The Deep Zone: A Novel (16 page)

“One thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine feet across to the far wall.” Hallie aimed a laser range finder across, then pointed it straight down. “Five hundred and twenty-three feet deep.”

“This is a beautiful thing.” Cahner eased up and played his light over polished bronze walls so smooth they gleamed. “Think of the water flow it took to carve such an abyss. Unimaginable.” There was pure awe in his voice.

“Do we take a break here?” Arguello was already dropping his pack to the floor. “I could use a snack. And some water. It will take you an hour or so to rig the rappel rope here, will it not?”

“We won’t be rigging rappel ropes. Remember I mentioned that back at BARDA?” Bowman cast his light around, assessing the area.

“I had forgotten. But I will just grab a snack in any case.” Arguello started munching a Hershey bar with almonds. Hallie considered saying something about conserving their rations, not gobbling stuff this early into the expedition, but decided it would be better to mention it to Arguello when she had a chance to be alone with him.

Haight was focused, gleefully, on the down-climb. “
I
hadn’t forgotten. I’ve been dying to find out what y’all have up your sleeve.”

“In my pack, actually.” Bowman dropped his backpack and began digging through it. “I couldn’t release these until we were in the cave, with zero chance of security breach.” He handed each of them small bags that resembled zippered toiletry kits. “Otherwise, you would have been carrying them yourselves, believe me. Drop your packs, look at this gear. We’ll be here awhile.”

Inside her bag, Hallie found two gloves made of what appeared to be thick neoprene, the material used in divers’ wet suits, and two other things, made of the same material, that looked like the black rubber overshoes men used, once upon a time, to protect their dress shoes. She slipped her left hand into one of the gloves and jumped back.

“Hey!” she exclaimed.
“Bowman! What’s it doing?”

The glove was moving like a thing alive. Enlarging, molding to her hand. At first, it was like a blood pressure cuff tightening, but then it stopped. It felt to Hallie like she was wearing a new layer of flesh.

“Don’t worry.” Bowman was smiling, obviously enjoying her discomfiture. “It won’t hurt. Performing as designed.”

“How in God’s name did it do that?”

“The rest of you put on your gloves and I’ll explain.”

They did, with exclamations ranging from Arguello’s
“Madre de Dios”
to Haight’s “Unbelievable, y’all.”

“These gloves and shoes come to us from DARPA.” The ease with which he donned his gloves indicated that Bowman had done this before.

“The supersecret black ops place?” Haight was turning his hands over and over, like a boxer examining a taping job.

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, yes. They do high-risk, high-reward work.”

“Like?” Haight asked.

“Stealth aircraft. An antigravity-force project. Superheal—biotechnology that accelerates the human body’s healing process. I could go on for a long time. But you get the idea.”

“It sounds rather like science fiction.” Arguello was tugging at one of his gloves.

“So about these things here?” Haight was making fists, punching air.

Bowman’s helmet light bobbed up and down. “DARPA was asked to develop a system that would enable soldiers to climb and descend vertical surfaces.”

“Wait a minute.” Arguello sounded worried. “You are not suggesting that we are going to climb down into that pit using these things?”

“How do they work?” asked Hallie, intrigued.

“DARPA calls them z-man tools, but I like gecko gear. Rolls off
the tongue better. DARPA first tried suction devices, but they weren’t powerful enough. Then they investigated how geckos and spiders climb and stick.”

“Magic.” Arguello’s voice was low.

“No, very much science. They found that certain lizards and spiders use something called van der Waals forces. There’s some very sophisticated nanotechnology involved, but I’ve climbed with these things, and all that matters is that they work.”

“Hold on a sec.” Now even Haight sounded hesitant. “This pit’s walls are wet rock. How’re these things ever going to get a seal on that kind of surface?”

“It’s not suction, Ron. It’s more to do with molecular linearity.”

The two scientists, Hallie and Cahner, and the doctor, Haight, were at least somewhat familiar with van der Waals forces, which they had learned about way back in graduate and medical school. Arguello, who was not, looked at the two gloves on his hands like they were snakes.

This is going to be interesting
, Hallie thought.
Getting them to trust these things going down a five-hundred-foot wall. Good test of a leader
.

Haight spoke with unusual sharpness, all trace of backwoods Tennessee gone from his voice. “Wil, I’ve been caving and climbing most of my life. I’m still alive because I am very careful about my equipment. That means not using something I don’t understand, especially experimental Buck Rogers stuff.”

“Absolutely right.” Bowman nodded. “Bear with me for a minute. We’re all familiar with how lasers work, I’d guess?”

“They organize random light energy into a coherent, focused beam,” Arguello said, sounding distracted. He was trying to remove his gloves, without success.

“These tools work the same way,” said Bowman. “They organize random molecular bonding energy—those van der Waal forces—into coherent beams. When they meet other random molecular energy, say from a pane of glass, they pull that energy into coherent attraction.”

“Like two magnets?” Hallie was trying to take a glove off, too. It was like trying to peel away her own flesh.

“Yes. But many times more powerful.”

“But are they going to work on rock that is slick and wet?” Haight still sounded skeptical.

“Even better. Moisture enhances the van der Waal forces’ flow. And a slightly rough surface like rock is better than a smooth one because it presents more total bonding area.”

“But how are they able to change themselves to mimic the forms of our hands?” Arguello asked. “And why can’t I get them off?”

“Once again, thank DARPA.” Hallie could hear impatience creeping into Bowman’s voice. But he continued: “It’s called ‘jamming skin enabled locomotion.’ DARPA’s molecular engineers made certain substances, including flexible plastics, capable of changing shape to create motion. It could be helpful moving around on other planets with surfaces that might be impassable by conventional vehicles.” He moved his light toward Cahner, then Arguello. “They don’t come off that way. They meld with, rather than mold to, surfaces.”

