The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

  “Hello, Sergeant,” said Major Lenora Stilwell, MD. She was trim and pretty, with short brown hair and kind eyes and freckles from the Florida sun. Her Tampa practice was orthopedic surgery; her Terok practice was gunshot wounds and blast trauma. Not so different, she told the people back home—surgery was surgery. But that wasn’t true. It was very different.

  In a way, Wyman was lucky, getting to a real doctor so quickly—and he had, incongruously, the Taliban to thank. Because Terok did such a good job of sending hajis to meet their seventy-two virgins, the Taliban had targeted it for annihilation. Then, of course, the Army had decreed that Terok would never fall. Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh redux. More, bigger, fiercer Taliban attacks, worse atrocities. More troopers, arty, gunships, Bradleys, drones. Taliban and Terok, two scorpions in a jar, stinging each other slowly to death.

  The one benefit of the Army’s commitment was a combat support hospital (CSH). Most COPs had plywood cubicles with extra sandbags where medics stanched bleeding, doped up the bad cases, and waited for Chinooks. Terok had an actual little hospital with two surgical theaters, two ten-bed wards, twelve nurses, and three doctors. One was Lenora Stilwell.

  “Hello, ma’am.”

  Good strong voice, Stilwell noted.

  “Are you hit anyplace other than the shoulder?”

  “Don’t think so, ma’am.” The kid was grinning now. Amazing.

  Nurses scissored off his uniform, started IV ampicillin, removed the tampon, irrigated the wound.

  “What’s your name, Sergeant?”

  “Daniel, ma’am. Wyman.” That stopped her. Stilwell’s son was named Danny.

  “Do I hear a little Kansas there?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Delacor, Kansas. You, ma’am?”

  “Tampa.” Stilwell probed, assessed. His jaw muscles clenched. “Ketamine twenty cc’s IV,” Stilwell instructed a nurse without looking. “Through and through. You are a lucky young man, Daniel.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Bullet missed bone. A couple centimeters lower and you’re minus an arm. I’ll clean you up, start you on antibiotics, get a drain in place.”

  “So then I can go back?”

  “Back where?”

  “With the squad. Angel and all.”

  “You’ll be here awhile. Maybe Kabul.”

  “No way. Really, ma’am?” Kabul was the home of CENMEDFAC, the big military hospital. He looked more troubled by that possibility than by the wound.

  “Way. We want you to have that arm for a long time. Hey, it’s not so bad here, Daniel. We have some vivacious nurses.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Hot.”

  “Oh. Well.” The grin returned. “Thass good. Thank you, ma’am.”

  He yawned, the ketamine working. Without his combat gear, Wyman’s wide blue eyes and towhead buzz cut made him look more like the high-schooler he had so recently been than the expert killer he was now. That had been the hardest thing for Stilwell. Not the gore and carnage—those she saw in operating theaters every week. But the youth. Kids too young to drink whiskey in a bar damaged in every imaginable way and some that were simply unimaginable until seen. That was the hardest part.

  Her Danny was fifteen and talking about enlisting already. In a few years, a doctor in some godforsaken corner of the world might be ministering to him. Her eyes felt hot. She put a hand on the exam table to steady herself.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” She had thought him asleep, but he had been watching, concerned, up on his good elbow now. He was worried about her. Stilwell patted his healthy shoulder, eased him down.

  “I’m fine, Daniel. I was just thinking …”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Nothing. You go to sleep, Sergeant.”

  Wyman rubbed his eyes like a little kid and dropped right off.

  The next morning Angel visited. Wyman’s bed was one of ten in a long, rectangular room. Only two others were occupied: by a corporal who had dropped an eighty-pound mortar tube on his foot and a Humvee driver with back injuries from an IED.

  The quiet struck Angel. Outside there were whapping helicopters and thrumming generators and outgoing arty thumping like the drums of God. Never quiet. Here, it felt weird. Dead. Angel stopped at the blue curtain drawn around Wyman’s bed.

  “Wy. You awake? How you doin’, dog?”

  “All good, Angie. Come on in here.”

  Angel thought Wyman looked normal, a little drowsy maybe. His shoulder was bandaged and he had needles in both arms.

  “What they sayin’, Wy?”

  “No biggie. Hit muscle, missed bone.”

