Authors: David DeBatto
“This was the easy part,” Truitt said.
They hiked The Rift, a sequence of downward vertical passages that could be traversed with only the occasional use of ropes.
DeLuca was aware that every step took him farther from the world he knew. He noted, with irony, that until Koenig could be
stopped, this world beneath the world was safer than the one above. It was warm inside the cave, a constant seventy-two degrees,
but humid. In a matter of minutes, he and the others were soaked in sweat. At a place called Snow White’s Passage, they rested
a few moments, drinking from a nearby pool. They were at the central nexus of the cave system, Josh explained. From here,
they could turn either to the Near East, a confusing maze of passages leading to an even more convoluted spaghettilike structure
of caverns, faults, and constrictions known as the Far East subsystem, or they could head into the Southwestern Branch, or
they could pass through the Western Borehole into the Western Branch, the most reticulated and perforated of the subsystems,
with sponge work that had stopped all previous cavers from further exploration. On a road atlas, Carlsbad Caverns and Sinkhole
lay to the east-southeast. Burgess expressed surprise when Truitt got to his feet and headed toward the Western Borehole.
“West?” Burgess said. “That’s a bit counterintuitive.”
“Not really. You have to look at the rims,” Truitt said. “If gypsum precipitates on the downwind side, then from here through
to the Three Amigos, the air movement is eastward, but in the Northwest Passage it reverses. There’s no way it could do that
unless the pressure source was higher than in the Wild West. You can see it where the hydromag balloons curl at the eruptions—they
all sag in the same direction. It took me three trips, but I finally found a breach just past Hudson Bay, where it meets Spar
City. You’ll see.”
In some chambers, passage was a relatively easy stroll. Occasionally, the team was required to squeeze through terrifying
constrictions between bedding planes where water had once flowed across horizontal plates of bedrock. For DeLuca, the squeezes
were the worst, the fear of getting stuck pervasive and unshakable, even with Burgess coaching him reassuringly from behind,
“a little to the left, now bend your knee…” At the same time, the mineral deposits they saw along the way were beyond
description, words like “breathtaking” and “astonishing” failing to describe what they saw, flowstones and dripstones, gypsum
blossoms and flowers and massive chandeliers the size of upside-down oak trees hanging from the ceilings of ballroom-sized
chambers, aragonite bushes blooming on flat shelfstones as if on display in a museum, coralloid sheets and forms coated in
frostwork glistening brightly in their headlamps, selenite crystals the size of grandfather clocks, cave pearls and button
popcorn and snarls of underwater helictites and calcite-encrusted strings of organic material in pools so still and clear
it was difficult to see where the surface began unless you made a ripple.
It was hard to estimate the passage of time. When DeLuca finally thought to look at his watch, he saw that ten hours had passed.
He might have guessed five. They stopped for dinner, six MREs from Sykes’s pack. In Iraq, “MRE” was commonly understood to
stand for Meals Refused by Everyone, but DeLuca was ravenous, the turkey Tetrazzini he’d mocked in Balad as so much wallpaper
paste now possibly the best thing he’d ever eaten. Truitt wanted to push ahead another kilometer before making camp for the
night.
“Are you serious, man?” Vasquez said. “I’m wiped.”
“You can wait here if you want,” Truitt said with a smile. DeLuca tried to imagine what they would do if Truitt or Burgess
were to somehow get hurt. None of them would be able to find their way out, and none of their technology would help them one
bit. “Just remember the first rule of caving. Truitt’s Law.”
“Which is?”
“You must exit a cave the same number of times as you enter it.”
The next three hours were excruciating. Every muscle in DeLuca’s body ached, as did his rib where it was cracked, and his
ankle, but he kept going. Finally, Truitt stopped beside a gorgeous pool that glowed in blues and oranges when he shone his
light into it.
“We’ll camp here,” he said, turning to DeLuca. “How much sleep do you think you’ll need? I usually get by on two. If you want
to make it in forty-eight, I suggest no more than four.”
“Four it is,” DeLuca said. He felt like he could sleep for twenty-four. “Where do we go tomorrow?”
“Through there,” Truitt said, pointing to the wall at the far end of the lake.
“Through the wall?” Sykes said.
“Under it,” Truitt said.
“That’s a water trap?” Burgess asked. Truitt nodded.
