“When?” I asked.
“Later. But I want some proof this time.”
I said, “Okay—but keep him away from that dredge until I need him. Keep him away from all my gear, in fact.”
King claimed he had repaired the hose. He hadn’t, of course, so I had made the dredge marginally workable by screwing a radiator clamp tight at the end of the hose to constrict water flow. It would cut through sand, but it wouldn’t move rock.
Perry was irritable and tired of making decisions. “You don’t say much, but, when you do, it’s always trouble.”
I told him, “Blame your partner, not me.”
King snapped, “I didn’t break that hose and you know it. Stop blaming other people for your own screwups. That’s a sign of immaturity, Jock-o.”
The man was maddening. I let him see that I wasn’t listening, but he continued to talk, anyway.
“How about this? How about you do what we tell you to do and keep your mouth shut? What’s so hard about that? I think you’ve been around ol’ Perry long enough to know he’s got quite a temper on him when things don’t go our way. Dredge or no dredge, you’d better come back with more coins, Jock-o. If you don’t, Grandpa will end up with a knife in his ribs—and you’re next on the menu.”
I was sitting at the edge of the lake doing a final check of my gear. Everything had to be as solid as I could make it for this dive and I didn’t have much to work with. There were only two tanks of air left, counting the bottle I would use, and one extra regulator. An important additional piece of equipment was a fishing reel I had found in the back of Arlis’s truck. It was an old Penn grouper reel, loaded with a couple hundred yards of monofilament that would be useful if I needed to put down a lay line. Old fishing line was a poor substitute for a thousand yards of nylon cord on a Jasper reel, but it would have to do.
The two cons didn’t know it, of course, but I wasn’t going into the lake to fetch coins. I was going down into that damn drainpipe-sized cave again to search for Tomlinson and Will.
I hadn’t imagined hearing Tomlinson’s shrill whistle. Maybe the boy was still alive, too. They had somehow managed to find an air bell or a breathing space above the water table. It had to be one of the two, and now they were trapped beneath the limestone awaiting rescue.
I went over and over it in my mind, arguing the likelihood. In all my reading, I could remember only a few rare mentions of air bells. Those were in caves formed during the Pleistocene before the water table fell and then rose again—but I had never heard of an air bell in Florida. Limestone was too porous to maintain the watertight seal an air pocket requires, but it was possible. More likely, though, they had dug their way close enough to the surface to breathe through a hole or some type of vent yet were unable to break free for some reason.
A disturbing fact nagged at me, though. The whistling sound hadn’t come from beneath the lake. It had seemed to originate in the swamp far beyond the shoreline. But sound plays tricks when filtered through water or when reverberating through limestone. It was also possible that Tomlinson and the kid had followed a karst vein beyond the perimeter of the lake. Even so, I would have to start where they had started—underwater, in that damn tunnel.
It wouldn’t have been an easy operation even with a chopper standing by and a fully manned rescue team. Alone, the difficulties were too many to list. Finding Will and Tomlinson wouldn’t be easy, but, if I did, that’s when the real work would begin. With only one extra tank and regulator, we would have to somehow buddy-breathe through the tunnel, then back to the surface. I couldn’t picture how that was possible in a conduit so narrow, but if I found them we would have to manage.
All I knew for certain was that they were alive and I had to hurry. A true air bell—a pocket of air trapped in a rock chamber beneath the water’s surface—would keep them alive for only a short amount of time. Because of that, it was pointless to dwell on the obstacles. I had an objective. I would move toward it. Sometimes, circumstances demand that you step off the high board and deal with water issues while en route to your destination. Sometimes, difficulties that can’t be controlled become tolerable only when viewed as assets.
Looking at it that way, I had a lot going for me.
I was alone—it meant I didn’t have a partner to worry about. The fact that there was a single spare tank meant that I didn’t have to lug a lot of extra equipment. The tunnel was claustrophobic, it was potentially deadly, but if Will and Tomlinson had made it then chances were good that I could find my way through the maze, too.
King and Perry? I told myself that they were additional motivation. I was tired, my nerves were raw and I was scared—but not of the animal we’d heard banging around in the brush. I was afraid that if I failed underwater, I’d miss the opportunity to deal with King and Perry one-on-one when I returned to the surface.
With that kind of motivation, failure wasn’t an option.
As I stood to collect the last of my gear, Perry asked me, “What do you think that hissing noise was? Seriously.” He was pacing between the truck and the shoreline, the rifle cradled beneath his arm as if he were hunting pheasants. The man’s eyes never stopped moving, and he rammed the words together, talking faster than he had an hour earlier. If he was using drugs, I guessed it was some type of amphetamine. I also guessed that he had amped up recently.
I said, “What’s it matter? You’ve got a gun, and you can always hide in the truck.”
The man nodded, oblivious to the veiled slight.
I knelt to secure the octopus hose on the spare regulator. As I did, King moved close enough to grab my night vision mask, then backed away a safe distance before inspecting it. “How do you turn this gizmo on?”
“Put it down,” I snapped.
He had the mask pressed against his face as he felt around for the switch. “This is a pretty fancy piece of equipment for a nerd like you to be carrying. How much this thing set you back?”
I was walking toward King, intending to take it away from him, when he found the monocular’s switch. After a pause, he said, “Goddamn, Perry, you gotta take a look through this thing! It’s like daylight, all of a sudden . . . And you can see about ten times as many stars!”
The man began turning in a circle, looking at the sky, then he stopped and aimed the monocular into the shadows of the swamp. After a moment, he said, “Holy shit! There’s something out there!” He paused. “What the hell are those things?”
I stared into the darkness as Perry said, “What do you see? Is it that animal we heard? Damn it, let me look, it’s my turn!”
They sounded like two kids squabbling over a toy.
In my bag, I had a palm-sized flashlight, an ASP Triad, ultrabright. I switched it on, then listened to King complain, “Dumb-ass, now you scared them!,” as Perry whispered, “Jesus Christ, I see them. There must be three or four. What are they?”
Across the lake, staring back at me, were three sets of orange eyes bright as coals. I thought they were small crocodiles at first. As I watched, the animals turned and crashed through the brush toward the swamp. They were reptilian, low to the ground, like crocs, but their movements were snakelike. All three possessed a dense, four-legged musculature, yet they moved over the ground as if swimming on their bellies. As they ran, they held their heads erect like cobras.
In an amphetamine rush, Perry said to me, “They’re too small to make that crashing sound we heard. Don’t you think? Unless, maybe, they were all running around together. Hey—Ford! What do you think they are? Like, little alligators or something?”