The Deep Zone

by James M. Tabor

  “No problem. Doing your job.” The clear plastic cannula, inserted into her nostrils, made her sound like she had a bad cold, but they were delivering four liters per hour of 100 percent oxygen.

  “How you doing, ma’am?”

  “All things considered, not so bad.”

  The nurse smiled, nodded, but, to Lenora’s amazement, she saw the other woman’s eyes well up with tears. A lot of people seemed very concerned about her here at CENMEDFAC. She knew it was because word had gotten around about her work with the troopers back at COP Terok. They were calling her a hero, Major Angel, things like that. She had no patience for such things. The heroes were those boys fighting every day.

  “I hate this. Excuse me, Major.”

  She smiled back. Could still do that. Only had three lesions so far: right thigh, abdomen, left arm.

  “Ma’am, why don’t you let us give you a little something to make you more comfortable?”

  “I may just do that in a bit. Right now, I’m good. But I appreciate your concern.” She reached out and gave the nurse’s gloved hand a squeeze, managed a wink.

  “All right, ma’am. You know I’m close as that button there.” A large woman, she nodded at the call button safety-pinned to Stilwell’s sheet, and her forehead bumped against the blurry plastic of the suit’s helmet. She squeezed Stilwell’s hand back and headed off to the nurses’ station.

  Stilwell was in an isolation ward with four beds. There was another woman, an ACE sufferer, drugged to sleep. There would come a time, Stilwell knew, when morphine would not be enough, when nothing would be enough, and then it would be truly bad. The other woman’s case was not as advanced, but in her, asymptomatically, ACE had emerged through the tissues of her face first, rather than eating its way out of the body cavity. There were so many nerves in the face, so much pain there just waiting to be set free. She needed morphine, and a lot of it.

  It won’t be long for you, girl, Stilwell thought. You’re steady at level seven now. Yesterday was level five. So a couple of days at most. You can probably handle up to eight without the morphine. She had often asked patients to rank their pain on a scale of one to ten, one being pain-free and ten being unendurable agony. Now, for the first time ever, she was giving herself the same quiz.

  She didn’t want meds yet. For one thing, they made her constipated. They also muddled her thinking. The pain did that, too, of course, but she found that she could take “vacations” from the pain, going to other places and times in her mind. And when she came back from vacation to the hospital room, she could think clearly for a while. She was thinking about ACE, reviewing all she knew about it, trying to create a virtual laboratory in her mind to work out some protocol to counter it. Having contracted it herself put her at a disadvantage. But looked at another way, it gave her the advantage of being a physician and scientist who could analyze the symptoms and progression firsthand.

  Just now, though, the pain interrupted her thoughts. The spots on her leg, abdomen, and arm were red and raw, leaking blood and pungent fluids, the products of putrefaction. The spots felt like someone had poured gasoline on her body there and set it afire. Bad. Very bad. But so far the spots were a relatively small part of her body’s entire surface, and none of them were in a nerve-dense zone. So she could manage, at least for periods of time. Now, though, she knew it was time to go on vacation.

  She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and slowly, and thought back to the day she had graduated from Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. She went there, felt the green-edged black cap with gold tassel on her head, the weight of the black gown on her shoulders, saw the black toes of her low-heeled pumps peeking out. Felt the graduates in front of her and behind shuffling forward.

  Smelled the aftershave and perfume and sweat on that hot Tennessee day. Felt her heart beating more quickly as she approached the steps to the outdoor stage—

  “Major?”

  It was the young nurse. Stilwell pulled herself back to the world of pain.

  “Hi.”

  “Major, ma’am, you have a visitor.” The young woman grimaced, blew air through her nose in an indignant snort. “I told him you shouldn’t be disturbed, but… he’s an officer.”

  That brought her awake. “Really? Who?”

  “Um, I didn’t catch his name, ma’am. Can’t see the name tag through his suit. He’s an officer, though, made sure I knew that. You feel up to it?”

