Sinkhole Read online

  Sinkhole

  Deborah Jackson

  Sinkhole

  Copyright © Deborah Jackson 2012

  Published by Deborah Jackson

  Cover Design by Matthew Birtch

  Illustrations/Maps by Jessica Jackson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  A Note to the Reader

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  A Note to the Reader

  You’ll find a map of the cave system at the back of the book. I recommend that you refrain from looking at it until you’ve read the story, so that you can experience the atmosphere of the cave and each new passage and challenge as the characters do. But if you become confused and disoriented and must take a peek, it’s there to relieve your befuddlement and claustrophobia.

  D.J.J.

  Chapter One

  You’re insane, thought Kat. As she clung to the spear of limestone that projected into the river, she felt it again—a heart-stopping shift in the rock. Isn’t it enough that you drove them this deep? she berated herself. Now you’re risking their lives! She half-turned and looked at Ray, who clawed at the slick rock, battling the turbulent current of the sump, despite all his skill. Beyond him, the two inexperienced cave divers clutched the rope she’d secured to them, as tightly fixed as the nodes on the wall.

  But if you don’t keep going . . .

  “This rock’s weak,” she said to the others. “Don’t use it when you reach this point. I’ll try to find a more stable one.”

  “I think we should go back,” said Ray. His voice came out as a tinny squawk on the underwater PA system.

  Kat caught the gleam of his eye in the faint light cast from her helmet. Damn Ray. Mr. I-don’t-care-if-it’s-a-sheer-drop-into-hell was now the voice of reason?

  “No,” she said, ignoring the nagging voice in her head. “Not yet. If we just descend a little farther, we’ll find a dry tunnel.”

  “And more specimens,” said Pete. “We haven’t collected many yet.”

  Kat felt another wobble in the rock. She reached for a more solid handhold.

  “I’m ready to turn back,” said Megan, gasping as if the effort of hanging on was too much for her. “There’s no sign . . . that the Mayans . . . ever came down this far.”

  Kat clutched the next rock node, the last remnant of some outcrop of karst that hadn’t been polished clean by the water. She dug her fingers into a groove at the side.

  “There is something waiting to be discovered down below,” she argued. “I just know it, after what they’ve found in other caves and seafloor vents. Even on Mars. We have to keep going.”

  “Kat, this is crazy. You said the rock was unstable,” said Ray. “And the current here is too strong. If we lose our grip, we’ll be swept away. No one comes back from that.”

  “Just ten more meters,” she insisted.

  Kat turned and gripped the next knob of rock, hauling the others along with the rope. They each had to copy her movements, clinging to the rock wall like spiders, just to keep the current from catching them and flinging them downstream. At this point in the channel, the current was so wild it whipped up a lather of bubbles, obscuring any view ahead. Kat reached blindly, latching onto another rocky handhold. But as her full weight rested on the next projection, the rock shivered. It twisted and shuddered and grated. Then it ripped free of the wall.

  Kat screamed as the water punched her forward, dislodging Ray, Pete, and Megan too. Caught in the current, she flailed helplessly, her head crunching again and again on the walls. The flashlight in her helmet flickered, as it crashed into the tongues of rock and, all too soon, it was snuffed out.

  This was it then, the end. She was flying blindly through a narrow stream framed by rocky outcrops that could snap her limbs and split her skull. The dark wrapped around her like a suffocating blanket, preventing her from grabbing any lifeline that might be within reach, and the force of the current pummeled her chest so violently she couldn’t even scream. Kat waited for the last brain-nullifying impact.

  But it didn’t come.

  Incredibly, and without warning, she bobbed up like a buoy into empty space. It must be an open chamber, but the suction pulled her under again before she could react.

  Oh no, you don’t.

  She pumped her legs. Her hands plowed through the water until she bounced up into the cavity again. Now, to stay there.

  Kat grappled for a handhold in the dark and finally found purchase in a slippery crack. It took the last scrap of strength she had to pull herself out of the water and onto a flat surface. She flipped up her mask and gasped the stale, dank air.

  Sanctuary.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Ray, Pete, and Megan were still attached to the rope, and as the current swept them past and sucked them farther down the stream, it wrenched Kat from the solid ground and into the water again. At the last second she shot out a hand and just managed to clamp onto a jagged spear of rock. She had to hold fast or they were all dead. Somehow she had to pull them out.

  Struggling against the vortex, Kat slapped another hand on the rock. Although it was smooth and slick—maybe a stalagmite—she managed to haul herself up, wedging a knee behind the limestone fragment.

