The Deep Zone

rolled in. Instead of the silence that had greeted him before, Angel now heard a sound that made him think of chanting by drugged monks, an endless chorus of moans and cries from soldiers in morphine-proof pain. The mobile unit’s flimsy floor and walls seemed to vibrate with the sound.

There was also a funny smell he had not noticed last time, a sour tang like meat gone bad. He stopped in front of Wyman’s drawn blue curtain.

“Wy. Hey, Wy. You up, dog?”

No answer.

“Wy?”

Angel eased the curtain aside and stepped in. Father Wyman was lying on his back. Blood soaked the sheet covering him and had gathered in dark red pools on the floor. Wyman’s breathing sounded like steel wool being dragged over a washboard. Angel stepped forward and pulled the sheet back, smearing both hands with Wyman’s blood. Silver dollar-sized patches of Wyman’s skin were missing, exposing red, raw muscle. His left cheek looked like it had been chewed by animals, the white eyeball floating in blood. He smelled like a slaughterhouse.

“MEDIC! MEDIC! I need a medic here!” Angel kept screaming until a slim, white- coated doctor with short brown hair and a blue flock of following nurses pushed him out. Somebody whipped the curtain closed. Other soldiers—the few who could manage—were sitting up in their beds, staring, looking at each other: What’s going on, man? Angel, terrified as he had never been in battle, backed out of the ward wide-eyed and open-mouthed, tears of fear and horror streaming down his face as he left a trail of wet, red bootprints going the wrong way.

FOUR

LEAP DAY IN NORTHERN FLORIDA, AND A TALL YOUNG WOMAN with short hair was opening the Deep Enough Dive Shop for business. She was thinking that the peculiar month’s extra day was going to muck up the bookkeeping, but that was getting ahead of things. She wore khaki shorts, a red Hawaiian-print shirt with the tail out, and New Balance running shoes. She was tanned the shade of tea, her naturally blond hair sun-bleached almost pure white. She had square shoulders and runner’s legs. Her forearms were corded with muscle and veins from climbing, her hands scarred and as rough as a laborer’s. Her nose had a slight crook in it.

A squat man with a bodybuilder’s physique walked in while she was arranging a new display of Liquivision dive computers behind the counter. He wore tight red swim trunks and a yellow tank top and his biceps and calves were like loaves of bread. The man’s way of walking made his Teva sandals slap the floor like flyswatters smacking a tabletop. “I need a guide to dive the Boneyard.” The man’s voice was high and boyish for one so armor-plated. Tourist sunburn, last night’s margaritas on his breath. “I heard this shop had the best guides.”

“Are you cave certified?”

He showed a TDI C-card that affirmed that Thomas Brewster of White Plains, New York, was indeed full- cave certified. “Also deep diving, decompression, and trimix. You want to see those cards, too?”

“No. There’s no deco or trimix on the Boneyard dive.”

She was thinking that if were up to her, she might not take the guy—impatient, puffing out tequila fumes. But Mary Stilwell, sleeping one off herself, had given Hallie this job after the fiasco in D.C. Mary was her best friend, but not much of a businesswoman. An inch-high stack of unpaid bills sat on the card-table desk in the back office. No time to turn away customers.

“I’ve done the Doria twice. Empress of Ireland, too. Plus Nowhere Caverns and Bottom of Hell.” Brewster said this in a flat voice, but his face shone with pride.

“What did you think of the Doria?” Hallie had always wanted to do that dive herself.

“Tell you the truth, I was freaking terrified the whole time.” With that, she liked him a little better. “Two- knot current, ten-foot viz. Risk my life for some crockery? But now I get to say I did it.”

She smiled. “There is that.”

“So what’s this gonna cost me today?”

“It’s three hundred dollars for one guided dive, five-fifty for two. We’d do the Boneyard first, maybe Sink to Perdition in the afternoon.”

She waited, knowing that the guys over at Divers Down charged two hundred for the one-dive package.

He glanced around the shop. “Who’s the guide?”

“I’m the guide.”

“Can I see your C-card?”

“Sure.” She reached under the counter. “I’m NAUI, TDI, and NOAA certified, bonded, licensed by the state of Florida.”

“Hey. Just kidding. Can we go now?”

“Like, right now?”

“Yes.”

The patience of tourists, she thought. The options: stay at the shop for four hours or until whenever Mary came in, sell some fins and masks to tourons who would call them “flippers” and “goggles,” or guide Thomas Brewster and make three hundred, maybe five-fifty, for the shop. Bird in the hand.

“Let’s go.”

The shop was two miles north of Ginnie Springs Park on State Road 47. With Brewster following in his black Escalade, she drove the shop’s red F-150, windows cranked down. It was very hot already, but she loved the moist air, sweet with gardenia and hibiscus and orange blossom and, when the wind was right, with the Gulf’s saline tang. Welcome change from the diesel and sewer reek of D.C.

They parked in a dirt lot and carried their gear to a wooden dive platform by the water. Nearby, families who could not afford trips to the Gulf or the Atlantic were picnicking on fried chicken, potato salad, burgers, and Budweiser, drawn to the shade of the park’s big live oaks and the cool springs’ turquoise water.

Assembling her rig, Hallie looked over Brewster’s gear. Double-steel 100-cubic-foot tanks, Halcyon buoyancy compensator with Hogarthian rig, dual Atomic regulators, redundant NiTek dive computers, fifteen-hundred-dollar Halcyon cave lights, OMS fins with steel-spring heel straps. Maybe I was wrong about the guy, she thought. It was a new thing with her, judging quickly and harshly, and, she understood, a direct result of the mess in Washington. It had soured her as surely as a cup of vinegar spilled into a bottle of good wine. Easier to get it in than to take it out, was the problem. Hanging around with Mary, who had been an Apache pilot in Iraq and was scarred in body and soul, was not the best cure.

She explained the dive plan: one-third of their air going in, one-third coming out, one-third in reserve.

“Sure, sure,” Brewster said. “SOP.”

“There is no SOP in cave diving, Mr. Brewster. And especially not in the Boneyard.”

He nodded, stared back, after a while looked away. “Right.”

“I lead going in, you lead coming out. The line is clearly visible all the way to the Boneyard Chamber. Viz should be good but not great, thirty feet or so. We’ve had rain.”

“Any obstacles?”

“One restriction. Tight, but no doffing gear required.”

“I’m gonna shoot some video.” He held up a Nikonos digital video recorder with integrated lights that, she knew, retailed for about five thousand dollars.

“Gas allowing, not a problem.”

“So what actually happened in there?”

They had been donning gear as they talked and were almost ready to enter.

“Two good divers drowned in 1998.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Why are the bodies still there?”

“Recovering would have been too dangerous. Plus both had wills stating that if they died in a cave, they