The Deep Zone: A Novel

by James M. Tabor

  It was past nine P.M. when the four of them took a secure elevator to the lowest level that BARDA acknowledged publicly and then dropped on down to Sublevel 1, the first of four classified levels that it did not acknowledge. The elevator stopped. Barnard entered an alphanumeric code on a keypad, the elevator door opened, and they walked forward into a biosecure chamber with gray walls and blue germicidal UV lights. The door slid closed behind them and there was a soft hiss as the chamber’s airtight seals engaged. Clicks and whirs, integrated sensors and analyzers scanning them for pathogens, explosives, biological material. Presently a group of lights on the air lock’s far wall glowed green and the inner door slid open.

  The limited access was essential, for reasons well known to Hallie. In January 1989, chimpanzees infected with Ebola Zaire virus had gotten loose inside a research facility in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They, in turn, had infected hundreds of other chimps. Before long, the entire complex became one vast Ebola-Z growth medium. Hot animals were running amok, others going crazy in their cages, still others breaking out.

  Hallie did not routinely work with chimps, but she knew that they were eight times stronger than a human and could eat a man’s face in ten seconds. If any of those animals had escaped, a pandemic of hemorrhagic fever with a 90 percent mortality rate and no known cure would have burned through Washington’s civilian population in two weeks. It would have obliterated the constitutional line of succession like a wet sponge wiping chalk marks off a blackboard. There would not have been an executive, legislative, or judicial branch of government, nor any military command to speak of. Washington, D.C., would have been a cauldron of death.

  In the end, only the work of some very brave people and more sheer luck than humanity had any right to expect had averted disaster. But the Monkey Business, as it was known forever after, had had lasting effects. To ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, the CDC had imposed fail-safe security precautions. Now a hot pathogen break might kill many BARDA people, but the bug would find no further hosts. Those BARDA lives would be the price of containment.

  They stepped into a long corridor flooded with more watery UV germicidal light, cream-colored walls, tan floor. Though mostly administrative work was done here, some research was ongoing and the air carried odors of alcohol and formaldehyde and disinfectant. People in white lab coats and business suits moved in both directions, some pushing carts, others speaking into Bluetooth-style microphones attached to earpieces. It could have been a hallway in any government building, except that it was almost ten P.M. and everyone was in a hurry.

  “How on earth were you able to get me back in here?” Hallie was a little surprised by how good it felt to be back in a place where important science was being done—dangerous important science, at that.

  “Friends in high places.”

  “But … even after what happened?”

  “I couldn’t stop that at the time.” Barnard’s voice tightened with anger every time the subject came up. “But now that we have a situation, they were more willing to listen to reason.”

  “You put your career on the line for me, in other words. Again.”

  “And I never had a better use for it, Hallie.”

  “Hear, hear.” Lew Casey reached up to pat her shoulder reassuringly.

  They passed through an unmarked door that opened onto a sparsely furnished anteroom with another inner door, guarded by a U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant wearing a crisp uniform and a green beret. He carried a sidearm and had a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun slung across his chest.

  Barnard said his own name out loud, pronouncing the syllables carefully, and a green LED light came to life on a panel on the sergeant’s desk.

  “Good evening, ma’am, sirs.” The sergeant nodded to each in turn. “Please go right in.”

  They walked through the inner door into a rectangular conference room. White ceiling, beige carpet, big flat-screen monitors on sky-blue walls. On a long mahogany table sat pitchers of water, juice, coffee, and plates filled with sandwiches and cookies. Five men sat at the table, and among those was her old research partner, Albert Cahner.

  “Hallie!” He jumped out of his chair and came around the table to give her a hug, which she returned, laughing.

  “Al! I’m so glad to see you again!” She thumped him on the back.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, Hallie.”

  They stood there grinning. He was as she remembered, though perhaps with a little more gray in the comb-over now, the circles under his eyes darker. Otherwise, he was the same old Al, wearing a wrinkled blue shirt with a flyaway collar and a skinny tie that had gone out of fashion ten years earlier. He gave her shoulder a final pat and went back to his place at the table.

