The Sigma Protocol

  “This is not so easy to do, getting into the cave mouth,” he announced. “We’ll rappel down and swing a little, maneuver into the cave. Now we put on the crampons and the harnesses.”

  “What about the ice axes?” “Not for here,” he said. “There’s very little ice here. For the cave.”

  “There’s ice in the cave?”

  But Neumann, busy unpacking, did not reply.

  Ben and Peter used to go caving near the Greenbriar, but the caves there were little more than crawl holes. He’d never had to deal with ice.

  For a moment he felt his stomach knot. Until this point he had been propelled by adrenaline and anger and fear, focusing on one thing only: getting Anna out of Lenz’s clinic, where he was convinced she’d been taken.

  Now he wondered whether this was the best way. Climbing wasn’t particularly risky if you did it right, and he was confident of his climbing skills. But even very experienced cavers had been killed.

  He had weighed storming the main gate, counting on the guards to seize him, and thereby attracting Lenz’s attention.

  But it was just as likely that the guards would shoot to kill.

  Hard as it was to accept, this cave was the only alternative.

  The two of them lashed the crampons’ neoprene straps over the Vibram soles of their weathered mountaineering boots. These affixed twelve sharp spikes to the bottoms and toes of their boots, giving them serious traction on the cliff side. Then they attached the nylon climbing harnesses to their waists and they were ready to go.

  “We use the dulfersitz, yes?” Neumann said, using the Austrian argot for rappelling without a rack, using only one’s body to control the descent.

  “No rappel rack?”

  Neumann smiled, enjoying Ben’s discomfort. “Who needs it?”

  Without a rappel rack the descent would be unpleasant, but it saved them having to bring racks. Also, they wouldn’t be tied to the rope, making the rappel more dangerous.

  “You will follow,” Neumann said as he tied a double figure-eight knot at one end of the rope and then wrapped the rope around his shoulder, around his hip, and through his crotch. He walked backward toward the edge, lifting the rope a bit, his feet spread widely, and then he went over the side.

  Ben watched the older man dangling free, swinging slowly back and forth, facing the cliff, until he found a foothold. From there, tensioning the rope, Neumann moved his feet down the cliff face. He descended a little farther, dangling in free space again, swaying back and forth, then there was a crunching sound, followed by a shout.

  “O.K., come on, now you!”

  Ben straddled the rope in the same manner, walked backward to the edge, held his breath, and dropped over the side.

  The rope immediately slid against his crotch, the friction creating a painful burn even through the wind-proof pants. Now he remembered why he hated the dulfersitz. Using his right hand as a brake, he descended slowly, leaning back, his feet against the cliff, groping for footholds, maneuvering downward, playing the rope. In what seemed like seconds, he spotted his target: a small, dark ellipse. The mouth of the cave. Moving his feet down a few more meters, he came to the opening, and swung his feet inward.

  This wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped. It wasn’t a matter of simply dropping into the cave mouth; it was more complicated than that. The opening was flush with the sheer cliff face.

  “Move in a little!” Neumann shouted. “Move in!”

  Ben saw at once what he meant. There was a narrow inset ledge on which he would have to land.

  There was very little room for error. The ledge was no more than two feet wide. Neumann was crouched on it, gripping a handhold in the rock.

  As Ben moved his body forward, into the cave, he began to sway backward and forward as well. He felt unstable, and he forced himself to hang until the swaying slowed.

  Finally he played out the rope, braking with his right hand, swaying into the cave and then out again. Finally, when he was both forward just enough and far enough down, he dropped to the ledge, cushioning the impact by bending his knees.

  “Good!” Neumann shouted.

  Still gripping the rope, Ben leaned forward into the darkness of the cave and peered down. Enough sunlight streamed in at an oblique angle to illuminate the peril just below.

  The first hundred or so feet of the entrance to the cave, a steep downhill slant, was thickly coated with ice. Worse, it was watered ice, slick and treacherous. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

  “Well,” Neumann called to him after a few seconds, sensing Ben’s reluctance. “We can’t stand here on this ledge all day, hmm?”

