The Deep Zone

by James M. Tabor

  There had been an expectant pressure in the room, tension generated by crisis and challenge, Lathrop and Barnard working it, shaping it up to a climax. This, clearly, was not the one they had hoped for. The phone in Lathrop’s jacket pocket vibrated over and over. He seemed not to notice. Barnard’s head and eyes and shoulders drooped, like the top stories of a building keeling over slowly, reluctantly, resisting the downward pull to the very last. Barnard was not the kind of man who spent a lot of time looking at the floor. Hallie did not like what was happening here.

  She glanced around the table. No one met her eyes except Bowman—who, she got the feeling, had been watching her first. Al Cahner was chewing a cookie, slowly, thoughtfully, as though it might be his last. Arguello was still tapping one finger on the table, rhythmically, as though to a song only he could hear. Bowman sat perfectly still, eyes locked with Hallie’s. Having grown up with two brothers and a soldier father, Hallie had become very good at staring matches. The urge to look away was deeply instinctual, like the urge to gasp in air after a long bout of breath holding, but Hallie would not quit first. Seconds passed. Finally, Bowman pointed an index finger at her, mouthed the words You win, and looked away.

  For his part, Lathrop appeared to know quite well what happened in Washington to those who carried bad news to high places. The phone vibrated again. He ignored it.

  “I’m afraid that is about the size of it, Dr. Haight.”

  “Sounds like a pretty desperate thing.” Haight looked from Lathrop to Barnard.

  “We would be lying if we suggested otherwise.” Barnard, returning his gaze directly.

  Something had been building in Hallie, and she could contain it no longer. Bowman had distracted her, but now she stood up so quickly her chair tipped over backward and hit the floor with a bang. The door opened and the security officer stood there, surveying. Lathrop waved him back out.

  “God damn it.” Beneath the deep tan, Hallie’s face was reddening. “How often do you get the chance to save thousands—maybe millions—of people from horrible deaths? We have just been offered the opportunity of a lifetime, gentlemen.”

  “We have to be clear, Dr. Leland,” said Lathrop, “so there is absolutely no misunderstanding. People could die on this mission. It is, as Dr. Haight observed, a desperate thing.”

  In her head, Hallie heard her father’s voice: Every day, every single thing you do writes a page in the book of your life. You can write them, but you can never change them.

  “We could die driving to work and what good does that do anybody? But we’re not going to die. We are going into that cave to get the moonmilk.”

  Ron Haight shook his head, laughed out loud. “Hell, this is the best deal I been offered for an ol’ coon’s age. Savin’ people is what I do for a livin’. Hallie’s right. I’m in like Flynn, y’all.”

  Arguello’s index finger landed on the table and stopped. He arranged his face, swallowed, spoke formally. “When my time comes, I do not want to look back on this day and feel shame. I am going.”

  Al Cahner reached for another chocolate cookie. “I always intended to go.” His voice was calm, confident. “It was never in question.” The steel there surprised Hallie. It was not something she had heard during their time working together.

  They all looked at Lathrop. He stared back, expressionless for a few seconds. Then he raised his coffee cup in salute.

  “Lady and gentlemen, we have a team.”

  Hallie cut her gaze from Lathrop to Bowman. He winked, the movement nearly imperceptible, accompanied by the tiniest crinkling at the corners of his mouth. The wink and crinkles could have meant anything, but in Hallie’s mind they caused these words to form: Thank you.

  For his part, Lathrop looked like a man whose death sentence had just been commuted.

  There followed a few long moments of silence as the full significance of their decisions sank in. Then Bowman turned to Hallie.

  “You’ve been there. What can you tell us about the cave?”

  She looked to Barnard, who nodded, and then she got up and walked to a whiteboard at the front of the room.

  “Dr. Haight’s probably the most experienced, but we’ve all been in big caves. Here’s the thing, though. Cueva de Luz isn’t a cave. It’s a supercave.”

  She drew a line that plunged from the board’s top left corner toward the bottom right corner with a lot of small, jagged steps in between. It looked like the graph of a badly failing business’s cash flow.