  She took an empty chair and poured herself more coffee. Don Barnard leaned against a wall. Lathrop addressed them.

  “I know that you all have traveled hard and must be tired. So let me make a few things clear right away. My name is David Lathrop. Officially I work for Central Intelligence, but for now I report to the secretary of Homeland Security, Hunter Mason. Directly. He reports to the president. Directly. They both know we’re here.”

  Lathrop introduced Barnard and Casey, then turned back to those seated at the table.

  “We thank each of you for responding to our requests, which must have seemed strange, to say the least. We are grateful beyond measure for your presence here.”

  While Lathrop spoke, Hallie eyed the three men at the table she did not know. She pegged them in her own mind as Blond Man, Dark Man, and Big Man.

  “More introductions are in order.” Lathrop gestured toward Blond Man. “Dr. Haight”—he pronounced it height—“is a medical doctor from Tennessee. Emergency medicine specialty. An accomplished technical climber, caver, and diver.”

  Hallie had thought he looked familiar, and now realized why. “You’re Ron Haight!” she blurted. “You were on the cover of National Geographic last year. They called you ‘the caver saver.’ ”

  “Well, yeah, I was.” Haight looked down at the table, grinning and shaking his head.

  “Dr. Haight is justly famous for his rescue work,” Lathrop said.

  “Please call me Ron.” Haight looked uncomfortable with all the attention, which Hallie found positively endearing.

  “You were all muddy, with a helmet and dive mask on. It took me a minute to recognize you,” she said.

  “Hard to believe they’d put an ugly mug like this’un on the cover of such a fine magazine, I know.” Haight’s accent was Tennessee thick, his words flowing softly and slowly.

  But Hallie thought he had a right nice mug. Haight’s hair was almost as light as hers, worn in a ponytail. He was one of those rare blonds who have dark eyebrows; his were perched high on his forehead and far apart, like quotation marks at the ends of a sentence, making him look perpetually, pleasantly surprised. Beneath those eyebrows were angular features in a lean, open face. He was not tall but had the build of a serious climber, a compact bundle of muscle with about 5 percent body fat. He looked to be in his late twenties.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Haight,” said Hallie. “Sorry, I mean Ron. You saved a couple of friends of mine once.”

  Haight nodded, formal, graceful, as if he were bowing to a princess, the deathless courtesy of southern men.

  Lathrop turned to Dark Man. “Dr. Rafael Arguello is a paleoanthropologist from the University of New Mexico and a member of the Cuicatec Native American population in Oaxaca, Mexico. He speaks several languages but, most importantly, Cuicatec.”

  Arguello was perhaps thirty years older than Haight. He had high cheekbones, olive skin, black eyes, and neatly barbered, shining black hair. His unshaven cheeks looked like someone had smudged charcoal over them. He wore a rumpled business suit and a white shirt with no tie, a professor whisked all the way from New Mexico on the strange wings of power.

  “Dr. Arguello has done groundbreaking research on Native American shaman
ic practices. He underwent shamanic preparation and initiation himself. He also served as a cultural liaison officer with Mexico’s military. And as a paleoanthropologist, he has explored many very serious caves.”

  “I should say how pleased I am to meet you, everyone.” Arguello’s accent was unlike any Hallie had heard. Neither Spanish nor English, but something more like the Comanche dialogue she’d heard when she had gone to New Mexico with Stephen Redhorse.

  Finally, Lathrop nodded at Big Man. “Dr. Wil Bowman is in our government’s service, on loan to us. He has the requisite skills—diving, climbing, caving. Plus, ah, appropriate security experience.”

  Bowman sat directly across the table from Hallie, wearing jeans, running shoes, and an old red rugby shirt. He looked to her like a six-four, 220-pound slab of muscle. His face was a collection of juts and angles: outsized cheekbones, thrusting chin, and prominent nose with a zigzag from more than one break. He had a straw-colored crew cut and a scar divided one of his eyebrows into two short dashes. Bright, hard, unblinking eyes the blue of glacial ice. He had the body of a professional athlete and the face of a warrior. Not beautiful, certainly, but a face that would have held her glance if she had seen him in a restaurant or on the street. His age was less apparent than the others’, but she guessed about forty.

