Quit complaining. You’re here. You’re diving. You haven’t drowned yet …
But would they ever get to dive again? Who knew how Cutter would react when he found the four of them lying in wait on the Ponce de León?
At long last, sleep claimed him. But it was uneasy sleep, marred by dreams of everything that could go wrong on a dive.
Descend too fast without equalizing pressure … bust an eardrum … excruciating pain …
He tossed in the narrow berth. Amazingly, that was one of the milder diving hazards.
Nitrogen narcosis — the rapture of the deep … dissolved nitrogen gas causes a state almost like drunkenness …
Dante had never been drunk. But he was pretty sure a hundred feet below the waves wasn’t the place to do it. There were horror stories of “narced” divers who actually forgot which way was up until they ran out of air and drowned. But that still wasn’t the ultimate scuba nightmare.
The bends … bubbles in the bloodstream … tiny time bombs in the body … all you can do is wait to see if you’re crippled for life or even …
“Killed!” He sat bolt upright in his bunk. The Ponce de León was moving. He could feel and hear the thrum of the engine.
He opened dry crusty eyes and found himself gawking at the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen — tall and tan, with long dark — brown? — hair.
She seemed just as surprised to see him. Then she smiled. “Look, Chris,” she called through the low hatch. “Stowaways.”
A bearded man appeared beside her, his arms laden with gear. He looked at Dante in dismay. “The kids!”
“We’re all here,” Dante managed, trying to keep from staring at her. “Tad said you wanted our — help.”
She grinned even wider — a magazine cover smile. “I’m Marina Kappas, Poseidon, San Diego. The sourpuss here is Chris Reardon.” She held out her hand. “We could really use you today.”
Dante scrambled from his bedroll and shook it. It was electric just touching her. “Dante. Dante Lewis.”
“The photographer!” she beamed. “I’m really excited to take a look at some of your work.”
Reardon seemed bewildered by the friendly exchange. “Marina — can I talk to you?”
“Not now.”
“But — ”
A cloud passed briefly over her perfect features. “I said not now. Why don’t you go on deck and tell Tad the good news.”
Dante set about rousing his teammates with the information that they had been discovered.
“You mean Cutter walked right in on you?” asked Kaz, scrambling out of his bunk.
“Not Cutter — Marina.” Dante couldn’t resist adding, “Wait till you see her!”
“Was she mad?” Adriana probed.
“Actually, she seemed kind of happy to see me,” he replied honestly. “Her friend wasn’t all that thrilled, though.”
Topside, they introduced themselves to Bill Hamilton, captain of the Ponce de León. Cutter was half buried in the motor of a Brownie floating air compressor, tinkering with a wrench.
Noticing them, the team leader grunted, “Good. You’re up. You’ll be logging a lot of dive time today — too much for scuba. But this big baby can keep you down there for hours.”
Their uneasiness quickly turned to confusion. Cutter was acting as if their presence today was not only expected, but vital. As if he hadn’t been dodging them for close to a week!
Kaz spoke up. “It takes so long to clean a sonar tow?”
“Oh, I checked that; it’s fine,” Cutter assured them. “We need you for something much more important. There are a lot of caves down there that the sonar won’t pick up. We need you to find them for us.”
“And explore them?” Star asked eagerly.
Cutter shook his head. “Too dangerous. Just tag the mouth with one of these marker buoys. That’ll fire off a float to the surface. Then we’ll catalog the location from topside. Got it?”
There was genuine excitement as the four divers suited up.
“Maybe we were wrong about Cutter and his people,” Adriana suggested, pulling the thin wetsuit material until it fit snugly at her wrists. “It looks like they’re really going to let us do some work this summer.”
Star was skeptical. “I’ve seen a lot of reef maps. They don’t have caves marked on them.”
“This one will,” put in Dante, detaching his regulator from its tank. On this dive, they would be breathing air directly from the Brownie, via long flexible hoses. “Remember, Poseidon’s number one. They do everything to the max.”
