The Deep Zone: A Novel (11 page)

“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
.

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.