James Tabor - The Deep Zone

She stopped, exhausted. She was up to about seven and a half, still managing, but knew it would not be long before she had to ask for serious meds. It was important that she get this done before then.

HALLIE’S FACE WAS TURNED UP TO THE SKY, WATCHING. THE blasts of gunfire and grenade detonations continued, but she heard them as from a great distance. A soft, light breeze touched her face. There were no more thoughts, only a vast stillness enveloping her like mist in the mountains.

Suddenly a new sound, the whole world exploding. She looked at Bowman and knew. A barrage of grenades before their rush. In a moment the narcos would flood over their wall, shooting, killing them. She peeked over the rocks, watching the entire far meadow and tree line erupt in one long, roaring burst. But the narcos were not attacking. They were dying.

“Thirty-millimeter cannons.” Bowman was grinning. “Did you ever hear sweeter music?”

Two Apache attack helicopters were destroying the narcos . The black Osprey was hovering behind them, waiting for them to finish their work.

Most of the narcos were trapped in the open space between the tree line and Bowman and Hallie. The Apaches fired Hellfire missiles and the narcos simply disappeared in red fountains of flame and earth. In less than sixty seconds, nothing was moving, in the trees or the meadow. The Apaches kept watch, circling while the Osprey settled down. A ramp dropped and troopers in jungle-green camo sprinted out and set up a perimeter around the aircraft.

“Go!” Bowman pulled her up with his good arm. They left the shelter of their rocks and crossed the fifty yards to the Osprey at a dead run, Hallie carrying the moonmilk, Bowman the FAFO weapon. She was dimly aware of short bursts of fire from the troopers and the immense ripping roar of the Apaches’ cannons hosing down the forest. She ran up the ramp, its hard metal hurting her bare feet, and blundered straight into the arms of a sergeant, big as a wall, grinning.

“Go easy, ma’am,” he said. “You with us. Safe now.”

He deposited her gently onto one of the bench seats that ran the length of both sides of the fuselage interior. Bowman dropped down beside her. The team rushed back aboard and the ramp door closed with a hiss. Acceleration shoved her down as the Osprey shot up and away from the meadow.

Two medics went to work on Bowman, laying him flat on the deck. The men watched, mildly interested. They had seen wounds before. These were not the killing type. When the medics cut away Bowman’s shirt, she saw the two surprisingly small red holes, one in his right upper chest, the other through the muscle just above his left hip bone. They irrigated the wounds, infused them with antibiotics and coagulants, and gave him a handful of capsules, which he swallowed dry-throated. One of them started an IV transfusion in his right arm. “You want a little something for the pain, sir? We can put it in that other arm there.”

“All good, Sergeant, but thanks.”

Bowman got up and came to sit beside Hallie on the bench again. The medic hung the IV bag from a hook on the fuselage. There were a lot of things she wanted to say, questions she needed to ask, events she had to tell Bowman about. But inside, the Osprey wasn’t so quiet, and she would have had to shout. There were all those troopers, too, at ease now, the day’s work done, sitting on the benches, rifles between their legs like hockey players with their sticks. They were all, to a man, looking at her and grinning.

She grinned back at them, then stood up, stepped across the fuselage, pulled one young trooper to his feet, kissed him on both cheeks. He sat back down, grinning even wider and looking slightly dazed. To the rest of them, standing in the middle of the aircraft bay, she gave a double okay sign, thumbs and forefingers circled. They understood her gratitude and answered: every right arm came up, fist extended, thumb upraised, and they let fly a thunderous “OOH-RAH!”

Hallie sat back down beside Bowman, who had been watching the whole thing with undisguised amusement.

What the hell , she thought. She wrapped her arms around him, careful with the shoulder, looked into his eyes, and kissed him long and hard. The troopers gave another cheer, even louder than the first.

“SO THE NARCOTICS TRAFFICKERS SHOT THE BLACK MAN, AND the big man fell into the water. He might have been shot, too. You’re not sure. But you believe he drowned.” The Homeland Security debriefer glanced down at notes she had been taking. She was a petite woman who’d introduced herself as Rosalind Gurwitz. She had brown hair that framed her face in clusters of natural curls, an apple-cheeked face, and a surprisingly sympathetic, unlawyerly manner. The living, breathing opposite of Rhodes and Rivers.

Hallie thought, No, he did not fall in and he was not shot. I pulled him in . But instead, she nodded and said, as Don Barnard had instructed earlier, “That’s correct.”

Gurwitz, in a navy blue pantsuit, was standing by Hallie’s bedside in the room at Walter Reed. A wallet-sized digital video recorder mounted on a tripod at the foot of the bed was capturing the interview. Barnard, looking official and very directorial in a dark gray three-piece suit, hovered around the room, a glowering presence making sure the debriefer did not overstay her welcome.

“And the drug traffickers who attacked the two men took you prisoner.”

“Yes.”

“And it was when they were taking you back to their camp that you managed to escape.”

“What?” They had given her meds. Her head felt weird, filled with a soft buzzing that would not stop, and thoughts floated around, wispy, hard to grasp. What had Barnard said to say about that?

The lawyer appeared to sense her confusion. She repeated, “The drug traffickers were taking you back to their camp. But you got loose and escaped them. And signaled for the recovery team to pick you up.”

She blinked, rubbed her face, looked at Don Barnard, behind the lawyer. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

“That’s right.”

“How were you able to do that?”

“They were drunk and high on drugs. It wasn’t so hard.”

“Really?” Gurwitz looked at her with admiration and astonishment and, just maybe, a hint of disbelief. “Incredible. No—wrong word. I believe you, of course. It’s just… fantastic.”

“Tell me about it.” Hallie took a sip of ginger ale. She thought the hospital straw with its little flexible joint was one of the funniest things she had ever seen, and laughed out loud.

Rosalind Gurwitz stared.

“Sorry. It’s the meds.” Hallie blinked, grinned.

Hallie looked bad, but the meds were helping. The extraction team had lifted her and Bowman out of the meadow two days earlier. At the Reynosa airfield they’d both been transferred to a government jet. Accompanied by a medical team, they’d flown to Washington and had been airlifted to WRAMC. She and Bowman had been separated then, and she had not seen him since.

The doctors here had sutured the cut in her eyebrow from when Cahner punched her, or maybe when he’d kicked her. There was a stitched cut above her right ear, but she couldn’t recall when that one had happened. One eye was plum-colored and swollen half shut. She had to squint through the other eye, because she had still not fully adjusted to bright surface light, let alone the light in a hospital. That would take several more days. They had also sutured the gash in her left hand, the worst wound of all, requiring twenty stitches. It was wrapped in a sterile bandage. Her back was covered with wine-colored bruises from hitting the microbial mat. She had suffered a mild concussion and had lost nine pounds. But she was alive and, as Barnard had assured her, every BARDA lab and a number of others at the CDC were working with the moonmilk she had retrieved.