by Greig Beck
He’d just descended over 7,000 feet into a damn deep hole in the ground and now it may look like they took a wrong turn. A picture of the sump pool was supposed to be their proof of a successful arrival.
He lit one, inhaled deeply, and then blew a cloud of smoke into the beam of his headlamp.
He looked at his young team. Maggie Harper, his current girlfriend, was 32 and an athletic golden girl. She had desperately wanted to come on this cave drop, and said she’d do anything to be picked. And she did. He grinned and drew in more smoke, looking again at the outline of her figure in the near shapeless overalls.
The other three cavers he’d brought were Jamison Williams, an Ivy League enthusiast who was capable, as well as being a tech genius. He’d brought along a few toys to help them map their cave and place markers. Then there was Marcus “Jazz” Lawrence, a track and field champion in his school days, and totally fearless.
Rounding his team off was Bruno Markowitz, Russian ex-military, who had been involved with caving rescue teams for many years. Wenton had worked with Bruno before and the guy was strong as an ox, loyal, and sometimes a little brutal, which was a hangover from his military days. On this trip, his language skills had proved invaluable.
Wenton sighed and leaned back on an elbow. All he thought he needed to do was get to the absolute lowest point he could manage, take a reading, and then head back. He had expected to be sipping champagne and then collecting a check for a million dollars by Christmas. Plus rubbing a few noses in it come acceptance speech time.
Maybe the sump pool being gone was a blessing, he thought. Meant he could get down an extra few feet and claim another record.
Wenton sprang forward. “Come on, people, please tell me we’re in the goddamn right cave.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the rock beside him and stood.
“This is it, I’m sure of it. We came the right way, and that pool was here. I can still see the mineral water-level line.” Jamison read from the pulser he aimed into the basin. He turned slowly. “That’s weird.”
Wenton groaned. Here it comes, he thought.
Jamison held the device out toward a shelf of stone at the far side of the empty sump pool. “I’m getting another reading—a deeper reading.”
“How much deeper? We only need a few more feet to set a new world record,” Maggie announced.
“No, no, I mean deep, deep.” He looked up, and then began to walk forward. He got to the edge of the former sump pool line and eased down. “The readings are off the chart.”
Wenton followed him in.
“Holy crap.” Jamison turned but Wenton was already behind him, with Maggie and Bruno crowding in as well. “There’s another cave under here.”
“This isn’t on the maps,” Maggie said excitedly. “This must be newly opened.”
“Let’s go for it,” Marcus enthused.
“Wait a minute. What are the readings?” Wenton asked.
Jamison shook his head. “Plotter can’t get a proper fix.” He turned and grinned. “It’s too deep to allocate a measurement.”
Wenton backed up from under the lip. “We’re not just going to set a record…we’re going to make history.” He felt his fatigue fall away like scales. “Rig up, everyone—we’re going in.”
“Harry, we’re not really provisioned for a lot more caving.” Maggie blew out her cheeks as she looked toward the new cave. “How far will we go?”
Just a couple of feet more than Michael Monroe will go, he thought. He smiled back at her. “Don’t worry, we’ll just check it out.”
Harry Wenton then turned to the caves they had just come from and walked toward the opening. “Everyone quiet so I can check where our competition is up to.”
The group stopped and waited for a moment. Wenton listened but couldn’t hear them but knew that Michael Monroe would be coming fast. As he was about to turn away, he heard something—soft, like a scraping of nails on stone.
Wenton turned his head about. Odd, he thought and turned slowly. That seemed to come from the new cave.
CHAPTER 07
Jane watched Michael as he moved like a machine through the caves. He had let his team catch a little more sleep when they were about six hours out from the sump pool. But now in the final stretch he had worked them hard, leading from the front to try and catch Harry Wenton.
Michael entered into the sump pool cavern breathing heavily, and like the rest of them, greasy with perspiration that had collected cave dust to be like a paste on their skin. Jane rolled her shoulders, feeling the uncomfortable slickness on her back.
