Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (13 page)

  Tears started in Frieda's eyes. The first Anna had seen. "No way," she said. "I won't do it. This litter will go through there like a bulldozer. What I don't ruin, you guys will, manhandling me. Get me out." She began to fight the straps that held the lower half of her body in the Stokes. "I'll walk it. Get me a stick."

  She fell back, tears streaking the mud on her cheeks. "There's not a stick for a day's travel in any direction," she said.

  "Lean on me," Anna offered lamely, at a loss how to comfort her.

  "It can't be done," Frieda said.

  Holden smiled. It was inoffensive. The smile of a child. "Au contraire," he said. Anna could almost see the miles of rope and rigging stringing through his brain like the solution to a complex trigonometry problem.

  He started to lay a hand on Frieda's arm but didn't, and Anna sensed for the first time what an essentially shy man he was. "I got it covered. Remember who you're talking to here: Mr. Leave Nothing. Not Even Footprints. Lookie." With his light he pointed to the narrow top of the keyhole. "We're gonna rig you through there. No decorations. Straight line, like thread through the eye of a needle. Bad climb, good haul. You've got to go by your lonesome. There's just room for the litter. Not even a place for your scrawny little lady." He winked at Anna.

  "Good. Okay." Frieda was so relieved she would have agreed to be shot through the keyhole by a cannon. Holden stayed a minute longer to give her a chance for second thoughts. "Really," she said at last. "Alone is fine."

  "I didn't doubt it," Holden said.

  When he'd moved out of earshot, Anna asked, "Why didn't you tell him about the glove on the rock? Both he and Oscar should know." Anna's only reason for not reporting it was Frieda's return to consciousness. In regaining her mental powers, she had regained the right to make her own decisions. "Do you want me to call him back?"

  "No. Don't," Frieda said. "Life is too embarrassing as it is. An attempt on my life. Who'd believe it? Even I don't believe it. I can't remember anything that makes sense. Let's leave well enough alone. Please."

  It didn't feel "well enough" to Anna, and it went against the grain to leave it alone. She'd ever been one to give sleeping dogs a good poke just to see if they were faking it. But she would go along with Frieda because she didn't want to upset her. And she had no proof, not of malfeasance, or even of negligence. Thirty hours-give or take-and they would be out. Thirty hours in a crowd all looking after Frieda's well-being. She would probably be safe.

  For the descent to the floor of the Lounge and the haul up the other side, Anna was rigged along with the Stokes. A spider, a confluence of lines attached to the litter, met several feet above Frieda's midsection. Anna was tied into this spider, the Stokes cutting across her at waist level. Thus secured, she was always with her patient, there to reassure, to push the litter out from the wall when necessary, to handle any problems that came up en route.

  Frieda was in good spirits, and it was contagious. They made it through the magnificent tables without destroying a single formation. On the ascent Anna found herself actually having a good time.

  As promised, phone service awaited them at the top. Twelve or fifteen cavers were scattered around the low-ceilinged room that connected the Cocktail Lounge with Razor Blade. The space resembled the inside of a giant clam shell. Elliptically shaped, the floor and ceiling of bedrock, it came out in a concentric circle from the keyhole to a wide slot. At its highest point, the ceiling was five feet from the floor. There was little that human impact could destroy, making it the ideal place for the teams to congregate. All of the core group, including Oscar and Holden, had made the ascent. The other cavers were a mix of the rescuers from the first team and the three men responsible for providing the phone line.

  Frieda was sequestered near the back of the clam shell, Holden's pack and helmet laid down like sentinels guarding her from all but Anna, Sondra, and the doctor. Peter McCarty was with her, taking advantage of the flat bit of earth to perform central nervous system tests he had been unable to when his patient was comatose.

