SIXTEEN
BY 10:00 P.M. ROLLAND HAD NOT returned to Camp 5. That was the agreed-upon time when Broad would make the steep, hard climb back up to Camp 3 for help, which he had done. Now, in the early-morning hours of March 27, Stone and Broad gathered the others in Camp 3: Don Broussard, Rob Parker, Jim Brown. The group also included Stone’s girlfriend, Barbara am Ende, thirty-four. She was tall and blond and slender, with a very attractive face that her practical Dutch boy haircut (less likely to get tangled in rappel racks and mechanical ascenders) emphasized rather than disguised.
Am Ende and Stone, forty at the time, had met during a West Virginia cave rescue in 1992. The attraction had not been instant. Stone’s reputation as a stellar expeditionary caver was already well established, and when he learned that a woman would be part of the rescue team, he expressed his skepticism directly to am Ende. He didn’t go so far as to kick her off the team, however, which turned out to be a good thing because am Ende and Stone were the first rescuers to find and help the injured caver.
That impressed Stone. The next morning, he lingered in camp to chat her up. Well, sort of. Bill Stone wasn’t much of a chatter. His pickup line was really a series of short, sharp questions about her caving experience, delivered almost as though he were interviewing her for an expedition. (Which, in a way, he was.) For her part, am Ende was angered rather than attracted, but she could not help being impressed by Stone’s energy, strength, and caving skill. A kind of electric charge seemed to surround Bill Stone, felt by all, men and women alike, who came in contact with him. It was, for lack of a better word, exciting.
Perhaps understanding that Lothario was not his best role, Stone secreted a business card in one of am Ende’s packs. She found it after arriving home, and understood that she had at least passed Stone’s first level of scrutiny.
There were others, of course. Stone was grieving the loss of his family—he and Pat were separated, their divorce still in the works—and did not want to go through that again. Any woman he became involved with now would have to keep up with him on the surface as well as in caves. That meant, first of all, being a competent caver. It also meant being fit—very fit. Stone knew that expeditionary caving, and especially deep-cave diving, demanded extreme fitness, and he worked hard to stay in shape, running and cycling and weightlifting. Am Ende passed that test, too. She was trim and athletic, riding a bicycle from her apartment to classes every day, and was a regular runner as well.
Before long they were both commuting. Stone drove down to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where am Ende was working toward her Ph.D. in marine geochemistry. Doing her part, am Ende made the five-hour trip north to Stone’s house—not the former family residence—in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., where Stone still worked for the U.S. government. As the months passed, their relationship deepened. Barbara am Ende was passionate about caving, could just about keep pace with Stone, and was lovely, to boot. Am Ende found the tall, strong, utterly confident Stone fascinating and stood somewhat in awe of his caving exploits. As another plus, her cooler, more laid-back personality made a nice complement to his intensity.
In late January 1994, she pulled up stakes and moved from Chapel Hill to live with Stone. Less than three weeks later, they left together for Huautla, Stone to lead his most massive and ambitious expedition to date, am Ende to encounter her first supercave.
AS IT TURNED OUT, AM ENDE was the only woman on the Huautla team, an inclusion that caused problems from the outset. Her presence disturbed some of the men, especially Steve Porter, who was no less outspoken for being a rookie. During one team meeting, which did not include am Ende, Porter said, “Let’s be honest. She wouldn’t even be here if she weren’t Bill’s girlfriend.”
But that was not entirely true, and am Ende had her defenders. One was a more experienced cave explorer named Tom Morris, a biologist from Florida.
“She’s like some dream Amazon,” he said. “Some tall, blond geologist caver who dives his rebreathers. Good for friggin’ Bill.”
Am Ende was a cave diver, albeit a newly minted one, having earned her basic scuba certification just a year earlier. She was also the first in a series of younger, very attractive women Bill Stone would take with him to the great caves. The habit invited another comparison between Stone and Reinhold Messner, who brought beautiful young women along on some of his memorable climbs. During his greatest of all, the solo, oxygenless ascent of Everest in August 1980, his lover Nena Holguin held silent vigil for him in their tent and was there to help when he returned, utterly spent.
BLEARY AND BEDRAGGLED, THE CREW AT Camp 3 listened to Broad’s explanation. The seven stood around, wet, muddy, dulled by fatigue, prison-pale, smelling of mold and excrement, the carbide lamps on their fiberglass helmets burning white circles in the darkness. It was one of those situations for which no amount of years of experience or training could fully prepare them. Down here, as in life, the line between happiness and horror was thin indeed. But horror up top can be mitigated: by family, friends, clergy, police, doctors. Down here, they were the mitigation. Getting help would not be an option.
