FIFTEEN
TWO YEARS LATER, AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT on Sunday, March 27, 1994, Bill Stone was back underground, enjoying the world’s deepest sleep—literally—in Huautla Cave’s Camp 3. His long-awaited Huautla expedition had finally come to pass, and the team had been working in the cave for about six weeks already. Camp 3 was a vertical half mile deep and two miles distant from the entrance, a trip that took good, strong cavers two days to make. The cavern in which Camp 3 sat was the Sala Grande de la Sierra Mazateca, or SGSM. It measured about 200 feet wide, 165 feet high, and 650 feet long, with a total area of about 3.5 acres. It could have contained seven typical McMansions and their half-acre lots.
If not a McMansion, the camp was, at least by deep-caving standards, a four-star abode. There were smooth and level sleeping areas and four Olympian “thrones” constructed by the members of a 1981 expedition who had hauled limestone slabs from around the cavern and assembled them into crude chairs. The camp was strewn with blue and red sleeping bags, mountaineering stoves, shiny cooking pots, waterproof Nalgene bottles full of various powdered foods, and piles of technical caving and diving gear.
Shortly after midnight, Stone was awakened by a sound like the rattling of chains. It was Kenny Broad, his climbing hardware clanking as he arrived from Camp 5, which was 550 vertical feet below Camp 3. Broad, twenty-seven, was one of this expedition’s lead cave divers. Normally Stone would have been happy to see him. But the expedition had not been going as well as he had hoped. Many days of grinding underground labor and what he considered to be halfhearted efforts by some of the crew, despite the example of his own near-frantic pace, had been exacerbated by his awareness of the coming rainy season and the fear that he would not be able to mount another expedition until who knew when. All of this had eroded his patience, so he was not happy about being yanked out of much-needed sleep. Nevertheless, his first thought was: This can’t be good.
It was not. “Ian is missing. We need to mount a rescue right now,” Broad announced.
IAN ROLLAND, A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Royal Air Force sergeant, was Broad’s diving partner. Rolland was diminutive—about five foot six and 145 pounds—but tremendously strong. A husband with three young children, he was good-natured and even-tempered, with the rare ability to disagree, even under great stress, without being disagreeable. He was no cream puff—Rolland’s edged sarcasm could lacerate as well as elicit laughs—but as often as not he was the butt of his own gibes. All these traits were invaluable on demanding expeditions, where people who might or might not like one another were squeezed together, stressed and endangered, for weeks on end.
Rolland was a mechanical as well as psychological asset to the team. His job in the RAF was to maintain jet fighters, giving him an unusual feel for finicky, high-tech equipment like redundant, computerized experimental rebreathers. Ian Rolland had brought only one liability to this expedition: a year earlier, he had been diagnosed as an insulin-dependent diabetic. That would have kept most people from diving at all, let alone cave diving, but not this intrepid young Scot, who had learned to manage his diabetes with insulin and a proper diet.
A Miami native, Broad had more diving experience than any other expedition member, experience that included work as a stunt diver for filmmakers. He was slim and often had a growth of scraggly red beard sprouting from cheeks toughened by years of exposure to strong sun. Broad was also something of a superachiever. He was a U.S. Coast Guard–licensed captain, an EMT, a hyperbaric chamber operator, and was pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University. For all his accomplishments, though, Broad was no stuffed shirt. Irreverent by nature, he loved to crack jokes and fire off smart-aleck retorts. Stone thought of him as the team wiseacre.
Rolland and Broad had not met before this expedition, but they became close friends quickly. The team’s youngest participants, they shared a fondness for barbed humor and skill at using it to defuse stress. Each recognized the other as a master of this dangerous game, producing mutual respect. Given its hazards, confinement, and exhausting demands, caving was one of those activities—like combat, police work, and mountain climbing—that could turn people into raging enemies overnight. Or, as with Rolland and Broad, it could quickly forge friendships that otherwise might have evolved only over years.
The two of them, along with three other expedition members, had begun diving from Camp 5 on March 23. Their goal—the goal of this entire, massive expedition, in fact—was to find a way through San Agustín Sump, the flooded tunnel that had frustrated all attempts at penetration since 1979. This was supercave diving at its most challenging. For starters, living conditions at the divers’ deep camp were horrendous. Here the cave’s walls dropped straight into the sump’s water. With no horizontal surfaces to occupy, the cavers suspended several red nylon, aluminum-framed platforms, called portaledges, from bolts driven into Huautla’s walls. These rigid, hanging platforms, like those used by mountain climbers, were no bigger than the door to the average home. The divers lived on these spray-slickened shelves for days. Their bathroom was a plastic garbage bag. Some, like Broad, hung hammocks from the rock walls, but that was like trying to sleep in a body bag.
In the saturated atmosphere, the platforms were slippery and easy to fall from. Needing to relieve himself one night, Broad crept to the platform’s edge and let fly into the stream below. To conserve carbide and batteries, he left his lights off and edged cautiously back to his hammock in the dark. Thinking he had arrived, he sat down, but his dead reckoning was off. The hammock spun and tossed him out. His head smashed into the cave’s jagged wall. Stunned, flailing, he fell off the platform. In a move straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, he managed to grab one of the ropes on which the portaledge hung from the cave wall. Dangling there in the dark by one arm over the water ten feet below, Broad screamed for help, but the waterfall’s roar drowned out his cries. With his grip loosening, Broad realized that he would have to save himself, and quickly, or fall and be swept away into the cave’s black maw. He began swinging back and forth, waving his free hand around in the dark, and by sheer chance grabbed one of the other ropes from which the platform hung. With the last of his strength Broad dragged himself back up and flopped onto his belly, gasping and shaking, dizzy with pain, stunned by the fact that he had almost died in this supercave, not from diving but from falling out of bed.