Seeing Star limp as she stepped into the lightweight suit, Marina rushed over to steady her.
Star wheeled away. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Her outrage was so genuine, so harsh, that the researcher was struck momentarily dumb.
“Leave her alone, Star — ” Dante began.
“Do you think I’m a beginner at this?” Star persisted.
Marina found her voice at last. “I saw you stumble. It happens to everyone in rolling seas — even top divers.”
“Thou shalt not help Star,” Kaz intoned apologetically. “That’s kind of the eleventh commandment around here.”
The slight girl glared at him as Marina went back to help Cutter with the compressor. “You’re hot for her! You too, Dante!”
“So what if we are?” Dante shot back at her. “You’re our dive partner, not our mother. What’s it to you?”
Star’s anger did not fade until she had slipped beneath the choppy surface. It was impossible to stay mad down here, in the crystalline waters, passing through a school of chromis, swimming in tight formation, an orange cloud.
Sure, she was sensitive about her handicap. But she certainly couldn’t blame Marina Kappas for being beautiful — or Dante and Kaz for noticing.
Anyway, underwater, Star Ling had no handicap. This was her medium, the world her body had been designed for. She slowly fan-kicked her flippers on the descent. If, at that moment, she had suddenly woken up with amnesia, she would have noticed no weakness at all on her left side. And that was exactly the way she liked it.
The reef here was fairly shallow — only about forty feet at its deepest — and flatter than the dive site they had visited with Vanover and English. But life and color were everywhere. Decorating the coral were fire-engine-red sponges, towering sea fans, and starfish the size of throw rugs. Snakelike trumpet fish, multihued creatures straight out of Dr. Seuss, stabbed down from above, feeding on the polyps. A curious tetra darted around the safety line hooked to her belt. She chased it away with a flurry of bubbles.
“Hey!”
The sound carried so well through the water that she recognized Dante’s voice. She spied the young photographer not far away, hovering neutrally buoyant, waving wildly. As she swam closer, she spied the cause of his excitement — a black hole in the limestone seafloor about the circumference of a prizewinning watermelon.
He calls that a cave?
Pulling her slate out of the B.C. vest, she scribbled TOO SMALL. But Dante shook his head and began fumbling with one of the marker buoys on his belt. He lost his grip on the cartridge, and it floated to the sand at the mouth of the opening.
Dante reached down to recover it.
Now it was Star’s turn to shout aloud. “No!”
Just as Dante’s glove closed over the cartridge, the grotesque head of a moray eel exploded out of the hole, revealing an improbably gaping mouth of inch-long needles. Shocked, he snapped back his arm, and the jaws bit down on the metal of the marker buoy, sending broken teeth in all directions.
In a panic, Dante dropped the cartridge and reached for the valve of his B.C. Star grabbed him before he could inflate the vest and shoot upward.
She pushed her mask right up against his, communicating her message with dark eyes: Calm down. It didn’t happen. You’re okay.
Dante nodded, gasping into his regulator. He was a pretty crummy diver, Star reflected, but sometimes luc
k was more important than skill. The big eel could have taken a substantial chunk of flesh out of his hand.
Not far away, Kaz and Adriana were tagging a cave entrance with another one of the marker buoys. There was a pop followed by a hiss, and the float rocketed to the surface.
One down and five hundred to go, Star thought to herself. She still couldn’t figure out why Tad Cutter needed this. To map every grotto and nook in a reef system the size of Hidden Shoals would take years, not a couple of months. It didn’t make sense.
She was enjoying the chance to dive without the bulky scuba tank. It was a feeling of freedom, although she was tethered to the Brownie by her air hose and safety line. Soaring and swooping with the fish, pretending to be one of them — it was a childish game, but Star never got tired of it.
She swam with a school of mackerel until they were scattered by a big loggerhead turtle. The loggerhead’s stony shell felt ancient against her gloved hand — a piece of prehistory here in the twenty-first century.