That was true for two reasons. They were at least a day’s climb from the surface. News of Rolland’s absence had reached them no faster than Broad could, and a request for help would make it to the top no sooner than someone could climb up there and deliver it. Mountaineers had been using radios since the 1960s, and divers had had “voice-comm” capability well before that. But radios are useless for surface-to-depth cave communications because their waves cannot penetrate solid rock. As late as 2002, information in caves still traveled no faster than in the ancient times before humans rode horses—walking speed, in other words. And not even running speed, because caves don’t lend themselves to a faster gait. Stone once remarked that from deep camps, “You would send out this laundry list. Guys would carry it back to the next camp. ‘Did they say this or that?’ So by the time the answer came back in, you didn’t always get what was on that list. And you just lost a week.”
THE CRISIS PRESENTED STONE WITH a Hobson’s choice: further endanger Rolland by delaying a rescue attempt or risk others’ lives by rushing one. Talking to the team, using his engineer’s logic to analyze options, he explained. If Ian was dead, game over, no need to rush. Cold, but true. If he was alive but had not returned, he obviously needed help. But he could be alive—undrowned, in other words—only if he was out of the water, stranded but safe for the time being on some dry land. If that were the case, they must rescue him. But to do that, one or more of them would have to dive the quarter-mile sump, and to do that they would have to assemble the expedition’s other rebreather, a multihour job devilishly challenging even above ground, with good light and clean surroundings. Down here, screwing up just one tiny task out of hundreds could mean death for the next user. Assembling the apparatus was no job to rush, especially not by people stupefied by exhaustion. They needed several hours of rest first.
Appalled, Broad objected—strenuously. He and Ian had become close, and, familiar with diving’s hazards, he could visualize his friend alone in the cold darkness, suffering the agonies of decompression sickness (“the bends”), or lying immobilized by some surface injury, or sickened and dying from his diabetes. Broad simply could not accept delaying a rescue attempt, risk be damned, and said so. But it was not his decision to make.
Stone determined that they would all sleep for a few hours, then go down to mount a rescue from Camp 5. As he had said, if Ian had already drowned, nothing could be done, though that possibility was not a nice thing to contemplate. Drowning is a cruel way to go. It throws two of the body’s most potent self-preservation reflexes into competition. Trapped underwater, you hold your breath as long as possible, with the urge to breathe growing from a whisper in your chest to a scream in your brain. As the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream builds up, you start to jerk and spasm. Gray fog closes down your peripheral vision. Ultimately, it is all a matter of chemistry. With your vision down to points of light, your fists clenched and toes curled as if in orgasm, your mouth opens not to scream but to inhale involuntarily. Most drowning victims reach this point in ninety seconds, give or take, which is very long indeed in extremis. Finally, your lungs fill and you become negatively buoyant, floating slowly down, staring at eternity. There may be no good ways to die, but some are worse than others.
AT FIVE THE NEXT MORNING, March 28, barely rested, Bill Stone, Kenny Broad, and three others climbed down to Camp 5, where they reassembled the expedition’s second rebreather. Shortly after noon, Broad geared up and disappeared into the sump. He reached the airbell at 12:45 P.M. He explored the passage with his light and found footprints leading onto the sandbar. He followed them to where the sandbar sloped into clear water about 10 feet deep. Broad entered the water and swam, looking down at the bottom through his mask, for about 50 feet on the surface. Then his circle of light surrounded Ian Rolland, lying still on the sandy bottom. His mask and other equipment were in place, undisturbed. A red light was blinking on his rebreather’s buddy console. There was no evidence of struggle.
Because his was a reconnaissance rather than an investigation dive, Broad had no underwater slate to make detailed notes on, so he left everything untouched and headed back to Camp 5. Bill Stone, awaiting his return, spotted his light approaching. Broad surfaced, spat out his mouthpiece, and took off his mask.
“Ian drowned,” he said.
Speaking first and foremost of himself, Stone had once remarked that if some people die making faster pushes to the moon and Mars that are necessary for successful space exploration, well, no big deal—there are lots more where they came from. Those who know Stone, whether they like him or not, will tell you that he has the strongest will they have ever encountered. Such Shackleton-class resolve stood him and all the others in good stead just now. Compartmentalizing grief, he set about organizing a recovery. Keeping Kenny Broad with him, he sent the other three up for help. It was going to take a large team to get Ian Rolland out of the cave, but he would come out. Stone well remembered the Chris Yeager controversy. Before Ian could be carried out of the cave, he had to be brought back through the sump. Stone knew it would be the most difficult and dangerous thing any of them had ever done. And, since he was both the expedition leader and one of its most experienced divers, the job would fall to him.