  “How long you be in here?”

  “Doc said couple of days.” Wyman was not going to mention Kabul. Bad juju.

  “Ain’t the same without you on the five-oh, Wy.”

  “Roger that. Anything happening?”

  “Same ol’ same ol’.”

  Wyman yawned. “I think they been giving me a little dope.” Crooked frown. “Don’t like th’ stuff.”

  Angel chuckled. “Oh my. Back in the ’hood, dog … No, forget that. Look, Wy, I’m gonna go, let you sleep. You need anything?”

  “All good, Angie. Thank you f’ comin’ over here.” Eyelids drooping.

  “You send for me, you be needin’ something, hear?”

  “I will. See you later.”

  “Roger that.” Angel started to leave. Then he turned back and put a hand on Wyman’s good shoulder. “You sure you don’t need nothin’?”

  “Needa get back on the fifty.” Wyman tapped Angel’s hand with his fist.

  “All right. I’m gone.”

  “Hey, know what? The nurses in here are vivacious, man.”

  “They what?”

  “Hot.” Wyman laughed, a groggy chuckle. Angel, not sure what the joke was, laughed, too. If it made Wyman laugh, it was a good thing.

  Lenora Stilwell returned that evening, expecting to find Wyman better. Instead, he was feverish, BP and pulse elevated, skin sallow.

  “Ma’am, I think I’m coming down with flu or something.” He said this without being asked.

  “What are you feeling?”

  “Hot. Sore throat. My body hurts.”

  “How about the shoulder?”

  “Hurts, ma’am.” Paratroopers’ pain thresholds were off the charts. If this one was telling her it hurt, it hurt.

  She removed the dressing and a yellow reek rose from his wound. Between tribiotic ointment and IV ampicillin, Wyman should have been infection-free, but Stilwell was seeing puffy, whitish flesh flecked with dark spots, bacterial colonies oozing pus like rancid butter.

  Stilwell cleaned and irrigated Wyman’s wound, applied more tribiotic, replaced the drain, and put on a fresh dressing.

  “There’s some infection, Daniel. I’m putting you on a different antibiotic, tigecycline. And something for the pain.”

  This time he did not argue. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “All right. Rest, drink a lot. I’ll come by later tonight.”

  She did not return then, nor most of the next day, nor even the next. The same action that kept the doctors and nurses up to their elbows in blood for almost four days kept Angel and his squadmates in the field as well. On the first day, Viper and Tango companies surprised insurgent units moving in daylight, a rare thing but, as it turned out, no accident. The firefight quickly became a complex encounter that unfolded according to a careful plan—the insurgents’ plan.

  They did not hit and run, as usual. In fact, they made contact and then engaged even more aggressively, taking a page from the old North Vietnamese Army tactic of “hold them by their belts.” This clutch of death negated the Americans’ artillery and most of their tactical air support. The initial action became a running battle that the insurgents seemed to have no interest in breaking off. Going to ground during the days, they were resupplied with fresh fighters and matériel each night and renewed their attacks on multiple fronts under cover of darkness. The KIAs and MIAs mounted. After
the first day, medevac helicopters flooded Terok with an endless red stream of wounded troopers.

  Angel wasn’t a casualty, but once he was finally back at Terok, he fell asleep in his gear and didn’t wake for ten hours. It was late afternoon, six days after Father Wyman’s wounding, when he walked back into the ward—which, though still white, was no longer silent. The ward was filled with damaged troopers. Extra beds had been rolled in. Instead of the silence that had greeted him before, Angel now heard a sound that made him think of chanting by drugged monks, an endless chorus of moans and cries from soldiers in morphine-proof pain. The mobile unit’s flimsy floor and walls seemed to vibrate with the sound.

  There was also a funny smell he had not noticed last time, a sour tang like meat gone bad. He stopped in front of Wyman’s drawn blue curtain.

  “Wy. Hey, Wy. You up, dog?”

  No answer.

  “Wy?”

  Angel eased the curtain aside and stepped in. Father Wyman was lying on his back. Blood soaked the sheet covering him and had gathered in dark red pools on the floor. Wyman’s breathing sounded like steel wool being dragged over a washboard. Angel stepped forward and pulled the sheet back, smearing both hands with Wyman’s blood. Silver dollar-sized patches of Wyman’s skin were missing, exposing red, raw muscle. His left cheek looked like it had been chewed by animals, the white eyeball floating in blood. He smelled like a slaughterhouse.

