The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

  After Hallie had traversed fifty feet she stopped, rested briefly, and watched Al clamber onto the ledge. If we’re going to lose Arguello, she thought, this will be the place.

  But there was nothing she could do, so she started off again. Left hand ahead, right hand, left foot, right foot. After a few minutes, the sequence became almost automatic, and that, she knew, was the greatest danger. Got to stay sharp. Their one bit of good luck here was the cave wall. If it had been smooth, they would have had serious problems. This one was rough and pocked, offering good hand placements—“jugs,” climbers called them, because they resembled jug handles.

  She had gone perhaps three hundred feet when she realized that she could not see Bowman, in front of her, or Cahner, behind. Bowman had been moving faster, Cahner slower, and the cave wall here had become convex, bulging outward enough to block her view past twenty feet either way. She had not remembered that from before. Bowman could take care of himself, in any case. Arguello she worried about, but his fate was out of her hands.

  She was more than halfway when she got sewing-machine legs: her exhausted calf muscles starting to spasm, heels jerking up and down like the needles of sewing machines. The next thing, she knew, would be a searing cramp—a charley horse, they used to call them—and her calf muscles would contract into agonizing knots. She stopped, stretched one carefully, pulling her toes up toward her knees, breathing deeply, letting her system flush out the lactic acid, giving the muscles time to rejuvenate.

  That let her mind, which had been focusing so hard on traversing the ledge, flutter off to think of other things. It landed on Bowman. The idea of him, anyway. And the next thing she thought of was how it would feel to kiss him, and then how it would feel to …

  She returned her attention to the wall, her calves feeling better now. She moved off, more slowly this time, trying to make her shuffle-and-clutch sequence of movements as smooth and fluid as possible. After a while she finally found her rhythm and it became almost like a slow dance, her feet and hands making their own decisions. The curve of the cave wall became more pronounced, a true bulge, so that she could see even less of the ledge in front of and behind her.

  She kept going, developing the incredible intimacy with a surface known only by climbers and the blind. Sliding her hands slowly over the wall, she felt every crack, crevice, and protuberance. Tiny flakes of rock no thicker than a guitar pick seemed huge to her hypersensitized fingertips.

  Just as it seemed the ledge would never end, with her calves on fire again, her light revealed the surface underfoot beginning to tilt downward. She recognized this from her last time here. She moved carefully down the slope until she was over solid cave floor. A bit farther along, the ledge dropped enough that she was able to step off. Her legs were so tired that she stumbled, knees buckling. Moving faster than she would have thought possible for a man his size, Bowman was suddenly in front of her, grabbing her under the arms, lifting her to her feet. They stood like that for just a moment, his arms around her, her hands clasping the backs of his shoulders, separated by the rebreathers on their chests, faces averted so as not to blind each other with their lights. She did not often feel small in the presence of a man, but in the expanse of this one’s arms, she did.

  “You good now?” His voice was muffled by the rebreather, but she could hear the concern.

  “Real good. You?” She pulled him a little closer, but the goddamned rebreathers … it was like trying to hold someone with two briefcases squeezed between them. Still, it was better than nothing, and she held on.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bowman?”

  “Yes?”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Sharing body warmth. Very common in potentially hypothermic situations.”

  “Right. That’s what I thought.”

  “You warm yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Me neither.”

  So they stood like that, pulling together but pushed apart by the chest units, arms around each other, unable to kiss or even to look into each other’s eyes.

  “Lights,” he said, and let her go.

  Hallie and Bowman watched Cahner inching along carefully, stopping once to lean against the wall and rest. Through the faceplate of his rebreather Hallie could see that he was pale, his face streaming with sweat.

  “You okay, Al?”

  He waved a hand. “Yeah, fine. Just need to catch my breath.”

  “Why don’t you dump the pack and rest over on that flat boulder.”

  “Okay. How long before Rafael shows up, do you think?”

  “Five minutes, maybe ten,” Bowman said.

