forgive me if I don’t get my hopes up,” she said, thinking. “Oh, God. I thought all these feelings were dead. I’m not soft,
you know. I just need closure, one way or the other. Anyway, I need to ask—why are you asking all these questions about Sinkhole?”
DeLuca hesitated.
“I found the diskettes Cheryl Escavedo took,” DeLuca said. “And I know that she passed some of that information to you. Some
of her figures turned up in your speeches, and there was no other way you could have gotten them. I’m not angry with you for
not telling me. I even understand why you’d think I’m one of the bad guys. I was hoping you’d at least see me as one of the
not-as-bad guys, because I’m after the worse guys, and if you knew how bad they were, I think you’d help me. I’ll settle for
one honest answer to one question. Did Sergeant Escavedo tell you anything about the project her boss was working on?”
“She said she could give me a breakdown of space weapon program figures, including black budgets,” Penelope Burgess said.
“We were going to meet in person but we never got the chance. I think all I actually got was a two-page e-mail attachment.
She said there was more she could tell me, but I don’t know what that was. That’s the truth.”
DeLuca nodded.
“And I don’t think you’re one of the bad guys. Maybe I did at first, but I don’t anymore. How can I help you?”
“I don’t know that you can,” DeLuca said. “Unless you know a way into Sinkhole that nobody else knows about. There’s someone
in there and we have to get him out. That’s all I can really tell you. I came here on the chance that you might have an idea.”
She sipped her cocoa, staring at the fire for a moment.
“Well,” she said at last. “I might. It’s almost not worth mentioning, but…”
“What?”
“I was thinking about the ventilation system.”
“No offense, but I think you watch too much television,” DeLuca said. “People crawling through big giant vents isn’t exactly
how it works in the real world. We don’t have too many bombs with a digital clock counting down the time to detonation in
big red digital numbers on the outside either, while we have to decide whether to cut the red wire or the white one.”
Penelope Burgess stared at him.
“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “And if you take a look around you, you might notice that I don’t
even own a television.”
“I stand corrected,” he said. “And I apologize. But I’m serious about the ventilation system. I looked at the schematics and
as far as I could tell, there isn’t one.”
“I know,” she said. “The air is drawn from the cave itself. It’s run through a HEPA filter but it’s not drawn from the surface,
at least not through any man-made shafts. Caves breathe through their skin. Particularly the ones in the New Mexico karst.”
DeLuca could imagine what a good teacher she was.
“Sinkhole is a subsystem of Carlsbad,” she continued, reaching for a book from her shelf and opening it to the central map.
She pointed out the places she was talking about with her finger, setting the book open on the coffee table and sitting on
the couch next to DeLuca. “Carlsbad has been a show cave for the last hundred years and it still hasn’t been entirely explored.
The southeastern escarpment of the Guadalupe Mountains comprises a limestone uplift that happened during the Tertiary period,
about ten million years ago, but the limestones and dolomites themselves were formed during the Permian period, 230 to 250
million years ago, when the entire region was underwater and full of organic life. Part of that sea was a deeper section called
the Delaware Basin, now the Chihuahuan Desert extending into the plains of west Texas, but reef limestone and lagoon limestone
built up at a much shallower part on the western end of the basin. During the Tertiary uplift, the rock fractured into fissures
that allowed hydrogen sulfide gases to rise from deep within the earth, and when the hydrogen sulfide hit the water table,
it combined with the oxygen in the water to form sulfuric acid. Limestone is soluble both in water and in sulfuric acid, but
the processes are quite different. Lechugilla cave, where I’ve worked, was formed by sulfuric acid slowly bubbling up, unlike
most caves, which are formed by water percolating down or flowing underground to form carbonic acid.”
She reached for a second book, the same book that DeLuca had found in the backseat of Cheryl Escavedo’s car, and opened it
to the section of cave maps, using her finger on the page to lead DeLuca through the system.
“The entrances to Carlsbad and Lechugilla are about eight kilometers apart as the crow flies, but Lechugilla starts at a lower
elevation. Lechugilla is the deepest limestone cave in the United States. I’d compare it to Swiss cheese, but Swiss cheese
is much more predictable and not nearly as complex. There’ve been theories for years that Lechugilla and Carlsbad connect
somewhere. If they do connect, then they might connect to Sinkhole as well, since it would be an uphill approach and Sinkhole
is the lowest part of Carlsbad.”