She followed Michael as he first consulted Katya’s notes, and then jumped down into the empty basin and moved to the shelf of stone at the rear.
“Yes.” He turned. “It’s here, just like she said it would be.”
“Holy shit,” Ronnie said. “So she wasn’t just pulling it out of her wild imagination.”
“We go in,” Michael pronounced.
“Not so quick,” Jane threw back. “We need to have a quick planning meet, grab a coffee, and fuel ourselves up first.” She saw Michael’s expression harden. “Come on, Michael. This is a group effort, and we need to load up on energy. Down there is all unknown territory. We don’t know what to expect.”
“Yeah, we do.” His mouth curved a little.
Jane put her hands on her hips. “I wouldn’t believe everything Katya wrote…or told you.”
He shrugged. “She was right about this.” He bobbed his head. “But okay, I agree. Let’s take some rest before we head in.”
“Michael.” Andy was peering at something toward the rear side of the cave.
“What have you got?” Michael asked.
“Some dirty bastard stubbing out his smokes.” He pointed.
Michael leaped out of the basin and crossed to Andy. He crouched, lifted the butt to his nose, and then rolled it between his thumb and forefinger.
“Fresh.” He stood and turned back toward the sump pool. “That bastard Wenton has gone in.”
CHAPTER 08
Maggie Harper lifted a hand to stop them. “Got a fork in the road.”
Wenton joined her, looking at the three cave mouths before them. “Interesting.” He turned. “Jamison, give us a depth check.”
Jamison pointed his pulser into each, storing the results and then moving to the next. After a few moments, he turned, reading from the small screen on the device. “No help. They’re all telling me they continue on until the pulse waves dissipate.” He looked up. “All deep, no blockages.”
“That’s a big help.” Wenton walked to the mouth of the first cave and fished in his pocket. He retrieved his cigarette lighter, flicked it, and held it up. The small orange flame rose like a tiny luminous tongue. It was unmoved.
Wenton moved to the next. In front of this one, the flame bent back toward him. He moved to the third and once again the flame was unbent.
“Got a breeze coming at us from door number two. That’s our path forward.” He half-turned. “Maggie, do us the honors.”
*****
Michael felt a little guilty about only giving the group 20 minutes to catch their breath, but he knew this was too important.
He had hoped when Katya had told him about the opening in the sump pool that it might not have been so easy to find. But he guessed having to descend over 7,000 feet below the earth was enough of a deterrent for most people. Even most professional cavers.
He knew Harry Wenton was a pro, and he would have chosen a team who were just as competent. The glimmer of hope he had was that Wenton wouldn’t know what the new cavern actually meant. And that might mean he’d be satisfied with traveling a few hundred or so feet just to satisfy his curiosity and some sort of record, and then he’d turn back.
Whereas Michael had plans to go all the way. He hadn’t really thought just how long he was prepared to give this expedition, and also how long the team would stick with him.
He remembered an old caver telling him once that you neve
r conquered deep caves—you outlasted them, endured them, and suffered them. And, in turn, the caves would try and grind you down, and get you to make a mistake. The deeper the cave, the more chance you’d make that mistake, and the cave would win.
But if you did stick with it, sometimes it would reward you by showing you something that no one else on Earth had ever seen. And that was what drove him. Michael took a deep breath; he’d worry about those bridges when it came to cross them.
“Let’s roll.” He walked them toward the end of the sump pool and crouched under the lip of stone. Everyone waited behind him as he hung there for a moment, staring in. His light only extended for a few dozen feet and beyond that there was darkness and silence. The only thing he experienced was a warm, slightly earthy-smelling breeze blowing into his face.
Hot air rose, and unless there was water somewhere below, then the smells should have only been of rock dust, age-old mustiness, and little else. Michael felt it was a good sign.
“Going in,” he said and stepped through the tumbled-down hole in the cave wall.
