Will was thinking, Stay calm . . . don’t rush . . . that’s how people screw up.
As he tried to remove the little tank, though, the knob caught inside his vest. Fumbling in the darkness, Will tried to free the thing, but he yanked too hard. The tank went spinning out of his hands before he could take a breath . . .
TWELVE
WHEN THE LIMESTONE OVERHANG COLLAPSED, I LET go of the jet dredge hose and tried to swim free of the chaos, but there was no escaping what followed.
Water, displaced by tons of rock, pushed a descending ridge of pressure that was stronger than any squall I had ever experienced. I felt like a seed being ejected from a grape. The shock wave hit me, tumbled me, then jettisoned me downward but also toward the concave wall of the lake and out of the path of the largest limestone slabs.
Smaller rocks caught me as I descended. I covered my head with my arms and kicked hard, riding the expanding pressure away from the worst of it, surfing the shock wave toward what I hoped was safety. The hiss of my regulator added a rhythmic counterbeat to the random clatter of rock colliding with rock and clanking off my air bottle. I continued swimming hard until the noise had ceased.
When I was safe within the great hollowed convexity of the lake’s northern wall, I stopped and turned, straining to see through the silt. I hadn’t intended to bring the entire overhang crashing down, only the midsection, but maybe the strategy had worked. Will and Tomlinson had been trapped somewhere inside the porous outcrop. It seemed likely that now, for better or worse, they were free. But where?
I checked my gauges. I was at forty-five feet and still had three-quarters of a tank of air. I had plenty of time to wait for visibility to improve, but my partners did not. They had now been underwater for one hour and seven minutes. If the collapse hadn’t freed them, and if they were not already swimming toward the surface, it seemed probable that Will was dead. And Tomlinson . . . ?
The possibility of Tomlinson being dead—actually dead—was beyond my grasp. It refused to take root in my brain. The man had the sensibilities and instincts of a cat—the morals, too—which added credibility, however perverse, to the expectation that he was entitled to more than just one life. Even our history argued against the inevitability that Tomlinson would in fact one day die.
“There are ghosts at this marina,” he was fond of saying, particularly after blending some illegal stew of weed and fungi, then chasing it with state-licensed rum.
Ghosts—ghosts at the marina, ghosts at home in Dinkin’s Bay. He spoke of the things fondly as if they actually existed. I didn’t believe it, of course, but at least the setting was acceptable. The marina was home. His boat and my lab were simply extensions of Dinkin’s Bay, familiar outposts that would be suitable places for our haunted specters to reside, if such things were real.
Not here at the bottom of a lake, though. Not in a place so far from the sea—and not linked to a random series of events that had been catalyzed by two equally random losers, King and Perry.
I began kicking toward the surface, left hand extended as a bumper, the silt so thick that my mind had nothing to process but internal data as I calculated my friend’s chances.
Tomlinson is never easy to assess or predict, and it was no different now, particularly after this chain of disasters. Tomlinson’s idea of a tough workout was swimming a case of beer out to his boat. To him, hangovers were the only variety of endurance sport worthy of his participation. And, up until the last week, he’d been a habitual ganja smoker.
Could he still be alive?
Possibly, I told myself, because it was also true that the man was a meditation guru, a master of breathing techniques. Living aboard a sailboat kept him fit, all leather and sinew, despite his devotion to excess and debauchery. Because of this, he might have another five or ten minutes of air left.
Tomlinson dead? No, it couldn’t happen. Bad enough was the probability that Will Chaser was gone, a tough teenage kid who, for no rational reason, seemed targeted by bad luck and fated to die young.
At twenty-eight feet, the water began to clear, although debris was still raining down—kept in suspension by the aftershock possibly or the result of miniature landslides from the last remaining truncated section of the overhang.
Beneath me, I could see a jumbled darkness that was a small mountain of rock. I decided that I would do another bounce dive if I didn’t find Will and Tomlinson somewhere above me, but it would be the last place I looked because if they were on the bottom they were dead. There was no way they could have survived a collapse so massive. It was possible that even the plane wreckage was now buried. Not that it mattered. The plane, the prospect of finding more gold, were meaningless to me now.
I continued swimming toward the surface.
Above me, striations of light showed that the northern section of limestone bridge was gone. All that remained was a cavernous space from which silt boiled—the same dark silt that earlier had reminded me of volcanic ash.
Fluttering down through the ash, I noticed, were several glittering objects. They were bright as fireflies. The particles formed a sparkling, descending pointillism that spun through the silt, raining down on me. Still swimming, I held out a hand and caught one.
It was a gold coin.
I looked at it for a moment, then caught another. There were dozens of the things. They appeared to gain speed as they fell.
I pocketed two of the coins but ignored the others. I didn’t need the flashlight to identify them. I knew what they were. They were more hundred-peso coins, stolen from the Cuban treasury.
Arlis had been right. He had found Batista’s gold plane.
Looking up, rays of late sunlight pierced the murk, I could make out the silhouette of the tractor-sized inner tube and King’s idle swim fins. The man was still up there, waiting to see if I was alive or dead and if I had found more gold.
But his were the only fins visible, which told me that Will and Tomlinson hadn’t made it to the surface. It gave me a sickening feeling seeing only King, and I slowed my ascent as I reassessed. If Tomlinson and the boy weren’t above me, then they were somewhere below me. Either that or they had disappeared into the porous limestone wall of the lake.
Thinking that gave me hope—but not much.
A jagged indentation marked where the overhang had broken free. It was a vertical crater the size of a closet. It looked as if a giant molar had been extracted from a limestone jaw. I knew I was in the right area because, surprisingly, the coiled ivory mammoth tusk appeared through the swirl of silt. It rested only a few yards from the crater, undisturbed, on a platform of rock that now constituted the edge of the lake’s shallow rim. The extra tank was gone, though, freed by the tremor, and had to be somewhere on the bottom.
There was no need to go looking for it now.
Probing ahead with my flashlight, I swam through black detritus, my hand extended. Visibility was so bad I had to find the inside wall of the crater by touch. If I pressed my face mask within a foot of the wall, I could make out coral patterns on gray limestone and dinosaur-sized oyster shells.
High on an inside corner, I discovered an opening. It was a karst vent less than two feet wide. I poked my head inside, feeling the limestone hard against the back of my neck. It took me several seconds to figure out that the vent angled downward, an incline as steep as a child’s slide.