  Experience or no, negotiating that long icy slope was unnerving to contemplate. “Let’s go,” Ben said with all the enthusiasm he could muster.

  They donned their lightweight helmets and Velcrostrapped them into place, then their headlamps. Neumann handed Ben a couple of high-tech carbon-fiber ice axes with curved picks. One axe looped over each wrist by means of a leash. They dangled from Ben’s hands like useless appendages.

  With a nod, Neumann turned his back to the cave mouth, and Ben followed suit, his stomach fluttering. Each took one backward step, and they were off the narrow ledge, their crampons crunching into the ice. The first few steps were awkward. Ben tried to maintain his balance, driving his crampons deep into the ice, steadying himself until he had backed down far enough to grab the ice axes in each hand and chop into the glossy surface. He saw Neumann scrambling down the steep slope as if he were walking down a staircase. The old man was a goat.

  Ben continued unsteadily, spider-crawling down, stomach to the ice, leaning his body weight on the wrist loops of the axes. The crunch of a boot, the chop of the ice axe, then again, and again, and by the time he had begun to achieve some sort of rhythm, he had reached the bottom, where the ice had given way to limestone.

  Neumann turned, slipped off his ice axes and crampons, and began to negotiate the gentler downward slope. Ben followed close behind.

  The descent was gradual, a spiral staircase through rock, and as they went the beam of Ben’s headlamp illuminated any number of passages that diverged to either side of them, branches he might easily have taken were it not for Neumann. There were no slashes of red paint here, nothing to separate the right path from the many wrong ones. Fritz Neumann was obviously navigating from memory.

  The air felt warmer than it had outside, but Ben knew this was deceptive. There was permanent ice on the walls of the cave, which indicated the temperature was below freezing, and the water that ran underfoot would soon make it feel even colder. It was also extremely humid.

  The floor of the cave was strewn with rubble and coursed with running water. Here and there, Ben almost lost his footing as the debris on the cave floor shifted. Soon the passage broadened into a gallery, and Neumann stopped for a moment, turning his head slowly, his helmet lamp illuminating the breathtaking formations. Some of the stalactites were fragile soda straws, slender and delicate, tapering to points as sharp as knitting needles; too, there were the banded calcite stumps of stalagmites, the occasional column formed by the meeting of a stalactite and a stalagmite. Water oozed down the walls and seeped down the stalactites, the steady drip-drip-dripping into water on the cave floor the only noise in the eerie silence. Hardened flowstone formed terraces, and translucent sheets of calcite hung down from the ceiling like drapery, their edges serrated and sharp. Everywhere was the acrid ammonia stench of bat guano.

  “Ah, look!” Neumann said, and Ben turned to see the perfectly preserved skeleton of a bear. There arose a sudden papery thunder of hundreds of batwings; a cluster of hibernating bats had been awakened by their approach.

  Now Ben began to feel the chill. Somehow, for all his precautions, water had seeped into his boots, dampening his socks.

  “Come,” Neumann said, “this way.”

  He led them into a narrow passage, one of several corridors off the gallery barely distinguishable from the
others. The ground gradually rose up before them, the walls growing closer together, almost to a bottleneck. The ceiling was barely head-high; had Ben been any taller than his six feet, he would have had to stoop. The walls here were icy, the seep water at their feet frigid.

  Ben’s toes had begun to go numb. But lithe Neumann scrambled up the steep crevice with astonishing ease, and Ben followed more gingerly, stepping over the jagged rocks, knowing that if he lost his footing here, the tumble would be nasty.

  Finally the ground seemed to level off. “We’re about on the same level as the Schloss now,” Neumann said.

  Then without warning the narrow passage came to a dead end. They stopped at what appeared to be a blank wall, in front of which was a pile of rubble, evidently the remains of a long-ago cave-in.

  “Jesus,” Ben said. “Are we lost?”