Inside, the cave opened up a little and walking just a few steps forward, Michael found himself on a ledge that had a gentle curve along a towering cliff face and on the other a drop off that fell away into impenetrable darkness.
“It’s a ledge and looks good. Come on in,” he said over his shoulder.
Andy was first in and went to the edge to point his pulser downward, waited a few seconds, and then read the numbers.
He whistled. “Vertical drop for around 8,000 feet.” He turned and shook his head. “That’s a mile and a half, straight down, and deeper than the entire Krubera.”
Michael nodded. “Think of it as us climbing Mount Everest, but upside down.”
“Into the belly of the beast,” Ronnie whispered as he stared down over the edge.
“A beast?” Michael snorted softly. “I remember reading a book by James Tabor called Blind Descent. He likened caves to living organisms, whereby they had bloodstreams and respiratory systems, they got infections, infestations, and could even be corrupted.” He turned to Ronnie. “And they sometimes took in organic matter, digested it, and then usually flushed it out slowly through their river systems.”
Michael turned away. But sometimes the caves swallowed down that organic matter and kept it in their belly forever, he thought, as he remembered Katya’s notes.
“Let’s stay sharp.” Michael waved them on.
They continued downward, the rock shelf they were traveling on wide enough to allow a good pace. Michael looked up and found it hard to ignore the feeling of weight as miles of rocks was pressing down on you from above. One shimmy and movement of the earth, and they could all end up nothing more than an interesting line of color between sedimentary rock layers.
To this cave, tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of years old, they were like motes of dust; insignificant specks that lived and died in the blink of eye.
Michael only slowed to examine interesting formations that loomed out of the blackness. He’d had a love of caving and the deep earth ever since he was a boy when he had ventured alone into a disused mine on his grandfather’s property.
Most people were afraid of the dark, as it contained things that couldn’t be seen and a world that hid from the light—mysteries, oddities, and danger. But cavers reveled in those things. Because around the next corner, over the next cliff, or through the next squeeze hole, you might encounter something truly wonderful.
As Michael passed underneath a shawl of stone, he stopped dead. “Whoa.” He grinned and waved Jane over. “Come check this out.”
“Holy shit.” David lifted his light. “Writing. It’s Russian, right?”
“Yeah, but old-style Russian.” Michael translated. “We few venture into the unknown, for the greater knowledge of all mankind.” He turned. “A.S.”
“A.S.—Arkady Saknussov,” Jane finished.
“Hole-eeey shit.” Ronnie grinned, open-mouthed.
“We’re on the right track,” Angela said. “I cannot get my head around this guy Saknussov came all this way over 500 years ago. I don’t know how.”
“Because it was more than just a hobby or passion for him,” Michael said. “It was his life’s work. He was determined to prove his theory true, and nothing was going to stop him.”
“He was going to get his answers or die trying,” Jane said. “And he never came back, did he?”
Michael shook his head. “Because maybe he found his Shangri-La.”
“More tracks—recent ones.” Andy looked back at them. “Wenton?”
“Yeah, they’re still ahead of us,” Michael said. “Let’s keep moving.”
The descent was easier than in the upper caves as the rift in the earth had dragged the huge crustal plates apart just enough for the tiny human beings to travel easily.
After another hour, they stopped for a protein break. The fact was, they expended huge amounts of energy caving and needed to continually replenish their stocks. As it was, all of them would lose considerable weight underground. The loss of weight only became an issue when there was an accompanying loss of muscle mass—and that would only happen if they stopped eating.
In 10 minutes, Michael had them moving again. But their ledge had begun to narrow to be only 18 inches wide, so it had to be traversed with their face to the wall.
It was then they came to the three cave mouths, and Andy quickly found track evidence that Wenton’s team had taken the middle cave.
Michael’s grin split his face from ear to ear.
“What?” Jane said, also smiling.
Michael pointed. “Wenton took the middle cave.”