  “Cueva de Luz’s profile. About five thousand vertical feet deep. A bit more than four miles from entrance to the cave’s known terminus.”

  “Known terminus. So there is more unexplored terrain beyond that point?” Arguello asked.

  “It keeps going and going. No one knows how far. We could tell that because wind was ripping up from somewhere deep beyond the place we stopped. Right after the mouth, this cave gets vertical quickly, so we’ll pass through the twilight zone fast. Before you know it, the dark zone just ambushes you. And because of its size and depth, this cave has a special zone not identified in other caves. It’s called the deep zone.”

  “Is that name because the terrain down there is different?” Arguello wanted to know.

  “You’re much deeper, so the watercourses are bigger, but it has more to do with the psychological impact,” Hallie said. “You know that every human body has a unique response to altitude in the mountains, right? Depth and darkness don’t affect the body that way, but they do the brain. Scientists have studied the phenomenon. Some believe it’s neurochemistry. Down there, the brain knows it’s a mile or whatever from the surface and doesn’t like how that feels. Self-preservation is the oldest, strongest instinct. The brain will do weird things to keep its body alive, like drive a person to fatal panic. When that happens we call it the Rapture.”

  “Like the rapture of the deep, in diving?” Arguello asked.

  “No. Most divers experience that—nitrogen narcosis is the real name—as euphoria. Some have taken off their masks and tried to talk to fish, others believe they can breathe water. It’s like a five-martini buzz. The Rapture in a cave is like, well, like the worst anxiety attack you can imagine, multiplied tenfold. Just the opposite of euphoric: horrific.”

  “It sounds perfectly delightful,” Arguello said. Hallie stared—it was the first time he had tried to say something funny. Defusing fear, she knew, but that was fine—whatever worked.

  “To continue about the cave,” she said. “I’m assuming we all know the standard expeditionary caving drill: vertical work, diving, breakdown, squeezes, gas pockets. Right?”

  She got the nods she wanted.

  “Good. So let’s talk about the major obstacles in Cueva de Luz. First one’s a big wall.”

  “What is ‘big’?” Bowman, professionally curious.

  “About five hundred feet, lip to pit.” Haight whistled, and even Bowman looked impressed. Cahner and Arguello exchanged worried glances.

  “That’s the Washington Monument,” Cahner said.

  “Right. Lots more drops of fifty to seventy-five feet each. At least one long flooded tunnel and maybe more, depending on recent rainfall. After that, the usual big-cave nightmares: squeezes, lakes, breakdown, rotten rock, some pockets of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.”

  “What provisions for our rescue if something happens?” Arguello asked.

  “There are no rescues from deep in a cave like Cueva de Luz.” Bowman, announcing grim news as if it were a weather report. “For one thing, there’s no communication. For another, if you get hurt far down in a cave like that, evacuation is not a possibility. Vertical walls, flooded tunnels and sumps…” He shrugged. “We will be on our own. From start to finish.” Though he was giving them facts that would unsettle most normal people, she found his words, or maybe the way they came across, reassuring, and it appeared the others’ reactions were similar. The power of a natural-born leader, she thought.


  Her eyes kept flicking back toward Bowman. Something about the man was pulling her. It wasn’t purely his looks. He struck her as one of the toughest, most intimidating men she’d ever seen up close. Well, all right, it might have a little to do with the way he looked. But there was something else, intangible and ineffable, a pull like two magnets just close enough to generate attraction. And his eyes, his intense, hypervigilant, unwavering eyes, which seemed to be looking out from some great depth.

  Which was when she realized the others were all looking at her looking at Bowman. She cleared her throat, continued: “The main thing to understand about Cueva de Luz is that we don’t really understand it. We know more about the moon than about supercaves like this one.”

  “Hey, y’all did have some problems down there. Care to enlighten us?” said Haight, leaning back in his chair, hands folded over his belt buckle.

  “It’s true,” Hallie said. “We did have some trouble.”