  Anna had done those tests she was familiar with. Frieda's limbs responded, she had feeling in her extremities, and there were no palpable deformations along her first eight vertebrae. Beyond these simple reassurances, Anna was out of her league and relieved to have someone with training double-check her work. Though it surprised her somewhat, she was also relieved to be given a respite from her duties as chief lady-in-waiting. Physically it was no more demanding than the jobs of any of the others. Often it proved less strenuous. When Frieda rested, Anna rested. It was the caring that sapped her strength. For Frieda she had to be strong, optimistic, unafraid. When she thirsted, she asked Frieda if she wanted a drink. When rope cut through her clothing to rub raw her flesh, she checked her patient to see if she suffered like discomforts. It was good simply to sit and be selfish.

  The "phone booth" had been established up near the keyhole, where those using it would be afforded at least the illusion of privacy. Always needing to be near the spotlight, Sondra squatted close by, sitting on her helmet, a notebook on her lap. Playing at being a journalist, Anna thought uncharitably. Maybe Frieda's rescue was the one big story she thought would give her the financial freedom to abandon what was apparently a loveless marriage. Schatz sprawled nearby, looking for all intents and purposes dead to the world.

  Oscar used the phone, then Brent Roxbury, and finally Holden. After he'd been on the line for maybe three minutes, Sondra slammed her notebook shut like an angry schoolgirl and huffed over to where Anna was sitting.

  "The New York Times." She spit out the words. "They're onto this story. Like they can know anything." She flopped down, glaring at Anna as if waiting for her to take up the cause and fume with her.

  Anna was too tired. "You'll have the first-person I-was-there angle," she said consolingly.

  "Who'll care? By the time we get out of this hellhole it'll be old news."

  "I guess." Anna concentrated on unwrapping a Jolly Rancher Holden had given her at the last rest stop. She wished Sondra would go away. Petty concerns in the face of disaster irritated her. She remembered a self-important tour guide from one of the many buses that plagued Mesa Verde during the tourist season. An elderly man in her group had collapsed on the porch of the museum, dead of a massive coronary. They'd practically had to pry the guide's grasping fingers from the corpse's wrist so they could shock him in an attempt to restart his heart. The woman was livid, spouting New Age bullshit about how she needed to say good-bye to his spirit. Later, when Anna was tying up the loose ends, it turned out the guide didn't even know the man's name. She'd traveled with the group for three days and had never been interested enough to remember it.

  That was about as close as Anna had ever come to taking her baton to a visitor who wasn't actually breaking any laws.

  "I told Holden I'd talk to the Times," Sondra said. "He said they declined. Those sons of bitches have no interest if you're female. Screw the truth. White male only wants to talk to white male. Big surprise."

  Holden Tillman's race would be pretty hard to discern over the phone, but Anna didn't say anything. Maybe the newspaper business was as sexist as Sondra believed. It wasn't a circle Anna had ever moved in, or ever wanted to.

  "Anna," Dr. McCarty called, and she looked over to where he sat with Frieda. "Frieda's going to do her phone interview now. Want to come keep her company?"

  Grasping at any excuse to leave, Anna pushed herself to her feet. As she stoop-walked toward the back of this cave-within-a-cave, she could hear Sondra grumbling, "Anna. Of course. Anna. Now I suppose there's only one lady-in-waiting..."

  "It's Katie Couric," Peter called.

  Sondra gasped. Or hissed. Anna couldn't tell with her back turned. In spite of herself, she laughed. She didn't much care if Sondra heard or not. The woman was beyond help.

  Frieda did splendidly. Dr. McCarty's central nervous system exam had freed her from the cervical collar, and she was in excellent spirits. Whether she liked it or not, she was both a good sport and a trooper.

  She was charming and gracious and brave and funny, lots of good stuff to quote on the six o'clock news. Or the ten o'clock news. Anna no longer had any sense of time. The little numbers the hands of her watch pointed at, then passed, had ceased to have meaning.

  Phone calls finally at an end, Holden delivered the good news. At least it was good to everyone but Anna and possibly the doctor's wife. For the past five minutes he had closeted himself in a cranny near the keyhole with Peter McCarty. When the two men emerged it was to tell the rescue party that their hellish pace could be relaxed. Frieda was stable and alert. The break in her tibia was in no way life-threatening. With this fortuitous development they could afford to move more slowly, take greater care not to harm any of the natural resources of the cave.

