The Deep Zone: A Novel (44 page)

“WELL, HELLO THERE.”

One of the men spoke, the huge one. They had not been there seconds earlier. For a moment she thought they were
narcotraficantes
. But the man did not sound Mexican. His accent was distinctly American South, red-clay, redneck cracker. The other man, standing to his left, was black, not quite as large. They wore camouflage uniforms, helmets, giant knives, sidearms, even grenades. They certainly looked like warriors, but they were too neat and their uniforms were too complete for them to be
narcos
. They wore no insignia of unit or rank. And their helmets were not U.S. mil-spec gear.

“You’re Americans?” Hallie thought perhaps they were part of some special operations unit sent to retrieve and protect the team. She had seen pictures of such fighters, and they often looked less
than spit-and-polish. The two men exchanged glances and the big man snickered. She sank lower in the water, right up to her chin.

“We sure are, honey,” the big one said. “Patriotic Americans, both of us. Retired veterans, too. Hey, let me ask you a question: any of your friends coming out behind you?”

“Did BARDA send you?”

The huge man looked puzzled. He glanced at his partner, who shrugged.

“Well, no, as a matter of fact.” The giant was grinning, and she could not help noticing that he had amazing teeth, as even and white as a news anchor’s. “We work for the competition, you might say.”

“The what?”

“Never mind. Why don’t you come on out of there and we’ll get you a blanket and some hot chow. I bet you’re hungry after all that time down in that cave. We got some great stuff. Delta rations. None of that MRE junk.”

“How did you know how long I’ve been in the cave?” Hallie was feeling more afraid with each passing second. The two men radiated threat like heat. Watching them, she started to swim away on her back, sculling with both arms.

“Whoa now, that’s not very friendly. Come here so we can talk.” The giant was still grinning, but his mouth was tight around the white teeth.

She flipped onto her stomach and started swimming as fast as she could toward the other shore. Then she heard a short, sharp noise that sounded like
puppuppuppuppuppup
as the man squeezed off a six-round burst from the silenced rifle and the cenote’s surface erupted three feet in front of her face. She stopped, turned, treaded water, unsure of what to do. There was no way she could dive deep enough quickly enough to escape if they fired again. She was a good swimmer, but not faster than rifle bullets.

The big man held his rifle at the hip. Looking down, she saw the
red laser aiming dot centered on her exposed breastbone.
Twenty feet away. He can’t miss
.

“Now why don’t you just swim your beautiful self on over here and let’s talk.” No more nice, the voice raw and frightening.

“We don’t have time for this, man,” the other said, standing with one hip cocked, his rifle stock tucked against his waist, muzzle pointing skyward. He sounded like someone who just wanted to get on with a piece of business. The big man ignored him.

There was no option. She swam slowly to the rim of the cenote, put her hands on the rocky edge, and pulled herself out, first to her knees, then up to stand in front of them in her underwear. She sluiced the water back out of her hair. The bigger man had the strangest expression on his face, mouth open, eyes glazed, breath coming in short, sharp little pants.
Like a starving animal who sees food
, she thought.

“Let me tell you something.” She tried to sound commanding. “I am on a special assignment for the United States government. Many people up to and including the White House know exactly where I am and what I’m doing. Do you understand that? If you interfere with me in any way you will—”

The giant cut her off. “What we
understand
is that you are here all by your own self. And we are here with you.”

“But I radioed for evac ten minutes ago, right after I came out of the cave. A serious military presence will arrive here in minutes.”

“No, you didn’t, as a matter of fact. We’ve been watching you every second.”

“All right, look.” She maintained eye contact with the big man, who stood six-six if he was an inch. “I’m going to tell you why I’m here. I think when you understand the nature of my mission—”

“Honey, you could be on a mission to save Jesus Christ himself and it wouldn’t matter to us.”

The other man spoke, his voice sharper: “Kathan—we need to
move
.”