  It was her turn. Lathrop said, “Dr. Hallie Leland, BS in microbiology from Georgetown University, PhD in microbiology, Johns Hopkins University. Extremophiles are her area of research. She is an accomplished climber and master technical diver. Her research has taken her into many caves.”

  “Is there anything you don’t do?” Bowman looked at her, his eyebrows raised.

  “Dishes and laundry.”

  She watched him, saw a flicker of something like amusement.

  At the same time, Haight laughed out loud. Cahner chuckled, and Arguello said nothing. Whatever had been in Bowman’s eyes was as quickly gone. Not a man to have mad at you, she thought.

  BEFORE LATHROP COULD SPEAK AGAIN, A CELLPHONE BUZZED in his pocket. He retrieved it, turned away. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I understand. Yes, sir. Immediately, sir.” He closed the phone, turned back to them. “Sorry. My boss.”

  Lathrop hooked thumbs in his vest pockets and took a breath. “Dr. Cahner was introduced earlier, and Dr. Leland knows him. Let’s move on. All of you know some of why you’re here, but none of you know all.” Lathrop related the background that Hallie had already heard from Barnard. At the end, he repeated the president’s comment about Pearl Harbor.

  “Long story short, we need to kill this germ before it kills our military. Whatever your political persuasions, visualize the United States of America without armed forces. Fresh meat for the animals of the world. Al Qaeda would be in every city in a month, with the Taliban right on their heels. And those are just the obvious ones.”

  And not just us, Hallie thought. A new kind of domino theory. Take down America and the others go, plunk-plunk-plunk. A world where men behead a woman for flashing an ankle.

  “Now about you. The five of you were distilled from a database of hundreds of thousands. Parameters included security clearance potential, fitness and health, unique skill sets, and a couple of other things. Think of yourselves as the only keys for a very complex lock.”

  He paused, looked at Barnard. “That’s enough from me. Don?”

  Barnard pushed off the wall he had been leaning against. “Let’s back up a bit. The media has talked about ‘supergerms’ in the past, but that’s wrong. They were bugs with acquired resistance, but bugs we knew. ACE, however, really is a supergerm. An entirely new species.

  “Something called antigenic shift is probably responsible. Antigenic drift accounts for most evolutionary changes, but it works over eons. Antigenic shift can happen in weeks or days. Or even seconds, at the microscopic level. Viruses and bacteria have a special gift for it. Antigenic shifts caused the influenza pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968.

  “We all knew this was coming. We just didn’t know when. To kill a superbacterium, you need a superantibiotic. My section in BARDA had been pursuing one in Dr. Cahner’s lab. He can tell you himself. Al?”

  Cahner squirmed, ran a hand over thinning hair. “I, ah, well … maybe we should let Hallie—I mean Dr. Leland—explain. It was her work originally, and I, ah, just …” Cahner looked with desperation at Hallie, who knew how much he hated being in any spotlight, no matter how small.

  She glanced at Barnard “Don?”

  “Go ahead, Hallie.”

  She swigged strong coffee, then began: “Two years ago I accompanied an expedition to a remote cave called Cueva de Luz, in southern Mexico. It’s a supercave, one of the deepest on earth. Maybe the deepest. No one knows for sure. The team included two hydrogeologists, a paleontologist, and me. Five thousand feet deep and four miles into this cave, I found a unique extremophile.”

  “Cueva de Luz means ‘Cave of Light,’ ” Haight said. “Why is it called that? There’s no light in any caves I’ve ever seen.”

  “I don’t know.” Hallie shrugged. “Maybe Dr. Arguello knows.”

  Arguello did not respond immediately. He seemed slightly uncomfortable with all eyes on him. He opened his mouth to speak, then held up his hands, shrugging. “It is not certain.” He knows more than he’s telling us, Hallie thought.

  “Dr. Leland—” Lathrop said, to get things back on track. But Arguello was not finished. He had a question: “Wait. I do not understand that term, ‘extremophile.’ ”

  Hallie explained: “They survive where nothing should: geo-thermal vents twenty-five thousand feet deep in the ocean, arctic wastes, hyperacidic pools. And in caves. Some persist in absolute darkness for millennia.

