The Deep Zone

“It would have taken a sharp impact on a pointed object to break this faceplate.” Bowman held up Haight’s rebreather. “Tempered four-millimeter glass. It’s what commercial divers use.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t think Haight was the kind of diver to go through a tunnel like that in a hurry.”

Hallie shook her head briskly. “I don’t agree.”

“Why not?”

“I liked him very much, don’t misunderstand. But he struck me as young, impatient, and impulsive. I can easily see him trying to go too fast, especially since he was the sweep diver. He wouldn’t want the rest of us to think he was slow or inept. Ego could have kicked in.”

“Did you see or feel any projections that could have broken glass like that?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything with such bad viz. And as for feeling something, you know we would have come in contact with only a tiny percentage of the tunnel’s overall inside surface. There could have been a thousand sharp projections and we’d never know it.”

After a while, Bowman nodded. “I think you’re right.”

“Tea is ready, my friends,” Arguello called from the kitchen.

“Haight was fit and strong. He could have been pulling himself along pretty fast,” Hallie said.

“True enough.”

She waited for Bowman to go on, but he did not. She had been looking at Haight’s body just then, but shifted her gaze to Bowman. Her light lit up his chest and showed his face in peripheral glow. To her surprise, there were tears in his eyes.

The big man made no effort to wipe them away or hide them. Hallie was not sure what to say. She felt very bad for Bowman just then. He was the leader, and a good young man had just died on his watch, and that had to hurt terribly. She wanted to reach out and touch him, hug him even, but something stopped her. Her own eyes filled with tears, and her chest felt stuffed.

“We should go back with the others now.” Bowman’s voice was rough with emotion.

“You go ahead. I’ll be along. I just want a few moments with him.”

She knelt beside Haight’s body. She had grown to like him in the short time they’d known each other; there had been something brotherly about him. She had enjoyed listening to his thick, drawly accent and jokes and had admired his skill on that huge wall they’d descended.

She picked up his hands, one after the other. They felt cold and dead and much too heavy. She turned them over, focusing her helmet light on one palm and then the other, but there was no bruising, no cuts or other signs of struggle there. She examined the rebreather unit on his chest, but it showed no evidence of damage.

She was not unaccustomed to handling dead bodies, given the recoveries she had helped with. Turning Haight’s head gently, she examined his eyes. Wide open and staring, they showed no injury. She ran her fingers down his face, closing the eyes. His skin was like cold white wax, and his lips were a livid blue going to gray. There was no sign of struggle or trauma there, either, no cuts or bruises.

In death he looked even younger than he had alive, and tears suddenly filled Hallie’s eyes again as she thought of all the years Ron Haight should have had left, the women he would not love, children he would not father, discoveries he would not make. For an instant she hated the cave, but then it passed. The cave was just a cave, a force of nature like mountains and forests, neither benign nor malign but simply there—deadly, to be sure, but indifferent. Then Arguello’s words came back to her and she thought, Or is it?

Hallie picked up Haight’s rebreather, wanting to examine the cracked faceplate, and as she did so a shard of rock fell out and landed on his chest. They had not seen it before. There was the answer, then. It was part of the rock that had shattered his mask. He must have run into it with considerable force to knock a piece of it loose. Her theory had been correct, apparently. Haight, though a veteran cave diver, had made one of the countless mistakes that can get you killed in an environment with zero tolerance for error.

Hallie set the mask down beside Haight. We ought to cover him with something. It’s not right just to leave him here like this. She stood, meaning to get something out of one of their packs, and bumped into Bowman, who had returned and had been standing behind her. She had not heard him approach. He had a green plastic groundsheet, and together they covered Haight’s body, pinning the edges of the sheet down with rocks.

“I’d like to give him a decent burial,” Bowman said, “but we can’t afford the time. We’re behind already.”

She took one of Bowman’s hands. It felt solid and rough and surprisingly warm. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He looked straight at her. His fingers closed around hers. She liked how that felt. A little shock sparked in her chest, a windy feeling, something she hadn’t experienced for a long time. Not since Redhorse, she thought.

“I know,” Bowman said. “But it doesn’t matter, really.”

That, she had to admit, was true. She held his hand tighter.

The cave made its low, unceasing moan, and from a great distance came the crash of vast rock breaking and smashing.

EIGHTEEN

NATHAN RATHOR, A SMALL MAN WHO HAD NEVER BEEN physically strong and who had grown up in a family with servants, disliked doing things for himself. Some tasks, however, could not be delegated. Thus, after the last Sit Room teleconference with Donald Barnard, Rathor had sat in front of his restricted, eyes-only computer for the better part of an hour. Not much caught Nathan Rathor off guard, but Barnard’s comment that the team down in Mexico had a good chance of succeeding with its mission had. Knowing little about caves, and less about the team itself, Rathor had assumed it was the longest of long shots. But Barnard obviously knew something he did not—and that was unacceptable. The thing was, though, that Rathor could not delegate any of his sycophantic undersecretaries or special assistants to do this. Only he could tackle this job.

Rathor had told his staff to get dossiers on all the people on the team heading down into that cave. Thick files had come back quickly on every one of them except the security man—Bowman, if that was his real name— about whom not even Rathor’s best people had been able to find anything. Bowman aside, the more he learned about those people, the more concerned Rathor became. He was not stupid by any means, and he could see what this unique assemblage might be capable of.

If those people came back with some of that exotic extremophile, and if BARDA’s people really could fabricate new antibiotics, Barnard, not Rathor, would be the hero of the day. It would be insulting, but far from the worst possible thing that could come out of this, as Rathor well knew. The worst possible thing would be… well, better not to even think about it, given all the planning and money and painstaking preparation he and certain associates had put into this project. Not to mention the level of risk they were all tolerating. Plans, money, groundwork—all those were really only the body of the machine. Risk was the motor that made it run. When he was still quite young, Rathor had experienced the epiphany that avoiding risk meant consignment to the dustbin of life. As he grew older, he understood the epiphany’s corollary: that rules were for sporty games and fools. The competitions of life were deadly earnest, and in those, the greatest risk of all was losing.

As a cabinet-level official, Rathor had access to the government’s most sophisticated technology. Well, not its most sophisticated stuff—that was reserved for the secretaries of defense and state, and he knew it, and it infuriated him. But the things he did have access to still amazed him.

One of them that he had greatly enjoyed was the NSA’s version of Google Earth. Actually, Google had replicated the NSA program from cobbled-together bits and pieces of information. Google’s version never worried the spooks, whose software was about three generations ahead, and who had access to satellite data the lefty geeks at Google could only dream about. Even Rathor’s stepped-down version of the program could let him see, on a clear day, the license plate on a New York City yellow cab.

If people only knew.

Rathor often played with the observation tool. The NSA net collected images not only from orbiting satellites but from countless terrestrial cameras as well. Many were visible to the public—cameras that caught people running