A computer alarm sounded.
She gasped involuntarily, sucked in a spoonful of freezing, salty water, spat it back through her regulator.
Calm down.
Breathe.
Think.
Act.
The computer alarm had been her turnaround signal.
One-third of her gas gone.
Time to leave.
Her right knee suddenly felt as if someone had stuck an ice pick into it.
She looked down. A tiny stream of bubbles was flowing from a pinhole in her dry suit. That ice pick was a needle-sharp stream of frigid water, driven by the pressure here at depth, squirting through her inner layers to her skin. How? Tough reinforcing patches covered both knees, so they were the last places a suit failure should have occurred. That was beside the point now. She could feel icy water beginning to accumulate in the dry suit boot on that side. The cold was so intense that it felt like her foot was on fire.
Thank God it was only a pinhole. Not common in professionalgrade, $3,000 dry suits like hers, but not unheard of, either. This suit didn’t have that many dives on it — fifty, maybe. It had seen hard use on deep wrecks, though. She might have damaged that knee on a previous dive, not punctured it completely but stressed it enough that failure would occur later. It would be uncomfortable, but not a true emergency. She had plenty of air and was already starting her return.
She headed back the way she had come, frog-kicking, reeling in her safety line. Halfway to the shaft’s bottom, she felt the leak in her suit grow worse. Her boot was full of water, and her foot was completely numb. The feeling of being on fire was crawling up her leg. Soon it would go numb, as well.
She knew that this was how disasters began: with a single failure that led to two others, each of which led to more, a cascade of events feeding on itself. She forced herself to breathe evenly and slowly and swam faster. Eventually she spotted the ice screw, untied her line, and secured her reel.
The pain in her leg was excruciating, but she could not rise up through the shaft too fast. In warmer water, an ascent rate of thirty feet per minute would have been possible. Here, in water so cold, that might not give her tissues enough time to off-gas their nitrogen load, and nitrogen caused the bends, a buildup of gas in the joints that could cripple or even kill a diver. With no recompression chamber, she could not risk getting bent. To be on the safe side, she had decided earlier that ten feet per minute would be best. At that rate, it would take her three minutes to ascend to the top of the shaft.
Almost immediately her computers began to beep, signaling that she was violating her preset ascent rate. It had happened without her realizing it, prompted by anxiety. She slowed down, but recognized a new danger. As it filled with water, the dry suit lost buoyancy. Even completely flooded, it would not sink, because the water in her suit would have the same buoyancy as the surrounding water. But without the buoyancy of an intact dry suit to compensate, the weight of all her equipment would make her sink.
In addition to the dry suit, she was wearing a buoyancy-control device, which, when inflated, might get her to the surface. But buoyancy was not the worst of her problems. That was hypothermia. She knew that water conducted heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air. If her suit flooded with twenty-two-degree water, she might well die from hypothermia before buoyancy became an issue. She was facing a Hobson’s choice: ascend too fast and risk the bends or rise too slowly and have her dry suit flood. She checked her depth. Twenty-five feet. Two and a half minutes. It was going to be close, and painful, but she would make it. Probably.
Then two things happened in rapid succession.
A pinhole leak opened over her other knee.
Her helmet light went out.
24
Night in the jungle, and Barnard saw the bayonet glittering gold in the AK-47’s muzzle flashes. Stroboscopic bursts all up and down the line, the smell of cordite and shit, salt sweat burning his eyes. Rounds slapping mud, smacking tree trunks, a scream, curses. A bullet nicked the toe of his boot, felt like a trap snapping on it.
He was pushing and pulling his M16’s charging lever to clear a stoppage, but it was solidly jammed, not a millimeter of travel forward or back, and the NVA soldier was coming at a dead run and Barnard could not take his eyes from that shining bayonet and the NVA was ten steps away, then five, and the bayonet came at his face and Barnard started to scream.
Something woke him from the jammed-gun dream. He had it only rarely now, but it came back when things were stressful in the waking world. At least he wasn’t sweating and gasping, the dream’s occasional aftermath. Lucianne still slept beside him. It was the soft buzzing of his cellphone on the bedside table that had awakened him before the bayonet punched through his eye socket.
Wednesday, 3:54 A.M., the clock’s luminous numbers said. Moving carefully, so as not to disturb Lucianne, he eased out of bed and went into the hall, closing the door behind him.
Normally, the ID window in his phone showed who was calling — name and number. Failing that, it said, “Private caller.” Just now, nothing at all appeared. That was a tip-off in itself.
“We need to meet,” Bowman said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Barnard knew Wil would not be calling like this without good reason. “It’ll take me a few minutes to get dressed. Where are you?”
“Stay in your pajamas. Just make some coffee. I’m in your driveway.”
Barnard examined the manila folder’s labeclass="underline" “Christchurch medical examiner’s report.” They were sitting downstairs at Barnard’s dining room table. Both had cups of fresh black coffee.
“None other.”
“How in God’s name …” Barnard began, then stopped. “I know. Don’t ask.”
“Give it a read,” Bowman said.
Five minutes later, Barnard put the papers on the table in front of him. “Ketamine overdose.”
“Self-administered. That was their finding. Do you see anything wrong with the report?”
“No. Their procedure looked three-P.”
“What’s that?”
“Sorry. ‘Per proper protocol.’ They performed a solid-phase extraction procedure using Bond Elut C18 for ketamine and norket-amine detection in biological fluids and tissues. They analyzed and confirmed the drug using gas-chromatography and mass spectrometry. The procedures yielded ketamine levels of 8.1 and 2.9 milligrams per liter in heart and femoral blood, respectively. Anything above about 6.0 in heart blood would likely be fatal to an otherwise healthy adult.”
“They also found alcohol in her system.”
“Level just.038. That’s not even a DUI.” Barnard pushed the papers away from him. “Emily Durant using drugs? Unthinkable.”
“But there was ketamine in her system.”
“Know much about it?” Barnard asked.
“It’s an anesthetic. Not much beyond that.”
“Was an anesthetic. Today, a recreational drug. ‘Vitamin K.’ Some years back, it was used for monitored anesthesia surgery — twilight sedation. Colonoscopies, some plastic and dental work, minor ophthalmic procedures. That lasted until people started waking up.”
“While they were being operated on, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Bad.”
“Worse. Waking up during a colonoscopy is one thing. In the middle of a face-lift …”
“That happened?” Bowman asked.
“Yes. And wasn’t even the worst of it.”
“What could be worse than waking up while someone was carving you a new face?”
“Not being able to move or communicate about what you were feeling. Ketamine is a short-acting paralytic. So imagine being fully awake, paralyzed, in agony.”