The Madonna In 1921, in the Demnovsk Valley in the northern part of the Czechoslovakian Low Tatras, a spelunker called A. Krl penetrated a cave. The cave, or rather system of caves, turned out to be in four levels connected by steep pa.s.sages, and to be over eight kilometres long. Bones showed that, long ago, the cave had been penetrated by some bear, which had no doubt wandered in the dark until it died of starvation. Over the years the cave was made accessible through a system of walkways, stairs and galleries, and the public could now visit the sinter waterfalls, the stalagmites and stalact.i.tes, the caverns, pools and streams of this Tolkien-like underworld.

In 1951, thirty years after it had first been penetrated, a connection was discovered to another cave system. Thirty-two years on again, in 1983, a speleo-diving team discovered yet another connection, and three years after that the system, now named 'the Demnovsk Cave of Liberty, was found to be connected also to 'the Demnovsk Cave of Peace. The limestone mountains, it seemed, were honeycombed with tunnels.

In the early twenty-first century, a young German caver by the name of Armin Tyson explored a long, deeply descending pa.s.sage. After many kilometres this opened out to a cavern of curved and banded curtains, flowstones like melted wax, ten-metre stalagmites rising out of rimstone pools and most amazing of all a cavern with an underground lake almost a kilometre across and, it would later turn out, two hundred metres deep.

Vashislav Shtyrkov, of Moscow State University, heard of this lake by chance from a speleo-fanatic student. Himself physically incapable of squeezing through the discovery pa.s.sage, now known as 'the Wormhole, he sent the student to Slovakia with Geiger counters. The student reported back that the radon, uranium and carbon-14 levels in this deep hole were satisfyingly low. The lake was wonderfully inaccessible to the public, and the opportunity was too good to miss.

There was just one problem: the Russians had no money.

The British, however, had. Charlie Gibson was soon enticed from the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratorys Yorkshire mine experiment by the prospect of leading a new dark matter team. He fronted the paperwork necessary for the British funding.

At a c.o.c.ktail party in Warsaw, Shtyrkov also approached Svetlana Popov, a Russian woman at Cracow University with a rising reputation as a careful experimentalist. On the basis of a conversation over lemonade and canapes, she agreed to join Shtyrkovs little team: dark matter was a powerful lure, the quest for it hard to resist.

The newly discovered lake was part of the Tatras National Park but Shtyrkov, as he liked to say, had friends in high places. Nevertheless strict conditions were imposed for the use of the lake as a laboratory. Diversion of an underground stream, nicknamed 'the Styx, was permitted. A narrow shaft could be sunk. Everything scaffolding, chairs, cables, electromagnets, computers had to be brought up and down this shaft. Desks were a.s.sembled underground. Doors were welded on site out of steel panels. Svetlana knew every piece of wire in the cavern.

From then on, it was a question of maintaining and improving the apparatus, and waiting. Waiting for a dark matter particle to zip through the lake, trailing light, on its endless cosmic journey.

Tysons Wormhole was the way out.

Tyson and his team had used ropes, bobbins, gunlocks, Gibbs ascenders.

Between them, Freya and Petrie had a screwdriver.

The driver maintained a sullen silence and chain-smoked along a twisting, narrow road. Petrie, having retched his stomach contents out a few hours previously, began to long for an early death. That the wish might be close to fulfilment was something he couldnt quite take in.

Visions of Hanning kept recurring: an axe splitting the mans skull like a log; blood and grey matter squirting up; face becoming a non-face, something hideous and nonhuman; the cadaver sliding, trembling violently, under the table. It added to his sense of unreality, of detachment from the real world. Freya smiled thinly at him from time to time but he was too miserable for conversation.

Svetlanas sketch had been too dangerous to carry and he tried to go over it in his head.

'First the Styx, then the Madonna. First opening left, along the phreatic tube. A high vertical chimney to the grotto with the white flowstone; first left again and a long narrow crawl to a boulder chamber. Over this to a broad sloping highway, like a motorway with a rocky roof, marching steadily and steeply up for a kilometre. Then the dreaded sump, a long underwater tunnel which Tysons team had traversed with aqualungs and which you probably wont survive. Use the guide rope left in place by Tysons team. Finally, if by a miracle you arent lost or drowned to this point, you arrive at Piccadilly Station. Take the fourth entrance round from the big orange stalact.i.te; you will find walkways and lights and human society. Slip in with a tourist group and leave the mountain. What follows then is up to G.o.d and you.

