THIRTY-NINE
ONCE AGAIN, THEY WERE ABKHAZIANS. Dropping in unannounced, they stated their intention to stay for “a few days.” Perhaps because of the Europeans on this team, or for some other, unknown reason, these soldiers seemed less friendly than the ones who had dropped in on the August 2000 expedition. This was part of their training, they explained, and in addition, they wanted the cave explorers to feel safe and secure, which, they had no doubt, the presence of stalwart Abkhazian troops would ensure. In fact, the cavers had shrewdly anticipated such an event and made sure that their camp was flying two flags—one Abkhazian, the other white. The soldiers hung around, smoking and watching, but did not interfere.
The cavers went back to work, and on August 14, Oleg Klimchouk entered the world’s deepest sump. Around the world in Mexico, Bill Stone, Rick Stanton, and Jason Mallinson had demonstrated that all the immense preparation required to make a supercave dive might produce only a few extra yards of passage and depth; or it just might unlock miles, as Stone and Barbara am Ende’s had in Huautla in 1994. It was always a crapshoot, and this time the dice came up snake eyes. The sump Oleg Klimchouk dove was almost comically anticlimactic: only 13 feet long and 6 feet deep, it quickly narrowed down to a hole the size of a basketball. Beyond, Klimchouk could see no bottom, but with the poor visibility, that could have meant anything from 10 feet to 1,000.
Klimchouk’s dive was the deepest ever done in a cave, but it did not take him deeper than the French had gone in Mirolda. Thus it was worth not even a footnote in the record books—unless it opened the way to go much deeper in Krubera. Accordingly, teams brought down more air tanks, as well as tools for enlarging the hole at the sump’s end.
On the evening of August 18, Oleg Klimchouk and Denis Provalov dove the sump together, slipping through the newly enlarged portal into the big chamber beyond. Finding dry walking passages at its end, they explored on foot until they came to a large waterfall rushing over a cliff. With neither rope nor hardware to descend farther, they returned through the sump. That second dive marked the 2003 expedition’s deepest penetration, which broke no records. It was time to begin the long ordeal of derigging.
Several teams, including Sergio García-Dils’s, were working deep in the cave when, early in the morning on August 22, a storm struck. Above ground, wind and cloudburst rains damaged tents and scattered gear. According to accounts published later by the expedition leaders, the steady, hard rain produced torrents of water that began flooding the cave. Worse, they were then struck by an earthquake. For the record, Alexander Klimchouk, though he was not on the scene, remained skeptical about such dramatics. To his way of thinking, the “flood” was no more than routine water inflow for that time of year. Nor, he felt sure, had there been an earthquake. He attributed the tremors to a rockfall deep in Krubera or a nearby cave. Klimchouk concluded that the 2003 cavers’ relative inexperience had led them to describe as catastrophic events that would have left more seasoned veterans unfazed. Lending credence to Klimchouk’s theory, Sergio García-Dils later wrote that the “earthquake” felt by those inside the cave went unnoticed by those on the surface.
The storm did, unquestionably, bring heavy lightning. One bolt struck the communications center on the surface, sending a charge down through the telephone line. Ilya Zharkov happened to be talking on the phone at that moment. The receiver jumped out of his hand, and he flew ten feet through the air. Despite his thick caving gloves, Zharkov’s hand was badly burned. He was probably saved from outright electrocution by the thick rubber soles of his caving boots.
What with the storm, possible earthquake, flood, and lightning, García-Dils and the others imagined that before long they might start hearing apocalyptic trumpets. The lightning storm abated eventually, but the rain continued, and the flooding in the cave really did get serious. Two separate pairs of cavers found themselves trapped in meanders between the 500-Meter Camp and the one down at 4,000 feet. One pair survived, barely, by climbing to the ceiling and clinging to the wall of their particular passage, which had flooded almost completely. The other fled desperately from an onrushing wall of water, jumping out and to the side of a tight passage just in time to avoid being washed away. Shades of Indiana Jones.
No one was killed by the flood, quake, or lightning. By the morning of August 23, the high water was receding and the derigging resumed. At about 11:00 A.M., Alexander Kabanikhin entered the cave and began working his way down, rappelling successive pitches. He made his way through a 360-foot meander called Ulybka, which, translated, means “Smile.” He came to the edge of the Big Cascade and rappelled over its lip. At the first rebelay anchor, he transferred his descender to the second rope, leaned back, and fell away into the darkness.