  This was a surprise. She had not had any visitors, save routine calls from the doctors and the nurses’ regular checks. “Yes, I can do it. Tell him to come in.”

  “All right, ma’am.”

  “Wait… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Artwell, ma’am. Sergeant Artwell.”

  “Your first name.”

  “Oh. Yes, ma’am. It’s Regina. People call me Reggie.”

  “Thanks. Reggie, would you please raise the bed so I can sit up?”

  “Sure enough, ma’am.” She did that and left, and presently a short, stout man in a Chemturion shuffled in. His face was obscured behind the suit’s scratched, wrinkled plastic faceplate. In one black-gloved hand he held a bulging yellow envelope with the word CONFIDENTIAL stamped on it in fat red letters.

  “You don’t look so good, Major.” She recognized the stuffy voice. Ribbesh the fobbit. What the hell is he doing here? “Sorry to see that. Anything I can get you?” Some kind of adenoidal hypertrophy, probably, his voice.

  “I’m all good, Colonel.”

  “Hm. Is it… very painful?”

  “Not so bad.” No way she would admit hurting to this fobbit.

  “I’m glad to hear that.” He came around the foot of her bed, took a cautious step closer. She could see his face more clearly. Some people had facial features that made them look piggish—round, pink cheeks, upturned nose, tiny eyes, plump chin. Colonel Ribbesh was one. Overweight, he was perspiring heavily inside the suit.

  “I’m sorry about that little business with the suit, Colonel,” she said. “I was under a lot of stress.”

  “No doubt. It’s regrettable. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if you’d obeyed my order, you wouldn’t be here like this.”

  “And young soldiers would have suffered a hell of a lot more. Not a good trade-off, Colonel. May I ask why you’re here?”

  “Of course. As a matter of fact, it’s about that… incident.” His eyes flicked around the room. He touched the side of his hood, cleared his throat. “You see, I had you on speakerphone to hear you through the suit. So our conversation was witnessed by a number of other personnel. A major who is my adjutant and quite a few enlisted people. That created a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “If it had been a direct, unobserved communication just between you and me, it could perhaps have been resolved differently. But the presence of other personnel made it… unavoidable.”

  “Made what unavoidable?”

  “I had no choice but to report your action to higher authority. I’m sure you’re familiar with the military Code of Conduct. Any failure to report a violation of the code is a violation in itself.” He reached up as though to wipe the sweat from his forehead, remembered, let his hand drop. “Hot in these things, isn’t it? You’d think they’d air-condition them or something.”

  “Go on, Colonel, please.”

  “Yes. Well, I had no choice, don’t you see? I would have risked my career by turning a blind eye to that exchange. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, I can assure you.”

  I bet not, fobbit, she thought. Ribbesh was not only a fobbit, he was a purveyor of chickenshit, which had a very special definition in the Army. She knew officers like Ribbesh, miserable people with small minds and great buzzing swarms of resentments. They lived to dole out chickenshit—unnecessary punishment for trivial infractions, the punishment bearing no appropriate relationship to the offense, the purpose being nothing more than making life worse for someone of lower rank. She
also knew that the Army, which welcomed all and fired none, bore an inordinate number of chicken-shitters.

  “Shouldn’t I have been notified? Served with a paper or something?”

  “That’s what I’m doing now, Major.”

  “Oh. Took you a while, then, didn’t it?”

  His pink face got pinker. “It was necessary for the document to move through proper channels.”

  “Of course,” she said. So there’ll be a letter in my Guard file. Big deal.

  As if he had read her mind, he said, “I had a need to review your personnel file. Unfortunately, this was not the first occurrence of insubordination.”

  “That’s true. Sometimes orders and good medicine don’t mix. From where I sit, medicine always trumps.”

  “Yes, that was clear from your responses to the previous charges. Frankly, I was surprised. No ordinary officer could have gotten off so lightly. But then, you’re a doctor. Obviously exceptions were made.”

  “Colonel, is there anything else? I’m tired and—”

  “If you’ll allow me, I will complete this conference and leave. Because this was a subsequent incident, rather than an initial occurrence, the severity escalated. In addition to disciplinary action, it appears that there will be DOB as well.”

