The Deep Zone: A Novel (12 page)

They were all carrying heavy North Face backpacks. Bowman was the only one with weapons: a SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol in a thigh holster, a huge dive knife worn in a scabbard strapped to the inside of his left calf, and, slung over one shoulder, a weird, futuristic-looking rifle with a carbine-length barrel, a circular magazine like the ones used on Thompson submachine guns, a lightweight tubular stock, and a pistol grip like an M-16’s. Hallie had asked him if was a rifle or a shotgun during their ride in the stealth Osprey.

“Neither,” Bowman had told her. “It fires ten-millimeter FAFO projectiles.”

“What’s FAFO?”

“Fire and forget. You put the laser spot on something, fire, and the projectile will find that target. The projectiles are explosive OSOKs—sorry, one-shot, one-kill designs. Like little grenades.” He looked at her for a moment. “You like guns?”

“My dad was an Army officer. I grew up on a farm. I’m a hell of a wing shot. I’d love to try that thing.”

She saw that he tried, but failed, to suppress a grin. “Maybe one day you’ll get the chance.”

Now, in the forest at the tree line, Bowman shifted his massive pack and whispered to the others.

“Okay, listen up. I’ve walked through this terrain in SatIm holograms and I’ve got GPS waypoints to the cave in a HUD on my NVDs. I’ll lead. The rest of you follow in the order we briefed. Most important thing is noise discipline. Around here, the Mexican army patrols during the day, but
narcos
own the night. God knows what the Indians do. I do not want to hear one clink, rattle, or cough. It could mean our lives. Let’s go.”

A trail climbed out of the clearing’s northwestern corner. Bowman
led, Arguello came next, and then Hallie, Cahner, and Haight. After a quarter mile, the trail simply ended and then, even with the night-vision goggles, it was slow going. They were at about four thousand feet in mountain cloud forest. Warm temperatures, high humidity, and prodigious annual rainfall combined to produce 150-foot-tall oak and pine trees towering like giant temple columns over a forest floor overgrown with monstrous lime-colored ferns, tangled vines, and, most remarkably of all, a particularly vicious nettle shrub,
Cnidoscolus angustidens
, which natives called
mala mujer—
evil woman. The plant had beautiful leaves, like spiky, shining green hearts strewn with white spots. But they were covered with poisonous hairs and needle-sharp thorns that inflicted wounds worse than those of the Portuguese man-of-war. Stings could induce paralysis and, in extreme cases, even death. Had they all not been wearing one-piece, ballistic nylon caving suits, it would have been virtually impossible to make it through here.

Hallie expected Bowman to set a blistering pace, but he did not. Their progress was almost leisurely. Even though she was carrying close to forty pounds, she could have conversed easily with the others. No so Rafael Arguello, whom she could hear puffing and panting. She could understand his difficulty. As good as they were, the NVDs couldn’t distinguish between slippery exposed roots and, say, a hunting fer-de-lance, so every step demanded caution. It was also hard not to blunder head-on into the
mala mujers
. And the most daunting challenges lay ahead. Once they entered Cueva de Luz, Hallie would become their guide.
Point woman
. Bowman would still command, but she would be in front.

She was concerned about the supercave, of course, but she had taken its measure before. The
people
worried her more. If Lathrop was right, with the exception of Arguello, they had all spent enough time down deep to be expert with the techniques. So it wasn’t their experience that concerned Hallie. Depth and darkness could prey on a person’s mind; she had seen brave and brawny men reduced to trembling wrecks after several days far down. She had—

She walked right into Arguello, who had stopped suddenly to avoid running into Bowman. Someone spoke, words unintelligible, the voice like wind-blown tree branches scratching on a wall.