He used the other one’s name
, she thought.
A very bad sign
.

“You need to shut up and let me do my thing,” the one called Kathan said to the other in a voice heavy with warning. He never took his eyes off Hallie. “Honey, I got a question for you.”

“Like what?” She immediately regretted saying that, because the giant’s question had to do with what variety of sexual activity she preferred. He shifted his rifle to his left hand, then lowered the zipper of his camo suit.

“Here’s how we’re gonna start. You get down on your knees and I think you know what comes after that.”

“No.”

He moved more quickly than she would have thought possible for a man so huge, slapping the barrel of his rifle against the right side of Hallie’s neck, just below her ear. It wasn’t a hard blow but it hit the brachial nexus, the same spot where she had hit Cahner with a rock. Her legs collapsed and suddenly she was on her knees, trying to blink away bright sparks of light.

“Do it,” he said.

“No.”

Kathan sighed. He set his rifle on the ground. With his right hand, he pulled the combat knife from its belt scabbard and held it poised over her head. His left hand wrapped around her neck. He lowered the point of his knife onto her scalp, letting her see how it felt. He wasn’t even pressing, but just the weight of the knife itself made her gasp, and a small rivulet of blood ran down her forehead. She flicked her eyes sideways at the other man, who stood as he had before, hip cocked, rifle propped, watching. For a split second their eyes met and she thought she saw a flicker of something human, but then he blinked and looked away. Hallie thought of lunging at the rifle where it lay on the ground, but as if he had read her mind, her tormentor applied pressure and the knife point dug deeper and she grunted, her vision blurring into a red mist.

“I’m hoping we can all be nice about this, blondie,” he said.

“Kathan, goddamnit, we—” the other one said.

“Hey, bro? You need to shut the fuck up now, hear?”

Kathan dug the knife point in so hard she almost fainted. Then he eased the pressure off and lifted it a centimeter above her scalp. He put his other hand behind Hallie’s head and pulled her toward his crotch.

In her peripheral vision, Hallie saw the other man take a step sideways. He said, “Hey,
bro
.”

His aiming laser’s red dot appeared in the center of the big man’s throat, just above the top of his body armor. “Throw the knife in the water. Let her go.”

The grip on Hallie’s neck did not loosen, but the big one turned his head toward the other. “You really do not want to do this, Stikes,” he said.

Kathan and Stikes
, she thought.
Do not forget those names
.

Stikes sighed. Hallie heard the sharp double click as he thumbed his M4’s safety lever from “safe” past “semi” to “burst.” He said, “It won’t take two of us to get that stuff home, and I can really use another share. You know what else? This world could use one less racist psycho cracker.”

“Wait, Stikes—” Kathan said.

Stikes braced the rifle’s stock against his side, locking it in tight with his right elbow. Turning her head an inch, Hallie saw the tip of his index finger starting to pale as he applied pressure to the trigger.

A small hole appeared just in front of Stikes’s right ear and a dark red fountain blossomed out the other side of his skull. Hallie heard the sharp report of a rifle, the sound coming a millisecond after the bullet. Stikes stood upright for a second. Then he jerked, collapsed to his knees, and flopped onto his face.

More rifle fire, short, full-auto bursts. Bullets spattered the rocks around them, threw up geysers of water and spurts of soil. The giant named Kathan dropped the knife and snatched his rifle off the ground. Hallie jumped to her feet, readying for a sprint into the protective forest. With his rifle in one hand, Kathan lunged and grabbed her upper right arm with the other.

Reaching for her like that put him off balance, so that he was leaning sharply toward the cenote. Her mind did the necessary calculations in a microsecond. Whoever had fired the shot might be as bad as the man named Kathan. Or they might be help. It was at least possible. With Kathan, there was only one possibility.

Hallie spun behind Kathan and wrapped both arms around him in a bear hug, pinning his own arms momentarily to his sides. She pulled back and Kathan began to tilt like a great column, slowly at first, then more quickly, accelerating toward the water. As they landed, she wound both legs around his waist and just before going under she sucked in a huge breath.