  She was out of the water now, but the noose about her waist felt like it could slice her in half. Keep going. Just a little bit more. Using the stalagmite as a pulley, she dragged the ropes around it. She heard the faint crumbling of calcite as she liberated the first team member from the water.

  The suction snapped like a plug suddenly popped free from a drain. Kat felt Ray flop beside her, the seal-slick neop
rene brushing her leg. He gasped and smacked wet palms on the porous rock. She hauled again on the rope, wincing as she heard chunks of limestone break off of the stalagmite and tumble to the ground with a hollow clatter. But the drag lessened when Ray caught his breath and added his biceps to the task. Out came Pete—the lesser weight—and then Megan, releasing the strain altogether. Kat could hear them panting as they stripped off their rebreathers.

  “Thanks,” rasped Megan. “Thought we were goners.”

  Kat collapsed on the stone slab, feeling the throb and sting of bruises and cuts. A sharper pain jabbed her leg—the one she’d sliced open six hundred meters above on a razor fragment of rock. She’d probably ripped it further. She couldn’t see anything, but her hearing was acute in the oppressive darkness. The slosh of the water from the sump was punctuated by a steady drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . of condensation from the ceiling of the cavern. You . . . stupid . . . idiot . . . Kat listened to the rhythm for the space of a few heartbeats before she responded.

  “Thought we were, too.” She peeled off her helmet and neoprene cap. Chuckling nervously, she ran a trembling hand through her damp hair. “Thought I was going to meet my Maker. But I wasn’t ready for it. Not quite yet, anyway.”

  Tentative fingers touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?” asked Ray.

  “Never better.” She ignored the throbbing in her chest. “Does anyone have a light? Mine must have smashed against the rock, and I guess yours did too, Pete.” Ray and Megan had gone without in order to save batteries.

  “I can find my extra,” said Pete. She heard a rustling and the plastic whine of a zipper. “Got it.”

  He flicked on a beam, which slashed through the darkness and painted the rock with a pearly glow. Thick columns of limestone surrounded them, glistening tree trunks of white. The wall was three meters away, and to the side, a narrow crack in the stone seemed the only extension of the cave besides the sump. Kat could feel a shy breeze brush her face.

  “Well, I could think of worse places to end up,” said Ray, smiling. His silver-streaked mustache sparkled in the pale light. “At least there’s air. There could be an open passage to an even deeper shaft.”

  “You’re right,” said Kat. “Despite the fact that we nearly died, this may turn out to be a good thing. The walls are glistening—they’re probably slimy with microbial life. We still have our packs and the line. We can just explore here for a while and haul ourselves out again.”

  “Um,” said Megan. “I think we have a problem.”

  Kat turned toward her. “A problem?”

  Megan held up the guideline. It had been severed two meters behind her. “I was just happy it didn’t snap in front of me.”

  Kat smothered a curse. What more could go wrong? “I guess we have to call for help.” She sloughed off her waterproof pack and zipped it open. She’d placed a series of miniature radio relays every one hundred and fifty meters so she could communicate with the men topside who were monitoring their progress. Pete’s men from the pharmaceutical company and a caver called Harding. She rummaged through her pack and extracted the case that should contain the radio. It was empty. It must have snapped open inside the pack during their white-water ride through the sump. Kat rooted frantically through her pack and unearthed the radio. What was left of it. Wires and shards of black casing dangled from her hand.

  “Damn,” she said. “It’s trashed.” She rested her head against the pack. She couldn’t believe this. They were trapped at two thousand meters. No hope of rescue. Even this last sump was something very few cavers would risk.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Pete. “All we have to do is go back the way we came.”

  Three heads swung toward him.

  “Well, gee, Pete,” said Ray. “How do you suppose we do that? Have you ever swum against the current in white water?”

  Pete bit his lip and shook his head.

  “Imbecile,” said Ray, reverting to his native French, something he only did when he was upset or angry. “We can’t get out through the sump. But maybe there’s another tunnel.”

  Kat smiled. Never say trapped to a caver. If you can belly crawl a mile underground, you can find a way out. “Right,” she said. “We’ll get what we came for, then we’ll find the exit.”

  She stood up and gazed at the magnificent thicket of stalactites and columns. Like fine white icicles, delicate soda straws pointed waxy tips into the air above her head. There were bound to be microbes here. Undetected, unchallenged microfingers that tickled life from the rock itself.

  “This could be the place,” she said. A stab of pain from beneath the old surgery scar made her grunt and double over.

  “Kat, are you okay?” asked Megan.

  “Sure,” she gasped. Just dying.

  Chapter Two

  “Dr. Delaney, you have a phone call.”