After an hour a sizeable town, or at least rows of Identikit high-rise flats, appeared ahead of them. They joined a motorway, its surface wet but clear of snow. The jeep speeded up, turned north. The Male Karpaty receded to the horizon. The driver maintained his silence and kept up his chain-smoking. Now and then he would hum something tuneless, strumming nicotine-stained fingers on the steering wheel. Petrie wondered about heaving the wretch out of the jeep, taking off with the lorry in pursuit, finding a helicopter in the wilds, flying to an airport and jumping on a plane to Rio de Janeiro. He laughed and Freya gave him a look.

After another hour the lorry behind them tooted and the driver pulled over to a small roadside restaurant. A young officer opened the jeep door and guided Petrie by the arm to a table. Freya was led to a separate table. A dozen soldiers spread themselves noisily around and Petrie ate what was put in front of him without knowing or caring what it was.

It was late afternoon, with the traffic getting dense, when the jeep began to run alongside sterner mountains. A white fluffy cloud in the distance turned out to belong to a chemical works. They pa.s.sed by mysterious a.s.semblies of fat pipes, and big cylinders painted blue or yellow, and tall chimney stacks, all enclosed within wire-topped concrete fencing and not a human being in sight. Petrie thought it could be run by aliens and n.o.body would ever know.

At last, just past a large lake, the driver left the motorway, took a side-road, turned off at a roundabout. Almost immediately they found themselves on a narrow road, covered with compacted snow, heading towards ma.s.sive peaks. The ski-laden cars were here in force, streaming away from the mountains with snow chains on their wheels and snow on their roofs.

Petrie began to tense. He sensed that Freya, next to him, was the same.

To their astonishment, the driver finally spoke. 'Nizke Tatry.

Petrie said, 'Drop dead.

They drove into a car park deep with snow. There was a little row of wooden shops with postcard stands at their entrances, and windows filled with tourist junk. They stepped out and stretched. A path from the car park led over a wooden bridge and disappeared into a conifer forest hugging the mountainside. A chain barred the way over the bridge, and next to it there was a notice. Petrie guessed the path was closed because of avalanche risk.

The army truck was just turning into the car park and Petrie momentarily wondered about running into the trees. He caught Freyas glance; she was clearly thinking the same. But then the truck had stopped and soldiers were jumping out and the moment had pa.s.sed.

An officer was shouting orders. Then he pointed at Freya and Petrie and snapped something, waving his hand towards the path. They followed him along it. The soldier unhooked the chain and they pa.s.sed over a stream of icy water and then they were climbing a steep, slippery path, soldiers strung out behind them on the trail. They had rifles, a fact which excluded any prospect of running away through the trees.

Stick with the Russians plan.

A steel door. The officer had a key. A push from behind, from some teenage soldier enjoying a sense of power. A dark atrium, the indefinable smell of old air, and steps going down to blackness. Lights flickered and came on, and there was the yellow cage, just as the others had described.

The steel door clanged shut. More orders, and the scientists were hustled down the stone steps. Two soldiers squeezed into the cage. With rifles and combat gear, it was almost impossibly tight. There was some chatter and then someone pressed the red b.u.t.ton and they dropped from sight as if through a hangmans trapdoor. The overhead drum whined smoothly and the braided metal cable vibrated tautly. Freya and Petrie stood close and shivered.

Presently the whine stopped, and then the cable began to move in reverse, more slowly. When the cage appeared two more soldiers were ordered into it and the shaft swallowed them up.

Fifteen seconds. That was Shtyrkovs figure. Not fourteen, not sixteen. Fifteen precisely. Get it wrong by a second and you miss by ten metres.

The officers game plan was clear. At least four soldiers would be waiting for them down below. That left eight up above or, if he sent two more down, an even split between the top and bottom of the shaft. Freya and Petrie would each be under the guard of at least two, and possibly three, armed men. The cage reappeared and two more soldiers were sent down to Hades; the officer was going for a fifty-fifty split.

This was the crunch moment, or rather the first of several. The essence of Shtyrkovs plan was that they go down the shaft together. The big worry was that Freya and Petrie would be split, each being sent down with a single soldier. In that case, the contingency plan was to insist on going back up together, on the slender grounds that two were needed to tend the delicate equipment. If that too failed, the outlook was bleak.

The officer snapped his fingers and waved them towards the cage. Petrie tried to look impa.s.sive, and Freya was putting on a good act. The cage closed. Freya pressed the red b.u.t.ton and they plunged out of sight.

In an instant Freya produced the screwdriver from her waistband and Petrie started the count. 'Fifteen fourteen thirteen twelve... while she frantically unscrewed the black cowling protecting the circuit box. It came away easily and she was faced with a ma.s.s of wires. Rockface was hurtling past and the buffeting wind was blowing her long blonde hair in her eyes.

To stop the cage they only had to press the emergency b.u.t.ton. But the plan was to destroy it. To do that, they had to kill the circuit which told the winch far above to stop unwinding the cable. They had to pour a ton of steel cable down on to the cage. And they had to be out of it.

