“Haight? No worries about him. He’s probably the most experienced cave diver among us.” But she understood that Bowman had refused the rum-laced tea in case he might have to dive again. She went ahead and sampled the spiked tea herself. It exploded in her mouth, seared her tongue, and burned all the way down to her stomach. Maybe the best drink she had ever tasted.
“Whew. That’s some rum.”
“One hundred eighty proof,” Bowman said. “Real Navy grog.”
“If I’d known that, I’d have been a bit lighter with the pours.”
“It’s absolutely bracing.” Cahner, sipping gingerly. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
Bowman was looking at his watch. “By my reckoning, he’s almost ten minutes overdue.”
“Bowman, really, he’s…” Her reassurance faded. In fact, she, too, was becoming concerned about Haight.
“I know his experience. But it makes his absence more troubling.”
That, she had to admit, was true. Still, it had been a relatively straightforward dive, if you could ever say that about a cave dive. Tight passage and poor visibility, sure, but Haight would have dealt with worse many times.
Bowman picked up his rebreather. “I’m going back. I want all of you to stay here. If I don’t return, you are not to come looking for me. Hallie will become the mission leader.”
“Bowman.” Hallie stepped forward. “I’m coming. You should have a buddy.”
“Not in a cave rescue. Or recovery. Protocol for those is solo. Two divers doubles the likelihood of problems. You know that.”
She did. He was right, and she backed off.
“Is everyone clear?” Bowman’s voice was sharper.
Each of them voiced acknowledgment. But Arguello held up a hand. “I understand the mission-critical aspect of what you just described. But I have an unpleasant question. If you do not return, it will presumably be because you have drowned in the tunnel. If that is the case, how will we make the return passage?”
“You will have to pull me out. Ron, too, if it comes to that. Clear?”
They acknowledged the instruction. Bowman geared up and got into the water. They watched him sink beneath the surface, his helmet lights dimming and disappearing quickly as he retraced the route. Hallie felt part of her heart sinking as well.
They sat on nearby rocks and turned off their lights to conserve batteries.
Before long, Al Cahner spoke, his voice tense: “I hope to God that young man is all right. He’s a bit rough around the edges, but really quite likable.”
“Haight’s dived some of the toughest caves in the country,” Hallie pointed out. “My guess is he’s just taking his time, having fun with a new toy, his rebreather.”
No one spoke for a while. Hallie took a Snickers bar from a pocket of her caving suit, unwrapped it, and broke it into three pieces. Without turning on her light, she stood and walked to where Arguello was sitting. She moved lightly, the sound of wind and flowing water covering her footsteps.
“Have some chocolate, Rafael.”
“Jesus.” Arguello, startled, jumped off his rock seat. “Where did you come from?”
She moved on to Cahner, handed him a piece, and returned to her own place.
“How did you do that?” Arguello asked the question through a mouthful of Snickers.
“I learned it from other cavers a long time ago. You should, too. Before you turn off your light, make a mental snapshot of your surroundings. It’s hard at first, but gets to be second nature after a while. You’d be amazed at how much detail you can retain with practice.”
“I will try to learn how to do that myself.”
“It’s a necessary skill down here,” Cahner said.
Then they were quiet. Hallie listened to the sound of air moving through the cave, and to flowing water, and she felt the cave enveloping them. Most people thought caves were dead and silent places, she knew, but they were rarely silent and never dead. Life thrived in every cave, often weird life, it was true, but weirdness was really in the eye of the beholder.
And then, almost as if he had been reading her mind, Arguello spoke:
“I was telling you earlier that many native peoples believe caves are alive.”
“Tell me—tell us—more,” Cahner said.
“I am pleased by your interest. Many scientists are quick to dismiss such things.”
“These people and their beliefs have survived for thousands of years. That says something,” Cahner pointed out.
“Indeed. So, the Cuicatecs say that caves breathe, which we know they do. They have circulatory systems, which is also true. Ours have blood in them; caves’ systems have mineral-rich water.”
Arguello paused to chew a bit of candy bar, then continued: “There’s more. According to Cuicatec beliefs, caves eat and excrete—two more of science’s criteria for classifying something as a living organism.”
“I’m not sure I get those,” Cahner said.
“Think of the earth as a big apple and a cave as a worm eating tunnels through it. And caves do have excretory systems—the rivers that flush waste from them. And they can heal themselves when injured.”
Cahner nodded. “All true, when you really think about it.”
Hallie had a question of her own. “So those are all the physical characteristics, Rafael. What about the other? The spirit? The thing they call Chi Con Gui-Jao.”
“The Cuicatecs believe that the first people were born out of this cave into the light. This cave and a few others. As we saw, they made sacrifices to appease the spirits that live here. For many centuries, also, they buried their dead here, because they felt it brought them closer to the gods who inhabit the cave.”
“You said gods, plural,” Hallie noted. “So it’s not just Chi Con Gui-Jao?”
“Oh, no. There are others. Chi Con is like Zeus in the other myths, the god of all gods. But many others exist, some good, some bad. For the ancients who inhabited this region, the cave was like our heaven—but also like our hell.”