  “MEDIC! MEDIC! I need a medic here!” Angel kept screaming until a slim, white-coated doctor with short brown hair and a blue flock of following nurses pushed him out. Somebody whipped the curtain closed. Other soldiers—the few who could manage—were sitting up in their beds, staring, looking at each other: What’s going on, man? Angel, terrified as he had never been in battle, backed out of the ward wide-eyed and open-mouthed, tears of fear and horror streaming down his face as he left a trail of wet, red bootprints going the wrong way.

  LEAP DAY IN NORTHERN FLORIDA, AND A TALL YOUNG WOMAN with short hair was opening the Deep Enough Dive Shop for business. She was thinking that the peculiar month’s extra day was going to muck up the bookkeeping, but that was getting ahead of things. She wore khaki shorts, a red Hawaiian-print shirt with the tail out, and New Balance running shoes. She was tanned the shade of tea, her naturally blond hair sun-bleached almost pure white. She had square shoulders and runner’s legs. Her forearms were corded with muscle and veins from climbing, her hands scarred and as rough as a laborer’s. Her nose had a slight crook in it.

  A squat man with a bodybuilder’s physique walked in while she was arranging a new display of Liquivision dive computers behind the counter. He wore tight red swim trunks and a yellow tank top and his biceps and calves were like loaves of bread. The man’s way of walking made his Teva sandals slap the floor like flyswatters smacking a tabletop. “I need a guide to dive the Boneyard.” The man’s voice was high and boyish for one so armor-plated. Tourist sunburn, last night’s margaritas on his breath. “I heard this shop had the best guides.”

  “Are you cave certified?”

  He showed a TDI C-card that affirmed that Thomas Brewster of White Plains, New York, was indeed full-cave certified. “Also deep diving, decompression, and trimix. You want to see those cards, too?”

  “No. There’s no deco or trimix on the Boneyard dive.”

  She was thinking that if were up to her, she might not take the guy—impatient, puffing out tequila fumes. But Mary Stilwell, sleeping one off herself, had given Hallie this job after the fiasco in D.C. Mary was her best friend, but not much of a businesswoman. An inch-high stack of unpaid bills sat on the card-table desk in the back office. No time to turn away customers.

  “I’ve done the Doria twice. Empress of Ireland, too. Plus Nowhere Caverns and Bottom of Hell.” Brewster said this in a flat voice, but his face shone with pride.

  “What did you think of the Doria?” Hallie had always wanted to do that dive herself.

  “Tell you the truth, I was freaking terrified the whole time.” With that, she liked him a little better. “Two-knot current, ten-foot viz. Risk my life for some crockery? But now I get to say I did it.”

  She smiled. “There is that.”

  “So what’s this gonna cost me today?”

  “It’s three hundred dollars for one guided dive, five-fifty for two. We’d do the Boneyard first, maybe Sink to Perdition in the afternoon.”

  She waited, knowing that the guys over at Divers Down charged two hundred for the one-dive package.

  He glanced around the shop. “Who’s the guide?”

  “I’m the guide.”

  “Can I see your C-card?”

  “Sure.” She reached under the counter. “I’m NAUI, TDI, and NOAA certified, bonded, licensed by the state of Florida.”

  “Hey. Just kidding. Can we go now?”

  “Like, right now?”

  “Yes.”

  The patience of tourists, she thought. The options: stay at the shop for four hours or until whenever Mary came in, sell some fins and masks to tourons who would call them “flippers” and “goggles,” or guide Thomas Brewster and make three hundred, maybe five-fifty, for the shop. Bird in the hand.

  “Let’s go.”

  The shop was two miles north of Ginnie Springs Park on State Road 47. With Brewster following in his black Escalade, she drove the shop’s red F-150, windows cranked down. It was very hot already, but she loved the moist air, sweet with gardenia and hibiscus and orange blossom and, when the wind was right, with the Gulf’s saline tang. Welcome change from the diesel and sewer reek of D.C.

  They parked in a dirt lot and carried their gear to a wooden dive platform by the water. Nearby, families who could not afford trips to the Gulf or the Atlantic were picnicking on fried chicken, potato salad, burgers, and Budweiser, drawn to the shade of the park’s big live oaks and the cool springs’ turquoise water.

