The Deep Zone: A Novel by James M. Tabor

Author:James M. Tabor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345532282
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-03T06:00:00+00:00

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.

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