The Deep Zone: A Novel (27 page)

Too good a man to have died like that
.

Hallie realized the others were all looking at her. She raised her voice to be heard through the mask: “Let’s go. Be especially careful with these things on. They’ll restrict your peripheral vision. You’ll lose some view of the footing.”

After another quarter mile, Hallie’s skin began to tingle inside her caving suit. She looked at the Sirius and saw its red warning LED illuminated. The concentration of hydrogen sulfide here was now lethal. If any of them had a mask leak or failure, they would die like the soldiers gassed in the trenches of World War I.

They passed through a stadium-sized chamber with a domed ceiling fifty feet overhead and walls striped red and white like a barber pole from alternating layers of iron sulfide and calcite. The air filled with a yellow-green fog that diffused their light beams and, in low places, collected into a gaseous soup so thick it hid their feet.

After another five minutes, Hallie stopped. The others came up beside her.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” The rebreather did nothing to muffle the horror and awe in Arguello’s voice.

“Welcome to the Acid Bath.” Hallie played her light beam back and forth, out in front of them. “Pure, industrial-grade sulfuric acid.” The light reflected off the surface of a subterranean lake filled with shining liquid about the consistency of kerosene, glistening and oily. Even though there was not enough air movement to create wave action, the liquid had a life of its own, colors changing on its surface in a slow, endless upwelling of iridescent reds and yellows and greens. Vapor floated over the liquid and collected in a urine-colored fog.

“Without rebreathers, standing here you’d be dead in five seconds.” Hallie picked up a rock and tossed it far enough out into the lake that no liquid would splash on them. When the rock hit the lake’s surface, there was an instantaneous boiling, accompanied by a sound like sharp static electricity. And that was it. The lake had eaten the rock that quickly.

Bowman stepped closer, using a stronger hand light to see farther. “We can’t go through it, so we must be able to go around it.

Right?”

“Yes.” Hallie led them to the right, following the acid lake’s shore, and came to the place where the cave floor met vertical wall. Two feet above the floor there was a ledge no more than twelve inches wide, like those that ringed older buildings in cities.

“A section of wall peeled off, leaving that ledge. It’ll take us around to the lake’s far side. No other way.”

“How far?” Bowman asked.

“A thousand feet, give or take. The ledge isn’t wide, but it’s dead flat all the way. Like a traverse on a rock climb.”

“I have not climbed rock as much as you,” said Arguello, tense but under control. “What is the best way to do this?”

“Keep as much boot sole on the ledge as you can. Hands shoulder height. Never move both hands at the same time. Left hand moves forward, finds a hold, secures, then right hand follows. Then left foot, then right. Don’t overreach. You want to stay balanced on this thing.”

“That will not be so easy with such packs.” Arguello, again.

“It’s doable. We made it before. Just cinch your shoulder straps and waist belts as tight as you can get them.”

“Why don’t we use the Gecko Gear?” asked Cahner.

“The atmosphere here is toxic, so all the moisture on the rocks will be, too. It could damage those tools. I don’t know that for sure, but I don’t know that it won’t, either. Without those, we won’t get out of the cave. We’ll have to go with our regular caving gloves.”

“I understand.”

“I have one question,” Arguello said.

“Shoot,” Hallie said.

“If that acid dissolved the rock you threw, why does it not eat through the rock at its bottom and just seep away someplace?”

“Good question. The acid is lighter than water, so it floats on top of an aqueous layer—it’s called a lens—that protects the bottom.” Hallie turned to Bowman. “How do you want to go? What order, I mean?”

“I’ll lead off. Then you, Al, and Rafael. Let’s do it.”

Bowman stepped up onto the ledge and found secure holds for both hands. He stood there for a moment, checking his balance. Then he started traversing along the ledge, sliding his feet and relocating his hands in small, smooth movements, the fluid rhythm of an experienced climber.

Hallie waited until he was fifty feet ahead, then clambered up to
the ledge herself. Standing on it was, right away, an exercise in battling vertigo. Her whole body was pressed against the cave wall, breasts and belly and thighs. The pack was not much of a problem, but the ledge was narrow enough that she had to lean her head back to change the direction in which she was looking.

“Let’s keep separation!” she called back. If anyone came off, better not to have him grab someone else and take them along. She started moving to her left, sliding her feet one after the other, letting her hands find their own placements. She went foot by foot and could not help seeing the oily, roiling surface of the lake two feet below.

After Hallie had traversed fifty feet she stopped, rested briefly, and watched Al clamber onto the ledge.
If we’re going to lose Arguello
, she thought,
this will be the place
.

