Authors: David DeBatto
He gasped as he broke the surface, supported on all sides by his team, their hands holding him up.
“Are you all right?” Truitt asked.
“I’m fine,” DeLuca said, shaking the water from his eyes. “Where to from here?”
“Straight up,” Truitt said. “Maybe two hundred feet.” DeLuca looked up to see a narrow slit between two vertical walls, close
enough, Truitt said, that they could chimney up without using ascenders.
“Terrific,” DeLuca said. “Let’s go.”
“You didn’t really do that when you were kids in Long Island, did you?” Burgess asked him when they had a private moment,
after the others had begun the ascent.
“No,” DeLuca said. “But it’s exactly the stupid kind of thing we would have tried.”
They rested at the top, everyone but Truitt exhausted, then pushed forward down what Truitt had dubbed the Northeastern Borehole.
They passed one spectacular chamber after the next, scrambling over chockblocks and talus fields, drop passages, an open traverse
across a place Josh called the Bottomless Pit, and judging from how long it took for a tossed rock to reach the bottom, he
was nearly right. They walked, climbed, and roped until they came to the edge of a precipice where their combined headlights
revealed nothing in front of them. When Truitt took a pocket laser and projected it into the void, a beam that should have
been visible from up to half a mile revealed nothing ahead.
“I call this Gram’s Canyon, after Gram Parsons,” Truitt said. “I think it could be the largest underground canyon in the world.
Some day I’m going to photograph it if I can figure out how to light it. The left wall is lagoon limestone and the right wall
is reef limestone and I think the ceiling is the base plate of the Yates formation.”
“It’s strange to think there’s so much beauty in front of us and we can’t see any of it,” MacKenzie said.
“Sort of like sitting in a bathroom stall next to Catherine Zeta-Jones,” Hoolie said. “Not that I’ve ever done that. To my
knowledge.”
“That’s gross,” Mack said.
They made good progress, moving through forests of stalactites, stalagmites, towers, and columns, past haystack-shaped mounds
of flowstone, balancing on steppingstones that shifted underfoot as they crossed shallow ponds and deep water-filled crevasses.
Here the ground was red with iron, there it was a curried yellow color from sulfur, until it turned white with gypsum forming
carpets of cauliflower, then a prairie of straw crystals, dropping off into an inky void.
DeLuca stopped beneath an arch to catch his breath. His legs felt as if they were turning to rubber. He let the others go
on ahead while he cracked a power bar for energy. He chewed slowly, watching the headlamps of his teammates bobbing in the
darkness, strung out along a relatively easy uphill trail. He turned off his own light for a moment, to save on batteries.
Then he thought he heard something, but the sound came from behind him instead of in front of him.
He froze, listening.
He heard it again, the sound of gravel falling on rock. He’d thought he’d sensed that someone was following them an hour earlier
but wrote it off to his imagination. Who could possibly be following them? And if someone was, why didn’t DeLuca see his lights?
From his backpack, he quietly opened a Ziploc bag and took out his NVGs. The batteries powering the goggles were only good
for a few hours, and without peripheral vision or depth perception, they weren’t the tool of choice for caving, but whoever
was following them was evidently using them, for when DeLuca donned his, he saw a man approaching, an infrared lamp glowing
from his helmet.
DeLuca took a second Ziploc bag from his pack and drew from it his Beretta, chambering a round before taking position to the
side of the trail behind an outcrop. He waited. He heard footsteps, drawing closer. When the man passed him, DeLuca stepped
out and put the gun to the base of the man’s skull.
“Not another step,” DeLuca said.
“Don’t shoot,” the man said, raising his hands in the air. “Please…”
DeLuca put the gun down.
“I hope you called your father before you came here,” DeLuca said. “He doesn’t know where you are.”
“Agent DeLuca?” Marvin Yutahay said. He was wearing jeans, a denim workshirt and canvas high-top sneakers, a red bandana around
his neck and a coil of rope over one shoulder.
“What are you doing here, Marvin?” DeLuca asked. “Your old man thinks you went over the cliff at Koenig’s ranch.”
“The bike did, but I got off,” Marvin said. “Koenig was trying to kill me. He killed Cheryl.”
“I know,” DeLuca said. “That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here?”