“So they’ve literally merged with our bodies?” Haight sounded incredulous.

“More or less. Now watch.” Bowman walked to the nearest vertical section of rock, about twenty feet to their right. He slipped the “overshoes” onto his caving boots, where they molded to the shape of the boots as the gloves had to their hands. It was an incredible thing to watch, the inert black material suddenly appearing to come alive, moving and changing, flowing around the caving boots. He pressed the palm of his right hand onto the wall just above his head, then the left. He placed one foot against the wall, then the other. There was a barely audible sound, something between a hiss and a gulp, and suddenly Bowman was attached to the wall.

He started climbing. It was like watching someone crawl along a floor, except Bowman was doing it straight up.

“Dracula,” Haight whispered.

Hallie didn’t like that comparison. “Spider-Man,” she said. Whatever you called it, Bowman’s demonstration up there
was
amazing. It wasn’t only the Gecko Gear. A climber herself, she knew how much strength it took to go straight up a wall like that, sticky hands and feet or no.

Bowman ascended thirty feet above the cave floor. There he rested briefly in the big spot cast by the light beams of the other four, staring up at him from below. He moved his hands and feet so that they described half of a large circle. He stopped, hanging upside down above them like a giant red lizard in his brightly colored caving suit. He rotated the remaining half of the circle so that he was upright again.

“Now, here’s a really cool thing.” He peeled his left hand and both feet off the wall and hung by only his right hand. “These things
work
.”

He reattached his other hand and both feet, down-climbed, rejoined them.

“Things you should know: You don’t need to press hard. And you don’t need to have the whole boot sole in contact. A few square inches are enough. It’s like front-pointing on ice with crampons. You detach by peeling up and away from the bottom. Which is also how you walk on level ground, if you have to, though it’s awkward at best, as you might have noticed.”

“So now what, Wil?” Arguello was looking toward the giant pit.

“Now you practice. Let’s take …” He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes. Go find a wall.”

At the bottom of a vertical section, Hallie put on the overshoes. Then, taking a deep breath, she moved her right hand slowly toward a spot on the wall about a foot higher than her head. When her hand was several inches from the wall, she began to feel a pull, like that of a magnet attracted to steel.
Amazing
. The closer she moved her hand, the stronger that pull became. When the “glove” touched rock, she felt it moving again, changing, joining itself, at the molecular level, with the wall. She tested it carefully, first pulling down
on it and then, when it would not move, hanging more and more of her body weight from the hand placement. It was an unbelievably solid connection—as though her hand had become part of the rock. Ascending very carefully, she discovered that the climbing was less physically demanding than she’d expected, once she lost the tension of fear and reverted to good form, using the big muscles in her legs rather than trying to power up with her arms. Before long, she and Haight were moving smoothly around like a pair of giant spiders. Cahner took a bit longer, but eventually he, too, was crawling confidently up and down the wall.

Arguello, however, couldn’t seem to get it. Despite working himself into a red-faced sweat, he wasn’t able to rise more than a couple of feet. One hand or boot would peel off and he’d lose control of the others, dropping clumsily to the floor. Bowman watched, arms folded. After a while he walked over.

“I think I can help, Rafael. Don’t reach so high. You can’t use your most powerful leg muscles, and you don’t have the right angle to peel off correctly.”

Arguello looked skeptical, but he did as Bowman suggested, setting his hands closer to the top of his helmet, then finding his foot placements. He moved tentatively, as though expecting to fall off again, but before long, he was twenty feet above Bowman. He glanced back over his shoulder, grinning.

“It works!” He traversed side to side, went up and down a few more times, then stepped down beside Bowman. “Once you get it, these things are fun.”

“Good job, Rafael. You looked strong up there.”

Arguello shook his head. “Good job by
you
. If not for you, I would still be flopping around.”

“What I’m here for.”

“Hey, this place have a name?” It was Haight, calling down from far above.

Hallie answered. “You know cavers give names to everything, Ron. This is Don’t Fall Wall.”

DON BARNARD SAT BEHIND HIS DESK AND TRIED TO REMEMBER
when he had slept last. He couldn’t recall, but he did know the current day, date, and time—because in a bit less than two minutes he would have a videoconference with the president of the United States and some of his key advisers.

He had put on a fresh white shirt and a new tie, blue with small silver stars. He fiddled a good deal with the knot, getting the dimple just right, and playing with the dimple made him remember the day his father had taught him to tie a tie, more than a half century ago.

“The dimple is everything, Donald,” his father had said. “And nothing. Nothing but a tiny detail, but of such details fortunes and tragedies are made.” He had been ten at the time, and, though he had dutifully said, “Yes, sir,” he’d had little idea what his father was talking about. Now he did.

He ran a comb through his white hair one more time, straightened his suitcoat. His attire was in good order. Not the face, though. The face looked like that of a man who had aged five years in two weeks. Nothing he could do about that. Maybe he would look better when this was all over. Then again, maybe not. Fatigue and fear were cruel sculptors.

He took a sip of water from the glass on the desktop, which was clean except for a fresh legal pad and a pen. He looked at his watch. Twenty-eight seconds.

He watched the red hand climb up toward 12, and just as it passed over that number, a soft chime sounded. The big flat-screen monitor on the wall changed from blue to a bright image of President O’Neil in the White House Situation Room. A tall black man with close-cut hair beginning to show flecks of gray, he was sitting at the head of the room’s thirty-foot-long mahogany conference table, wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, collar loosened, dark red tie pulled down. He did not look here as he always did in public—calm, collected, quick to flash a dazzling smile. Now he looked tired. The president was flanked by Vice President Eileen Washinsky, Health and Human Services Secretary Nathan Rathor, and Secretary of Homeland Security Hunter Mason.