'The green wire, Petrie shouted. 'Nineeightseven...

'No, the yellow. Svetlana got it wrong. The yellow feeds up to the cable.

'Five four Do something! two one.

Freya wrenched fiercely at a thick green wire. There was a vicious spark of current, she yelped, and then a nerve-shattering screech! as electromagnetic clamps tried to strangle the metal shafts and the cage juddered to a halt, its overhead light flickering.

Petrie found that his eyes were level with a roughly hewn floor. He scrabbled up and out of the cage, his nose catching painfully on a sharp rock.

Up top the big winch, unaware that the elevator had stopped, was still unwinding its steel cable, which was now raining down on the wire mesh above them. The noise was deafening. He turned and to his horror the cage lurched down. Freya, halfway out, fell back into it with a frightened cry, landing on her backside. For a ghastly moment he thought it was headed down the shaft but it stopped, groaning, inching down in little jerks as the overhead cable poured down.

And now, steel was beginning to tear. The screeching was painful on Petries ears. He had a brief, claustrophobic fantasy: he was trapped inside a ship on its way to the sea floor.

And Freya was on her toes, arms extended, her face white with fear. She was now out of arms length.

If we both go down the shaft the project is finished.

And thick metal cable was still pouring down.

Two corpses rather than one. Leave her.

She was reading his mind, pleading with her eyes.

I cant risk the project for one individual.

Freyas hands were stretched up, but Petrie, hanging halfway into the elevator, could only touch her fingertips.

The wire mesh was buckling. The elevator was now juddering down more rapidly, inches at a time.

Any second now.

She jumped. Petrie grabbed her wrists but the lift lurched suddenly and she slipped from his grasp. She jumped again, and again he made contact with her hands; desperately, he dug his nails in, but Freyas hands were slippery with sweat, and again he lost them and she fell back on the elevator floor with a despairing cry.

Oh, what the h.e.l.l! He scrambled back down into the elevator. He cupped his hands. She clambered, there was a painful heel on his collar bone, and then their positions were reversed; Petrie was in the cage and Freya on her knees in the tunnel and turning to catch him.

The foot of the tunnel was now about nine feet above him. The gap between tunnel floor and sagging elevator roof was now about eighteen inches and shrinking. Petrie leaped up, aware that he had only this one chance. His fingers clutched at the rim of the tunnel floor. It was wet and slippery. Freya leaned down, grabbed his hair and pulled. Slowly, he bent his arms until his elbows reached the tunnel floor. Then he levered himself up by the elbows and rolled on to wet, freezing ground and pulled his feet clear just as the wire roof of the elevator gave way with a crash! and tons of thick metal cable clattered on to its floor and started to spill into the tunnel mouth.

They leaped away from the mortally wounded elevator. In the confined s.p.a.ce of the tunnel the thunder of the falling cable was like hammering on a steel drum. They scrambled back just as the elevator gave way with a final scream and the cable which had been overflowing into the tunnel started to accelerate swiftly down the shaft after it.

The tunnel lights failed.

Petrie cursed, and waved his arms in the dark like antennae. The cable was now whipping the air and he had another brief fantasy, that of decapitation. The noise seemed to come from all directions and he broke into a sudden sweat with the realisation that he had lost his sense of orientation.

A voice in the dark, surprisingly faint. 'Where are you?

Seconds later there was a bang! from below, like an explosion, but by now Petrie had found the damp tunnel wall and was feeling his way along it away, he hoped, from the elevator shaft. From somewhere in the distance he began to hear another sound, the thunder of a torrent. He edged towards it.

'Over here! Freya shouted. Again her voice came over faintly, and Petrie thought his hearing had temporarily gone. There was a sc.r.a.ping sound, like metal on wood, as if she was struggling with a metal clasp on a box. Petrie stopped, trying to locate the direction in the pitch black.

And then there were four pinp.r.i.c.ks of green light, making a rectangle before Freyas body interposed itself on the line of sight. Petrie quickly crossed the twelve feet to the lights. He b.u.mped into Freya and she gave a startled little scream. Four torches, each charged up: the beams were dazzling. And four yellow helmets. They selected helmets and clipped the torches into place.

'I wonder how long weve got? Even at a couple of feet separation, Freyas voice was faint, and he understood her more by lip-reading than by the sound of her words. The torchlight from her helmet was painful, and she was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her eyes up.

Petrie tried to calm down, collect his thoughts. His whole body was beginning to shake. 'Depends, he said. He noted with surprise the calmness of his own voice, which contrasted with the turmoil in his mind and body. 'If the officer thinks it was an accident, we have a good start. If not, h.e.l.l know we must have an escape route in mind and h.e.l.l start finding out about the cave system...