“So you had demons and angels all living down here together?”
“That is right. In perfect balance. And only the curanderos could summon them. But not every curandero could summon every god.”
“You lost me,” Cahner said.
“Like our white magic and black magic. Some curanderos could invoke beneficent gods to heal the sick, ensure good crops, bless a marriage. Others could bring up the, as we would say, demons. To curse enemies, defeat invaders, acquire power.”
Hallie had another question. “How were curanderos chosen?”
“Anyone who wished to follow the path of curandero first underwent a trial. Only those who passed could go on.”
“What was the trial?” Hallie asked.
“The aspirant was brought deep into a cave by the oldest curanderos. He was left alone. Finding his way out proved that he was chosen. Failing to do so proved he was not.”
“How did the curanderos get in and out? With torches, like you told us about the sacrifices?”
“They needed no torches,” Arguello said.
Hallie decided to let that pass for the moment. “So they went back in and brought him out after a certain time?”
“Oh, no. Those who failed remained in the cave forever. That was the trial.”
“Come on, Rafael,” Cahner said. “If they really did that, there wouldn’t have been any curanderos. Nobody could get out of a cave like this without light.”
“The ancient records abound with accounts of those who did exactly that,” Arguello said.
“Sure, but our ancient myths are full of stories about beings who could fly and throw lightning bolts and command the oceans. These things are myths, not to be taken literally.”
“The accounts I speak of are not myths, my friend. They are true statements.”
Cahner chuckled. “But how could you know that, Rafael? You’re talking about things that supposedly happened, what, hundreds or even thousands of years ago.”
Hallie remembered Lathrop saying that Arguello had undergone shamanic training himself. She and Cahner spoke at the same time, both with the same words:
“What are you—”
Before they could finish, they heard Bowman break the water’s surface, back from his rescue dive. All three reached for their light switches.
At first, it appeared that Bowman was alone. But then he placed one arm on the rocky edge of the flooded tunnel, heaved with the other, and Ron Haight came into sight. The blond head flopped loosely, grotesquely, to one side. The faceplate of his diving mask was shattered. Through it, Hallie could see his dull, unfocused brown eyes.
The presence of death tripped a very deep switch in her brain. Later there would be time to cry, but now she needed to act. She, Cahner, and Arguello grabbed the body, hauled it out of the water, and laid it facedown on the cave floor. Hallie ripped off the dive mask, rolled Haight onto his side, cleared his airway with two fingers, then put him on his back and tilted his head to begin CPR.
She breathed and Cahner did chest compressions. Arguello stood to one side, horrified.
Bowman joined her on the body’s other side and they performed CPR as a team, taking turns. After ten minutes, Bowman sat back on his heels. “Let’s call it. He’s not coming back.”
Cahner stood up. Hallie stayed on her knees, light-headed and dizzy from the hyperventilating. Through the mental haze she looked at Haight’s face, trying to imagine how this could have happened. And then, suddenly, Haight groaned.
“Madre de Dios!” Arguello and Cahner jumped. Hallie and Bowman did not.
“Residual air in his lungs,” she said. “The muscles loosen up before they go into rigor, and it escapes.” She turned to Bowman. “What happened?”
“I found him about twenty feet beyond where the tunnel makes that sharp right-hand turn.”
Arguello breathed a soft prayer in Spanish and did something with his hands over Haight’s body. To Hallie it looked like a stage magician’s movements, but Arguello was dead serious. He asked, “Where is his pack?”
“I cut it off and left it in the tunnel,” Bowman said. “It would have made recovering him much harder.”
Arguello moved off to one side and stood there looking at Haight. Hallie saw tears on his cheeks. She went to him and touched him on the shoulder. He put his hand on hers and let out a long breath.
“Look here.” Bowman held up the rebreather’s shattered faceplate. “That’s what killed him. The faceplate cracked, flooded, and drowned him.”
“If he had been using standard scuba gear, it would not have happened,” said Cahner. “He would have had a regulator mouthpiece in place. Even without the mask, he could have kept going. Visibility was almost zero anyway.”
“How did he break his mask?” Arguello asked.
“I don’t know.” Bowman, still trying to understand, was looking at Cahner, his light making a bright circle on the older man’s chest. “The dive plan called for him to come in after you. Did that happen?”
Cahner took a moment before answering, then said, “I suppose so. I went in first, like you instructed. I pulled myself along and just kept going.”
“So you didn’t see Haight enter the water?”
“No, I was already in, as I just said.”
“Were you aware of him behind you? Did he touch your foot or leg to let you know he was there?”
“No, he didn’t.” Cahner hesitated, considering. “He was probably keeping distance between us, in case there was a cave-in.”
Bowman nodded, turned his gaze back toward the body.
“What do you think, Hallie? You’ve been involved in lots of cave rescues. And recoveries.”
She had been sorting scenarios all the while. “I can think of only three possibilities. One is that the faceplate fractured spontaneously. Rare, but it does happen. Two is that in one of the tunnel’s wider sections there was rockfall that hit the mask and broke it. Three is that he ran into a sharp outcrop and broke it.”