But there was nothing she could do, so she started off again. Left hand ahead, right hand, left foot, right foot. After a few minutes, the sequence became almost automatic, and that, she knew, was the greatest danger.
Got to stay sharp
. Their one bit of good luck here was the cave wall. If it had been smooth, they would have had serious problems. This one was rough and pocked, offering good hand placements—“jugs,” climbers called them, because they resembled jug handles.

She had gone perhaps three hundred feet when she realized that she could not see Bowman, in front of her, or Cahner, behind. Bowman had been moving faster, Cahner slower, and the cave wall here had become convex, bulging outward enough to block her view past twenty feet either way. She had not remembered that from before. Bowman could take care of himself, in any case. Arguello she worried about, but his fate was out of her hands.

She was more than halfway when she got sewing-machine legs: her exhausted calf muscles starting to spasm, heels jerking up and down like the needles of sewing machines. The next thing, she knew, would be a searing cramp—a charley horse, they used to call them—and her calf muscles would contract into agonizing knots.
She stopped, stretched one carefully, pulling her toes up toward her knees, breathing deeply, letting her system flush out the lactic acid, giving the muscles time to rejuvenate.

That let her mind, which had been focusing so hard on traversing the ledge, flutter off to think of other things. It landed on Bowman. The idea of him, anyway. And the next thing she thought of was how it would feel to kiss him, and then how it would feel to …

She returned her attention to the wall, her calves feeling better now. She moved off, more slowly this time, trying to make her shuffle-and-clutch sequence of movements as smooth and fluid as possible. After a while she finally found her rhythm and it became almost like a slow dance, her feet and hands making their own decisions. The curve of the cave wall became more pronounced, a true bulge, so that she could see even less of the ledge in front of and behind her.

She kept going, developing the incredible intimacy with a surface known only by climbers and the blind. Sliding her hands slowly over the wall, she felt every crack, crevice, and protuberance. Tiny flakes of rock no thicker than a guitar pick seemed huge to her hypersensitized fingertips.

Just as it seemed the ledge would never end, with her calves on fire again, her light revealed the surface underfoot beginning to tilt downward. She recognized this from her last time here. She moved carefully down the slope until she was over solid cave floor. A bit farther along, the ledge dropped enough that she was able to step off. Her legs were so tired that she stumbled, knees buckling. Moving faster than she would have thought possible for a man his size, Bowman was suddenly in front of her, grabbing her under the arms, lifting her to her feet. They stood like that for just a moment, his arms around her, her hands clasping the backs of his shoulders, separated by the rebreathers on their chests, faces averted so as not to blind each other with their lights. She did not often feel small in the presence of a man, but in the expanse of this one’s arms, she did.

“You good now?” His voice was muffled by the rebreather, but she could hear the concern.

“Real good. You?” She pulled him a little closer, but the goddamned rebreathers … it was like trying to hold someone with two briefcases squeezed between them. Still, it was better than nothing, and she held on.

“Yeah.”

“Bowman?”

“Yes?”

“What are we doing?”

“Sharing body warmth. Very common in potentially hypothermic situations.”

“Right. That’s what I thought.”

“You warm yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Me neither.”

So they stood like that, pulling together but pushed apart by the chest units, arms around each other, unable to kiss or even to look into each other’s eyes.

“Lights,” he said, and let her go.

Hallie and Bowman watched Cahner inching along carefully, stopping once to lean against the wall and rest. Through the faceplate of his rebreather Hallie could see that he was pale, his face streaming with sweat.

“You okay, Al?”

He waved a hand. “Yeah, fine. Just need to catch my breath.”

“Why don’t you dump the pack and rest over on that flat boulder.”

“Okay. How long before Rafael shows up, do you think?”

“Five minutes, maybe ten,” Bowman said.

They waited. Cahner sat on the boulder, elbows on knees, saying nothing. Hallie and Bowman dropped their packs, too, and sat on them. Ten minutes passed, then twenty.

“He should be here.” Bowman stood.

“Give it a while.” Hallie, looking toward the ledge.

They gave it another ten minutes.

“I’m going back. He may be stuck somewhere along there.” Leaving his pack, Bowman climbed back up onto the ledge and started off. In several minutes he disappeared around the curve in the wall. Hallie stood there, watching. Cahner came up beside her.

“He’s an amazing man.”

“Bowman?”

“Yes. Never hesitated. Just jumped right back up on that ledge. I’d rather poke sticks in my eyes than do that again.”

“It’s different for him, Al. He does things like this for a living.”

“For a living.” He shook his head. “Imagine that.”

After twenty minutes, Hallie began to feel crawly inside. She touched Cahner’s shoulder. “Al, I’m worried.”

“
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.