“Keyhole passage,” Master Sergeant Attie said, pouring a bottle of water over the Kriss to get some of the mud off. They were both covered in the thick, sticky mud, as was all of their equipment. “Called that ’cause it looks sort of like an old-time skeleton keyhole.”
Barb did a rough clean on the weapon, ensured that it was still cycling well, then shone her gun-light up. She quickly realized that it didn’t reach all the way into the sides of the spread-out upper portion.
“There could be anything up there,” she noted, sweeping the Kriss around.
“Yep,” Attie replied as the rest of the team dragged themselves out. “I’ve been thinking on that.”
“That was just unpleasant as anything I’ve ever done,” Janea said. “Except this one guy in Los Angeles…”
“Let’s do a gear check,” Attie said. “That could have been pretty rough on our systems.”
The team, in pairs, spent a couple of minutes checking out all their gear. Surprisingly, with the exception of having to change a battery in Randell’s radio, it was all functioning.
“Good stuff,” Barb said, happily. “I do so appreciate good gear.”
“I got most of it off of Navy SPECWAR,” Attie admitted. “Salt water is worse than mud, and the SEALS can break anything. So their stuff has to be really robust. And the radios are designed with obstructions in mind. They’ve actually got about the best gear around for caving, just most cavers can’t afford it. Or don’t have the clearance to get it. Let’s stay sharp. There’s not only limited visibility at the top, there could be passages off of it.”
“Master Sergeant?” Struletz said. “I could probably chimbley to the top and work my way along through there. That way we’d have top cover.”
“And if you had to get down in the middle of a firefight you’d be vulnerable as hell,” Attie said.
“I’ll do it,” Barb said, releasing the Kriss to draw back on its three-point harness. She jumped up and got both feet onto small projections on the wall, and then started climbing the passage like a spread-out spider. Fast. She was rarely in even three points of contact, and it looked most of the time like she wasn’t in contact at all. She hardly used her hands.
“That was just…bizarre,” Attie said when she reached the top.
“Benefits of a lifetime of martial arts study, Master Sergeant,” Barb said, not even winded. “I had this instructor in…Malaysia? Yeah, Malaysia. He loved really bad martial arts movies. But he took some of the stuff from them, some of the stuff you’re looking at and going ‘Yeah, right,’ and added it to his art. Stuff like fighting off of balconies and walls. He believed that the essence of martial arts was grace. It wasn’t a really great combat art, unless you were fighting on a ledge, but it was good for learning balance.”
“ Kung Pow?” Struletz asked.
“Oh, that was minor,” Barb said, laughing. “The original was worse. And there are much, much worse martial arts movies than that.”
She shone her light down the passage and was pleasantly surprised to find that from the top, she could see for nearly sixty feet. The passage, viewed from her lofty vantage, was a series of domes covering the serpentine lower portion. There were still bends, and there were spots that the light didn’t illuminate; indeed, there were small nooks and crannies that were going to be hard to check out, but she could cover the team very well from up here. The only problem being that the irregular oval top portion she currently was standing in was short enough she was having to bend nearly double. But she’d be able to stand up in the next dome. At least if she did the whole thing with her legs spread across the passage. That was going to be unpleasant.
“I won’t say what you look like from down here,” Janea said. “But you’d better be glad you’re not wearing a skirt.”
Barb pulled both legs to one side of the passage, bracing on the far side with one hand, and held out her right.
“Toss me Lazarus,” she said.
“You’re joking,” Janea said.
“He can make his way through up here,” Barb said. “And he’s better at spotting these things than we are.”
“Okay,” Janea said, coaxing the cat over then standing up with him in her arms. “I’m not very good at throwing.”
“Let me,” Randell said, taking the cat. Lazarus was looking notably worried but he allowed himself to be manhandled. “Catch.”
Randell tossed the cat vertically, eliciting a startled “Rrow?!” but he tossed him high enough and accurately enough that Barb was able to make a fair catch.
“You’ve got point,” she said, setting Lazarus on a more-or-less flat spot. “Head on out.”
Where the domes were, the passage became, from her position, an oval tube, slightly serpentine, with a very wide crevasse in the middle. Most of the time she could make her way along in a crouch to the side of the lower passage on the slightly slanted floor. Other times she braced with one hand and moved from one side of the lower passage to the other. Sometimes she had to spread and duck-walk, especially in the short lower portions between domed areas. Those would have been the unfun portions where she couldn’t see what was awaiting her in the dark nooks to either side. But then there was Lazarus.
In a similar way, but easier because he was shorter, four-legged, and, well, a cat, Lazarus was more or less trotting down the passage, his tail flicking from side to side for balance and occasionally jumping across the crevasse when one side or the other became nonnegotiable. He was, in fact, getting very near the limit of Barb’s light.
“Slow down, Laz,” Barb said.
“Tell him to slow down?” Attie said. “ You slow down. We’re barely keeping up and we’re walking.”
“It’s clear,” Barb said, squatting on one foot and bracing across the passage with the other. She was in one of the narrower entries to a dome, and the crack to the lower passage was barely six inches wide. “This is a really strange formation.”
“The upper passage is formed when an underground river finds a portion of softer rock,” Attie said, taking a pause under her position. “That’s the upper tube. Over time, it wears away at the lower rock, again finding channels through it, until it either dies, goes to easier rock to wear away, or whatever. Generally it forms something like this. They’re fairly common.”
“First one I’ve seen,” Barb said. “Everybody good?”
“Except for the drying mud caked in my hair, ears and nose?” Janea asked. “Peachy.”
“Good,” Barb said, shining her light towards Lazarus. The cat had gone to full “Halloween cat” mode, back arched, tail straight up and bristled into a bush. “We’ve got company! IR mode!”
The Sure-Fire built into the end of the boxy weapon had a flipped-down cover. Flipping it up, the light apparently disappeared. In fact, it was now filtered entirely for infrared. As the whole team followed suit, the light in the passage disappeared entirely.
Dropping her FLIR down, Barb regained sight of the passage, the gun-light now acting as an infrared spotlight.
“Laz!” Barb yelled. “Get out of there!”
Her connection to the cat was something she barely understood. As far as she could comprehend it, they weren’t even two different individuals. The type of soul that was necessary for Barb to resurrect the cat was an indivisible part of a human being. To bring Lazarus back to life had required sharing the soul. They were now one being in two separate bodies.
She wasn’t sure what would happen if Lazarus was ever killed. But she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. The highest probability was that she would also die.
Cats rarely obey orders but they do have a certain amount of common sense. As a tide of blackness roiled down the passageway, the cat turned and bolted for the rear, jumping lithely from side to side of the passage. However, as he passed Barb, he yowled a warning.