“Ranked by probability?” Bowman asked.
“Collision with rock most likely, rockfall second, defect fracture third.”
“I agree. A defect is very unlikely. These things are all mil-spec quality, meaning they went through even more rigorous testing than civilian dive equipment.”
“This is awful.” There was horror in Cahner’s voice, but he was under control. “He was such a good young man. I was getting ready to go in and he could see that I was… tense… and he double-checked my rebreather and helped me calm down.”
Arguello could not seem to stop staring at Haight’s body. He stood there, as if mesmerized, and Hallie saw that he had started to tremble. It could have been from the cold, or fear, or both. Bowman saw it, too.
“Al, why don’t you two get that stove going and brew us up some tea,” Bowman said, nodding toward the area they had used as a kitchen earlier. “I think we could all use another strong one. Hallie and I will join you shortly.”
“Good idea,” said Cahner. He turned to Arguello and gently took him by the elbow. “Come along. You can help me do it.”
When they were out of hearing, Bowman put his light on Hallie’s chest.
“Any thoughts?”
“Nothing other than what I already said.”
“It would have taken a sharp impact on a pointed object to break this faceplate.” Bowman held up Haight’s rebreather. “Tempered four-millimeter glass. It’s what commercial divers use.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I don’t think Haight was the kind of diver to go through a tunnel like that in a hurry.”
Hallie shook her head briskly. “I don’t agree.”
“Why not?”
“I liked him very much, don’t misunderstand. But he struck me as young, impatient, and impulsive. I can easily see him trying to go too fast, especially since he was the sweep diver. He wouldn’t want the rest of us to think he was slow or inept. Ego could have kicked in.”
“Did you see or feel any projections that could have broken glass like that?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything with such bad viz. And as for feeling something, you know we would have come in contact with only a tiny percentage of the tunnel’s overall inside surface. There could have been a thousand sharp projections and we’d never know it.”
After a while, Bowman nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“Tea is ready, my friends,” Arguello called from the kitchen.
“Haight was fit and strong. He could have been pulling himself along pretty fast,” Hallie said.
“True enough.”
She waited for Bowman to go on, but he did not. She had been looking at Haight’s body just then, but shifted her gaze to Bowman. Her light lit up his chest and showed his face in peripheral glow. To her surprise, there were tears in his eyes.
The big man made no effort to wipe them away or hide them. Hallie was not sure what to say. She felt very bad for Bowman just then. He was the leader, and a good young man had just died on his watch, and that had to hurt terribly. She wanted to reach out and touch him, hug him even, but something stopped her. Her own eyes filled with tears, and her chest felt stuffed.
“We should go back with the others now.” Bowman’s voice was rough with emotion.
“You go ahead. I’ll be along. I just want a few moments with him.”
She knelt beside Haight’s body. She had grown to like him in the short time they’d known each other; there had been something brotherly about him. She had enjoyed listening to his thick, drawly accent and jokes and had admired his skill on that huge wall they’d descended.
She picked up his hands, one after the other. They felt cold and dead and much too heavy. She turned them over, focusing her helmet light on one palm and then the other, but there was no bruising,
no cuts or other signs of struggle there. She examined the rebreather unit on his chest, but it showed no evidence of damage.
She was not unaccustomed to handling dead bodies, given the recoveries she had helped with. Turning Haight’s head gently, she examined his eyes. Wide open and staring, they showed no injury. She ran her fingers down his face, closing the eyes. His skin was like cold white wax, and his lips were a livid blue going to gray. There was no sign of struggle or trauma there, either, no cuts or bruises.
In death he looked even younger than he had alive, and tears suddenly filled Hallie’s eyes again as she thought of all the years Ron Haight should have had left, the women he would not love, children he would not father, discoveries he would not make. For an instant she hated the cave, but then it passed. The cave was just a cave, a force of nature like mountains and forests, neither benign nor malign but simply there—deadly, to be sure, but indifferent. Then Arguello’s words came back to her and she thought, Or is it?
Hallie picked up Haight’s rebreather, wanting to examine the cracked faceplate, and as she did so a shard of rock fell out and landed on his chest. They had not seen it before. There was the answer, then. It was part of the rock that had shattered his mask. He must have run into it with considerable force to knock a piece of it loose. Her theory had been correct, apparently. Haight, though a veteran cave diver, had made one of the countless mistakes that can get you killed in an environment with zero tolerance for error.
Hallie set the mask down beside Haight. We ought to cover him with something. It’s not right just to leave him here like this. She stood, meaning to get something out of one of their packs, and bumped into Bowman, who had returned and had been standing behind her. She had not heard him approach. He had a green plastic groundsheet, and together they covered Haight’s body, pinning the edges of the sheet down with rocks.
“I’d like to give him a decent burial,” Bowman said, “but we can’t afford the time. We’re behind already.”
She took one of Bowman’s hands. It felt solid and rough and surprisingly warm. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He looked straight at her. His fingers closed around hers. She liked how that felt. A little shock sparked in her chest, a windy feeling, something she hadn’t experienced for a long time. Not since Redhorse, she thought.
The Deep Zone Page 15