She spotted Kaz hovering over another cave, unclipping a fresh marker buoy from his belt. He wasn’t much of a diver either, she reflected. But there was an ease, almost a grace to his movements — something only natural athletes had.
As Star watched him work, a large barracuda loomed up behind the boy.
Should I signal him?
She remembered the incident with the shark. Kaz was easily spooked, and might do something stupid. Besides, barracudas never attack humans on purpose.
But the seven-footer was nosy. Star bit her tongue as the protruding lower jaw probed right up behind Kaz, the gleaming teeth mere inches from the back of his neck.
All at once, Kaz turned around, coming face to jaws with the notorious predator. Shocked, he triggered the marker buoy. The pop startled the barracuda, and it turned tail and darted away. Star laughed, sending clouds of bubbles rushing for the surface.
Adriana was nearby, paralleling the bottom, trying to shoo away an aggressive triggerfish. She was a little more comfortable in the water than Kaz — a tourist rather than a beginner. The girl had obviously done some diving on high-priced vacations in the past.
It bugged her. Not that Adriana was rich, but that Poseidon had matched Star with such unqualified teammates.
Then again, how could they be sure I was any good? They knew about my cerebral palsy….
It was almost as if Poseidon had gone after weak divers on purpose.
“Look!” came a cry.
Dante again. If the boy didn’t stop yelling underwater, he was going to drink enough salt to give himself high blood pressure.
He was pointing and waving — probably at another rabbit hole he considered a cave. But when she swam to his side, he was gazing into the distance, where the reef fell off into deeper water.
She squinted, trying to zoom in on the object of his interest. Light, and therefore visibility, diminished with depth. She shot him an expansive shrug. Because of the need to communicate without words, divers often used exaggerated gestures like stage actors playing to the back row.
Dante deflated his B.C., descending into the twilight. Star followed. A tug at her belt told her that the safety line had become taut, and that they were now pulling the Brownie along with them. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the others had noticed it too. Kaz and Adriana finned after them.
What does Dante think he sees? There was such a thing as an underwater mirage. His magnified eyes behind his mask gave him a deranged appearance. It was easy to believe he was hallucinating.
And then she spotted it.
In the middle of this most natural of settings, it was jarring to see something so artificial, so manmade. The sunken airplane sat in the sand, its fuselage partially encrusted with coral and sea life. One wing had broken off on impact with the water. It lay a short distance away, hidden by seaweed.
Star’s heart began to pound so hard she was afraid it might burst her wet suit. This was the ultimate diver’s prize. A wreck! She had read about this experience in scuba magazines. But the excitement of the real thing went far beyond anything she could have imagined.
She approached slowly, reverently, half expecting the plane to vanish just as she reached out to touch it. Never had she imagined this could happen to her — and certainly not when she was teamed up with a bunch of landlubbers like this bunch! The others hung back, watching her uncertainly.
When she spotted the insignia on the side, a gasp escaped her — a larger bubble among the many smaller ones. The marking was obscured by anemone growth, but it was unmistakable. A swastika. This was a German warplane from World War II!
She swam over to peer into the cockpit, wondering if she’d see a skeleton at the controls. But, no. The big bomber was deserted.
The windshield was shattered, providing a narrow entryway to the downed plane.
Star hesitated. Wreck diving could be dangerous.
But this is the chance of a lifetime!
She entered the cockpit and squeezed between the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs into the body of the plane. The space was tiny — it was hard to believe that an entire crew of grown men had flown in this cigar box. Just a few feet into the fuselage and she was in near-total darkness. The only light was from two turrets of bulletproof glass. Out of each pointed a swiveling machine gun, harmless now, encased in a layer of coral. It was a grim reminder that this silent metal husk was once an instrument of war, a delivery system for death.