Actually, sleeping was less of a problem than it might have been because no one really slept at Camp 5. Some 50 feet upstream a tremendous waterfall crashed and thundered, its roaring amplified by the rock chamber. It was like living next to a rocket engine with no off switch. To hear each other, Camp 5 occupants had to shout at the top of their lungs, which soon produced sore throats and laryngitis. The waterfall also kept Huautla’s 64-degree air constantly saturated, making the camp a cold-shower room where the water never stopped running. Given all this, even brief stays here were exhausting and debilitating.
And all that was before the divers even got into the water. Once they did, the visibility was low, 5 to 8 feet, and at 64 degrees, the water was cold. The sump twisted and turned like a maddened worm—it was just hellish, one diver said. Underlying everything was the knowledge that if one of them suffered any of diving’s myriad ills—the bends, oxygen toxicity, gas embolism, collapsed or ruptured lungs—or got hurt falling off a portaledge, help was so far away that they might as well have been on the far side of the moon. By the morning of March 26, these stressors had wrung out the other three divers, coolheaded veterans all. They headed for the surface, leaving Broad and Rolland alone.
At about four that afternoon, Broad helped Rolland slip into the sump’s gray-green, chilly water. Diving with the rebreather, now called the MK-IV, was not a matter of hopping into the water and quickly submerging, as with traditional scuba gear. Because the rebreathers were so complex, and to avoid a repeat of an accident like Brad Pecel’s, divers had to run through a long, detailed checklist similar to those pilots use to preflight their aircraft. A two-person job, it took more than fifteen minutes to complete.
Finally, Rolland rotated a valve on his black Delrin mouthpiece 90 degrees, activating the unit’s gas-recycling system. With air flowing, he submerged and began the half-hour, southward swim to a chamber, called an airbell, that Broad had discovered the previous day. Broad himself settled down in Camp 5 to await his partner’s return.
In the sump, Rolland followed white parachute cord that Broad had placed the day before during his dive. Swimming toward the airbell, intent on finding what lay beyond, he was surely having one of the great dives of his life. It was quiet. The rebreather emitted no bubbles, only the barely audible hiss of inspirations and exhalations. He was comfortably warm in his wet suit. The visibility wasn’t great, about 8 feet max, but he had experienced worse.
At four-thirty, the rock ceiling above Rolland’s head began to slope upward at a gentle angle. He followed it and soon saw the silvery reflection of the water’s surface. He broke through and crawled on his hands and knees up onto a muddy sandbar. He was 1,410 feet from Camp 5. The air felt warm and muggy. His lights revealed that the sausage-shaped passage was 40 to 50 feet wide, 40 feet high, and 300 feet long—the length of a football field. Narrow sandbars ran like stripes of mustard down the chamber’s length. Both water and air were still and, except for his breathing, the airbell was silent. To conserve precious gas while on the surface, Rolland disabled his rebreather’s automatic oxygen injector. Doing so would save a few dozen breaths’ worth at most. But down here a few dozen breaths could keep you on the right side of death’s door, and for Rolland, a man made thrifty by heritage and meticulous by profession, it was second nature.
Rolland’s MK-IV rebreather was the lightest version yet, but it still was no feather at ninety-five pounds. His remaining gear added another forty-five, giving him a total load almost equal to his body weight. It was an enormous burden, considering that the rule of thumb for fit backpackers is that you can handle one-third of your body weight. Trudging the length of the airbell while carrying his fins and walking through mud required immense effort. At the airbell’s far end he rested, but not for long. His computer recorded a total between-dives interval in the airbell of just twelve minutes. At four forty-six he eased back into the water. For some reason, he did not reopen the rebreather’s automatic oxygen feed. With traditional scuba gear, such an error would have been impossible. That much simpler equipment offered just two options: air or no air. Conventionally equipped divers assure themselves of the former by taking several test breaths before submerging. The more complicated rebreather, however, had more options, one of which could be, by mistake, breathing gas without the mix of oxygen.
Why would Ian Rolland, a world-class player of this deadly game, fail to make this essential reentry adjustment? It’s impossible to know for certain. He was excited and fatigued, and may have been suffering exercise-induced hypoglycemia. For whatever reason—and it was probably a combination of all three—from now on, every breath would reduce the level of oxygen in his blood and increase its carbon dioxide level.
Back in the water, Rolland turned left and swam about 30 feet to the sump’s east wall. Here the tunnel was not fully flooded, so he floated on his belly and tied off the guideline to a rocky projection just 2 feet below the surface. Then he turned right and swam along the wall for 50 feet, where he tied the line off again.
He pushed off and began to swim south once more, but then something happened. It hit hard and came on in seconds—that much is certain. It might have been hypoxia, a shortage of oxygen. But the most likely culprit, given his diabetes, was severe hypoglycemia, a sharp drop of his blood sugar, that could lead to insulin shock.
Many descriptions of hypoglycemia attacks exist, provided by victims who survived them. If—and it’s a big if, for reasons that will soon become apparent—Rolland experienced that condition, this is what it might well have felt like: His muscles turned flaccid and weak and his vision blurry. He experienced flaring anxiety—rare for him on a dive. His heartbeat accelerated and his breathing rate soared as he turned back toward the sandbar and struggled into the dimming tunnel of his own light beams. He was only 50 feet from the airbell’s sandy beach. He could make it that far. Surely he could make it that far.