  “The extremophile I found looked like blue cottage cheese. We called it moonmilk. It was bioluminescent, like some arthropods. Tests revealed genomes we had never seen. Back in the lab one day, I accidentally dropped some onto a tray of petri dishes where we were growing DRTB—drug-resistant tuberculosis—colonies. Level Four biosafety suits are not conducive to fine motor tasks.

  “We thought, What the hell, let’s see what happens. The cultures looked like dried splotches of red-and-green vomit. After six hours, little white spots appeared. Three more days and the dishes were white. The DRTB was killed.

  “You could spend ten careers and never see something like that. I damn near fainted, let me tell you. So this stuff was right on the outer edge of our science. Definitely from the Archaea domain, but like nothing we’d seen before. We tried it on other DRs. Killed every one.”

  “So why are we not giving this … this moonmilk to those soldiers right now?” Arguello sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “Because,” said Wil Bowman, “you can’t give an organism in its raw biological state to humans. That would be like feeding people the mold from which penicillin is made.” He spoke very softly, but with undertones that could be humor or could be threat. It was a voice that caught ears and held them. “Plus, they ran out of biomatter before learning how to replicate it.”

  Now, how would he know that? Hallie looked at him more closely. This time, when he returned her curious gaze directly, she actually felt a little twinge in her gut.

  “Why don’t y’all just send the troops down there and get some more?” said Haight, looking from Barnard to Lathrop to Casey, not sure who should answer.

  For the first time, sleek Lathrop looked uneasy. He cleared his throat. “It’s quite complicated, actually. But here’s the situation. Narcotraficantes now control eastern Oaxaca, which includes Cueva de Luz. They are well organized, well armed, and savage beyond belief.”

  Arguello gripped the table, his face darkening with anger. “And they perpetrate the most horrible atrocities against Cuicatecs, my own people.”

  This Hallie had not known. Before, the region had been idyllic, high mountain forest dotted with white villages overlooking steep-sided, green river valleys. The Cuicatecs she’d met had been reserved but not hostile, always ready to gamble with
homemade dice and share their ferocious sugarcane moonshine called aguardiente.

  “There is more.” Lathrop rubbed his forehead, stared at his fingernails. He half-turned to look at Barnard, who nodded. When he turned around again, his suit jacket moved aside just enough for Hallie to glimpse the butt of a semiautomatic pistol in a brown leather shoulder holster. That surprised her, but only a little. She knew the joke about the CIA being an employment agency for Skull and Bones, so a Yalie with a gun was not out of the realm of possibility.

  “Mexico’s army has gone after the narcos. It is war down there, unconstrained by niceties like Geneva conventions. The Cuicatecs, feeling invaded, are killing narcos and Mexican troops both. A total nightmare.”

  “More reason to send in troops, don’t y’all think?” said Haight.

  “Illegal-alien issues have strained our relations with Mexico to the breaking point. The demonstrations, riots, both here and there—you’ve all heard. Just now, we could not possibly insert military assets into their sovereign territory. Especially with their own military concentrated in the area.”

  “So how ’bout SEALs and Deltas and such? Those black ops guys.”

  “SEALs and Deltas are the best warfighters in history, but supercaves are one of the few environments they’re not trained for.” As Bowman said this, Hallie thought, Well, then, bet he was a Delta. She had never known any, but he fit pretty well her vision of one. Except for the “doctor” part. What exactly is he a doctor of?

  “Then how in hell’re y’all gonna get us in there?”

  “Stealth insertion.” Bowman bit off his words in short bursts. “Tomorrow night. No moon. Our good luck. Already planned. Assets staged. Ready to deploy.”

  With all of that laid out, it felt like those moments after a brutal fifteen-round fight when all anyone can do is wait for the decision. Nobody spoke. Haight had untied the ponytail and was running fingers through his blond hair. Al Cahner was looking at his hands. Arguello was tapping an index finger on the table. Bowman sat perfectly still, watching them all. Hallie noted that he was missing the tip of his left little finger.