She snaked back toward the bomber’s tail. Here, there was absolute blackness, and the walls closed in until she was in the narrowest of tunnels.
As she reversed course, her flipper caught on the low ceiling and came off. Alert, she was able to trap it between her legs. Putting it on again in the cramped space was a major operation, and she was surprised at how exhausted it left her. Her bubbles, trapped below the ceiling of the craft, converged to form a small pocket of air.
I’d better get out of here.
But not without a souvenir — some kind of proof that she’d been there. Artifacts, the wreck divers called them. Plates and silverware from sunken ships were especially prized. But what to take from a plane? She couldn’t exactly snap off a three-hundred-pound propeller.
Once again, her eyes fell on the machine gun. A full strap of ammunition dangled from the carbine, waving lightly in the current.
She crawled rather than swam up to it, grasping holds on the floor of the cabin. Popping the shells out was easier than she expected — the old strapping fell apart on contact, and the bullets dropped into her glove. The thrill of their touch was almost tangible.
World War II in the palm of your hand, she reflected. Hey —
Fiddling with the gun had disturbed the layer of silt that covered the plane. A storm of swirling brown particles filled the turret. The bullets slipped through her fingers and disappeared.
Going after her prize was instinct. Any diver would have done the same thing. She ducked into the cloud as if bobbing for apples. That was when she felt it — no flow of compressed gas from the demand regulator between her teeth.
She was out of air.
No! Star thought desperately. Impossible! I’m not breathing out of a tank!
The truth came to her in an icy shot of fear. A kink in her hose! Her air supply must have caught on something — a knob, a handle. But where? A frantic glance toward the back of the cabin revealed only darkness.
She tugged gently but insistently at the hose, hoping to jar it free. The life-giving gas would not come. Come on! She yanked harder, knowing all the while it was a bad idea, that she was likely to foul the supply even further.
Star Ling was such a confident diver that when panic came, the feeling was completely alien to her. Her first inclination was to spit out her mouthpiece and shoot for the surface, but when she tried to crawl out the opening in the gun turret, her tether line held her back. She was trapped in this submerged metal coffin.
She pulled out her knife and began to flail blind
ly behind her, but she couldn’t see anything in the billowing storm of silt.
It was the glint of the steel blade in the gun turret that told Kaz something was wrong. When Star saw him swimming toward her, she realized he was her only hope. She gestured madly with her finger across her throat — the diver’s signal for no air.
It seemed to take forever for him to get there. Water acts as a magnifying glass, she reminded herself. He looks closer than he is.
The thought was little comfort. She was close to unconsciousness, her field of vision darkening at the edges. She struggled to stay alert. Would this hockey player even know what to do when he reached her?
He’s paddling with his hands, for God’s sake! A mistake right out of Diving 101!
And then he was right there. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his mask and realized just how far gone she was. Her face was ashen, her eyes bulging in horror. She could not hold on much longer. The blackness was overtaking her.
Kaz sucked hard on his regulator, then spat it out and forced the mouthpiece between Star’s blue lips. The delicious blast of air snapped her back from the edge of the void. She breathed deeply, fighting to keep herself from hyperventilating.
Kaz crawled in through the opening in the turret and searched the floor of the plane. He fanned the water to disperse the curtain of silt. When he spied her regulator, he grasped the problem immediately. The hose had wrapped itself around the bombardier’s joystick so tightly that the flow of air had been cut off. The snarl was complicated further by Star’s safety line, which was tangled up with the air supply and also snagged on a hook above the bailout hatch. Kaz used his knife to cut the line, then freed the hose and breathed from the mouthpiece.
Star watched him in wonder. The boy was an awkward diver, but in this crisis, his actions were swift and decisive. Must be the hockey training, she thought grudgingly. She hated to admit it, but Bobby Kaczinski had very probably just saved her life.
She could feel herself trembling in spite of the warm water. The incident had rattled her — but not enough to keep her from grabbing another handful of bullets as they exited the plane.