Peering around Arguello and Bowman, in the NVDs’ green glow she could see the luminous form of a man blocking their way. A small dog stood beside him, eyes glowing red as fire. The man was of average height, his face etched with wrinkles, wearing a shirt and pants that hung loose on his bony frame. His sandals looked to have been made from old automobile tires. On his right side he carried a machete in a leather sheath hung with frayed rope around his waist. He had a battered leather satchel draped over his left shoulder.

The old man spoke again.

Bowman looked at Arguello. Hallie noted that the big man had turned ever so slightly, so that his right shoulder and hip were away from the old man. His right hand hung easily, casually, by the SIG Sauer.

Arguello hesitated a moment. “Sorry. A very old dialect. He asked if we are here to kill
narcotraficantes
.”

“Tell him we are not.”

Arguello did, and the old man spoke more.

“He says that is a pity. Now he asks if we are here to kill the
federales
. The government soldiers.”

“Tell him we’re not doing that, either.”

Arguello did, and the old man responded, his eyes straying to Hallie.

“He said that, too, is a pity. He also says that the high woman is very beautiful. The tall woman, he means. Even with the funny glasses.”

Hallie wondered how he could see her at all.

“Ask him if there are
narcos
or
federales
close by.”

“He says they are everywhere now. He calls them … ah, it is obscene. Something to do with the excretory function. But very bad.”

“The
narcos
or the
federales
?”

“Both, I believe.”

“Ask him how he travels on a moonless night with no light through a forest of
mala mujer
.”

The old man listened, chuckled, answered. Arguello translated: “He says that when you know
the way
, there is no darkness. And that he made friends with
mala mujer
long ago.”

“Friends? Ask him … never mind.”

The old man spoke at length then and Arguello translated again: “He says that he is sorry we are not here to kill the
federales
. They are stupid and careless, drunk constantly, and they shot his wife during a firefight. Also the
narcos
, drunk and worse, crazy on drugs. They took his two daughters and burned his home. Now he lives in the forest and kills those who get drunk and wander away from their camps.”

“What’s going on?” Cahner whispered from back in the line. “Why did we stop?”

The old man spoke again and Arguello murmured to Bowman: “He says Chi Con Gui-Jao is expecting us.”

And Hallie wondered,
How would he know we are going to the cave?

“Ask him why he approached us. Why he wasn’t afraid.” Bowman watched the old man, not Arguello.

After an exchange, Arguello answered, “He is a
curandero
. Shaman. He says that you give off good light. Not like the
narcos
and
federales
. Their light is like foul water.”

The old man kept talking, apparently explaining something to Arguello.

“He says that he would accompany us but cannot until his business of putting out the, ah, ‘filthy lights,’ he calls them, is finished.”

The old man spoke to Arguello once more.

“He says that the cave is another world,” Arguello relayed. “One that—how to explain this—contains what we call heaven and hell. Many enter the cave and never return. Those who do return are different.”

“Different how?” Bowman asked.

Arguello questioned the old man in his language and once again translated for Bowman. “There is no way to know,” he said.

Hallie felt goose bumps rise on her arms. The old man was speaking the truth. On her other trip into the cave, she had experienced exactly what the
curandero
described. One of the hydrogeologists, a hard-core smoker, had a cold when they entered Cueva de Luz. It intensified with frightening speed, becoming pneumonia in both lungs before they reached the cave’s terminus. If he had not disappeared, it was entirely possible that he would not have made it out of the cave in any case. Another of the men had flirted with her—just lightly, nothing offensive—during their trip down to Mexico. The deeper they went, the more powerful his lust became, the more insistent his advances, until toward the end she slept with her sheath knife in one hand inside her mummy bag. That man, too, had disappeared.

Bowman turned back, addressing the team: “We’ll move out now.” He swung toward the trail, and then froze.

The old man and the dog were gone. They had made no sound.

“Did you see where he went?” Bowman, tense, looking all around. “Anyone?” No one answered. “Let’s get on. The sooner we get into the cave, the safer we’ll be,” he said.

I wouldn’t count on that
, Hallie thought.