  Like a good citizen, Anna joined in the cheer, but her heart was creating a bizarre sensation in her chest by racing and sinking simultaneously. Thirty hours had seemed an eternity. Forty-eight rang in her ears like a death sentence. Get a grip, she told herself coldly. Pretend you are in a movie theater, a mall. The strategy was transparent; movie theaters and malls had doors.

  Holden went on to tell them anyone feeling the need to could rotate out. A cave rescue made special demands. Those unaccustomed to it, not in perfect health, or "off their feed" for any reason were to go and Godspeed. They'd already given several lifetimes' worth.

  "That's me," Sondra said, and her husband pretended not to hear.

  Anna wanted to go. Like a drowning woman wants air, she wanted space and sunlight. In an act of mind-bending courage, she put temptation from her and said nothing.

  Holden's rigging through the high slit above the aragonite forest of Razor Blade was a work of artistry. He edged through, a line tied into a carabiner at the back of his belt. A rig and tag line were pulled through using that first line as a tow. Pulleys were anchored at either end by running webbing around a boulder on the Lounge side and a formidable stalagmite on the far end. As he had promised, Frieda went through as neatly as silken thread through a needle's eye.

  It took considerably longer for the rescuers, now nineteen in number, to creep and contort through the lower, decorated passage. They went on the buddy system, two at a time, with orders to take it slow, warn each other of endangered formations, and never, under any circumstances, stray from the existing trail. In Holden, Lechuguilla had a staunch protector.

  Razor Blade opened on Lake Rapunzel, so named, Oscar said, because the only way to the lake was across fifty-five feet of flowstone, a stunning formation created by eons of trickles leaking down the side of the basin to leave behind golden locks that cascaded as enticingly as the imaginary damsel's tresses.

  Traveling in, they had passed through the chamber, but Anna had seen it only fleetingly via scraps of light that served more to irritate her exhausted retinae than to illuminate the room. Now, as it turned out, her lucent fantasy of earlier in the day had come true.

  Along with the rigging team working from Rapunzel to the cave's entrance came two newspaper photographers, sent by the Times and allowed in by George Laymon and Carlsbad's superintendent, to record the rescue. They had brought powerful floodlights. When Anna corkscrewed out of the aragonite embrace of Razor Blade, the room and lake were bathed in light. She laughed and clapped her hands like a delighted child. For that instant she was no longer tired, no longer afraid.

  The chamber was made of magic. From where she stood on the lip of the run, liquid gold poured down to a lake as crystalline and blue as a summer sky. Beneath the water's surface floated great clouds of white stone, appearing as ethereal as any she'd watched forming over the mountains of southern Colorado. This jewel was in a setting befitting its splendor. Flowing draperies ringed the water in a delicate golden tracery. It staggered the imagination to know this was all made of solid rock. That it had remained hidden from human eyes for the short eternity of its existence lent it a mystical aura. Anna was transfixed.

  In short order, bustling humanity compromised the beauty. Zeddie hovered at the drop, checking anchors as the teams began rigging the descent to the water from Razor Blade Run and the shorter climb up a second golden fall to a bleak section of the cave dubbed Katie's Pigtail.

  Sublime became surreal as a giant alligator flopped into the diamond waters.

  "What in the heck . . ." Anna heard Oscar whispering beside her.

  "It's Frieda's ride."

  Anna turned to see Holden looking particularly delighted at the gray-green amphibian. "It's Andrew's favorite. The boy has a deeply generous heart."

  Andrew, Anna recalled, was Tillman's four-year-old son.

  Oscar shook his head. Fatigue robbed him of his sense of humor.

  "Somehow I think the Park Service could have come up with a few inner tubes that would have done the job."

  "Oscar, Oscar, Oscar," Holden said sadly, a man lamenting the failure of a promising protégé. "Inner tubes are unclean. Andrew's 'gator is clean, lightweight, easily packed, and designed to float supine bathers."