“Cheryl said Koenig had a second place near Carlsbad,” Marvin said. “Some sort of control center. She wouldn’t tell me any
more, and she said she didn’t know where, exactly, so after he tried to kill me, I went to Carlsbad to ask around. When I
heard on the caver grapevine that a government team was coming to do survey work, I went to the airport and then I followed
you, but I didn’t know it was you. When I saw the sign you left at the water trap, I wasn’t sure if you knew I was here or
what, but by then I’d come too far to turn around.”
“You thought we were Koenig?” DeLuca said. Marvin shrugged. “And if we were, you were going to kill him?”
“He killed Cheryl,” Marvin said. “Somebody needs to kill him to make it even.”
“Come on,” DeLuca said. “The others are probably waiting for me to catch up. Where’d you get the NVGs?”
“E-Bay,” Marvin said. “Tricks of the trade. I was down to my last set of batteries.”
Marvin explained himself again when they reached the expedition party. Vasquez offered him a power bar, which he devoured.
Marvin hadn’t been prepared for such an undertaking, evidently, but his determination made up for it.
They rested again at the head of the canyon, pausing for a second round of MREs, during which Marvin told them how he’d navigated
the water trap, using the snorkel he’d brought along, standard equipment among experienced gem hunters. Truitt, who’d described
gem hunters with the less polite term “cave robbers,” held his tongue. Marvin had followed the string of chemlites until he
reached the end, then saw in the distance, using his NVGs, three that had floated to the top of the pool on the far side,
the image faint but enough to lead him to safety.
“How’d you get through the hatch?” Sykes asked him.
“I was hiding in the entrance pit,” he said. “Halfway up the wall. I was watching over your shoulder when you punched in the
code.”
While the others rested, Josh Truitt searched for the mark he’d made at the edge of a region he called the Bone Yard, a massive
limestone maze resembling a large pile of porous bones. He returned a few minutes later to say he’d found it. The team seemed
reenergized. Josh led the way, through an erratic three-dimensional webbing of shapes and forms, bridges and arches, keyholes
and windows, slots and grooves. They climbed up and forward, angling this way, then that. Occasionally Truitt stopped to get
his bearings. Midway through, they paused to rest.
“What exactly are you basing your decisions on?” Sykes said. “You change course but it all looks exactly the same.”
“Humidity,” Truitt said. “Where we’re going is wetter than where we came from. The water percolates from above. We’re looking
for the source.”
“You can sense that?” Sykes said. “Changes in humidity?”
“You can’t?” Truitt said.
“My hair gets frizzy,” MacKenzie said. “That’s how I know. I’d kill for a shower.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Truitt said, “because you’re going to get one.”
True to his word, they stopped where the Bone Yard met the ceiling, the air getting wetter and wetter until they could hear
the sound of running water. Illumination showed a stream of water pouring out of a hole in the wall, falling through a narrow
pit into a plunge pool Truitt said was five hundred meters down. By the look on his face, he seemed dismayed.
“What is it?” DeLuca asked.
“I was afraid of this,” Truitt said.
“Of what?”
“We want to go through there,” he said, pointing to the hole from which the water poured. “The stream is free surfaced on
the other side, but with all the rain we’ve been having, the hydrostatic pressure might be more than we can handle. In midsummer,
this thing would be dry. We’d just traverse across and zoop-zoop. It’s only about six feet, but against this kind of current,
that’s a lot.”
“You can’t do it?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, thinking. “I could bring a rope with me and then once I’m on the other side, I’ll pull whoever’s
next through. Actually, I’ll bring two ropes and anchor one for the next person to climb on, and they can tie off on the second
rope. The traverse across the pit is a little tricky. Penny, think you can handle that?”
Burgess nodded, asking, “How are you going to get through?”
“That’s a very good question. All we can do is try, right? Hey, cave robber,” Truitt said to Marvin Yutahay. “Mind if I borrow
your snorkel?”
“Not a problem,” Marvin said, handing it to him. “Just don’t get your germs on it.”
It took Truitt half an hour to rig a line of bolts on the far wall, tying a rope taut between them for the others to walk
on, looping the rope back around parallel, six feet higher, to serve as a hand line, both leading to the edge of the waterfall.
Standing on the base rope, he reached his arms into the flow in an attempt to hammer in a piton to hold on to. His first three
attempts failed. Finally he managed to set the first bolt, the water pounding against his chest and face as he worked. He
emerged from the stream to catch his breath, exhausted from the effort. When he regained his strength, he began tying knots
in the anchor rope.