“YOU OUGHTA BE WEARIN’ A HOT SUIT, DOC.” THE SPEAKER
was a young black sergeant.

Lenora Stilwell glanced up from her clipboard. The sergeant’s name was Dillon.
Marshell
Dillon.

“Can’t get anything done in those body condoms.” Stilwell winked, prompting a pained grin in return. “Can’t hear, can’t talk, can’t touch. Heck, you can barely walk in one of those. As for going to the bathroom …” She shook her head. “What kind of doctor would that be?”

It was early evening. Terok’s field hospital was now fully quarantined and isolated from the rest of the combat outpost. From the rest of the world, for that matter. The NBC—Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical—guys showed up the day after the presence of ACE was confirmed. They sealed the unit, installing one biosecure air lock for ingress and egress, and distributed Biosafety Level 4 suits.
The “hot suit” Dillon had referred to was the sky-blue Chemturion Model 3530, made of a twenty-millimeter impervious plastic called Cloropel. It weighed ten pounds. The personal life support system backpack (PLSS) added another ten pounds to the total weight. A BSL-4 felt, when zipped and clipped, like a diver’s heavy dry suit, but even stiffer. Every movement required extra effort, and the plastic popped and crinkled continuously. Then, too, they were so hot that it was possible to sweat out two pounds during an eight-hour shift, even with the little ventilator fan blowing.

Air from the PLSS backpack or an external supply kept the suits inflated to positive pressure, so that no pathogens could infiltrate even if a suit was breached. The integrated, bucket-shaped hood was made of thicker plastic that was clear enough when new but never remained so for long. It scratched and marred easily, so that seeing through one more than a few weeks old was like looking through a windshield spiderwebbed with cracks. After the antifog chemical wore off, which it usually did within a month, the plastic fogged up, making it even harder to see. The suits’ sleeves ended in heavy, double-layer hazmat gloves that allowed only slightly more manual dexterity than winter mittens. Since the suit, when inflated, effectively doubled the wearer’s volume and added a foot of height, it required constant mental recalibration to keep from blundering into equipment, other people, and containers holding pathogens so deadly that a thousandth of an ounce could depopulate the planet. Stilwell thought it was like driving an eighteen-wheeler after a lifetime of Hondas.

BSL-4 Chemturions were designed to protect laboratorians against nightmares from the invisible world, monsters like Ebola Zaire, superpox, pneumonic plague, and many others, including ACE, and they did that job well enough. But they were not designed to help an overtasked doctor in a combat zone do her work, and Stilwell had refused to wear one from the start. Since no one outranked her at Terok, no one could order her to wear one of the clumsy suits, and
that
suited her just fine.

“You don’t wanna catch this stuff, Doc. It’s amazing you don’t got it already.” Dillon was twenty-three, slim, his head shaved. He wore a wedding band and, Stilwell knew, had two young children back home in Atlanta, Georgia. He’d enlisted at eighteen, loved the Army, planned to make a career of it.

“Hey, you know about us doctors. We build up immunity. I’ve been exposed to so many bugs over the years, I’m probably immune to everything.”

“I’m sayin’ prayers for you, Doc.” Dillon gasped, his face collapsing into a clutch of pain as Stilwell lifted the dressing from one of the red, suppurating patches on his torso. The infection had not progressed as far as those that had killed Wyman and Washington and the others. IV colistin was slowing it down. That was the good news. But it was gaining on the colistin, despite steadily increasing dosages.

“Sorry,” she said. “Hey, tell me something, Sergeant. Did you ever hear of a TV show called
Gunsmoke
?”

“Only about a hundred million times, ma’am.” Dillon’s voice contained pain again, but of a different kind.

“So you know about Marshal Dillon? The character James Arness played?”

“Oh, do I ever, ma’am. Forget bein’ a boy named Sue. The ’hood I come from, you named for a cop, that’s two strikes right there.”