The Deep Zone

If he fell in here, he’s gone, Hallie thought. “I don’t think he fell in here.”

“Why not?”

“Why would he come over this way? Even if he did, Bowman was too experienced to just fall in. Not possible.”

“You just said anything is possible down here.”

She opened her mouth, shut it again. He was right about both. She had said that. And anything was possible. Motioning for him to stay where he was, she inched closer to the edge of the pit. The perimeters of shafts like this were often rotten and unstable, like big cornices on mountains. Stopping five feet from the lip, she played her light down into the darkness. The walls were dead vertical. Twenty feet down, a layer of thick mist ate her light. She glanced back at Cahner. “Too much fog. Can’t see.”

Standing there with her light on his chest, Hallie could see that Cahner looked used up. His eyes were bloodshot, the circles beneath them were almost black, the flesh of his face sagged, his body curved beneath unseen weight, even without the pack. He seemed to be having trouble holding his head up. Fatigue? Neck injury? He’s keeping it together with sheer willpower. Have to admire that.

Then a thought struck her: Do I look like that? She knew the answer, but there was nothing to do about it other than keep going. She pulled up the image she had seen in Don Barnard’s office, that soldier who had died so horribly, and it gave her strength.

“Now we do east and west. You go east.”

They started off again. Hallie headed west and made her three hundred steps more quickly this time, the route presenting fewer obstructions. She got back to their starting point first. Cahner returned five minutes later, held up his hands. They stared at each other.

Hallie shook her head, slumped against a boulder. You will not cry. You cannot afford that luxury here. Cahner came closer and patted her shoulder. Thoughts began to fly around in her mind like bats, darting, uncontrolled. A second later, she slapped herself hard, startling Cahner. Get yourself together. You have to find Bowman, she thought.

They could keep going out, following more points of the compass, northeast and southwest, northwest and southeast. But she was beginning to think the unthinkable, that they just might not find Bowman. She recalled the two scientists who had simply vanished when she had last been in this cave.

How had the cave done that? Those men were experienced cavers, and there were two of them. One, you could imagine dying by a fluke fall or getting hit by breakdown. But two? That stretched the limits of the imagination. And now Bowman. Not just anybody, but Bowman. The least likely man she had ever met to come to grief in a cave. Or anywhere, for that matter. And yet it was appearing more probable with each passing minute that that was exactly what had happened.

Cahner pointed toward the river. “I think we need to look down there. Maybe he went to pee, fell, and hurt himself. Maybe he can’t move.”

“That is where he went!” Hallie suddenly remembered. She regretted revealing the knowledge to Cahner because of what it would tell him, but the hell with it. She had been half asleep when Bowman had told her he was going to the river. She had given him her light. But Bowman being Bowman, he might not have turned it on, relying instead on his snapshot. Or he might have turned it on and still gotten too close to the rushing water and slipped.

It was, she realized, one of the easiest places to die in the whole cave. When did you need to pee? Middle of the night. Where did you go? To the river. What shape are you in? Half asleep. Jesus Christ.

“Let’s go see.” She pointed at his feet. “Be careful.”

They walked toward the river, and it was like walking down a wet, steeply pitched slate roof. Closer to it, the rocks became smooth, almost glassy, scoured by the action of grit-carrying water over countless eons. And right down close to the foaming water itself, Hallie could see that the rocks had an eerie shine, covered with a greenish algal growth that was almost invisible. She stood where she was. They played their lights up and down the riverbank, over and over. The river down here was so powerful that they felt it as much as heard it, their bodies vibrating with the energy that came up from the rocks, through their feet, and into their legs.

Flashing their lights, they walked back and forth both ways along the river, staying above the slippery algal sheen, for half an hour. Finally, she turned to Cahner and motioned for them to head back. There was no point in trying to make herself heard here.

They returned to their camp area and Hallie struggled to steady her voice. “He’s gone. Don’t know how, but gone. Probably the river.”

But her mind was filled with a simple, terrible question: How could he make such a mistake? He was tired, and exhaustion makes you careless, but still. How?

For a second, Cahner’s face looked like a pane of glass, pushed out of shape by great wind, in the moment just before it shattered. Hallie could sense the struggle going on within him, the urge for self-preservation warring with his conscious desire to help. Sometimes people lost that struggle and went berserk. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Al. I can’t do this alone. I need you.”

The words seemed to hit him like a slap. His head came up, his eyes clearing. He focused on her. She saw his jaw working, watched as the muscles of his face appeared to rearrange themselves, regaining tone and strength. He stood erect, swallowed, nodded. It was the first time she had ever seen him stand up really straight, and she realized that he was almost as tall as she. He took her hands from his shoulders and held them.

“You have me.” His voice was firm and certain. “Whatever it takes, we will do this.” He looked at her for another moment, then released her hands and turned toward his pack.

“Let’s go,” he said.

TWENTY-NINE

SIX HOURS AFTER LEAVING DEMPSEY’S BODY, STIKES AND Kathan finally located the meadow and sighted the mouth of Cueva de Luz. The mission had never called for them to actually go into the cave. Rather, they would wait for whoever came out and deal with them on the surface. They made a camp fifty yards back from the tree line. Then they created a hide, just inside the tree line at the meadow’s edge, from which one of them could watch the cave mouth constantly. One man slept or rested, one kept watch. Four on, four off. If Dempsey had been alive it would have been four on, eight off. This two-man rotation was punishing, but Stikes had endured worse.

He had just finished one of his fours and was rousing Kathan—carefully. It was unwise to startle a man like Kathan from sleep.

“Kathan. Kathan,” Stikes whispered.

The big man’s eyes snapped open. “My turn?”

“Yeah.”

Kathan sat up and rubbed his face. He gazed around the campsite with a puzzled look and for just a moment he seemed to Stikes like a huge child. But then Kathan focused and Stikes thought, No eyes like that in any child.

“I was about to ask you where the hell Dempsey is,” Kathan said. He shook his head. “Jesus.”

“It’s tough about Dempsey,” Stikes said. “I know you two went back a way.”

“Yeah, we did.” Stikes waited for more, but then Kathan started assembling gear for his turn in the hide.

“This place is crawling with bad actors,” Stikes said. “You can’t afford to get careless for a second.”

“Dempsey never got careless. I served with the man a long time. Something else happened.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know what. But trust me—Dempsey was not the careless type.”

Stikes saw no reason to argue the point. “I guess we’ll never know.”

“The real question is, why didn’t they come for us? They must have been watching, waiting for an opening, like Dempsey moving off to take a crap.”

“Two of us together, they probably figured too much for them,” Stikes said.