  Without a word, Neumann scraped some of the rubble aside with his boot, exposing a rusty iron rod about four feet long, which he hoisted with a flourish.

  “It’s undisturbed,” Neumann said. “This is good for you. It has not been used for many years. They have not discovered it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Neumann took the iron rod, wedged it underneath a boulder, and leaned his weight on it until the rock began to dislodge, revealing a small irregular passageway no more than two feet high and three or four feet wide.

  “During the war we’d move this rock back and forth to hide the final passage.” He pointed out grooves in the rock scored, Ben assumed, decades earlier. “Now you’re on your own. I’ll leave you here. This is a very narrow crawlway, and very low, but you can get through it, I believe.”

  Ben leaned closer and examined it with horrified fascination. He felt a wave of panic.

  This is a goddamned coffin. I don’t think I can do it.

  “You’ll travel about, oh, maybe two hundred meters. It’s most of the way level, but then it goes uphill at the very end. Unless it’s caved in since I was here as a boy, you’ll come to a keyhole slot opening.”

  “It opens right into the Schloss?”

  “No, of course not. The entrance is gated. Maybe even locked. Probably so.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  Neumann drew a rusty-looking skeleton key from a pocket of his old green parka. “I can’t tell you for sure if this will work, but the last time I tried it, it did.”

  “The last time being fifty years ago?”

  “More than that,” Neumann admitted. He extended his hand. “Now I say good-bye,” he said solemnly. “I wish you much luck.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  It was a formidably tight squeeze. It must have taken real courage and determination for the Resistance fighters to make this final approach to the Schloss, and do it repeatedly, Ben thought. No wonder they had made use of a boy like the young Fritz Neumann, who could slip through this space easily.

  Ben had wriggled through crawl holes like this before, in the caves of White Sulphur Springs, but never for more than a few feet before they broadened out. This, however, appeared to be hundreds of yards long.

  Only now did he fully understand what veteran cavers meant when they insisted that their subterranean pursuit allowed them to face down primordial terrors—the fear of darkness, of falling into the void, of being trapped in a maze, of being buried alive.

  But there was no choice, certainly not now. He thought only of Anna and summoned up the will.

  He entered the hole, headfirst, feeling a cold rush of air. At its opening, the passage was about two feet high, which meant that the only way to move through it was to slither on his stomach like an earthworm.

  He removed his pack and pushed off with his feet, pulling with his arms, nudging his pack ahead of him. There was an inch or two of frigid water on the tunnel floor. Quickly his pants became soaked through. The tunnel angled sharply one way, then another, forcing him to contort his body.

  Then, at last, the passageway began to widen, its ceiling rising to four feet, enabling him to lift his numbed belly out of the ice water, get to his feet, and stoop-walk.

  It was not long, though, before his back began to ache, and rather than continue he stopped for a moment and set down the pack, resting his hands on his thighs.

  When he was able to go farther, he noticed that the ceiling was lowering again, back to two, maybe three feet high. He got onto his hands and knees and began scuttling along like a crab.

  But not for long. The rocky floor bruised his kneecaps. He attempted to ease the stress by putting his weight on his elbows and toes instead. When he wearied of that, he continued crawling. The ceiling became lower still, and he turned onto his side, pushing with his feet and pulling with his arms along the winding tunnel.

  Now the ceiling height had diminished to no more than eighteen inches, scraping against his back, and he had to stop for a moment to suppress a wave of panic. He was back to belly-crawling again, only this time there was no end in sight. His headlamp shone a beam for twenty feet or so, but the coffin-sized, even coffin-shaped tunnel seemed to go on and on. The walls seemed to narrow.

  Through the scrim of his fear, he observed that the passage appeared to be winding slowly uphill, that water no longer pooled on the floor, though it was still damp, and that, horribly, rock was now scraping against both his stomach and his back.

  He continued pushing his pack ahead of him. The tunnel was now barely twelve inches high.