  They waited. Cahner sat on the boulder, elbows on knees, saying nothing. Hallie and Bowman dropped their packs, too, and sat on them. Ten minutes passed, then twenty.

  “He should be here.” Bowman stood.

  “Give it a while.” Hallie, looking toward the ledge.

  They gave it another ten minutes.

  “I’m going back. He may be stuck somewhere along there.” Leaving his pack, Bowman climbed back up onto the ledge and started off. In several minutes he disappeared around the curve in the wall. Hallie stood there, watching. Cahner came up beside her.

  “He’s an amazing man.”

  “Bowman?”

  “Yes. Never hesitated. Just jumped right back up on that ledge. I’d rather poke sticks in my eyes than do that again.”

  “It’s different for him, Al. He does things like this for a living.”

  “For a living.” He shook his head. “Imagine that.”

  After twenty minutes, Hallie began to feel crawly inside. She touched Cahner’s shoulder. “Al, I’m worried.”

  “You’re worried? I’m terrified. If we lose both of them, I don’t know how much help I’ll be for you.”

  “You’re doing just fine. No worries on that count. But goddamn it. Arguello has caved. He knows how to do something like this.”

  “What was that you said a while back about objective dangers, though? Maybe a piece of ledge collapsed. Or some of the wall peeled away. He could even—”

  They saw a light beam flickering through the gloom, and then Bowman appeared at the apex of the curve. Soon he was standing with them.

  “Nothing.”

  “Can’t be.” Cahner said. “He has to be here somewhere.”

  Bowman shook his head. “He must have fallen. There’s no other explanation.” His voice was dead calm now. “He’s not on the wall or on the other side. I went all the way back. So he must be in the lake.”

  Hallie pushed her mind away from what it would be like to die after falling into pure sulfuric acid.

  “We have to get out of this toxic area,” said Bowman. “These rebreathers have a limited capacity.” The big man hefted his pack. “Let’s go.”

  The other two shouldered their packs and moved off, Hallie leading, Cahner in the middle, Bowman last. From here the cave floor formed a great ramp that rose gently upward for about 150 vertical feet. The gain in elevation lifted them out of the sulfur fog. When the Sirius analyzer showed green, they stopped long enough to remove and stow their rebreathers, then kept going to put more distance between them and the sump of poison gas.

  Near the top of the ramp, the chamber narrowed, and the exit passage was not much bigger than a subway tunnel. Soon they were going downward again, at first gently, then more and more steeply until they had to turn and face inward, descending like rock climbers on technical terrain—which is exactly what they were, just a vertical mile beneath the surface. Hallie led them on. Fatigue blunted her concentration, and several times she realized that she had just stopped without meaning to, her body turning itself off and her mind going blank.

  She began to feel something close to panic, not from fear of injury but from fear of failing. The loss of Haight and Arguello, her exhaustion, the distance remaining to the moonmilk, and then the long, killing climb back to the surface. The thoughts themselves had weight and almost push
ed her down, off the face into the black air.

  That rock there. Focus on that rock. Then the next one. See it? Just keep doing that. One step at a time. That’s how you do these things. You’ve been here before. This tired, this wrung out. Remember?

  But try as she might, she couldn’t remember such a time.

  “I DON’T KNOW WHY THEY CALL THESE THINGS ‘COOL SUITS,’ ” Dempsey whispered. “I’m sweating my ass off.”

  Stikes had been with Dempsey and Kathan for less than twenty-four hours and he was already tired of hearing Dempsey complain. He whined about the heat, his hemorrhoids, their gear, the short notice for this run. Wee, wee, wee, Stikes thought. Just like the little piggy, all the way home. In the many years he had been a SEAL, Stikes had never heard such whining. But Dempsey and Kathan had been Army Special Forces, where, apparently, whining was a trainable skill. He was not a SEAL now, nor were they SF. All three were ex-military and part of a reaction team assembled very quickly by their current employer, GFM—Global Force Multiplier. GFM was a private security contractor whose main customers were men with reason to fear for their lives and enough money to do something about it. The company also took on missions like this one, some government, some private, the prime criterion being compensation level; in Stikes’s experience, they were usually on short notice. Thus he had ended up with these two mission partners, both ex-SF, rather than the former SEALs he usually joined.