“The phreatic zone starts here,” Truitt said, pointing. “You can find fluting along the sides if you dig deep enough, so it’s
the solution pan everybody always thought it was, but it also siphons off to the south. I was camped here one night and I
felt pressure in my ears, so I knew the water was rising. I learned later that it had rained heavily that night, but only
on the eastern slopes of the surface ridge. If you posit a uniform vadose zone, then the sump had to lead from west to east,
which made it a through-cave.”
“Could I get that in layman’s terms?” Vasquez asked.
“We swim underwater,” Burgess said. “Below the water table. The cave continues on the other side.”
“How far underwater?” Sykes asked.
“Not that far,” Truitt said. “The first time, I didn’t know exactly where I was going. I probably had two or three seconds
of air left before I found the pocket, but then, I was holding my breath. You guys have air, right?”
Peggy Romano had supplied each of them with a fifty-cubic-inch tank, the kind of emergency supply used by pilots forced to
ditch their aircraft in the sea. Each contained fifteen minutes of air.
“How long can you hold your breath?” MacKenzie asked him.
“Five minutes,” Truitt said. “But I got a bit disoriented.”
“I thought you didn’t get disoriented?”
“I accidentally kicked the sediment on the bottom with my foot,” Truitt said. “Ten million years’ worth of silt. The water
turned cloudier than clam chowder, but by then I was past the point of no return. I never said luck doesn’t play a part.”
“Are you nuts?” Sykes said. “This guy is insane. He dives into a pool past the point of no return because he thinks there’s
air on the other side.”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Truitt said. “I never break the first law of caving. Tomorrow, I’ll string a guideline for the
rest of you to follow. Just don’t lose the line.”
DeLuca wasn’t sure if he slept or not. He had vivid dreams of climbing through the darkness. The blackness he experienced
when he opened his eyes was profound and absolute, a complete absence of visual data that magnified everything else. He heard
the blood rushing in his ears. He felt his heart thumping in his chest. Surrounded by his team members, the way he’d been
so many nights in their tent in Balad, he nevertheless felt an intense sense of solitude, and a strange sadness—it made little
sense, but for a while, the sadness was overwhelming, until he reached for his helmet and turned on his headlight, briefly,
just long enough for him to regain his bearings. He shut the light off again.
“You, too?” he heard MacKenzie whisper from where she lay next to him.
“Me, too,” he admitted.
“I keep thinking this is what death is like,” MacKenzie whispered.
There was a long silence.
“Wanna spoon?” MacKenzie asked.
“Love to,” DeLuca said. He felt MacKenzie back into him, and he threw his arm over her side, hugging her close. “Just don’t
tell my wife.”
“You know what I always say,” she whispered. “What happens at the center of the earth stays at the center of the earth.”
They slept.
Seemingly seconds later, though it was hours, he heard Truitt’s watch beeping. They ate a quick breakfast. While they ate,
Truitt tied green Cyalume chemlites at ten-foot intervals along a length of rope, cracking each chemlite to make it glow before
moving on to the next one, the line like a string of Christmas lights where it piled up on the sand.
“Is everybody clear what we have to do?” he asked. “Any questions? I’ll go first and I’ll give a tug to tell you when I’m
on the other side, but if for some reason you don’t feel the tug, wait two minutes and then follow. Come one at a time and
keep your eye on the chemlites. If you bunch up, the chances of somebody silting it up increase. Put your pack under your
stomach if you want—it’ll help you float. The total swim is going to be about a hundred feet.”
“I do have a question,” Vasquez said. “What if the reason we don’t feel a tug is that you’ve drowned, and then we follow you
and one by one, we drown, too?”
“That would suck for all of us, wouldn’t it?” Truitt said. “And try not to touch the ceiling either because it’s white gypsum
and the shit is nasty if you get any down your collar or in your shorts. So, see you on the other side.”
“You don’t need one of these?” MacKenzie said, offering him a spare oxygen bottle.
“Air is for pussies,” he said. “No offense. Personally, it makes me lose focus.”
DeLuca watched as Truitt disappeared into the water, his headlamp illuminating the bottom, where DeLuca saw bright orange
disks and gray mineral crusts that looked like seashells or broken crockery. Then Truitt’s headlamp was gone, the way illuminated
only by the string of chemlites, which disappeared into the maw of the earth.
