Lethal Expedition (Short Story)

by James M. Tabor

  Lethal Expedition is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A 2012 Ballantine Books eBook Original

  Copyright © 2012 by James M. Tabor

  Excerpt from The Deep Zone by James M. Tabor copyright © 2012 by James M. Tabor

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53445-3

  Cover Art and design: Carlos Beltrán

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Day Seven: Sunday

  Chapter 1

  Day Six: Monday

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Day Five: Tuesday

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Day Four: Wednesday

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Day Three: Thursday

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Day Two: Friday

  Chapter 12

  Day One: Saturday

  Chapter 13

  Day Zero: Easter Sunday

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Aftermath

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Deep Zone

  Prologue

  Hallie Leland came to with a noose tight around her neck. She had to open her mouth wide to breathe, and the air coming and going sounded like steel wool scratching on wood. The sides of the loop pulled up under her jawbone and joined in a knot where her skull and spine met. A rope tight against the back of her head led straight up to some solid connection. Whoever had done this understood knots: if she moved, the noose tightened but would not loosen. It was pitch dark, but scents—old rope, damp concrete, stove fuel, and the milky smell of climber’s chalk—revealed that she was in her own windowless basement.

  She was sitting in a stout wooden chair. Towels wrapped her forearms and lower legs like soft casts, and duct tape bound her four limbs to the chair’s arms and legs. She thought: Why towels? Then: No marks.

  Yelling for help was pointless. Her house sat alone at the end of a dirt road twenty-five miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The nearest neighbor lived a half mile away. She didn’t yell for another reason: she would not give her captor that satisfaction.

  Who had done it? Stephen Redhorse was her first thought, but others came to mind. The Latin Kings. Or maybe even a man returning from the dead.

  But why?

  The horror in the cave seemed a good place to start.

  Day Seven: Sunday

  1

  Devan Halsted screamed.

  Hallie Leland, 150 feet below, saw his headlight beam slashing the cave’s darkness, then heard a sound like crockery shattering in a dropped sack. He had fallen from atop the vertical wall she had just rappelled, and now she rushed to his side. Half of his right leg hung by white tendons. Impact with the wall had shattered his helmet and removed most of his face. The landing had burst his viscera. Hallie had to breathe through her mouth.

  They were on the ninth day of this Talisto Cave expedition, still two days from the surface. At thirty-two, Hallie was a veteran of search-and-rescue missions in caves and mountains; she knew that grief would have to wait. Now she had to keep their third team member, Kurt Ely, from following Halsted onto the rocks.

  “Stay off rope!” she shouted.

  “What? Why? What’s going on?” Ely yelled back, and she cursed silently. She had more experience in extreme caves than the other two put together, but Ely had been questioning her judgment at every turn since their first day.

  “Devan fell! Stay off the rope!”

  “He fell? How far? Is he hurt? What happened? I—”

  “Hang on!” she shouted, out of patience and not wanting to have a second body lying before her. “And stay where you are until I say it’s safe to move!”

  She turned to look. Halsted had landed on his back, and she could see that his red chest and seat harnesses were properly buckled. His rappel rack, a device that looked like a big steel paper clip with transverse bars, was still attached to his harness with a locking carabiner. Both ’biner and rack were intact. That left only one possibility: a death rig. Threaded the wrong way through a rappel rack, the rope simply popped free when weighted, and the caver fell. It was called an “air rappel”—and from such a height, it meant certain death.

  “Kurt!” she shouted.

  “What?” He sounded angry.

  “Come on down.”

  Several minutes later, Ely dropped onto the cave floor. After nine days underground, he was ghost-pale, his long brown hair and full beard filthy and matted.

  “Oh my God.” He covered his mouth. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Hallie kept her headlamp beam averted as he stumbled away, retching. When he returned, he didn’t look at Halsted.

  “What do we do with him?” Ely asked, and she heard the edge of hysteria in his voice.

  ***

  “We should say something.” Hallie stood on one side of the mound of rocks.

  Ely slumped on the other side, eyes unfocused. He was not taking Halsted’s death well. Physically exhausted before the accident, he now appeared to be edging toward mental collapse. He was smoking a cigarette, absolute sacrilege in a cave to Hallie. He had promised, before entering the cave, not to smoke while in it, but apparently the stress of Halsted’s death was too much. She suspected he had been sneaking smokes most of the time anyway, because she’d smelled the tobacco reek on his breath.

  Hallie recited the Lord’s Prayer. They went to their packs and sat, keeping their headlamp beams pointed down, to avoid blinding each other. Ely scrubbed grimy hands over his face. “He was a good young man.”

  “Devan reminded me of a big, goofy puppy,” she said.

  “He must have gotten careless.”

  “Did you check his rig before he dropped in?”

  Ely’s head came up and his eyes flicked from side to side. “No. He’d been doing okay. Should I have?”