  Assembling her rig, Hallie looked over Brewster’s gear. Double-steel 100-cubic-foot tanks, Halcyon buoyancy compensator with Hogarthian rig, dual Atomic regulators, redundant NiTek dive computers, fifteen-hundred-dollar Halcyon cave lights, OMS fins with steel-spring heel straps. Maybe I was wrong about the guy, she thought. It was a new thing with her, judging quickly and harshly, and, she understood, a direct result of the mess in Washington. It had soured her as surely as a cup of vinegar spilled into a bottle of good wine. Easier to get it in than to take it out, was the problem. Hanging around with Mary, who had been an Apache pilot in Iraq and was scarred in body and soul, was not the best cure.

  She explained the dive plan: one-third of their air going in, one-third coming out, one-third in reserve.

  “Sure, sure,” Brewster said. “SOP.”

  “There is no SOP in cave diving, Mr. Brewster. And especially not in the Boneyard.”

  He nodded, stared back, after a while looked away. “Right.”

  “I lead going in, you lead coming out. The line is clearly visible all the way to the Boneyard Chamber. Viz should be good but not great, thirty feet or so. We’ve had rain.”

  “Any obstacles?”

  “One restriction. Tight, but no doffing gear required.”

  “I’m gonna shoot some video.” He held up a Nikonos digital video recorder with integrated lights that, she knew, retailed for about five thousand dollars.

  “Gas allowing, not a problem.”

  “So what actually happened in there?”

  They had been donning gear as they talked and were almost ready to enter.

  “Two good divers drowned in 1998.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Why are the bodies still there?”

  “Recovering would have been too dangerous. Plus both had wills stating that if they died in a cave, they didn’t want people risking their lives to bring them out. And, so I heard, the state thought it would help prevent repeats.”

  “Law of unintended consequences kicked in, though, am I right?”

  “What do yo
u mean?”

  “The place is famous now. Like the Doria. Everybody wants to dive here, go see the skeletons.”

  He had that much right. They ran through predive routines, made giant-stride entries, hovered at ten feet to perform bubble checks and S-drills. She vented gas from her own Halcyon and settled to thirty feet, the water sweetly cool after the heat above. The cave mouth was a dark hole in a pale underwater wall. Inside, beyond the entrance, she shone her light on the white guideline on the cave floor. Brewster pointed at his eyes, gave the circled thumb and forefinger: Okay.

  Hallie tied off line from her main reel to the permanent guideline. She pointed in the direction of their intended travel, watched him acknowledge by repeating the gesture, then took them down toward the Boneyard, spooling out line as she went.

  The first quarter mile was like the intestinal tract of a giant worm, ten feet in diameter, bending and twisting, striated limestone walls flaring green and white and black in their dive lights. The bottom was tan silt, fine as flour; the particles would remain suspended in the water for an hour if disturbed. The only sounds were the hissing and burbling of their regulators.

  Hallie loved being down here. She had been in her first cave at six, just a touristic operation, nothing special, Luray Caverns in Virginia. But that day something went click deep inside, and she had loved going into caves ever since. Sometimes she thought of herself as a troglodyte, one of those creatures, perfectly adapted to the cave environment, that died if brought out into the light. She wouldn’t die and she loved light, but in caves a certain ancient calm took her over. Very different on the surface, where type A genetics drove her like wind behind a sail.

  They each had two lights on their yellow helmets and bigger primary lights affixed to the backs of their right hands with surgical tube straps. Every twenty feet, Hallie looked back between her thighs at Brewster. He was moving well but breathing hard, blowing out a steady stream of bubbles.

  Four hundred yards in and forty-five feet deep, they came to the restriction. The ceiling dropped and the walls closed in, leaving an opening the size of a refrigerator door. It was called the Jaws of Death, something Hallie had neglected to mention to Brewster. She slipped through and hovered, waiting. His head and shoulders made it, but his big chest and double tanks did not. Instead of relaxing and emptying his lungs, Brewster started throwing his hips and legs around and yanking on rocks with his hands—bad mistake. Before he silted them out, she grabbed both his wrists, gave them a hard jerk, made eye contact, held up an index finger: Stop.