The Deep Zone

Arguello. Since y’all haven’t said anything about payment, this obviously will all be from our patriotic fervor and the goodness of our hearts. Is that about the size of it?”

There had been an expectant pressure in the room, tension generated by crisis and challenge, Lathrop and Barnard working it, shaping it up to a climax. This, clearly, was not the one they had hoped for. The phone in Lathrop’s jacket pocket vibrated over and over. He seemed not to notice. Barnard’s head and eyes and shoulders drooped, like the top stories of a building keeling over slowly, reluctantly, resisting the downward pull to the very last. Barnard was not the kind of man who spent a lot of time looking at the floor. Hallie did not like what was happening here.

She glanced around the table. No one met her eyes except Bowman—who, she got the feeling, had been watching her first. Al Cahner was chewing a cookie, slowly, thoughtfully, as though it might be his last. Arguello was still tapping one finger on the table, rhythmically, as though to a song only he could hear. Bowman sat perfectly still, eyes locked with Hallie’s. Having grown up with two brothers and a soldier father, Hallie had become very good at staring matches. The urge to look away was deeply instinctual, like the urge to gasp in air after a long bout of breath holding, but Hallie would not quit first. Seconds passed. Finally, Bowman pointed an index finger at her, mouthed the words You win, and looked away.

For his part, Lathrop appeared to know quite well what happened in Washington to those who carried bad news to high places. The phone vibrated again. He ignored it.

“I’m afraid that is about the size of it, Dr. Haight.”

“Sounds like a pretty desperate thing.” Haight looked from Lathrop to Barnard.

“We would be lying if we suggested otherwise.” Barnard, returning his gaze directly.

Something had been building in Hallie, and she could contain it no longer. Bowman had distracted her, but now she stood up so quickly her chair tipped over backward and hit the floor with a bang. The door opened and the security officer stood there, surveying. Lathrop waved him back out.

“God damn it.” Beneath the deep tan, Hallie’s face was reddening. “How often do you get the chance to save thousands—maybe millions—of people from horrible deaths? We have just been offered the opportunity of a lifetime, gentlemen.”

“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,