  Hallie said nothing, reaching for her canteen.

  “My God,” Ely said. He buried his face in his hands.

  Hallie wanted to comfort him, but not at the expense of honesty, and she knew that Ely should have checked the rig of the less-experienced caver. There would be time later to talk about that.

  “We’d better saddle up,” she said. “The sooner we move, the sooner we’re out.” And, though she did not say it, the sooner they would be away from Devan Halsted’s corpse.

  ***

  Fifteen hours later, Hallie awoke in her sleeping bag and lay watching the fireworks of false light images her darkness-tricked eyes kept displaying. She swigged water, spat, checked her luminous watch: 4:17 P.M. After leaving Halsted’s grave, they had climbed until Ely could go
no farther and camped near a watercourse. She had slept for four hours and still felt exhausted.

  “Kurt?”

  The rushing water was loud. She called his name again. Her flashlight beam swept the camp area, and she saw his black sleeping bag. Empty. She stood, shouted his name, flashed her light up and down—the universal distress signal. No response.

  Kneeling beside his sleeping bag, she found two things: their notebook with the cave route map and a torn-out page filled with barely legible printing:

  Hallie—

  I was responsible for Devan’s death. No. That is too easy. I killed him. You were right. I should have checked his rappel rig. I knew that but I was so tired and now he is dead. There will be an inquest and everyone will know that I was re killed him. I don’t think I could live with that. There’s more. Devan and I were closer than you knew.

  I’m going back to be with Devan. Please don’t search for me. It would only put you in danger for no good reason. I’m leaving the cave map to get you out. I won’t need it. I have been honored to know you even this brief time. I will pray for your safe exit from this cave. Pray for me if you can.

  Kurt

  She nearly shuddered, filled with a mix of rage and pity. Should she go after him? She could find the grave, but then what? Talk him into returning? Not likely. Tie him up in climbing rope and haul him back? Ridiculous. But neither did she feel comfortable packing up and leaving.

  She decided to wait at the camp one full day. She was out of food, but batteries were more important, and she had enough for another forty-eight hours, at least. She would spend most of the next twenty-four in the dark, so that should leave enough to get out. If Ely was not back the next day, she could assume that he was not coming back at all.

  ***

  He did not come back, and Hallie started out. Her journey became a blur of tight tunnels, freezing lakes, vertical climbs, boulder fields. Early on, rocks broke from a ceiling far above and exploded on the cave floor twenty feet away. All caves were beautiful to Hallie, but Talisto was particularly beautiful, its walls striped in brilliant colors from mineral deposits, the formations fantastic beyond imagining, punctuated by gigantic waterfalls and chambers bigger than Grand Central Station. Going down, she had reveled in this magic realm. Now, coming out, she was too exhausted to notice.

  It began to seem like she was detached from her body, feeling nothing, watching her progress from without. She thought more often of dying and found, as she had in other places, that it remained only a word. She assumed it would be so right up to the last breath and heartbeat. At least that was how it appeared when she helped recover bodies of very strong cavers and climbers. To a person they had died open-eyed and astonished.

  ***

  She kept moving, but more and more slowly; there would come a time, she knew, when her mind could no longer compel her body and she would sit down and not get up again. According to the route map, she was close to the surface, but she might be closer to the end of her strength. Still standing, she felt her eyes close, felt sleep’s lulling pull, and almost lay down. Then she heard her soldier father’s voice:

  Die before you quit.

  She stood up straight and said, “I am not going to die here.” It made her feel better to tell the cave that. So she shouted, and the cave answered in rolling volleys of echoes:

  “Die here … die here … die here.”

  Day Six: Monday

  2

  Hector Villanueva was rarely happy these days, given the escalating assaults on his person and prosperity. Just now, though, he was enjoying himself, and clearly his guest was, as well. They were at Oro Nuevo, one of Villanueva’s remote Mexican hideaways. A Bell JetRanger helicopter had plucked the guest from remote Oaxacan mountains and flown him two hours to this little Xanadu in the jungle. Peacocks strolled golf-green lawns, and dog-sized lizards called tegus glittered like chunks of gold in sun-washed ponds. Beautiful women strolled, sipping drinks, languid and graceful as browsing deer and naked as Eve in the Garden.

  Villanueva was a Mexican of Mayan descent, short and fat, with skin the color of muddy water and a pencil mustache over pendulous lips. He led the Salvados drug cartel in Mexico, controlling all cocaine and methamphetamine trade north of Acapulco, commerce worth billions. His was also the most vicious cartel. Just last week, as his guest knew, masked Salvados had deposited a secretary of national security—minus his hands and feet but still alive, more or less—on the steps of Mexico’s Supreme Court building.

  He and his visitor reclined on green lounges beside a swimming pool the size of four tennis courts. Most other pools the guest had seen were painted a cool, soothing blue. This one was dark red, and its water looked like blood.