  “It’s not about heat. It’s because they don’t reflect anything, little buddy.” Kathan kept his voice down, too. He did not look at Dempsey or Stikes while speaking, but monitored the 120-degree arc of their surroundings that was his responsibility. Dempsey and Stikes had their own thirds of the circle.

  “Hey, you think I don’t know that? I was just saying.”

  “Yeah. But it was worse in Iraq. Down in the valleys, anyway.”

  Stikes was glad, at least, that they had the good sense to whisper, given the kind of country they were in here, triple Indian country, crawling with narcotraficantes and Mexican federales and natives with some unpronounceable name. He knew that, Dempsey’s whining aside, the three of them could give a good account of themselves against any ordinary military force of up to thirty men, but this mission had to be slick—in and out clean. No fuss, no muss. Those were the orders, and to Stikes’s way of thinking it was stupid arguing over the heat—about which none of them could do a damned thing—even if they whispered.

  “All right,” Dempsey said. “I’ll give you that. But it was dry. There’s nothing like this wet bean-eater heat.”

  Enough, Stikes thought. “You should have gone with the SEALs, my men. It’s always cool in the water.”

  “I hate the water,” Kathan said. He was huge, easily six-six, with a neck like a professional football player’s. His accent was Georgia redneck and his voice was like a bass drum, so that even when he whispered Stikes winced at how the sound might carry here. Kathan’s answer befuddled him. How could anyone, even infantry pukes like SFs, hate being in the water? Now, ground—that was something to hate, all right. Ground was hard and painful rock, or soft and sucking mud, or some other nightmare like this infernal thorny forest they were fighting through. The military talked a lot about good ground but, as far as Stikes was concerned, that was an oxymoron. Water was different. Water was cool and soothing, and once you knew how to relax, it folded around you like a woman. Moved like a woman, too.

  Kathan was the team leader. He made a single motion with an index finger and they moved off again. The three had done a night HALO drop from fifteen thousand feet, right about the time Hallie and her team had been approaching the Acid Bath. Their intention had been to land in the clear meadow near the cave mouth. But as so often happened with high-altitude, low-opening night jumps, they touched down somewhere else. Now they were trying to find their way to the meadow and the cave, at night, through the forest of mala mujer.

  They were all very fit. Even with the altitude and heavy packs they weren’t breathing hard. Under the camouflage paint, their faces were sharp-featured, their bodies distilled to bone and muscle. They all had noses that had been broken but nicely even, white teeth, the products of expensive reconstruction after battle damage. They carried silenced M4 carbines with eight thirty-round magazines in chest packs, Beretta 9mm pistols in thigh holsters, big fighting knives in belt sheaths. They were dressed identically in the “cool suits”—green-and-tan camo, one-piece Gore-Tex suits coated with a nanopolymer that protected them from infrared, UV, and short-phase radar scans. To anyone looking through NVDs, they were invisible.

  But, as Dempsey had noted, the suits were hot and not so good at protecting them from the mala mujer plants. The pain of getting stuck by those poisonous spikes was such that Stikes found it hard not to curse out loud. But he had been on many missions that were, if not identical to this one in details, just like it in purpose, which was to kill some people, and Stikes had long since accepted that pain was part of the price you paid for the privilege of killing.

  Dempsey, following Kathan at the prescribed fifteen-foot interval, was a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than the other man. His voice was high and rough, like that of a boxer who had been punched too many times in the throat. As he had explained to Stikes earlier, that damage had actually been done by shrapnel from an IED north of Fallujah. Dempsey wore his brown hair shoulder length, kept in place by a headband of velvet-soft suede that, he’d bragged to Stikes, he had made from the skin of an Iraqi woman’s breast.