“So, do we follow?” Angela asked.
“No, he went the wrong way.” Michael fist-pumped. “At last, we get our first break.” He reached into his pocket for Katya’s notebook, undid the string, and then quickly paged through it.
“Which one?” David asked. “They all look deep.”
Michael read. “We ventured into all the caves, traveling for several hours to check which was the best chance to take us to the Earth’s interior. All continued deeper, but the cave on the left reached an almighty chasm that would have exhausted our rope and our appetite for adventure. The cave in the center delivered the first of the horrors of our journey. But the cave on the right is the pathway where we found the marks of Saknussov.”
He snapped the book shut. “So, now we begin to follow the true path of Saknussov, instead of trailing behind Harry Wenton.”
“I don’t like it,” Angela said.
“What? What’s not to like? We get the lead,” Michael asked.
“Well, for a start, what exactly does the ‘center cave delivered the first of our horrors’ mean?” Angela scowled. “If there’s something dangerous in there, then we need to warn Harry.”
Jane exhaled and groaned. “She’s right. The guy is an ass, but we can’t let a fellow caver walk right into danger.”
“Oh right, so five minutes ago, we’re all not believing anything that Katya Babikov has said, and now, we do need to worry about what she said?” Michael held up a hand; he had no time for this. “Listen, Harry and his team are way too far ahead for us to do anything about it unless we run, and we’re not going to do that. I’m sure that by the time we caught up, if we even could, Harry would have found out what it is he needs to be mindful of.”
Jane paced away for a moment but then came back. “Dammit, he’s right, Angela. Harry had half a day’s start on us. It’s not worth it.”
Angela’s lips pressed flat for a moment but eventually she gave an almost imperceptible nod. She walked to the mouth of the middle cave and leaned into it.
“Harry! Harry Wenton!”
The name bounced away into the cave, and she stood with her head cocked for a moment. But there was no reply.
“David, leave a cave note for him,” Michael said. “Tell him that there are dangers down here, and we’ll see him on the surface.�
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David Sholtzen nodded and then removed a small board with laminated sheets on it, plus a marker pen. He looked up, pen poised. “Should I tell him we’ve gone into the right…”
“No,” Michael shot back. “No, David. Best they head up and we’ll meet them top side.”
“Okay dokey.” He wrote the message, and then rock-tacked it to the wall at the cave mouth. David peered into the darkness for a few more moments. “Good luck, Harry.”
Michael smiled as he readjusted his pack. “Onward.”
He led them into the right-side cave.
*****
The caves got bigger, and drier, and the added exertion meant they used up more water in their bodies—perspired it and exhaled it—at a greater rate than they dared gulp it down.
So Angela’s words brought them to a sudden stop.
“There’s water.”
She crossed to a slime-covered wall with a pool at its base, crouched, and shone her light into it.
“Hang on, smells a little weird, and there’s something crusting the edges that could be a mineral build-up, or some sort of primitive cave fungus.”
“Is it clear?” David asked.
“Hmm, a little cloudy,” Angela replied.
“Good enough for me as I’m nearly out, and I have one hellova dehydration headache.” Ronnie took his canteen from his belt pouch at his back and shook it—there sounded like only a few drops left.
“I dunno. Looks a bit off.” Angela looked up. “Michael, Jane, what do you think?”
Ronnie knelt by the pool. “Shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll just use a purifying tablet for any bugs.”
Michael shrugged. “Might be okay. Caves are fairly pristine environments. But then again, no one has ever tested water from this depth. I’ll pass.”
“He’s right. Small pools of stagnant water are always high risk,” Jane added. “Just remember, aside from bacteria, there’s a lot of crappy fungus that lives in caves.”
David looked into the water. “She’s right, Ronnie. You could get brain rot from Pseudogymnoascus destructans, or if you inhale Histoplasma capsulatum, it’ll collapse your entire respiratory system.”
