The Deep Zone: A Novel (28 page)

“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 movement and soft-voiced, and he was the best hand-to-hand fighter of the three, with black belts in jujitsu, tae kwon do, and Krav Maga. This would almost certainly be his last mission, though. At thirty-six he was pushing the far edge of the envelope for work like this, and knew it. Old and slow got you killed doing these things, and it was they who were supposed to be doing the killing. He moved along fifteen feet behind Dempsey, making sure to maintain visual contact. This was no place to be wandering around alone.

Nor was it any place to be letting thoughts wander, but he could not keep himself from picturing Keyana. They had met six months earlier in San Diego after connecting on Facebook. They made a stunning couple, everybody said. She was a model and every bit as beautiful as the pictures he could see after she friended him. Almost six feet tall, slim in the right places and full where it counted, almond-eyed, with skin as flawless and smooth as porcelain.

Right away she had wanted to know what he did for a living, of course, and over dinner at a wharfside seafood restaurant, he’d said, “I do high-end security work.”

“You mean like guarding CEOs and movie stars, that kind of thing?” she had asked.

“Yeah, that kind of thing.” Keeping his voice a little vague, mysterious, but holding her gaze.

“It must be exciting.” She had sounded impressed. But what had
impressed
him
was how she’d picked right up on the fact that he wasn’t eager to talk about it in more detail and didn’t push him.

“It can be, at times.” Stikes had let her go on believing that he guarded CEOs and movie stars and that kind of thing, telling himself it was not a complete and deliberate lie. Once in a while Gray did have an executive-protection assignment to offer. For every one of those, there were half a dozen like this one, but that didn’t cancel out the others.

At any rate, it would be different from now on, because he was getting out. They were being paid handsomely for this run, as they called the things they did, $100,000 apiece, $20,000 for each of the five removals, $300,000 altogether. That was getting-out money for sure. You could marry, start a little business, maybe even have some kids, and stop dipping your hands in blood. It wasn’t that he minded the killing now. War and the SEALs had taken care of that, had taught him to shave away all the moral tangles and leave just the hard, clean fact of his craft. He knew how dangerous and difficult the jobs he did were, and he knew how well he did them, and satisfaction flowed from such awareness. So at this point, it wasn’t so much the killing as it was Stikes’s sense that every bullet and RPG he dodged brought him that much closer to the next one, and at some point there would not be enough room or time to dodge.

They kept moving for another two hours and Kathan held up a closed fist, time for the prescribed five-minute break. Dempsey came up and knelt near Kathan, and then Stikes joined them. On one knee, they drank electrolyte-replacement fluid from plastic tubes connected to hydration packs. They had added powdered coca leaves and ginseng to their ERF, providing a stimulant solution that could keep them moving for several days without rest, if the need arose. It was the same ancient pharmaceutical mix that had allowed Inca messengers to run a hundred miles a day.

Nobody spoke. They had about two minutes remaining, and Stikes was beginning to think they might make it through another stop without breaking noise discipline. No such luck.

“The blonde is a hot little puss.” Kathan was referring to pictures of Hallie Leland and the others they had viewed as part of their pre-mission briefing.

“Not so little, from what I could see,” Dempsey said, appraisingly. “You can’t really tell from a picture, though. The camera do lie. I had this girl in Anbar, like a beauty queen in person. But she couldn’t take a picture. Looked like a truck ran over her face.”

“Yeah.” Kathan reflected for a moment. “But some ugly girls are great in the sack. Butterfaces. They’re so grateful, I think is what it is.”

“They should be grateful. It’s not like dudes are lining up to do them.”

“Nah.” Kathan giggled softly, the childlike sound eerie coming from such a huge man. “They did for that little haji in Nasiriyah, though? You remember her, Demp?”

“Roger that. The whole team had a taste.”

“Those were good days.” Kathan’s voice went bitter.

“Finest kind.” So did Dempsey’s.

If you liked it that much, why’d you get out?
Stikes could not help but wonder as he listened to them mourn the passing of their good old SF days. Reading between the lines of their stories led him to believe that theirs might not have been voluntary separations. References to three prisoners and the phrase “extraordinary measures,” or its abbreviation, “EM,” kept popping up, as in
Hey, we were just emming those hajis, you know?

Stikes had come to suspect that their good old days consisted mostly of violating prisoners and women. Kathan, in particular, reminded him of certain SEAL trainees, crackers from Alabama and Georgia who’d talked about the Civil War, their voices going all soft and stupid over the Lost Cause, moaning in prayerful tones about Robert E. Lee like he was some kind of saint instead of a slave-owning, butchering old bastard. For Stikes, a black man, such things did not sit well at all. He said, “Hey, my men, you want to stay focused here. Can’t let anything derail this mission.”

“Be cool, Stikes,” Kathan said. “This a mission with benefits. What the contract said, recall, bro?” “With benefits” meant that they were free to take whatever ancillary proceeds the mission might deliver: money, jewels, precious metal, drugs—or women.

Stikes hated being called “bro” by someone like Kathan. “I can read contracts as well as you. But we don’t want to be in here one minute longer than we have to. With what you’re getting paid, you can buy yourself Pamela Anderson.”

“She’s old, man. I
could
go for Rihanna, though.
Whoeee
. You know what they say about colored girls, Stikes.”

“Yeah. Say they can’t find your tiny little peckers.”

Kathan blinked, as though he could not believe Stikes had spoken to him like that. Stikes stared back, and the longer the moment lasted, the calmer he became.
You want it, I got it
, he thought.
Come on
. Time stretched like a hot thing nobody wanted to touch until Dempsey said, “We need to roll.” He stood, and after a moment’s hesitation, the others followed suit.

But Stikes couldn’t quite let it go. He said to Kathan, “Hey, man.”

“What?”

“You got good waypoints? Feels to me like we might have lost the track.”

“You think I started doing this yesterday? Course the waypoints are good. Gray’s intel is always A-grade, man.”

LENORA STILWELL STOOD TO ONE SIDE, HER UNIFORM SPOTTED
with dried blood, shivering in the chill. Two biosuited nurses slid the long, stainless steel platform bearing Sergeant Marshell Dillon’s body into a refrigerated locker and closed the door. Dillon had died several hours earlier, but they had not autopsied the body; the cause of death had been all too obvious. Dillon had died like all the others: a mass of oozing red tissue, his face a bloody horror, screaming in pain that, near the end, massive doses of morphine did nothing to blunt.

Stilwell said a silent prayer for the young soldier, then turned to walk back to the wards. In the morgue’s doorway she had to stop and steady herself, placing one hand on the wall.