  The voice from the PA intruded into the silence. There were at least ten people in the operating theater at Toronto General Hospital, including scrub nurses, interns, and a few veteran surgeons with intense frowns on their faces, and nobody was making a sound.

  “I’m a little busy right now,” said Mark Delaney, his eyes glued to the computer screen as he watched the virtual path of the miniature submarine as it threaded through his patient’s coronary artery. He’d programmed the tiny machine prior to surgery, going by the patient’s angiogram and MRI scans to plot an exact route through the subclavian artery, up the aorta, and into the patient’s blocked coronary. “This is where it gets dicey,” he explained to his fellow surgeons.

  Dr. Cary, the director of cardiac surgery, shook his head. Under his familiar blue surgical cap, he wore a skeptical expression.

  Beside Mark, a sterile tray had been laid out with scalpels and saws, sutures and needles, but not a nick had been made in the patient—a very pleasant sixty-year-old guinea pig called Marsha Henley. She’d agreed to be the first cardiac patient to be operated on by a submarine. Mark could be very convincing when he explained how nanotechnology had advanced to the point where he could scour out her arteries without having to do bypass surgery. How he could save her life without slicing her open and sawing through her breastbone, without cutting into her major arteries and attaching a bypass machine, without flaying her leg and removing a vein, and without wiring her shut and then waiting months more for her to recuperate. Yes, he could be very persuasive.

  But not everyone was convinced. Dr. Ames, the gray-haired, thick-nosed, frowning individual to his right, had tried to veto the first human trials for four years, probably fearing that Mark might be his replacement. Mark had operated on pigs and monkeys, cats, and even his own dog, without one fatality. Kat had been frantic after he’d injected the sub into Sparky’s veins when the dog had become short of breath and lackadaisical, but Sparky had come out on top, with pristine, plaque-free arteries. Even Kat had had to admit afterward that he was on to something. Although not everyone was happy to give up the knife, scalpel-free surgery was here to stay.

  Has it been four years already? he thought, as the sub ticked its way through Marsha’s artery toward the blockage. Four years since Sparky’s surgery and Kat’s diagnosis? Four years since the arguments and the pain and his mistake.

  The sub moved forward, churning past red blood cells and white blood cells by using its tiny flagella—the bacterial mode of propulsion. He’d experimented with both synthetic flagella composed of carbon nanotubes and actual bacteria, using a wild strain of Salmonella typhimurium to power his sub, and had settled for the living organism because of its efficient mobility and relatively long life span—one hour. That was all he would need. Mark activated the ultrasonic transducers, which conveyed the actual image of the blockage to his VR screen. The clogged section, a thick conglomeration of mucus, was approaching and becoming clearer. Yes, this was the dicey part. He must be totally focused.

  “The call is from Mexico,” said the voice from the speaker, jarring his concentration.

  “Damn,” he sa
id. “I’m busy. Making history, as if she doesn’t know,” he muttered under his breath. “Tell Kat I’ll call her back.”

  The sub advanced toward the plug. He had to keep his mind on the task. But somehow she’d done it again, distracting him with her image, her keen blue eyes and the sarcastic tilt of her eyebrow. He thought of the pucker of her forehead as the pain sizzled through her. And she refused to let him help. She never let him help!

  “Doctor,” said Angela, the busty scrub nurse to his right. “Are you ready?” She arched her perfect charcoal eyebrows, diverting him from the memories and the pain, if only for a moment. How well Angela knew how to do that. Except it had been only a moment—a moment he would regret for the rest of his life.

  “Yes,” he said hollowly. He took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said firmly. He donned his virtual reality glove as the minute capsule sped toward the blockage. Funny how thoroughly it resembled the Starship Enterprise. He’d designed it that way, with a round chip in the front and a propeller in the rear, for which he’d eventually substituted the more efficient flagella, but still, it seemed like destiny. To boldly go where only blood cells, platelets, and hemoglobin had gone before.

  Mark hit the key that would contact the radio frequency receiver on the sub and give him full control. He halted the sub’s progress, anchored it to the arterial wall to prevent it from being flushed out of the artery again, and activated the micro-gripper. With a pincer movement of his fingers, two miniscule claws scooped out a chunk of deposit. With his other hand he tripped the piezoelectric actuators, initiating the ultrasound device and vaporizing the globule. He smiled.

  “Microrobotics is the future of surgery,” he said. Then he set to burrowing into the blockage and eliminating it. He was almost finished when the speaker blared to life again.

  “I’m sorry Dr. Delaney, but this man insists on speaking to you. He says it’s rather urgent. Could one of your assistants step in for a moment?”