Some people feed on the destruction of others. They are emotional scavengers, and their feeding assumes aspects of frenzy even when it ensures their own doom. But King would never find out that he had succeeded in scaring me. The man had sealed his fate when he’d sabotaged my attempt to help Tomlinson and Will.
I switched off the spotlight and secured it to a D ring on my BC. Because I’d had to use the light, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust before using the monocular again.
As I waited, I found myself glancing over one shoulder, then the other, studying the vacuous emptiness of an underwater lake basin at night. King’s joke had jolted my system with adrenaline. Now I felt a lingering buzz of paranoia.
Was something out there? Something that could see me without being seen? It is an ancient fear, the wellspring of all monsters and religions.
My intuition whispered, Yes, something’s out there. It was a feeling I had, a premonition of danger. Perry had seen something big in the water, his reaction was proof. The strange undertone in Arlis’s voice when he’d warned me was additional proof and even more compelling.
Intellectually, though, I knew that premonitions are nonsense. Intuition and lottery numbers are memorable only if they pay off, but both are fast forgotten when they fail to produce.
I don’t buy either one.
I went back to work.
I couldn’t find the opening to the karst vent. It made no sense. What the hell had happened during the last two hours? The mammoth tusk was where I had left it, close to the vertical crater, and the line to the marker buoy was still hanging straight. Nearby, the bottom looked unchanged, but the opening to the tunnel had vanished.
Impossible. Has there been another landslide?
I considered switching off the night vision monocular and using the spotlight again. But visibility wasn’t the problem, I decided. More likely, I was disoriented—everything on the water, and underwater looks different at night—so I gave myself a couple of minutes to get my bearings.
I positioned myself at the edge of the drop-off. I faced the remains of the limestone ledge and reconstructed the bottom in my memory.
Finally, I figured out what had happened. Sand and shell from the top of the crater had funneled down and covered the entrance.
I swam to the approximate area and began digging with my hands. For every scoop of sand I removed, it was replaced by double the amount. I found a sliver of oyster shell and began probing until I found an area where I could bury my arm up to the shoulder without hitting rock. If it wasn’t the exact location of the tunnel entrance, it had to be close, so I marked the spot with another inflatable buoy.
For several more minutes I attempted to dig but finally gave up.
Damn it!
Now I really did need the sand dredge, which meant I would have to depend on King once again—if Perry could talk the man into getting into the water.
Before moving on, I decided to try to signal Tomlinson and Will. I had been reluctant for a simple reason: I feared they were no longer alive to answer.
Using one of my smaller flashlights, I leaned over the spare tank and banged out Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits. I did it several times, then switched off my night vision and settled myself in silence, listening.
I didn’t expect an immediate response, but I got one.
The signal I received was faint, very faint, and as surprising as it was galvanizing. I heard a series of eight bell notes repeated several times.
It was Morse code for “fine business.” Everything was okay. Tomlinson, at least, was still alive. Suddenly, I was no longer tired.
There was no mistaking the distinctive pattern, but where was it coming from? The signal seemed to seep out of the rocks around me instead of from a specific location or direction. If Will and Tomlinson had escaped into the karst vein, how far could they have traveled?
I pulled the spare bottle closer to the marker, wincing as I imagined myself reentering that black hole, with its lichen gloom and shadows. I rapped on the tank, then pressed the side of my head into the sand and listened.
When Tomlinson responded, the metallic clanking was slightly louder.
Yes. They were somewhere in the karst passageway, which they had followed it a long distance, judging from the sound. Their air had to have run out more than an hour ago, so I’d been right. They had found an air bell or a breathing hole.
I attempted to parrot Tomlinson’s “fine business” message—maybe it would buoy his spirits. Next, I muled the rest of the gear and placed it near the marker as my brain worked out the details.
I needed the sand dredge, but I couldn’t surface right away. Part of my deal with Perry was that I would present him with proof there was more to salvage—and a reason to make King help me with the hose.
Finding more coins would take time, but that’s what I had to do. I wished now that I had grabbed a few extras when I’d had the chance and hidden them for later.
Carrying the spotlight but not using it, I began swimming slowly along the drop-off searching the bottom. I had seen several coins lying in the sand and I was confident I could find at least a few. Question was, would it be more effective using the monocular to search or the spotlight?
I tested both, then decided the light was better. Maybe it would cause the coins to glitter in the distance.
I switched off the monocular. Using oyster shells, I marked off the beginnings of a grid, trying to swim a straight line as I counted off the number of times I kicked with my right fin. Ten strokes would equal about twenty yards—a big search area at night, but I was counting on luck to help me.
I gave myself a time limit. One coin or a dozen—however many I found—I would surface after ten minutes. I would give the coins to Perry, who would then order King back in the lake so he could help me with the hose.
It seemed like a workable plan: Find a few coins, then swim straight back to that damn hole and blast it clear with the dredge. But I had ignored a fundamental reality when it comes to diving: It is never, ever easy to find something underwater even when you supposedly know where it is.
Seven minutes later, when I was about to give up, still empty-handed, I stumbled onto a vein-rich pocket of gold. It was in a little basin of oyster shells and sand where largemouth bass had fanned out a nest. The spot produced a dozen Cuban coins. I found five in a heap, the others scattered nearby.
As I kicked toward the surface, I stashed six of the coins in a mesh pocket inside my wet suit just in case I needed them for later.
TWENTY
BY 6:20 P.M., IN THE LAST ANGLING RAYS OF DAYLIGHT, Will had hacked away enough roots and stone with his knife for Tomlinson to pull his face up to the airhole, look into the small chamber above them and say, “You know why the place stinks so bad? Something lives here.”
“What?”
“An animal lives in here,” Tomlinson repeated. “Something big. And it’s definitely not a vegetarian. At least the place is above water level, but, whew, what a stench.”
The airhole was finally large enough for them both to breathe at the same time, but only if they pressed their heads together in a way that reminded Will of two desperate carp he’d once seen trapped in a puddle at the bottom of a drying lake bed, north of the Rez and south of Oklahoma City.
To talk, he and Tomlinson had to pull themselves close to the roof of the cave and turn mouth to ear, then ear to mouth, the air pocket was that small.