'Coffee breaks,' Holden said simply.
Coffee. Anna would have given a year of her life for a good hot cup of coffee. 'Where?' she almost wailed.
Holden tapped the pocket on the front of his tee-shirt. 'Next to my heart.' He pulled out a small foil envelope of Taster's Choice instant, ripped off a corner, and tapped the contents expertly into his bottom lip like a farmer taking chaw. 'Good to the last crystal.'
Frieda was as tired as any of them. Without the concealing mask of dirt, her face showed it. Her skin was drawn and pale and her eyes were staring, too much of the whites showing. For the hauls, Holden needed her awake and moderately alert so she could tell them if she was in any distress and needed to stop. There was a limit to the amount of pain medication Dr. McCarty could give her and still leave her with enough brain power to work on her own behalf. Though no one but Anna was permitted to hear a word of complaint from her lips, Frieda was not the best of patients. Anna suspected she hurt a good deal more than she would admit and took less pain medicine than she needed, as if by suffering she was somehow paying her way.
'Ready for a last push?' Tillman asked Frieda.
'Ready whenever you are. I'm the one's been napping all day.'
'This is rigged like a dream,' he promised. 'You'll be in camp in no time. I got a special room in the Swiss cheese earmarked. You two can have it all to yourselves to do lady things.'
When this was over Anna wanted to meet Holden's wife and his little boy. A man as fine as Tillman didn't just spring into being all of a piece like Venus on the half shell. Somewhere along the line he had been shaped. Anna had the feeling she would be right at home with those sculpting influences.
Anna and Frieda were tied into the web of ropes. Two pulleys, anodized in red, white, and blue, were set to roll down the main traverse, a thick lavender rope. The Stokes was tied into the system with webbing, two lines through each of the four carabiners locked onto the frame of the litter and running up to locking 'biners connected to the bottom of the rollers. A gray line attached at the same point. This would be used to pull the Stokes and Anna along the crevasse. A second, purple rope, lighter than the traverse line, was connected as well, but with its own carabiners, a tag line so the Stokes and its dependants could be retrieved in the event of a malfunction. Each system had a backup, and each connection had been checked by Holden, then rechecked by Oscar and, apparently on her own agenda, by Zeddie as well. Neither Anna nor Frieda had any compunction about trusting their lives to the cat's cradle of ropes.
Nothing in Lechuguilla was designed for the easy access of humans. Katie's Pigtail was no exception. The crack was irregular; the sides of jutting rock looked as if they had only recently been torn from the opposing wall. The stones were white overlaid with dirt that sifted from above. Below, all was darkness, a band of unrelenting night cutting raggedly away from the farthest reach of the lamps. The right side of the Pigtail was concave, gaping holes where chunks of rock had fallen away. On the left was a fractured ledge, a footpath for mountain goats. It was here the remaining rescuers would make their way. Three-quarters of the way to the exit, the crevasse was crossed by breakdown, immense slabs forming a natural bridge. Five yards beyond was the landing where they would start the climb to camp.
Katie's Pigtail couldn't be rigged in the neat in-line haul that Holden had managed above Razor Blade. For most of the way the rigging was tucked up close to the left-hand wall. The ledge was too fragmented to hand-carry the Stokes. It would be suspended over the drop and moved along by pulleys and haul lines.
Anna hooked into the spider, she and Frieda were lowered over the edge of the drop. Anna's feet were flat against the wall, her fanny over thin air. The Stokes was held several inches above her airborne lap. By using the strength of the muscles in her thighs, she would be able to 'walk' the Stokes over the rough patches along the edge. The haul line did the work of moving the litter forward. Wherever on the goat track cavers could find perches, they waited to help her manipulate the litter around obstacles.