  “Like two ol’ boys never came back.”

  She swallowed. “Yes.” Who else among these guys would know what happened? Bowman, almost certainly. Al did. And Barnard. And Lathrop would. So it would be news only to Arguello.

  “What was it, then? Where they spelunker types or what, Hallie?”

  Serious cavers derided casual enthusiasts, called them spelunkers. Cavers rescue spelunkers, went the saying.

  “They were good expeditionary cavers.”

  “So what happened to ’em, then?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Y’all don’t know?”

  “We never found them. They were exploring a side passage and never came back. We searched for two full days and nights. No trace.”

  Ten minutes later she finished telling her colleagues everything she knew, which really wasn’t much. No one spoke for a moment. Then Arguello did.

  “Now I will tell you some more things about Cueva de Luz. Cuicatecs have inhabited that region for a thousand years. The cave is sacred to them. The place from which all life flowed in the Great Beginning. For them, the cave is a living thing. They call its spirit Chi Con Gui-Jao. It is a place of great power.”

  “What kind of power?” Cahner asked.

  Arguello thought for a moment before responding. “Many kinds. Chi Con Gui-Jao guards the entrance to the underworld. He can take a spirit to La Terra de los Muertos, Land of the Dead. Or send it back to Tierra de la Luz, Land of the Light.”

  Cahner started to speak again, but Lathrop went first. “If I may. There will be time for this later, but now we need to focus. Are there any questions?”

  Haight’s hand went up. “I have one. I’ve been into some very big caves in my life, and to descend the vertical drops y’all described will take thousands of feet of rope that’ll weigh hundreds of pounds. Too much for a small team to carry. How will we get down and up?”

  “That’s my department,” said Bowman. “We won’t be needing rope.”

  “Y’all aren’t suggestin’ we BASE-jump the drops, are you? We still have to get back out.”

  Arguello grimaced. “I do not know how to do that and have no desire to learn.” Arms folded across his chest, he shook his head slowly back and forth.

  “It would take too long to explain now. But we won’t need rope.” Bowman looked at each of them in turn. “Trust me on this one.”

  Hallie watched their reactions. The others seemed willing to do that. And so, somewhat to her surprise, was she.

  “One last thing,” Lathrop said. “We will have a small special operations team staged near Brownsville. Two-hour response time. But they are only for extraction from the surface, not rescue from the cave.”

  “Whoa, there.” Haight held up both hands, like a cop stopping traffic. “I got a few more questions about little things like equipment, food, communications. An expedition like this would normally take months to organize.”

  Lathrop was ready. “We don’t have time for ‘normal.’ You saw the pictures of ACE victims. We have, at the very most, ten to twelve days.”

  “And those things are taken care of.” Bowman again.

  “Righto, then. Any idea how long we’ll be underground?”

  “We have planned for seven days,” Bowman said. “Two days to reach the bottom of the cave, one day there to collect material and rest, and three to come back out again. Plus one extra.”

  Lathrop looked around. “Thank you for your patience. Any more questions?”

  “Just one more.” Haight, hand up. “Really. Then I’ll stop. Earlier y’all said, if I remember aright, we were picked ’cause we could get security clearances and we all had serious cavin’ skills and such.”

  “Correct.”

  “Y’all also said, ‘and a coupla other things.’ ” He doesn’t miss much, Hallie thought. She remembered the phrasing now, but only after Haight had brought it up. Haight looked from Lathrop to Barnard and back to Lathrop. “I was just wonderin’ about those ‘coupla other things.’ ”

  Lathrop and Barnard exchanged glances. Barnard nodded slightly.

  Lathrop said, “Well, as a matter of fact, there were some other criteria.”

  They waited. He looked at the floor, then back at them.

  “You are all unmarried, live alone, and have no children.”

  No one spoke. But Hallie thought: In other words, expendables.