  The guest raised his glass of golden tequila. “We are forever in your debt.”

  “I will consider the debt paid in full when you put my gift to good use, Dr. Ely.”

  “It’ll be done. We work together for a common goal,” Kurt Ely said.

  “The elimination of that infernal whore.” Villanueva spat.

  “Exactly.”

  “When interests join, God smiles. Like the junction of roads. A thing of great power.”

  Villanueva puffed his Havana oscuro, looked reflective, shook his head. “Your President Laning’s reward. Very stupid. Ten million dollars made me a lot of new enemies overnight. Some are dead already, but many more are lining up.”

  ***

  The mention of death made Ely uncomfortable. Three months earlier, he had nearly gotten chopped up here himself. Looking for aquifer evidence, he had stumbled onto one of Villanueva’s secret cocaine factories. Only his passport kept the cocaínas from feeding him, alive, to their watchdogs as they did his three porters. Americans, they had learned, could be worth decent money, so they smacked his head with a rifle butt and delivered him to Villanueva.

  He awoke naked and lashed, spread-eagled, to a massive butcher block made from thick pine timbers and tree-trunk legs. He was in a big, dim, building filled with crates and sacks. It reeked like a slaughterhouse and was as hot as a sauna, though none of the four men surrounding him was sweating. Three he recognized as captors. The fourth was a short, fat man with skin the color of mud and grotesque lips. He was wearing a long, black rubber apron and black rubber gloves. Beside him, on another table, Ely saw tools: ax, hatchet, hacksaw, clawhammer, pliers, propane blowtorch, and an orange Stihl chain saw.

  “Habla usted español?” the aproned man asked.

  “Solamente poquito.”

  “A little, eh? We do English. I examined your documents. Your name means nothing. And you are not DEA or CIA. Why were you sneaking around my facility?”

  “I wasn’t. I’m a scientist doing fieldwork. Please! It’s true.” Ely was about to cry and lose control of his bladder; it was a toss-up which would occur first.

  The small man picked up a red-handled hatchet and approached. Ely saw that its head was caked with dried blood and tissue. “What kind of scientist are you?”

  “Hydrogeologist. I look for water.” Ely’s chin was trembling. His head rang from the blow with the rifle, and his muscles were screaming from being stretched tightly on the tabletop.

  “Do you know who I am?” The man waved his hatchet like a conductor’s baton, the blade an inch from Ely’s eyes.

  “No.”

  “I am Hector Villanueva.”

  “Oh God.” Despite himself, Ely said this out loud.

  “So you do know who I am?”

  “I know who Hector Villanueva is.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “It’s on TV and in the newspapers all the time. Because of that reward President Laning offered. They call you the Mexican al-Harani.”

  Villanueva hissed like a snake. He muttered something obscene in Spanish, then the word “Laning.” The guards laughed.

  “I think you are good for nothing except my technique.” He set the hatchet’s blade lightly on Ely’s wrist, where it felt like a sl
iver of ice. Villanueva sighed. “My only regret is that I will not be killing that filthy whore Laning instead. How I wish it were so.”

  Ely was seconds from being dismembered alive. The most ancient instinct made flashing connections, whipped through a desperate calculus.

  “Wait!” he cried. “I may be able to help you with that.”

  ***

  Now here he was, sharing a drink and trying not to stare at the “beauties,” as Villanueva called the naked women he used like peacocks and tegus to decorate his estate.

  “To make things worse, ten million is an insult,” Villanueva said.

  “Indeed.”

  “For Sayeedur al-Harani, they offered fifty million.” Villanueva was referring to a notorious Islamic terrorist whose life a drone-launched Hellfire missile had recently extinguished.

  “He did kill many Americans,” Ely pointed out. “And threatened a smallpox attack.”

  “Truly. But that will seem like—what do you say?—little potatoes compared to our action.” Villanueva puffed on his black cigar, scowled. “No woman should be a president.”

  “I could not agree with you more. And with al-Harani gone, you were the perfect straw man.”

  Villanueva’s eyes became slits. “Straw man?” Before Ely could answer, Villanueva said, “Don’t move.”

  Something quivered deep in Ely’s gut.

  The Mexican reached into his pocket and drew out a derringer pistol, silver with pearl grips and two stacked barrels. He aimed the gun at Ely’s face.

  “Do not move,” Villanueva said again. He leaned closer, and to Ely the bores looked big enough to climb into. Villanueva cocked the gun. Ely closed his eyes. Villanueva pulled the trigger. Ely heard the metallic snap of a firing pin falling on an empty chamber and gasped. He opened his eyes. Villanueva was grinning. From the derringer’s muzzle issued a small, steady flame.

  “Your cigar went out. Allow me to provide a light.”

  Ely put his cigar tip just above the flame. His hand was shaking so much that Villanueva had to keep moving the lighter.

  Villanueva sat back, laughing hard, his belly shaking. “Heee. It works every time.”