“Once I’m through,” he shouted above the roar, “I’ll lower the snorkel to the next person. Leave your packs and the last person
can tie them on. Watch out for the roof because that’s where you could get snagged, and getting snagged is going to be fatal.
Pull yourself hand over hand on the knotted rope and tie off with this one and I’ll pull you up from above. There’s a good
foothold here,” he said, reaching into the stream with his hand. “The second person is going to be the hardest—after that
we’ll have two people pulling. It should be someone small.”
“I’ll go second,” MacKenzie said. “I hate waiting for men to finish in the shower.”
DeLuca took Truitt aside for a moment.
“Needless to say,” DeLuca said, keeping his voice down, “the Army appreciates what you’ve done. Am I to understand that on
the other side of this is the passage that leads to Sinkhole?”
Truitt nodded.
“Then you might want to bear in mind,” DeLuca said, “the possibility exists that someone armed may be waiting for you on the
other side.”
Truitt stared at him.
“I just thought you should know.” DeLuca said.
Truitt readied himself, spending a few minutes taking deep breaths to charge his lungs with oxygen. He gave the others two
thumbs up, checked his gear one last time, took a final deep breath through the snorkel, and dived headfirst into the stream,
disappearing from the waist up. They watched his legs as he dug for the foothold, and then he found it, and then he was gone.
DeLuca stared at the water as it poured from the rock, glancing occasionally at his watch. Truitt had said he could hold his
breath for five minutes. DeLuca imagined that was probably sitting still in a chair, not fighting vigorously to make his way
upstream like some sort of subterranean salmon. The snorkel gave him a few extra minutes at best.
They watched, waiting.
Suddenly, they saw him again as the stream ejected him into the void.
Burgess screamed as Truitt fell, tumbling head over heels in the tumbling water.
Then the rope Truitt was fastened to drew taut and stopped his fall. He bounced once, until the water falling on him beat
him back, pounding him against the rock face parallel to his drop line. Quickly, Sykes and Vasquez moved to grab the rope
and pull Truitt up. A minute later, the caver was lying on the ledge next to the others. It took some time before he could
speak.
“I’m aborting,” DeLuca said. “We can’t do it. It’s all right. As soon as you’re good, we’ll head back.”
Truitt shook his head.
“That was just to set the second bolt,” he said, struggling to sit up, propping himself with one arm. “Now we’re good. Whoever’s
next, give me three tugs to tell me you’re coming and I’ll start to pull. I’m going to pull as hard and as fast as I can because
there’s no turning back once you commit. I’ll give you three tugs first to tell you I’m ready.”
He prepared himself with deep breathing, then disappeared back into the flow. A minute later, the knotted rope came back,
followed by the towrope with the snorkel attached to it. MacKenzie traversed the pit and readied herself, tying onto the towrope
and grabbing the knotted rope with both hands. DeLuca gave her two thumbs up. She felt three tugs on the towrope. Then she
gave three tugs and dived into the stream. DeLuca watched as her head and shoulders disappeared, then her torso, then her
legs. A few minutes later, the towrope returned with the snorkel attached. Sykes went next, followed by Yutahay, then Vasquez.
It got easier and easier with more people pulling on the other end. DeLuca told Burgess he believed in ladies first. When
she was gone, he had a fleeting thought—what if, for some reason, the rope didn’t reappear? What if they left him there? A
stupid but human thought. There was no reason to think they would. Horses didn’t like being alone. Deep down, humans didn’t
either.
Then the rope appeared. He tied on and went through.
They followed the stream above for a quarter mile, climbing a series of waterfalls, until they branched off to the right.
They chimneyed up a fissure and emerged only to squeeze through the narrowest constriction so far, but by now, DeLuca felt
like an old pro. They came to a grotto on the far side where, at the top opposite, DeLuca saw a faint light shining through
a slit in the rock. When he climbed up and stuck his head through the slit, Truitt next to him, he saw that they’d reached
the elevator shaft, the rungs of a service ladder fixed to the rails opposite and eight heavy steel cables running down into
a darkness lit every fifty feet by yellow light bulbs in wire cages for as far as the eye could see. Seeing something man-made
seemed strange, but also strangely comforting.