  Ben was trapped.

  No, not trapped, not yet, exactly, but it certainly felt that way. Terror overwhelmed him. He had to squeeze himself through. His heart raced, his body flooded with fear, and he had to stop.

  The worst thing, he knew, was to panic. Panic caused you to freeze up, lose flexibility. He breathed slowly in and out a few times, then exhaled completely to reduce his chest diameter so he could fit through the passage.

  Sweating and clammy, he forced himself to squirm ahead, trying to focus on where he was going and why, how crucial it was. He thought ahead, to what he would do once he got into the Schloss.

  The uphill slope was becoming steeper. He inhaled and felt the walls press in on his chest, keeping him from filling his lungs with air. This prompted a surge of adrenaline, which made his breathing fast and shallow, made him feel as if he were about to suffocate, and he had to stop once again.

  Don’t think.

  Relax.

  No one else knew he was down here. He would be buried alive here in this pitch-black hell where there was no day or night.

  Ben found himself listening to this voice with skepticism, as his braver, better self now assumed command of his brain. He began to feel his heart slow, felt the delicious cold air hit the bottom of his lungs, felt calm spread through his body like ink on a blotter.

  Steadily now, with an inner serenity, he urged his body along, earthwormed, wriggled, ignoring the chafing of his back.

  Suddenly the ceiling soared upward and the walls widened, and he got to his aching hands and knees and crawled up the incline. He had arrived at a sort of twilit grotto, where he was able to stand fully, blessedly, upright.

  He was aware of the faintest glimmering of light.

  It was a very dim and distant light, but to him it seemed almost as bright as day, as joy-inspiring as sunrise.

  Directly ahead of him was the cave exit, and it was indeed shaped a little like a keyhole. He scrambled up a scree pile, then sort of half-mantled himself into the lip of the opening, pushing down with both hands until he could support his body on rigid arms.

  There he saw the close-set rusted iron bars of an ancient gate that was fitted into the irregular cave mouth as tightly as a manhole cover. He could not make out what lay behind the gate but he could see an oblong shaft of light, as if from under a door.

  He drew out the skeleton key Neumann had given him, inserted it into the lock, and turned it.

  Tried to turn it.

  But it would not turn. The key would not move.

  The lock was rust
ed shut. That had to be it; the old lock hadn’t been replaced, at least not for decades. The entire thing, he saw, was one solid mass of rust. He wriggled the key back and forth again, but it would not turn.

  “Oh, my God,” Ben said out loud.

  He was done for.

  This was the one thing neither he nor Neumann had anticipated.

  He could see no other way in. Even if he had the tools, there was no way to dig around the gate; it was embedded in solid rock. Would he now have to somehow climb back out?

  Or maybe… Maybe one of the bars was so rusted through that he could push it out. He tried that, banging his gloved fist against the iron bars until the pain was too great, but no: the gate was solid. The rust was only on the surface.

  In desperation, he grabbed the bars and rattled them, like an enraged lifer in San Quentin, and suddenly there was a metallic clatter.

  One of the hinges had broken off.

  He rattled again, harder, until another hinge popped off.

  He kept rattling, exuberantly, and finally the third and last hinge fell to the ground.

  He grabbed the gate with both hands, lifted it up and pushed it forward, and gently lowered it to the ground.

  He was inside.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Ben felt something hard and smooth and dusty: it was a solid iron door, secured by a heavy latch. He lifted the latch and pushed at the door, and the door gave a brief high screech. Obviously it hadn’t been opened in decades. He pushed with all his weight. With a moan, the door gave way.

  He found himself in a larger space of some sort, though it was still small. His eyes, used to the dark, began to discern shapes, and he followed the narrow shaft of light to another door, where he felt around on either side for a light switch.

  He found the switch, and a light came on from a single bulb mounted on the ceiling.

  He was, he could see, in a small storage closet. The stone walls were lined with steel shelves painted an indeterminate beige, holding old cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and cylindrical metal tanks.