  PART TWO

  Cave of Light

  TEN

  THEY SPENT THE NIGHT IN GUEST ROOMS AT ANDREWS AIR Force Base. The next morning, after showers and breakfast, they were jetted to a military airfield at Reynosa, Texas. There they were outfitted with the caving equipment they would need: scuba rebreathers, mil-spec meals ready to eat (MREs), redundant lights, exposure suits—the best of everything that advanced research could create and government money could buy.

  At eight P.M., when it was full dark, a jet-engined, stealth version of the Osprey vertical takeoff and landing aircraft spirited them two hours south. In the moonless night—a gift of pure luck, as Bowman had noted—they off-loaded in a clearing a mile from Cueva de Luz’s mouth.

  Bowman herded them back to the tree line and the stealth craft lifted off, its jets making not much more noise than idling bus engines. Without lights of any kind, in ten seconds it disappeared into the black sky and they were alone in southern Mexico’s high mountain wilderness. The nearest village, a Cuicatec settlement, was twenty miles away.

  They were all carrying heavy North Face backpacks. Bowman was the only one with weapons: a SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol in a thigh holster, a huge dive knife worn in a scabbard strapped to the inside of his left calf, and, slung over one shoulder, a weird, futuristic-looking rifle with a carbine-length barrel, a circular magazine like the ones used on Thompson submachine guns, a lightweight tubular stock, and a pistol grip like an M-16’s. Hallie had asked him if was a rifle or a shotgun during their ride in the stealth Osprey.

  “Neither,” Bowman had told her. “It fires ten-millimeter FAFO projectiles.”

  “What’s FAFO?”

  “Fire and forget. You put the laser spot on something, fire, and the projectile will find that target. The projectiles are explosive OSOKs—sorry, one-shot, one-kill designs. Like little grenades.” He looked at her for a moment. “You like guns?”

  “My dad was an Army officer. I grew up on a farm. I’m a hell of a wing shot. I’d love to try that thing.”

  She saw that he tried, but failed, to suppress a grin. “Maybe one day you’ll get the chance.”

  Now, in the forest at the tree line, Bowman shifted his massive pack and whispered to the others.

  “Okay, listen up. I’ve walked through this terrain in SatIm holograms and I’ve got GPS waypoints to the cave in a HUD on my NVDs. I’ll lead. The rest of you follow in the order we briefed. Most important thing is noise discipline. Around here, the Mexican army patrols during the day, but narcos own the night. God knows what the Indians do. I do not want to hear one clink, rattle, or cough. It could mean our lives. Let’s
go.”

  A trail climbed out of the clearing’s northwestern corner. Bowman led, Arguello came next, and then Hallie, Cahner, and Haight. After a quarter mile, the trail simply ended and then, even with the night-vision goggles, it was slow going. They were at about four thousand feet in mountain cloud forest. Warm temperatures, high humidity, and prodigious annual rainfall combined to produce 150-foot-tall oak and pine trees towering like giant temple columns over a forest floor overgrown with monstrous lime-colored ferns, tangled vines, and, most remarkably of all, a particularly vicious nettle shrub, Cnidoscolus angustidens, which natives called mala mujer—evil woman. The plant had beautiful leaves, like spiky, shining green hearts strewn with white spots. But they were covered with poisonous hairs and needle-sharp thorns that inflicted wounds worse than those of the Portuguese man-of-war. Stings could induce paralysis and, in extreme cases, even death. Had they all not been wearing one-piece, ballistic nylon caving suits, it would have been virtually impossible to make it through here.

  Hallie expected Bowman to set a blistering pace, but he did not. Their progress was almost leisurely. Even though she was carrying close to forty pounds, she could have conversed easily with the others. No so Rafael Arguello, whom she could hear puffing and panting. She could understand his difficulty. As good as they were, the NVDs couldn’t distinguish between slippery exposed roots and, say, a hunting fer-de-lance, so every step demanded caution. It was also hard not to blunder head-on into the mala mujers. And the most daunting challenges lay ahead. Once they entered Cueva de Luz, Hallie would become their guide. Point woman. Bowman would still command, but she would be in front.