'Lets hope hes stupid. Hold it. She clicked her torch off and Petrie did the same, following her alarmed gaze to the tunnel mouth.

Little specks of dust were wafting up from below. They were visible because, far above, someone was shining a powerful light down the shaft.

'Surely they couldnt abseil down? Petrie wondered.

'Or climb down the cable?

'Lets get out of here.

The tunnel was broad and flat and the torchlight showed a spray of water about two hundred yards ahead of them. Freya led the way towards it at a brisk trot. The end of the tunnel was marked by a black metal railing with a red and white lifebelt attached to a long coil of rope. They found themselves inside a much larger, natural tunnel, about thirty feet wide and as high. Water below them was surging, tumbling, roaring along this channel; Petrie felt the ground vibrating. Their torches made rainbows in the cold spray, but showed only that the subterranean river curved out of sight on either side of them, piling up steeply at the corner.

Petrie said, 'The Styx, but his voice was lost in the roar.

He felt an urgent tug on his arm. Freya was pointing to a flight of stone steps on the left, going down to a concrete path running alongside the river. Just before they took them, he glanced back. It might just have been the dark adaption, but the light shining down the elevator shaft seemed stronger.

'Tysons entrance is two sixty metres along, Petrie shouted.

'I cant judge distances. In the torchlight, Freyas face was glistening wet. 'Im relying on you.

Petrie said, 'h.e.l.l. I was relying on you.

They hurried along, gripping the handrail. Here and there the river was almost level with the concrete path, and in some places they had to wade knee-deep, the force of the water threatening to knock them off their feet.

'The water level must be up, Freya shouted. She was shivering.

'And its rising. Petrie didnt try to hide the fear.

After two hundred metres the path seemed to dip into the water. Their torches picked out the railing for another twenty yards or so before it, too, vanished under the waves.

He looked along the tunnel wall, searching for footholds. About fifty metres ahead, his helmet light picked out a natural recess about seven metres above the river.

'What do you think? he shouted. 'Tysons Wormhole?

'Theres nothing else. Well have to swim for it, try to grab that ledge in pa.s.sing. Think you can do it?

Petrie was appalled. 'Youre mad. What if we miss?

'We drown. The river was thundering round the corner, heading for an uncertain destination.

'I cant swim, Petrie confessed.

'You idiot! Why didnt you say so at the castle? She turned away from him, her light scanning the recess and the smooth tunnel wall. Then: 'Go back for the lifebelt. And be quick.

Petrie waded back along the path. Without question, the river had risen, and the concrete was now almost wholly under water. To Petrie, the journey seemed to take an hour. He climbed the steps, gasping. To his horror, he saw that a light was still shining down the shaft but that it was much brighter than before. And it was swaying rhythmically, as if it was attached to a descending human. Hastily, he hoisted the lifebelt on his shoulder and put the coil of rope in the crook of his elbow. With a last fearful look at the light he ran back down the steps.

By the time he reached Freya the water was up to her chest and she was gripping the handrail, under the surface, with both hands. She was shivering violently and Petrie thought she looked ready to faint.

'Theyre coming.

'Put your arms and head into that, she ordered in a shaking voice. Petrie obliged. 'Wait until Im on the ledge and then float. Lets hope the ropes long enough.

'What if its not?

She ignored the question, tying the end of the rope crudely round her waist before wading along the path. In a moment she was caught up in the surge and bobbed along, seemingly helpless in the flow of freezing water. More than once her torchlight shone underwater, but then she was climbing on to the ledge and waving at Petrie.

The next ten seconds were amongst the most frightening in his life, but Freya was pulling the rope in as fast as the distance between them was shortening and he found himself gasping and spluttering face-down on a big slab of rock.

Freya was saying, 'Look! Set in the natural recess about seven metres diagonally up was a gnarled pillar of rock, vaguely resembling a faceless woman wrapped in a shawl or cloak. 'The Madonna!

With an effort, Petrie got to his knees, his clothes heavy with icy water. Freya was already skimming up the smooth rockface instinctively, like a spider. Water was pouring off her clothes. Petrie couldnt see what she was gripping but forced himself to follow. He found he could hardly grip the rock for shaking. He inched his way along, the torrent roaring angrily below. Once he glanced down and saw that the ledge was no longer below him: the helmet light showed only swift churning water.

Freya was shouting something. It took all his nerve to look up. He had pa.s.sed under the Madonna, but now he was only a few metres from the recess. He warily edged towards it; and then Freya was gripping him by the elbow and at last he was being pulled behind the pillar of rock.

The recess went in about five metres, and their lights showed that it narrowed to a crack about six feet wide and barely a foot high. Over it, someone it could only have been Tyson had sc.r.a.ped a T.

She pointed triumphantly. 'Weve found it! The Wormhole!