No one spoke. DeLuca looked at his watch. A minute passed. Then another. Sykes held the line, his head cocked as if he were
listening for something. Three minutes passed, then four.
“I don’t feel anything,” Sykes said. “Time to shove off then. I’ll go next…”
“Wait a minute,” Vasquez said, his voice filled with a sudden urgency. “Hold on.”
“What’s wrong?” DeLuca asked.
“I’ve been testing my breather,” Hoolie said. “It’s empty. I mean, it had about tens seconds of air and then it ran out.”
He looked at the gauge, tapping it against a rock. “The gauge says it’s full. Test yours.”
Sykes put the regulator in his mouth and breathed, spitting the mouthpiece out a few moments later.
“Mine’s empty, too,” he said. “Shit!” he shouted, his words echoing inside the cavity.
“Hold on,” DeLuca commanded. “Nobody panics. Mack, how about you?”
“Empty,” she said. “So’s the spare.”
“The gauges must be faulty,” Vasquez said.
“Stop,” DeLuca said, thinking. The mission was too important to abort. They had to try. “It doesn’t matter. We can do this.
We just have to think a minute.”
He looked to Penelope Burgess for ideas. She had none to offer.
“Hoolie,” DeLuca said. “How many Ziploc bags do we have left?”
“Half the box,” Hoolie said.
“Everybody fill up three or four with air and tuck them inside your overalls. That should give us enough air to get to the
other side if we need it. We used to do this when we were kids on Long Island—just remember when you open the bag to get underneath
it, open it, stick your mouth in, and inhale. Don’t try to catch the bubbles from above—go like this,” he said, demonstrating.
“Okay? We go as a team, buddy system. I don’t care what Truitt said—we’re stronger as a team than we are as individuals, right?
So we help each other, buddy system. Move quickly but no panic. We can do this.”
“I’m not saying we can’t,” MacKenzie said, steeling herself, “but if somehow we can’t… just on the off chance that we
can’t—does anybody know where we are?”
“LeDoux knows,” DeLuca said. “He’ll come and get us, even if he has to send the whole Third Army.”
“But how will they know where to look?” MacKenzie asked. She had a point. DeLuca knelt and wrote in the sand with his finger,
CI TEAM RED,
then drew an arrow indicating the way they would go.
“Thanks,” MacKenzie said.
She went first with Sykes, followed by Hoolie, then Burgess, DeLuca bringing up the rear. They swam as far as they could on
the surface, then collectively took deep breaths and dived at the count of three.
The string of green lights led into a darkness that, because it was underwater, seemed even blacker and more complete than
before. Burgess swam with a frog kick, while Vasquez chose a scissors kick. Sykes and MacKenzie were soon out of view. DeLuca
held his breath, feeling the tightness in his chest increasing with every stroke. He swam down, keeping the green chemlites
in view. He felt as if his eyes were going to burst from their sockets, his lungs aching, but he swam, until he needed air.
He reached for a Ziploc bag, but it slipped from his fingers and was gone. He grabbed a second bag and inhaled from it. It
was good, but it wasn’t enough. He swam quickly to catch up to the others as the string of chemlites turned to the right.
He kept going. He needed air. He kept going.
Then the water ahead of him turned cloudy. He reached up to grab the guideline just in time as the water around him turned
opaque. Somebody had silted the pool. He wasn’t angry. He slowed his thoughts. It was something like a habit he had, when
trouble loomed, telling himself, “If I’m going to die, I’m not going to die with fear in my heart…”
He swam, pulling himself forward and holding on to the line, hand over hand, his headlamp illuminating only the water six
inches ahead of him. He paused to pop his last air bag, inhaling.
It wasn’t enough.
He kept going. He could see nothing. He had to be close. How much farther? His lungs ached. Pain stabbed at his heart, and
then he realized that the line was now slack in his hands.
He slowed his thoughts. He slowed his thoughts. He slowed. Which way had he been heading? His muscles remembered which way
the line had tugged, so he swam in that direction. Then, he had nothing left, could hold his breath no longer. He thought
of his wife, and of his son, sorry that he’d never see them again.
Suddenly, he felt a tug on his sleeve as Josh Truitt grabbed his arm and pulled him the last ten feet.