  Stikes was good-looking enough to have been on a recruiting poster, though the Navy would never have allowed that. He was last on the trail but the middle man in height and weight. Stikes was normally languid in movement and soft-voiced, and he was the best hand-to-hand fighter of the three, with black belts in jujitsu, tae kwon do, and Krav Maga. This would almost certainly be his last mission, though. At thirty-six he was pushing the far edge of the envelope for work like this, and knew it. Old and slow got you killed doing these things, and it was they who were supposed to be doing the killing. He moved along fifteen feet behind Dempsey, making sure to maintain visual contact. This was no place to be wandering around alone.

  Nor was it any place to be letting thoughts wander, but he could not keep himself from picturing Keyana. They had met six months earlier in San Diego after connecting on Facebook. They made a stunning couple, everybody said. She was a model and every bit as beautiful as the pictures he could see after she friended him. Almost six feet tall, slim in the right places and full where it counted, almond-eyed, with skin as flawless and smooth as porcelain.

  Right away she had wanted to know what he did for a living, of course, and over dinner at a wharfside seafood restaurant, he’d said, “I do high-end security work.”

  “You mean like guarding CEOs and movie stars, that kind of thing?” she had asked.

  “Yeah, that kind of thing.” Keeping his voice a little vague, mysterious, but holding her gaze.

  “It must be exciting.” She had sounded impressed. But what had impressed him was how she’d picked right up on the fact that he wasn’t eager to talk about it in more detail and didn’t push him.

  “It can be, at times.” Stikes had let her go on believing that he guarded CEOs and movie stars and that kind of thing, telling himself it was not a complete and deliberate lie. Once in a while Gray did have an executive-protection assignment to offer. For every one of those, there were half a dozen like this one, but that didn’t cancel out the others.

  At any rate, it would be different from now on, because he was getting out. They were being paid handsomely for this run, as they called the things they did, $100,000 apiece, $20,000 for each of the five removals, $300,000 altogether. That was getting-out money for sure. You could marry, start a little business, maybe even have some kids, and stop dipping your hands in blood. It wasn’t that he minded the killing now. War and the SEALs had taken care of that, had taught him to shave away all the moral tangles and leave just the hard, clean
fact of his craft. He knew how dangerous and difficult the jobs he did were, and he knew how well he did them, and satisfaction flowed from such awareness. So at this point, it wasn’t so much the killing as it was Stikes’s sense that every bullet and RPG he dodged brought him that much closer to the next one, and at some point there would not be enough room or time to dodge.

  They kept moving for another two hours and Kathan held up a closed fist, time for the prescribed five-minute break. Dempsey came up and knelt near Kathan, and then Stikes joined them. On one knee, they drank electrolyte-replacement fluid from plastic tubes connected to hydration packs. They had added powdered coca leaves and ginseng to their ERF, providing a stimulant solution that could keep them moving for several days without rest, if the need arose. It was the same ancient pharmaceutical mix that had allowed Inca messengers to run a hundred miles a day.

  Nobody spoke. They had about two minutes remaining, and Stikes was beginning to think they might make it through another stop without breaking noise discipline. No such luck.

  “The blonde is a hot little puss.” Kathan was referring to pictures of Hallie Leland and the others they had viewed as part of their pre-mission briefing.

  “Not so little, from what I could see,” Dempsey said, appraisingly. “You can’t really tell from a picture, though. The camera do lie. I had this girl in Anbar, like a beauty queen in person. But she couldn’t take a picture. Looked like a truck ran over her face.”

  “Yeah.” Kathan reflected for a moment. “But some ugly girls are great in the sack. Butterfaces. They’re so grateful, I think is what it is.”

  “They should be grateful. It’s not like dudes are lining up to do them.”

  “Nah.” Kathan giggled softly, the childlike sound eerie coming from such a huge man. “They did for that little haji in Nasiriyah, though? You remember her, Demp?”