Anna Pigeon - Blind Descent Part 1

BLIND DESCENT.

NEVADA BARR.

For Andrea, Jim, and Andrew Goodbar.

Without their expertise and generosity not only could this book not have been written but I would never have been lured into the beauty of the underground.

With deep appreciation of the staff of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, particularly Dale Pate, Paula Bauer, Harry Burgess, and Frank Deckert. Among them, they educated, enlightened, amused, advised, and kept me safe on what turned out to be some of the most amazing journeys of my career. People like those at Carlsbad Caverns make me remember that the hackneyed phrase "our National Parks are our greatest heritage" is the simple truth.

1.

Anna hadn't seen so much das.h.i.+ng about and popping in and out of doors since the French farce went out of fas.h.i.+on. Given the pomp and posturing surrounding her, she felt like a walk-on in Noises Off.

Anna Pigeon was on the overhead team, the second wave to hit CACA-the official if unfortunate National Park Service abbreviation for New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns, home to two of the most famous caves in the world, the original cave, known and exploited since the late 1800s, and Lechuguilla, discovered in the 1980s and yet to be fully explored.

Though Carlsbad was less than an hour's drive from the Guadalupe Mountains, where Anna had worked some years back, she'd been down in the cave only once. The parts of Carlsbad open to the public were highly developed: paved paths, theatrical lighting, named formations, benches to sit on while changing film. At the bottom, some seven hundred fifty feet underground, there was a snack bar and souvenir shop. When hot dogs and rubber stalact.i.tes had been brought into this pristine heart of the earth, their ubiquitous companions came as well: rats, c.o.c.kroaches, and racc.o.o.ns.

It could be argued that the open areas of the caverns felt as much like a Disney creation as s.p.a.ce Mountain. There were no dangerous mazes, no precipitous heights, no tight squeezes. Still, it was a cave, and so Anna had pa.s.sed on repeat trips. Given the inevitable nature of things, she would spend much of eternity underground; no sense rus.h.i.+ng on down before the grim reaper called for her. Her love of bats might have overcome her fear of enclosed s.p.a.ces, but if one waited, the splendid little creatures were good enough to come out and be enjoyed in less Stygian realms.

This December she had been sent to CACA from her home park in Mesa Verde, Colorado. Trained teams consisting of park rangers from all over the region responded to catastrophes that ranged from hurricanes to presidential visits. This time it was the injury of a caver.

Had the caver been hurt in Carlsbad Cavern, extrication would have been simple: pop her in a wheelchair, roll her down to the snack bar and onto the elevator. She'd have been home before her mother knew she was missing.

But this caver had been injured in Lechuguilla. The cave was on NPS lands near CACA's headquarters. Lechuguilla was closed to the general public for the protection of both the cave and the visitors. Nearly ninety miles of the cave had been explored but it would be many years before it was fully mapped. Lech was a monster man-eating cave, dangerous to get into and harder to get out of.

Two days into Lechuguilla, a member of the survey team had been hurt in an accident. Not surprisingly there'd been a contingent of experienced cavers at Carlsbad at the time, a small but dedicated group given to squeezing themselves into dark holes and living to write home about it.

Before Anna and her teammates had descended on the park, the cavers had begun doing what they did best: getting one of their own back. Procedures in place from the last, well-publicized rescue from Lechuguilla, in 1991, the NPS had mobilized in record time. Within four hours of the report, Anna had been on a plane to El Paso. By the time she reached Carlsbad more than two dozen others from the southwestern region had arrived.

With the overhead team came the inevitable Porta-Johns, food trucks, and power struggles.

On duty less than three hours, Anna was happy to sit out the political squabbles in Oscar Iverson's snug little office. There, far from the madding crowd, she manned the phones in her official capacity as information officer, doling out approved statements to a press already panting for another media glut like that generated by the Baby Jessica case in Texas. When she was eight hundred feet below the surface of the earth and two days travel from the light of day, a grown woman in a limestone cave was almost as good as a baby in a well shaft.

