James Tabor - The Deep Zone

Arguello breathed a soft prayer in Spanish and did something with his hands over Haight’s body. To Hallie it looked like a stage magician’s movements, but Arguello was dead serious. He asked, “Where is his pack?”

“I cut it off and left it in the tunnel,” Bowman said. “It would have made recovering him much harder.”

Arguello moved off to one side and stood there looking at Haight. Hallie saw tears on his cheeks. She went to him and touched him on the shoulder. He put his hand on hers and let out a long breath.

“Look here.” Bowman held up the rebreather’s shattered faceplate. “That’s what killed him. The faceplate cracked, flooded, and drowned him.”

“If he had been using standard scuba gear, it would not have happened,” said Cahner. “He would have had a regulator mouthpiece in place. Even without the mask, he could have kept going. Visibility was almost zero anyway.”

“How did he break his mask?” Arguello asked.

“I don’t know.” Bowman, still trying to understand, was looking at Cahner, his light making a bright circle on the older man’s chest. “The dive plan called for him to come in after you. Did that happen?”

Cahner took a moment before answering, then said, “I suppose so. I went in first, like you instructed. I pulled myself along and just kept going.”

“So you didn’t see Haight enter the water?”

“No, I was already in, as I just said.”

“Were you aware of him behind you? Did he touch your foot or leg to let you know he was there?”

“No, he didn’t.” Cahner hesitated, considering. “He was probably keeping distance between us, in case there was a cave-in.”

Bowman nodded, turned his gaze back toward the body.

“What do you think, Hallie? You’ve been involved in lots of cave rescues. And recoveries.”

She had been sorting scenarios all the while. “I can think of only three possibilities. One is that the faceplate fractured spontaneously. Rare, but it does happen. Two is that in one of the tunnel’s wider sections there was rockfall that hit the mask and broke it. Three is that he ran into a sharp outcrop and broke it.”

“Ranked by probability?” Bowman asked.

“Collision with rock most likely, rockfall second, defect fracture third.”

“I agree. A defect is very unlikely. These things are all mil-spec quality, meaning they went through even more rigorous testing than civilian dive equipment.”

“This is awful.” There was horror in Cahner’s voice, but he was under control. “He was such a good young man. I was getting ready to go in and he could see that I was… tense… and he double-checked my rebreather and helped me calm down.”

Arguello could not seem to stop staring at Haight’s body. He stood there, as if mesmerized, and Hallie saw that he had started to tremble. It could have been from the cold, or fear, or both. Bowman saw it, too.

“Al, why don’t you two get that stove going and brew us up some tea,” Bowman said, nodding toward the area they had used as a kitchen earlier. “I think we could all use another strong one. Hallie and I will join you shortly.”

“Good idea,” said Cahner. He turned to Arguello and gently took him by the elbow. “Come along. You can help me do it.”

When they were out of hearing, Bowman put his light on Hallie’s chest.

“Any thoughts?”

“Nothing other than what I already said.”

“It would have taken a sharp impact on a pointed object to break this faceplate.” Bowman held up Haight’s rebreather. “Tempered four-millimeter glass. It’s what commercial divers use.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t think Haight was the kind of diver to go through a tunnel like that in a hurry.”

Hallie shook her head briskly. “I don’t agree.”

“Why not?”

“I liked him very much, don’t misunderstand. But he struck me as young, impatient, and impulsive. I can easily see him trying to go too fast, especially since he was the sweep diver. He wouldn’t want the rest of us to think he was slow or inept. Ego could have kicked in.”

“Did you see or feel any projections that could have broken glass like that?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything with such bad viz. And as for feeling something, you know we would have come in contact with only a tiny percentage of the tunnel’s overall inside surface. There could have been a thousand sharp projections and we’d never know it.”

After a while, Bowman nodded. “I think you’re right.”

“Tea is ready, my friends,” Arguello called from the kitchen.

“Haight was fit and strong. He could have been pulling himself along pretty fast,” Hallie said.

“True enough.”

She waited for Bowman to go on, but he did not. She had been looking at Haight’s body just then, but shifted her gaze to Bowman. Her light lit up his chest and showed his face in peripheral glow. To her surprise, there were tears in his eyes.

The big man made no effort to wipe them away or hide them. Hallie was not sure what to say. She felt very bad for Bowman just then. He was the leader, and a good young man had just died on his watch, and that had to hurt terribly. She wanted to reach out and touch him, hug him even, but something stopped her. Her own eyes filled with tears, and her chest felt stuffed.

“We should go back with the others now.” Bowman’s voice was rough with emotion.

“You go ahead. I’ll be along. I just want a few moments with him.”

She knelt beside Haight’s body. She had grown to like him in the short time they’d known each other; there had been something brotherly about him. She had enjoyed listening to his thick, drawly accent and jokes and had admired his skill on that huge wall they’d descended.

She picked up his hands, one after the other. They felt cold and dead and much too heavy. She turned them over, focusing her helmet light on one palm and then the other, but there was no bruising, no cuts or other signs of struggle there. She examined the rebreather unit on his chest, but it showed no evidence of damage.

She was not unaccustomed to handling dead bodies, given the recoveries she had helped with. Turning Haight’s head gently, she examined his eyes. Wide open and staring, they showed no injury. She ran her fingers down his face, closing the eyes. His skin was like cold white wax, and his lips were a livid blue going to gray. There was no sign of struggle or trauma there, either, no cuts or bruises.

In death he looked even younger than he had alive, and tears suddenly filled Hallie’s eyes again as she thought of all the years Ron Haight should have had left, the women he would not love, children he would not father, discoveries he would not make. For an instant she hated the cave, but then it passed. The cave was just a cave, a force of nature like mountains and forests, neither benign nor malign but simply there—deadly, to be sure, but indifferent. Then Arguello’s words came back to her and she thought, Or is it?

Hallie picked up Haight’s rebreather, wanting to examine the cracked faceplate, and as she did so a shard of rock fell out and landed on his chest. They had not seen it before. There was the answer, then. It was part of the rock that had shattered his mask. He must have run into it with considerable force to knock a piece of it loose. Her theory had been correct, apparently. Haight, though a veteran cave diver, had made one of the countless mistakes that can get you killed in an environment with zero tolerance for error.

Hallie set the mask down beside Haight. We ought to cover him with something. It’s not right just to leave him here like this . She stood, meaning to get something out of one of their packs, and bumped into Bowman, who had returned and had been standing behind her. She had not heard him approach. He had a green plastic groundsheet, and together they covered Haight’s body, pinning the edges of the sheet down with rocks.