SEVENTEEN
CAVE DIVING, BY ITSELF, IS EXTRAVAGANTLY dangerous, but recovering dead bodies from caves is even worse. For one thing, divers usually die not in benign places but in the more dangerous parts of caves. In addition, thrashing around in his death throes, a diver often becomes entangled in his own safety lines, which, in addition to the other guidelines strung in caves, create a deadly web waiting to snare rescuers. A live diver can squeeze and wriggle through perilously tight passages, some of which require doffing a tank, pushing it through, following, and then donning it again. Working a dead body back through such places (the need for forensic investigation makes it crucial to retrieve gear as well as body) is hideously difficult, exhausting, and invites damage to the rescuer’s own gear. Such contortions inevitably stir up huge amounts of silt, turning almost every recovery into a zero-visibility encounter, which increases all the other risks by an order of magnitude.
At about eight-thirty the next morning, Stone donned his usual diving gear, plus extras for this specialized mission: multiple carabiners to attach Ian’s body to his own, and straps to bind the dead man’s arms and legs if rigor mortis had stiffened them awkwardly. He dove through the sump, crossed the sandbar, and found his friend’s body. Rolland was lying on his right side, facing toward the passage, about 50 feet into the second sump. His red plastic line reel was lying on the bottom, 8 feet from his body. As Kenny Broad had noted, the death scene did not give an impression of drowning, which is often accompanied by evidence of frenzy—mask torn off, gear in disarray, hands lacerated, the diver entangled in his own safety line, disturbed silt resettled on the body. Stone saw none of that here, either. Rolland’s mask was in place. His hands were unscathed. The rebreather’s mouthpiece was hanging loose, emitting a slow, peaceful stream of bubbles. Both backup regulators were still properly secured and functional. Four of the five tanks he carried were full or nearly full.
So what had killed Rolland? Hypercapnia, an excess of carbon dioxide in the system, was one possibility, but unlikely. For that dive, Rolland had meticulously repacked the rebreather’s scrubbing canister, which removed carbon dioxide from the recycled gas. Insulin shock induced by hypoglycemia was another possible culprit. Crossing the sandy airbell floor after a stressful swim through the sump while loaded down with 140 pounds of equipment would have been a likely way to induce insulin shock. Just the anaerobic slog by itself could have had dire consequences.
Finally, there was hypoxia, a shortage of oxygen. Ultimately, hypoxia causes death by halting all normal metabolic functions, but the diver’s brain cells are more at risk than any others in the body. Because the brain is the organ first and most affected, a diver can become unconscious before recognizing any other symptoms. As in the case of hypercapnia, hypoxia can kill before the victim even understands that anything is wrong. Data downloaded later from the rebreather’s computer strongly suggested that hypoxia had not been at fault. But that information was not available to expedition members at the time.
Stone recorded information on waterproof slates, then hauled Rolland and his gear and himself, a total load of over six hundred pounds, up onto the sandbar and back to its far end. To retrieve the body, he would have to clip it to his chest harness, putting his face inches from Rolland’s for the duration of the dive, his bright helmet lights illuminating everything. Noel Sloan had recovered many bodies from caves. He’d once told Stone, When you have to do it, turn the wet-suit hood around. Stone took Sloan’s advice.
With the body fastened tightly to him, Stone crawled into the water and set off. Managing buoyancy in open water is scuba’s toughest discipline to master. Managing the buoyancy of two bodies, one of them dead, in a cave sump is nearly impossible. Stone yo-yoed erratically between the sump’s floor and ceiling, stirring up more silt all the time. Twice he lost the guideline. In a flooded, silted-out tunnel 90 feet wide and a quarter-mile long, this easily could have been a death sentence. Each time, Stone managed to relocate the little string. Sometimes fortune really does favor the bold and the brave.
At 11:30 A.M., he resurfaced in Camp 5. Immediate examination of the rebreather, as well as a later, much more thorough laboratory exam, all but ruled out MK-IV malfunction as the cause of death.
Ian Rolland’s diabetes was a more plausible explanation. He had been gone for a long time and might have already been mildly hypoglycemic when he entered Sump 2. But if that was the culprit, it killed him with astonishing speed, so quickly that he did not even have time to eat a Power Bar—the two he carried were still in his wet-suit thigh pocket when Stone found him. Frustratingly, not even that conclusion could be drawn with certainty because the body’s advanced decomposition prevented testing for insulin shock. The medical examiner’s verdict only added more shadows to a death already shrouded in mystery: the autopsy revealed no water in Rolland’s lungs. The official cause of death was listed as “asphyxia due to immersion in water,” a verdict no more satisfying than the one that had been rendered following Rolf Adams’s accident.
It took five days to haul Rolland’s body from the cave, wrapped in a plastic tarp, dripping fluids of decomposition onto its handlers, its Gorgon head shrouded in a wet-suit hood. Word of the death quickly circulated through the expedition and then the region. And well before the recovery team surfaced, people were speculating that the experimental, complex rebreather had killed Ian Rolland, one of the world’s best cave divers and one of the expedition’s most popular members.
The death was bad news for an already troubled team. For weeks, Stone had been driving himself and everyone else relentlessly. Depending on who was commenting, he was either “hyperinsensitive” or admirably committed to the mission, and more people were inclined to the former. Team members had taken to calling Stone “the Bulldozer,” as well as less flattering things, and bridled at his attempts to make them match his own frenetic pace. There was also Barbara am Ende’s presence, which for some was like the grain of sand in an oyster, a constant source of irritation that could not be reduced.
For his part, Stone believed that people who had benefited from his core team’s immense preparatory work had been slacking for quite a while, and that angered him. Regardless, Rolland’s death was the final blow. People, including some whose agreements called for them to stay until the expedition’s end, began talking about pulling out because of the death. To Stone, using a comrade’s death as an excuse to quit was reprehensible. But it didn’t feel that way at all to a number of the team members. With defections threatening, it was beginning to look like a repeat of the 1984 Pe?a Colorada mutiny.