For the past half hour reporters had been getting short shrift. Anna was reading. By chance she'd picked Trapped!, the story of caver Floyd Collins, off Iverson's shelves. It detailed the gruesome death and media circus surrounding the entrapment of a caver in the 1920s. Collins had become wedged in a tight pa.s.sage; his attempts to wriggle free had brought down loose dirt and rock, entombing him from neck to heels, his arms pinned at his sides. For thirteen days, friends had made the dangerous descent to feed him, while up above concessionaires sold food and souvenirs to an ever-growing crowd of vultures gathered in curiosity, sympathy, and morbidity. On the fourteenth day rains so softened the earth that the access tunnel collapsed. Collins was left to die alone.

Scrawled in the margin of the book were the words "fact: wedge victims die."

Transfixed by the same dread a woman in a stranded VW might feel watching a logging truck bearing down on her, Anna was glued to the book. Iverson, Carlsbad's cave specialist, gusted into her sanctuary, and she dropped Trapped!, glad to be rescued from its bleak pages. He waved her back into his ergonomically correct office chair and folded himself haphazardly over the corner of the desk.

Housed in an old stone building built in the 1920s, the office was small, crowded by two desks, the walls lined with metal shelving and stuffed with books. Sprawled over the cluttered desktop, Oscar looked as homey and leggy as a spider in his web. Long limbs poked out the fabric of his trousers at knee and hip. His arms, seeming to bend in several places along their bony length, were stacked like sticks on his thighs. Come Halloween it would take only a little white paint to pa.s.s him off as a respectable skeleton. A mummy of the sere and unwrapped variety would be even easier. The man looked made of leather, hide tanned by the desert, hair coa.r.s.e and straw-colored from the sun. Anna guessed he was close to her age, maybe forty-five or -six.

"Got some bizarre news," he said, banging his heel softly against the metal of the desk.

For whom the bell tolls, Anna's mind translated the hollow ringing.

"Now that the relatives have been notified we can release the name of the injured woman. Frieda Dierkz. And she's asking for one Anna Pigeon."

s.h.i.+t, Anna thought. It tolls for me.

"Frieda?" she echoed stupidly.

Iverson shot her a startled look. "Don't you know her? From the intensity of the summons, I got the idea you two were best buds."

"Buds." Anna's mind was paralyzed, not so much by shock as by incongruity. Hearing Frieda's name in reference to the victim of the rescue was akin to running into one's old grammar school teacher in an opium den.

"She's the dispatcher at Mesa Verde," Anna managed. "We're . . . friends." They were friends, fairly close friends, and Anna wondered why she'd sounded so halfhearted.

"Dierkz was on the survey team," Oscar said patiently, his washed out hazel eyes trying to read Anna's face.

It wasn't an earth-shattering revelation. Most cavers led other lives. They were geologists and physicists, beekeepers and b.u.ms; regular folks who had been bitten by an irregular bug that compelled them to creep beneath the skin of the world every chance they got. Anna had seen the photos of a helmeted and mud-bedaubed Frieda grinning out from nasty little crevices Anna wouldn't go into for love or money, and she'd listened with half an ear about her upcoming "vacation." She'd just not put two and two together.

"What does she want me for?" Without much caring, Anna noted the disapproval sharpening Iverson's gaze. She could guess where it came from: cavers helped cavers. It was an unwritten law of survival. Who else was going to fish them out of the G.o.d-awful places they insisted on pus.h.i.+ng their way into? Iverson stared, and Anna stared back, refusing to apologize or explain. A moment pa.s.sed, and his look softened. Perhaps he reminded himself she was not a caver but a mere mortal.

"The injury is worse than first thought." He spoke slowly as if Anna had a learning disability. His voice was low, gentling. She would have been irritated at the condescension had she not known Iverson always talked that way. "The caver who hiked out said a broken leg. Painful but not life-threatening. Apparently the rock that smashed her kneecap struck a glancing blow to her left temple as it fell. She was knocked unconscious but only briefly. We just got a second report. It was brought out by a member of another team surveying in the Great Beyond. He met up with one of Dierkz's team in Windy City and brought out a message. She's been slipping in and out of consciousness and has suffered some disorientation."

"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."

"Rapels 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 down-sizings, the Park Service had begun to overuse comforting words: team, group, symposium, cl.u.s.ter. 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 t.i.tle, 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 brimless 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 w.i.l.l.i.e.s.

"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 gla.s.ses, 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.tock.

"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 friends.h.i.+p 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 h.e.l.l, 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.sroom partic.i.p.ation, 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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."