  Denial of benefits. Her tired heart wrenched. “What are you saying?”

  “From the Army’s point of view, Major, it is no different than shooting your toe off to escape combat. Your intention might have been noble, but, to paraphrase your words, orders always trump intention. In essence, you inflicted this infection on yourself.”

  “So you’re saying that I will bear the expenses for all of my medical care.”

  “That is correct, I’m afraid.”

  “Stateside as well as here?”

  “Yes.”

  She experienced a new dread so intense it made her dizzy and even more nauseous. Her civilian, private health insurance provided zero coverage when she was on active duty. That was when the military Tricare program kicked in, and, as a physician, she knew the regulation verbatim: “When on military duty, members are covered for any injury, illness or disease incurred or aggravated in the line of duty.”

  She also knew, however, that Tricare had exclusions, including—as Ribbesh the fobbit had pointed out—self-inflicted injuries. If she lived, the expenses could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would bankrupt them. The house, the cars, their savings… everything would be consumed. Because of this fat little fobbit.

  But then she realized it wasn’t as bad as the fobbit obviously thought it would be, because she was not going to need a lot of medical treatment. She knew the odds. So if she died… no, when she died, Doug and Danny would receive the payout from her military life insurance. Five hundred thousand dollars. They could take care of the mortgage and be secure for the rest of their lives, if they invested wisely. So the fobbit was not getting over on her, as he assumed. She wanted him out.

  “Colonel, I respectfully request that you exit my room and leave me alone. I will summon medical staff if I have to.”

  “I was just leaving, Major,” he said. “But there is one more thing I am required to communicate.”

  She waited, glaring, one hand holding the call button.

  “DOB cases involve not only denial of medical benefits, but of death benefits as well. We can’t very well be paying huge life insurance dividends for people who cause their own deaths, can we? Army regulations, I’m afraid. I’m sure you’re familiar with General Order Nineteen, Section B3, Subsections r and s.”

  “Get out! Now.”

  “Goodbye, Major.” He dropped the heavy envelope on the foot of her bed. “I imagine someone here can help you review the documentation.” Colonel Ribbesh waddled out, buttocks pushing against the Chemturion’s heavy plastic.

  THIRTY-TWO

  IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER THREE A.M. AND DAVID LATHROP had been moving fast, running between the secretary’s office and BARDA and half a dozen other places, nonstop, since six that morning. His eyes felt like someone had thrown sand in them, his mouth tasted like spoiled meat, and his brain was grinding up thoughts before he could finish them.

  “Time to call it.” He pushed up from his chair too quickly, felt light-headed, leaned over with both hands on his desk until he steadied. Whenever he was on duty, Lathrop kept his vest buttoned and tie snug around his collar. Discipline was the key to the universe, and if you built it one small step at a time, the big things took care of themselves. We are our habits. He loved that saying, though just now he could not have told you its source to save his life.

  Lathrop did allow himself to hang up his suit jacket after six P.M., however. Walking to the closet in his office, he shrugged into the jacket, concealing the SIG Sauer he carried in a fine leather shoulder holster. He could have carried, compliments of Uncle Sam, a standard-issue Glock 9mm, but he preferred the extra power of the big .40-cal load and the greater reliability of the SIG. He had heard too many stories about Glocks jamming at inopportune times. Or he could have carried no weapon at all. The likelihood of him getting into a firefight now was about the same as his getting hit by lightning. His rock-and-roll field days were years behind him. But once upon a time, when he ran agents in Iraq and Pakistan, the need to carry a weapon had been real and ever-present. After all those years of going armed, being without a gun made him as uncomfortable as walking around without pants. And he reasoned that if one chose to carry a handgun, one should provide oneself with the very best, and that was a SIG Sauer. They were built like Swiss watches and never, ever malfunctioned. They cost an arm and a leg, true, but that was a fair price for life insurance.