Kathan let go of his rifle as soon as they hit the water, but with all the weight of metal and body armor he was wearing, they sank like an anchor. Hallie kept her arms and legs tight around him. She could not risk having him get free to drop the rest of his gear and make it back to the surface. She locked her ankles, one over the other, heels in his crotch. She grasped her left wrist with her right hand and her right wrist with her left. The double grip gave her twice the holding power. Twined together front to back like lovers, turning slowly, they plunged deeper, and the deeper they went, as pressure squeezed buoyancy from the man’s gear and their bodies, the faster they sank.

In two seconds they were twenty feet down. Kathan struggled frantically, kicking his legs, working his arms free to pull Hallie’s wrists and hands. Then panic took over and he began flailing in the water, trying to claw his way back to the surface.

At thirty feet he reached back and grabbed a handful of Hallie’s hair, but it was short and very fine, wet and greasy, and it was like trying to hold on to oiled monofilament. Then he went after her face, clawing for her eyes, but she kept them pressed tightly against the soft place where his neck and shoulder joined. At forty feet, his eardrums burst. Hallie actually heard the two sharp pops and knew that it felt like ice picks had just been driven deep into both sides of his skull. He opened his mouth in a silent scream and his head
whipped back and forth with a will of its own, trying to throw out the agony.

At fifty feet he began to jerk and dance with the involuntary spasms of near drowning as his immense body went to war with itself. His diaphragm and breathing muscles struggled to suck in air as the levels of carbon dioxide in his blood rose. His mouth and throat, controlled by the voluntary nervous system—which understood that to inhale meant death—fought those efforts.

A few seconds later his blood’s carbon dioxide level won the battle, tripping that irresistible switch in his brain, and the reflex designed by evolution to save his life took it instead. His body arched in one violent spasm. His head stretched back and his mouth opened wide, water flooded his lungs, and Hallie knew it would feel like someone had poured acid into his chest.

Her own vision was starting to dim. She pushed him away and he rolled over, turning his front to her. The cenote water was so clear that there was still light even at this depth. Without a mask everything underwater had a blurred, ghostly look, but for an instant their faces were so close that she could see his eyes. There was a second of life in them yet, agony and horror, the look of one in a nightmare from which there was no waking. Then he rolled over again and sank out of sight.

Hallie looked up. The small silver circle far above shone like a full moon in a dark sky. Her arms and legs felt as light and useless as featherless wings. There was no pain, and some dim remnant of consciousness knew that was bad. Then clouds began to tarnish the silver moon and the sky grew darker. When she was a child in Virginia, on summer nights Hallie had stood in the pasture among their grazing horses, touching stars with the tips of her fingers. Now she saw the stars beginning to come out, more and more tiny white sparks flickering against the black, and she stretched her fingertips up and up, trying to touch those stars one last time.

EVVIE FLEMMER AWOKE FROM A DREAM THAT LEFT HER WITH
clenched fists. She sat up in bed, breathing very carefully, and waited for the nausea.
Mal de mer
, the yacht’s steward had called it with a sympathetic tongue clucking. She knew it as seasickness, but whatever you called it, the puking horror had made every minute of the first days of her new life miserable. She had never spent time on the ocean before, and no one had warned her that seasickness might be a problem even on a boat the size of this superyacht with the peculiar name,
Lebens Leben
. To make things worse, they had put out from Cape May at night—no steadying horizon to stare at—and she had started throwing up within an hour. The steward had given her some blue pills that did nothing for the nausea but made her so drowsy she could barely talk, so she’d quit taking them. Flemmer had been told that this oceangoing yacht carried a chef lured away from La Tour d’Argent, the most famous restaurant in
all of France, but she had been able to keep down nothing more substantial than weak tea and chicken broth.