Detective Layla Washington feels helpless waiting for updates, and this latest text message is the most ominous yet.

A young woman is trapped in a remote cave system miles inside the Cascade Range. She’s injured, exhausted, and lapsing in and out of consciousness. Rescuers have managed to extract little information from her—not even a name—and at this point, questioning the victim is a waste of air and time. The team’s sole priority is rescuing her before she dies. As Washington understands it, the woman is inside a limestone tunnel just a few feet high and eighteen inches wide. A cave-in sealed her inside the crawlspace sometime last night, and now she’s pinned on her stomach by dense rockfall on all sides. One rescuer compared it to being stuck inside a smaller-than-average coffin.

Slowly filling with rocks.

In pitch blackness.

Alone.

For the past eighteen hours.

It’ll be all over local televisions by six tonight. The rescue operation is now dozens strong, mostly volunteers and local experts, and will double when reinforcements arrive from Portland. The incident commander is an old fire chief from Salem, just a few years younger than Washington herself, and he runs an efficient show. An underground manager and several specialized teams—medical, rigging, litter—are currently racing to clear rock debris, hand deliver oxygen bottles, and rig a pulley system down hundreds of feet of narrow, labyrinthine tunnels. They’d found the trapped woman by the echo of her screams, but it took hours to trace her exact location and even longer to safely reach her.

Underground lifesaving operations are rare and uniquely difficult: part confined-space rescue, part firefighting, with a dash of mountaineering thrown in for good measure. Much of this particular cave can only be traversed single file, risking bottlenecks and traffic jams while equipment is passed from rescuer to rescuer like a human daisy chain. Phone and radio signals are unable to penetrate rock, limiting communication to line of sight. Every inch of progress is incremental and dangerous. The primary directive of any rescue is to not require rescuing yourself, and one team member has already been seriously injured.