  As a GS-15, the highest nonappointed federal employment grade, Lathrop had an assigned space on the parking garage’s blue level, beneath the Homeland Security headquarters building. A year earlier, the department had moved from its temporary offices over on Nebraska Avenue to this new $6 billion complex, which held no fewer than seven major federal agencies, in addition to the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the National Cyber Security Division. It was not a little ironic, Lathrop often reflected, that the gigantic new headquarters facility was located on the former grounds of Washington’s infamous St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric facility that had treated, or at least housed, the legally and criminally insane since 1852. After all, if 9/11’s perpetrators and consequences were not insane, then who and what on earth was?

  The official address of the new Homeland Security complex was 1100 Alabama Avenue SE. Lathrop drove up out of the parking garage and headed for the Alabama Avenue exit. He stopped in front of massive gates bristling with razor wire and security cameras. Presently two uniformed Homeland Security guards came out of the small-windowed concrete gatehouse and approached Lathrop’s car. The screening for outgoing personnel was no less intense than that for incoming. Lathrop knew one of the guards, a young man named Jermayn Foster. During Lathrop’s countless comings and goings, he had encountered Foster often, and now and then they chatted. Foster had come over from Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, where he had been stuck at sergeant grade, hoping for better promotion possibilities in the vast federal system. A tall, thin man, he moved to the driver’s side while his partner—a man Lathrop did not know—walked to the passenger side and illuminated the interior of Lathrop’s vehicle with a million-candlepower spotlight. Lathrop knew that closed-circuit cameras and NBC—Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical—detectors were scanning the underside of his car at the same time.

  He had already lowered his window. “Evening, Jermayn. How’s the shift?”

  “Good evening, Mr. Lathrop. Slow and slower. Not many folks work the hours you do, sir.”

  “Just a tired spook with nothing to go home for.” It was true, and made something inside him wince as he said it. But he winked, and Foster smiled, taking it as light self-deprecation.

  Lathrop handed out his ID folder. Foster scanned it with an infrared barcode reader that he took fro
m a leather holster in front of his Glock. He handed the ID folder back and, from another belt holster, took a device that looked like a small flashlight.

  “Sorry, Mr. Lathrop.”

  “No problem. Rules are rules.” Lathrop knew the drill for iris detection. He turned his head so that Jermayn could see his eyes. The guard positioned the biometric scanner a foot from Lathrop’s right eye, touched a button, and waited. Lathrop knew that a soft, musical voice would say, “Approved” in Foster’s earpiece.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lathrop.” Foster started to move away, then hesitated. He put his hand on top of the car. “Mr. Lathrop, I hope you won’t take this wrong, but you look really tired, sir. I can call you a department car, you know? Take you home, leave your car here?”

  Lathrop actually considered that for a moment. He knew how dangerous exhausted drivers who dropped into microsleeps could be. But it was only twenty minutes to his condo in Rose Hill, Maryland. He would keep the window down and the radio turned up. “I appreciate that. I do. But I’ll be okay. I’m going straight home and then to bed. Long day.” He forced a chuckle. “Correction: long days.”

  “All right, sir. Drive carefully.” Foster stepped back, smiled, and gave Lathrop a crisp military salute.

  Lathrop headed west on Alabama Avenue, turned south on Fourth Street, and picked up Indian Head Highway southbound. There were few other cars on the road at this time of night, but he lowered both front windows halfway, just to ward off drowsiness. He was only half a mile west of the Potomac, enjoying the water’s fertile scent that the wind carried to him. He kept going for several miles before turning east on Palmer Road. As he made the turn he glanced at his gas gauge and saw that the empty warning light was blinking.

  There was a twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven and Mobil station in an otherwise deserted mile between Tucker and Bock roads, about halfway to his condo. He turned in and stopped by one of the pumps. A black Ford Expedition with tinted glass pulled up on the other side of the pump island. It looked like the kind of vehicle driven by upper-crust Washingtonians, and normally Lathrop might have glanced over in case a shapely leg emerged, but now he was too tired to care.