“How many miles of undiscovered cave are there?” DeLuca asked, before he could stop himself. She stared at him. “That’s a
stupid question, isn’t it?” She nodded. “And you’ve heard it before, haven’t you?” She nodded again.
“One way to estimate the size of a cave involves measuring the differences in barometric pressure changes within the cave
environment, relative to changes on the surface. A cave is like a bottle, and air goes in and out depending on the air pressure
outside. By those calculations, Lechugilla might be the largest by volume, and by the same calculations, we think only about
5 percent of it has been explored or accounted for. And again, parallel measurements of both Carlsbad and Lechugilla indicate
a connection. Theoretically.”
“Is it a passage a human being could make?”
“It would be extraordinarily difficult.”
“Has anyone ever tried?” DeLuca asked. She hesitated. “Has somebody done it?”
She hesitated again.
“According to caver legend, yes. A character who calls himself ‘The Mole.’”
“Josh Truitt?” DeLuca said.
Burgess looked stunned.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Just an informed guess,” DeLuca said. “Josh himself told me about The Mole. It’s been my experience, as a law enforcement
officer, that within the first five minutes of meeting certain types of people, if they know you’re a cop, they tell you a
secret. Or they hint at one to see if I can guess it, to test me. Like they have an urge to confess but not to get caught.
At first I thought it was odd, but now it seems almost charming.”
“What kind of people?”
“People with consciences,” DeLuca said. “And moral compasses. It’s like confessing to a priest, maybe. True psychopaths are
different.”
“Did I do that?” she asked him.
“Do you have a secret?”
“Josh Truitt and I had an affair,” she said. “I wondered if you were going to find that out. A fling. Gary and I were having
… trouble, and Josh and I were in Cuba, working in a cave there. We had to spend almost a week waiting in our beachside
motel for the government permits to come through. We agreed that it would end once we got back on American soil, and it did.
And we stayed friends. He told me what happened to Theresa. I had the impression he thought she was the one. I met her once.
She was nice.”
“Do you think he found the passage?”
“If he says he did, then he did,” Burgess said. “He’s got something really special. I was actually thinking of designing a
way to test it. The way he describes it is a photographic memory for spatial relationships, but I think there’s more to it.
Animals from humpback whales and bluefin tuna to hummingbirds and monarch butterflies have internal compasses that allow them
to migrate almost infallibly across great distances, using the earth’s magnetic field or the stars, we’re not sure. I think
Josh has whatever those animals have. In three dimensions. It’s funny. Not funny ha-ha.”
“What is?”
“The last I spoke to him, he said he was feeling a bit lost.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Penelope Burgess called Truitt on his cell. They found him in a Japanese tea garden in Rio Grande Park, protected from the
rain by the roof of the prayer pagoda, the Japanese symbol for peace painted on a hanging scroll that swayed in the breeze.
The rain was falling harder, filling the river below. Truitt had his headphones on, the corduroy collar of his Carhartt jacket
turned up against the cold, when DeLuca and Burgess approached. He took his headphones off when they sat opposite him, but
he said nothing.
“What are you listening to?” DeLuca said.
“The Brandenburg,” Truitt said. “Number Three.”
“Got a minute?”
“For what?” Truitt said, turning to Burgess. “You didn’t say you were bringing him.”
“Just listen,” Burgess said.
“I know you’re upset about Theresa,” DeLuca said. “I wanted to offer you a chance to do something about that. Penelope tells
me you have a gift. I know that you’re ‘The Mole.’ She tells me you have a gift for orienteering and spatial relationships.”
“I’m a fucking idiot savant,” Truitt said. “It’s people I don’t do so well with.”
“I didn’t think you were the type to waste time feeling sorry for yourself,” DeLuca said.
“Oh yeah?” Truitt said. “What type am I then?”
“The type that can’t see a problem without thinking of the solution. That point in the river,” DeLuca said. “What direction
is that?”
“From here?” Truitt said. He glanced at the sky, then looked upriver, then down. “Due west.”
“How far?”
He looked at the point of the towhead dividing the Rio Grande into two channels.
“Seventeen hundred feet,” he said. “Give or take a few.”
“Hang on,” DeLuca said. He took out his satellite phone and dialed the number for his son, Scott, whom he’d asked to stand
by. “Scooter—have you got me on your screen?”
“Milsat 14,” Scottie said. “Gotcha.”
“You have my GPS?” DeLuca asked.
“Loud and clear,” his son replied.
“Can you see the island in the river, the upstream point?” Scott said that he could. “What direction is that from me?”