The Deep Zone

“You’re worried? I’m terrified. If we lose both of them, I don’t know how much help I’ll be for you.”

“You’re doing just fine. No worries on that count. But goddamn it. Arguello has caved. He knows how to do something like this.”

“What was that you said a while back about objective dangers, though? Maybe a piece of ledge collapsed. Or some of the wall peeled away. He could even—”

They saw a light beam flickering through the gloom, and then Bowman appeared at the apex of the curve. Soon he was standing with them.

“Nothing.”

“Can’t be.” Cahner said. “He has to be here somewhere.”

Bowman shook his head. “He must have fallen. There’s no other explanation.” His voice was dead calm now. “He’s not on the wall or on the other side. I went all the way back. So he must be in the lake.”

Hallie pushed her mind away from what it would be like to die after falling into pure sulfuric acid.

“We have to get out of this toxic area,” said Bowman. “These rebreathers have a limited capacity.” The big man hefted his pack. “Let’s go.”

The other two shouldered their packs and moved off, Hallie leading, Cahner in the middle, Bowman last. From here the cave floor formed a great ramp that rose gently upward for about 150 vertical feet. The gain in elevation lifted them out of the sulfur fog. When the Sirius analyzer showed green, they stopped long enough to remove and stow their rebreathers, then kept going to put more distance between them and the sump of poison gas.

Near the top of the ramp, the chamber narrowed, and the exit passage was not much bigger than a subway tunnel. Soon they were going downward again, at first gently, then more and more steeply until they had to turn and face inward, descending like rock climbers on technical terrain—which is exactly what they were, just a vertical mile beneath the surface. Hallie led them on. Fatigue blunted her concentration, and several times she realized that she had just stopped without meaning to, her body turning itself off and her mind going blank.

She began to feel something close to panic, not from fear of injury but from fear of failing. The loss of Haight and Arguello, her exhaustion, the distance remaining to the moonmilk, and then the long, killing climb back to the surface. The thoughts themselves had weight and almost pushed her down, off the face into the black air.

That rock there. Focus on that rock. Then the next one. See it? Just keep doing that. One step at a time. That’s how you do these things. You’ve been here before. This tired, this wrung out. Remember?

But try as she might, she couldn’t remember such a time.

TWENTY-THREE

“I DON’T KNOW WHY THEY CALL THESE THINGS ‘COOL SUITS,’” Dempsey whispered. “I’m sweating my ass off.”

Stikes had been with Dempsey and Kathan for less than twenty-four hours and he was already tired of hearing Dempsey complain. He whined about the heat, his hemorrhoids, their gear, the short notice for this run. Wee, wee, wee, Stikes thought. Just like the little piggy, all the way home. In the many years he had been a SEAL, Stikes had never heard such whining. But Dempsey and Kathan had been Army Special Forces, where, apparently, whining was a trainable skill. He was not a SEAL now, nor were they SF. All three were ex-military and part of a reaction team assembled very quickly by their current employer, GFM—Global Force Multiplier. GFM was a private security contractor whose main customers were men with reason to fear for their lives and enough money to do something about it. The company also took on missions like this one, some government, some private, the prime criterion being compensation level; in Stikes’s experience, they were usually on short notice. Thus he had ended up with these two mission partners, both ex-SF, rather than the former SEALs he usually joined.

“It’s not about heat. It’s because they don’t reflect anything, little buddy.” Kathan kept his voice down, too. He did not look at Dempsey or Stikes while speaking, but monitored the 120-degree arc of their surroundings that was his responsibility. Dempsey and Stikes had their own thirds of the circle.

“Hey, you think I don’t know that? I was just saying.”

“Yeah. But it was worse in Iraq. Down in the valleys, anyway.”

Stikes was glad, at least, that they had the good sense to whisper, given the kind of country they were in here, triple Indian country, crawling with narcotraficantes and Mexican federales and natives with some unpronounceable name. He knew that, Dempsey’s whining aside, the three of them could give a good account of themselves against any ordinary military force of up to thirty men, but this mission had to be slick—in and out clean. No fuss, no muss. Those were the orders, and to Stikes’s way of thinking it was stupid arguing over the heat—about which none of them could do a damned thing— even if they whispered.

“All right,” Dempsey said. “I’ll give you that. But it was dry. There’s nothing like this wet bean-eater heat.”

Enough, Stikes thought. “You should have gone with the SEALs, my men. It’s always cool in the water.”

“I hate the water,” Kathan said. He was huge, easily six-six, with a neck like a professional football player’s. His accent was Georgia redneck and his voice was like a bass drum, so that even when he whispered Stikes winced at how the sound might carry here. Kathan’s answer befuddled him. How could anyone, even infantry pukes like SFs, hate being in the water? Now, ground—that was something to hate, all right. Ground was hard and painful rock, or soft and sucking mud, or some other nightmare like this infernal thorny forest they were fighting through. The military talked a lot about good ground but, as far as Stikes was concerned, that was an oxymoron. Water was different. Water was cool and soothing, and once you knew how to relax, it folded around you like a woman. Moved like a woman, too.

Kathan was the team leader. He made a single motion with an index finger and they moved off again. The three had done a night HALO drop from fifteen thousand feet, right about the time Hallie and her team had been approaching the Acid Bath. Their intention had been to land in the clear meadow near the cave mouth. But as so often happened with high-altitude, low-opening night jumps, they touched down somewhere else. Now they were trying to find their way to the meadow and the cave, at night, through the forest of mala mujer.

They were all very fit. Even with the altitude and heavy packs they weren’t breathing hard. Under the camouflage paint, their faces were sharp-featured, their bodies distilled to bone and muscle. They all had noses that had been broken but nicely even, white teeth, the products of expensive reconstruction after battle damage. They carried silenced M4 carbines with eight thirty-round magazines in chest packs, Beretta 9mm pistols in thigh holsters, big fighting knives in belt sheaths. They were dressed identically in the “cool suits”—green-and-tan camo, one-piece Gore-Tex suits coated with a nanopolymer that protected them from infrared, UV, and short-phase radar scans. To anyone looking through NVDs, they were invisible.

But, as Dempsey had noted, the suits were hot and not so good at protecting them from the mala mujer plants. The pain of getting stuck by those poisonous spikes was such that Stikes found it hard not to curse out loud. But he had been on many missions that were, if not identical to this one in details, just like it in purpose, which was to kill some people, and Stikes had long since accepted that pain was part of the price you paid for the privilege of killing.

Dempsey, following Kathan at the prescribed fifteen-foot interval, was a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than the other man. His voice was high and rough, like that of a boxer who had been punched too many times in the throat. As he had explained to Stikes earlier, that damage had actually been done by shrapnel from an IED north of Fallujah. Dempsey wore his brown hair shoulder length, kept in place by a headband of velvet-soft suede that, he’d bragged to Stikes, he had made from the skin of an Iraqi woman’s breast.

Stikes was good-looking enough to have been on a recruiting poster, though the Navy would never have allowed that. He was last on the trail but the middle man in height and weight. Stikes was normally languid in