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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 “Rock!” carried down the black canyon on a gust of fear.
Did you know that each touch from a human hand on the cave's interior will be a problem? Pieces may be totally destroyed by humans who are visiting with no thought but of their pleasure in seeing these beautiful examples of God's creations...In Barr's book we all learn that each move to be made must be in consideration of the place in which they are rather than just...living...as best as you can... In this case, the book was very informative re spelunking... Remember, they were moving into areas which had never been explored before, but the videos do illustrate the equipment needed to be worn to provide light in the Dark as you will be reading...
The search was intensive to get there, where Frieda was, but now, Anna, with the mind of a police office, albeit in the Rangers, had to be immediately aware that one or more of the people in Frieda's group had caused the fall of her friend... She began to gather info just by introducing herself to the few there... There was a doctor and his wife--a woman who was clearly a problem. She didn't want to be there, was disgusted that her husband had to be doctoring--well, he wasn't a true general practitioner, but at least he knew enough to provide medication, medical supplies. But it was clear his wife could care less about anything but getting out of there... It should be mentioned at this point that she actually disappeared and could not be found once outside... Anna could not let that go, as the book goes on... The wife had been asked to backup Anna "as a caretaker" and clearly that wasn't going to happen... This begins the mystery part of the book...
Anna found herself depending on one of her initial guides, who was now the onsite director of planning for the rescue... Somehow, she felt safer with him around... He was efficient and soon had everybody working to move out... They were waiting for the medical team who had the necessary equipment to carry Frieda out... People were beginning to look happy, excited, ready to leave this Dark that had kept them longer than originally planned...
And, Anna was right there by Frieda's side when the crew had arrived, prepared her for traveling in a secured manner and went through details with the Site Director... They were ready to go!
They were moving quickly and efficiently, when out of the surrounding darkness: Rock!
When Anna heard the call of a rock coming, she didn't know how fast it would become a slide that would overtake the entire group carrying Freida... After the slide settled, Anna tried to reconnect with Freida... She had fallen deeper into a hole...Anna could not reach her, but could touch her, checking her neck to find a pulse... feeling something wet, she thought it was blood and Freida was bleeding. She pulled her hand out and discovered it was her tears...
The rescue had become a recovery...
But Anna would not leave the site... She began searching, to learn where the Rock had come from. She began her search there, looking for anything that would help to document just how a slide had begun... finally, she found it--a place where somebody had sat on a rock, as if resting...or waiting...
Anna was now conducting a murder investigation...
It didn't take me long to determine the "whodunit." It seems I can recognize the character personalities that are created to reveal those who are power hungry... But there was another that I would not have picked. This, too, reflects what we are experiencing more and more... Who could Anna trust?
The ending surprised me, because there was so little to lead up to the actual crimes taking place. Readers will need to step back from the rescue efforts and its failure and move into investigation mode along with Anna, who became relentless. Even to the extent of talking one of the men in the original group into returning to the cave to find as much of actually what happened as possible. In the book, and I hope, not in reality, there is a major loss of a section of the cave that could not be reclaimed... And they found a lost member of the team...
One of the most fantastic, informative books about spelunking that perhaps has been written wrapped up in fiction. It is the only one I've read and who better than Nevada Barr to take on creating a thrilling story of a place where no man had ever been before... And, just how destructive people can become when riches beckon to those who place money over humanity... A Must-Read for many reasons, most of all to allow readers to experience some place where they really have a right to be afraid and be thankful there are others who will attempt to ensure you live through that experience! More people need to rely on their neighbors and find love and help from nearly all of them...
It could be argued that the open areas of the caverns felt as much like a Disney creation as Space Mountain. There were no dangerous mazes, no precipitous heights, no tight squeezes. Still, it was a cave, and so Anna had passed on repeat trips. Given the inevitable nature of things, she would spend much of eternity underground; no sense rushing on down before the grim reaper called for her.
Her love of bats might have overcome her fear of enclosed spaces, 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 passage; 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 pass 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 coarse 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.” Shit, 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 half-hearted. “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 bums; 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 god-awful places they insisted on pushing their way into? Iverson stared, and Anna stared back, refusing to apologize or explain. A moment passed, 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.” “Rappels sixty to a hundred fifty feet. Ascents ditto, naturally. Rope climbs with ascenders.” “I can do that.”
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I ran my Fire battery out for 3 days... Don't know how many days I'll take to share with all of you! LOL Watch for it!
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