Knowing this was the last work of the day gave strength to Anna's flagging spirits as she began the long crab-walk to the exit with Frieda. Ropes slid, pulleys rolled. Muscles in her thighs and butt burned, but the Stokes slipped and bumped along without mishap. At Holden's order, no one talked. His voice, light and clear as he supervised from the false floor of stone bridging the canyon, issued commands and encouragement. Foot by foot they passed through the maw of the Pigtail. Anna could see her own exhaustion and elation mirrored in the faces of the others; a dance, a symphony, a poem of human effort and mind.
The first hint that something had gone wrong was the call
7
Like a flick of foam on the crest of a tidal wave, the shout was borne down on a thunderous roar. In the insulated chamber, sworn to long silence by the earth itself, the noise consumed everything in its path. The stone beneath Anna's boot soles quaked. The Stokes chattered against the limestone. Anna could feel the frame ratcheting in her hands. The feeble clacking of metal was lost in the greater chaos. Helmet lights slashed at the darkness, cutting across each other in the void, vainly seeking the source of the racket. In a second Anna saw those beams turn from gold to brown. In another instant they were smothered completely.
Silt-out, she thought inanely, her mind grasping at a diving incident years before. Dust: the earth was reclaiming the canyon they crept through. Curling down over Frieda, Anna grabbed both sides of the Stokes and hung on. Her hard hat was pressed against the Plexiglas protecting Frieda's face. Anna thought she heard Frieda screaming, but it might have been her own voice.
Ropes slipped, and there was a sickening skid downward. Then something broke loose, and they fell as one falls in a nightmare. Sudden weightlessness, a sense of utter helplessness, as all that was once real, once stable, is sucked away. Without sight, there were no walls streaking by, no floor rushing up. There were just the wind and the breathless drop.
Without warning the ropes caught, and Anna was jerked above the litter, the webbing slashing at the soft skin of her groin. Upended, she snapped back against the canyon wall, elbow cracking into an unforgiving surface. The litter was still between her hands, the weight of it threatening to drag her arms from their sockets. Maybe lines still held it, maybe they didn't. Anna wasn't going to let go and find out. As long as the spider held, she could hold, she told herself.
She lied. The leather of her gloves began to slip, a slow rotation that would pry her fingers from the metal. Squeezing with every muscle in her body, Anna willed her bones to weld to the aluminum. 'I got you, Frieda,' she said over and over, as if by repeating it it would continue to be the truth.
By the light of her lamp she could see Frieda's face below her. Through the gauze of swirling dust she looked no more than twelve years old. 'Grab me, Frieda. Grab my wrists.' In what appeared to be slow motion, Frieda reached up. Anna could see the articulation of her fingers, opening like petals of a flower in time-lapse photography.
Grinding as of enormous gears out of sync clogged her ears and squeezed the gray matter in her skull. Dust boiled down in an opaque swirl, burning her eyes and lungs. Frieda vanished in a noxious cloud. 'Grab hold,' Anna cried. Dust forced her eyes closed, stopped her breath. None of her senses would function. She felt a terror so primal she could no longer even speak. Fingers closed around her wrists. Good girl, Frieda, she thought, and clenched eyes and teeth and hands against the onslaught.
Gradually the noise abated. The invisible freight train roaring down their canyon turned away, the rumble following it. Pressure lifted with the relative quiet. The sound of rocks skittering touched lightly on the ear like the burble of a mountain stream. Anna remembered to breathe and was rewarded by a hacking cough expelling dust- saturated air. She opened her eyes. In the brown glow of her headlamp she could see her left arm and Frieda's face. Through the Plexiglas Frieda looked up at her, and Anna saw her own fear mirrored.
Stillness reigned. Anna craned her neck, peering over her shoulder. The lines held. The traverse rope was at a drunken angle, but it was taut, and the spider looked solid, a testament to Oscar and Holden's rigging expertise.
'Whoa,' she said. 'They've still got us. We can let go. Easy.' Frieda loosed her hold on Anna's wrists, leaving a burn where she'd gripped bare skin. 'Me now. Sheesh. My hands are stuck in the 'on' position.' Anna laughed shakily, and Frieda managed a smile. Before Anna could pry her fingers from the metal, another sound assaulted
