Reprisal by Mitchell Smith

dark.
    On vacation after her freshman year at Radcliffe, she'd gone with a young man to New Mexico--a golden boy, Curt Garry, she'd been too careless in loving.
    They'd met at a dance at Dartmouth--both conscious of their cleverness, beauty, youth, and luck. Conscious even--at least she had been--of the picture they made together. A slender and active girl, dark-eyed, her long hair a rich and glossy black--and a tall lean hazel-eyed boy, old-fashioned in his angular good looks, his hair bright as sun-struck straw.
    Too perfect a picture for them to fulfill.

    Joanna had enjoyed the boy, the high-desert sun and sunlight, and had been invited by Curt's uncle down into the Lechuguilla cave, a very special favor.
    Lechuguilla contained the most beautiful series of cave chambers yet found on earth. And in those glittering spaces--snowy, delicate, spun with frosted calcite lace and fantastic in limestone chandeliers, exquisite decorations jeweled by millions of years--Joanna had fallen in love with under-earth. With the earth's secrets, as a little child found comfort and mystery both, beneath its mother's skirts.
    Muddy, exhausted, and badly frightened once-crawling through a narrow squeeze that seemed to contract its stone walls around her, press her breathless--she had found herself at home. ... She found caving, and later in the year lost Curt Garry--who ran from her like a rabbit--and lost forever a certain regard for herself as well.
    But after that, she had caved every chance she got. Below the earth seemed more important than above it, and she enjoyed the company of cavers--odd adventurers all, with that interesting combination of hard common sense and risk-taking seen in mountaineers, rock climbers, and pilots. Like poets, they saw life as a temporary opportunity, to be taken full advantage of.
    --Curt's mother, who'd liked Joanna, had called her seven years later. Still single, an attorney with a Chicago firm, he'd died of lymphoma ... had asked his mother to call, and sent love. ...
    Blue Water ropes, Pigeon Mountain ropes--all wonderfully light, slim, and strong--were hanging high on the garage wall in rich thick color-banded coils.
    Some of it static rope--tough and inelastic for long, long rappels down into darkness ... and then the endless climbs returning, working back up that single thin, sheathed strand of nylon. Stepping up, rope-walking, with two or three cammed ascenders each sliding up the line in turn, then gripping ...
    sliding up, then gripping ... so the caver, attached to them, traveled like a great slow spider back up the hundreds of feet he'd sailed down so lightly.
    Then a different rope for risk climbing, lead climbing for rock climbing to depths beneath the earth. A dynamic line, more fragile, with stretch enough under shock to cushion a sudden fall. Giving ... giving to prevent a smashed pelvis, a broken back, or snapped harness straps and a fall all the way.
    A screamer, cavers called that fall, though Merle Budwing had shouted, and only once, as he went.
    Hanging coils of rope, and below them the parachute-buckled black webbing straps of sit harness and chest harness. Her new harness--and her old set and helmet, brought out just in case she might persuade Frank down a shallow sea cave along the coast. ... The bright red PVC equipment and supply packs hung from pegs to the side, one loaded with web-tape cow's-tails, tape slings, an etrier--that useful thick nylon strap sewn into a four-loop ladder--and batteries, flashlight, lighters, and Cylume sticks for emergency backup light--along with freeze-dried food bars, Super Leatherman multitool, and small hand-pumped water filter.
    Another pack contained the neat machinery for movement up and down the rope.
    Cammed ascenders --yellow Jumars, Gibbses, and Petzl Crolls, with their nylon-webbing attachment straps and bungee cords--and the Simmons chest-harness rollers to run the rope through, hold the climber upright against the line. ... Then the