The Deep Zone

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.