The Deep Zone

hung over it their chest harnesses with eight thirty-round magazines for their M4 carbines.

Grabbing their rifles, they slipped back through the forest to the tree-line hide. They settled down on their bellies and slid into the hide, an oval depression covered with a selection of branches and foliage that made it all but indistinguishable from the surrounding forest floor. From their positions, with binoculars they could watch the cave entrance as though they were lying just twenty yards instead of two hundred from it.

They watched. And waited. And watched. “What the hell are they doing?” Stikes asked. “I’m sweating like a pig, man.”

“Here we go.” Kathan’s eyes were pressed to his binoculars. “It’s her.”

Stikes brought up his own binoculars. “How many others?”

“Hang on.”

They waited. They watched Hallie come out of the cave, cover her eyes from the blinding sunlight, stumble around like a drunk. They saw her drop her pack and scan the meadow and tree line. She looked right at them, and her eyes kept on going.

“Can’t tell much with that suit on.” Kathan, frustrated.

“Looks like she’s eating a candy bar or something,” Stikes said. “She’s drinking out of a red flask. They carry that kind of stuff in caves? Should we snatch her now?”

“No. We’re two hundred mikes away. She sees us, bang, she’s back in the cave. Or into the forest. Either way makes a lot more work for us, exposed. Bad way to roll around here, you know?” Kathan was quiet, considering.

“So… what then? Suppose she calls in an evac team or something.”

“I been thinking about that, too. She couldn’t do that from inside the cave. Only out here. And she’ll have to use a radio. Can’t let that happen. She picks up anything that looks like a radio, we’ll have to take her out. Can you line her up and stay on her?”

“Roger that.” Stikes brought his M4 forward and settled it onto the rocks he had earlier arranged into a shooting rest.

“You got her?” Kathan asked.

“I have her,” Stikes said, not moving his eye from the telescopic sight.

“Head shot, if you have to take it.”

“I said I have her. Two hundred mikes is nothing.”

“I’ll spot for you, stay on her with the binocs. Keep those crosshairs centered.”

“I can put one in her ear from here.”

They waited, sweating in the heat, besieged by biting insects from the air and crawling ones from the forest floor. As hides went, it was turning out to be unusually hellish.

Minutes passed. Stikes watched through the scope, crosshairs centered on Hallie’s head, the pad of his index finger putting two pounds of pressure on the M4’s trigger, which would fire with four pounds. Sweat burned his eyes. “I don’t see any others. You?”

“No.”

“You think she did all of them? Left them in the cave?” Stikes sounded skeptical, but he knew stranger things had happened.

“No. I think the cave did them.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Stikes saw Kathan lick his lips, massage his crotch. “I hope to hell we don’t have to shoot her.” He turned to Stikes. “Send the signal.”

“Not good. We don’t have it yet. The stuff from the cave.”

Kathan spat. “What do you think, she’s gonna kill us and take that stuff back herself? I don’t think so. Send the signal.”

“Kathan…”

“The sooner we let them know we have the stuff, the sooner they get our money flowing to the right places. I want it waiting for me when I get back.”

Stikes still didn’t think it was the right thing to do, but Kathan was the mission leader. From a uniform pocket Stikes took a sat transmitter. It was black, the size of a pack of cigarettes, and had a telescoping antenna, which Stikes pulled out to full extension.

“You sure about this?” he said one last time.

“Do it.”

The device had one purpose only: to send an encrypted data burst to a certain satellite, which would relay it to an intended recipient on earth. In this case, that was Gray. Stikes lifted a hinged cover, exposing a red button the size of a dime. He hesitated briefly, then depressed the button and held it for five seconds.

“Done,” he said.

“Done deal,” Kathan said.

FORTY-ONE

STAGGERING FROM EXHAUSTION, EYES POURING TEARS FROM the sudden glare, face bruised and swollen and with several cuts oozing blood, Hallie came out of the cave into the world of light. She had no idea how long she had been moving since the encounter with Cahner. Many, many hours, more than she could remember. It was daylight—that was all she knew and all she needed to know.

Her body hummed with pain. But she was out. She was out and she had the moonmilk. Her eyes would gradually calm down, the cuts would heal, the bruises would fade, the bumps and sprains would ease. Normally, when she came out of a cave, she felt a mixture of exhilaration and sadness, thrilled by the adventure and sad that it was ending. But not this time.

Stepping through the mouth of the cave had been like crossing the finish line of a marathon, squared. She had focused so hard, and for so long, on reaching the goal that when she finally made it, everything fell apart. It was all she could to do shrug off her pack, let it fall, and drop down beside it.

For a while she just sat in a fog of exhaustion and pain, eyes blinking against the light, unfocused, unseeing. After a long time, thoughts began to coalesce. She thought of the EPIRB in her pack, an emergency signaling device, employing a secure frequency similar to those downed military pilots used to call for rescue. She had a radio, too. Bowman had given one to each team member. He had said to first activate the EPIRB, alert the extrication team, then wait for comm on the radio. She opened her pack and started rooting around, trying to find the EPIRB. Then she stopped. It was daylight. They would not come in daylight. There was no point in risking detection now, when they could not come. She would have to hide until nightfall.

Back into the cave. Oh God.

But she did not move. She had become little more than the collection of her primal needs, hunger and thirst chief among them just now. She leaned toward her pack again and rummaged in it for something to eat or drink. She found a crushed energy bar and an empty water bottle. Bowman’s flask caught her eye, so she took that out. Little early for a drink, but what the hell.

She munched some of the energy bar and washed it down with a sip from the flask. The fiery rum burned taken straight like this, but it was better than anything she had ever tasted, good enough to cut through some of the fatigue like a light beam through fog and kindle a little spark in her brain.

Easy, girl. Won’t take much to get you stumbling drunk. Can’t have that.

She put the flask away, stood, hefted her pack, and turned toward the cave. Then a glint caught her eye, all the way across the meadow, sunlight glancing off the cenote’s still, shining surface. She looked at the water, kept looking, and felt something like great thirst arising in her. She was thirsty and would drink, but this was an urge of another kind: to feel water’s cleaning, healing touch all over her body. Hallie was filthy. “Disgusting” was the word that came to her mind. She had not bathed for more than a week. She couldn’t remember when she had run out of toilet paper, but it had been some time ago. After she had passed through Batshit Lake on the way out, there’d been no waterfall to shower beneath, so the stuff was drying and caking, giving off an unholy stink, layered over all the accumulated dirt and sweat and mud from the previous week. Some of her cuts had crusted and scabbed, and each one of those felt like a nail stuck through her flesh. She looked at the cenote and thought of all that cool, clear