Nothing.
Forty-eight feet.
She understood. It wasn’t only the dry suit’s inflator mechanism. After she’d tested both regulators on the surface, they had simply turned off her air and argon supplies while she’d been shuffling toward the shaft. It would have been easy for Guillotte to do that, without her feeling a thing, as he walked behind her.
It was one of the oldest and most common causes of fatalities, overeager divers killed by their rush to get in the water. They hurried through all the predive donning and forgot the most important thing of alclass="underline" opening valves to send air to regulators and the buoyancy-control system. How many dead divers had she read about who were found with their air turned off? Too many to count. Since divers used the same gas they breathed to inflate their buoyancy compensators and dry suits, they hit the water and, unable to arrest their descents, plunged too deep to reach the surface on the one lungful of air they had taken with them into the water. It was possible to reach back and turn on the air oneself, but an uncontrolled descent’s suffocating panic and bursting eardrums destroyed many a diver’s presence of mind. She tried that now, but with so many layers and the thick dry suit, she couldn’t even come close to the valve knobs.
Finning furiously, she arrested her descent and began slowly rising, looking desperately for the line or shaft, seeing nothing. At thirty feet her chest was on fire. Her hands and face tingled, and her peripheral vision started to close down. She was near the point where spasms would start convulsing her diaphragm, a result of the autonomic system’s involuntary attempt to breathe. She might resist that for a few seconds, but then the carbon dioxide buildup would trip a switch in her brain. Her mouth would open wide, and a silent, final gasp would fill her lungs with water.
Her peripheral vision narrowed. As though looking through the wrong end of a telescope, she saw what seemed to be blobs of liquid, molten silver trapped against the ice ceiling. It was exhaled air from Emily’s and her own dives. She knew that it had only about 5 percent less oxygen than fresh air.
She aimed for the largest silver bubble she could see, one about the size of a watermelon, in a cavity in the ice ceiling. She spat her regulator out and pressed her lips into the silvery mass. The hole in the ceiling was almost a foot deep, allowing her to push her face into the air pocket. She opened her mouth and breathed.
She held the air deep in her lungs for several seconds to let her system extract the maximum amount of oxygen. She put her face back in the water, exhaled bubbles away from the pocket to keep the air in it fresh, then took in more air. She did this until she felt her body’s air hunger fade, and then she kept doing it longer to stabilize her blood oxygen level.
She filled her lungs and pushed down, away from the ceiling, rotating 360 degrees, trying to light up the white guideline with her headlamp beam. She saw nothing but cloudy water. She exhaled, breathed again from the air pocket, and this time added the illumination from handheld lights to her headlamp beam. The extra lumens did it. She spotted the line twenty feet to her left.
She exhaled deeply to exhaust as much residual air as possible, then filled her lungs as fully as she could. She swam into the shaft mouth and started ascending. She had not been down long enough to worry about decompression sickness, and the water’s pressure, which had worked against her descending, now helped, especially without the weight belt. Pockets of gas in her dry suit expanded, speeding her rise, as did the air in her lungs, forcing more oxygen into her system.
She looked up at the bright circle of the shaft’s mouth and hoped that it would be enough.
55
She rose to the surface, exhaling a thin stream of bubbles on the way up to keep her lungs from exploding as the pressure lessened, and floated there without making a sound. At first, she let only her lips and mask show above water. She had no way of knowing what she would find in the dive shed. Guillotte and Merritt might well be waiting there — just to make sure she didn’t return. If they were, this time they would knock her unconscious or kill her before putting more weights around her waist and shoving her back into the hole.
She waited and listened for several minutes, hearing nothing. As quietly as possible, she worked free of her diving harness and let go of the double tanks. Still fully charged, they were negatively buoyant and sank out of sight. The edge of the dive shed’s ice floor, with its plywood covering around the shaft mouth, was two feet above the water’s surface.
She performed a slow, careful 360-degree rotation, listening for any sound Guillotte or Merritt might make. Nothing. No scraping boot, indrawing breath, rustling clothing. She had begun to shiver, the first stage of hypothermia. She needed to get out of the water. But looking up at the edge of the circular shaft gave her pause. In the salt water she was positively buoyant. Her body weight was about 135 pounds. The dry suit, underlayers, fins, and mitts added another 25. Every inch of her and gear that came out of the water would reclaim its full weight. Looking up at the lip, she knew she would have to get at least far enough above it to perform a mantle, the climbing move she had shown Graeter to help him escape the crevasse. To do that, she would have to lift three feet of her body out of the water: head, arms, and shoulders above the edge, which meant that her torso in the shaft would be above water, too. So at least 50 percent of her body and the dry suit — say 70 or 80 pounds.
The question would be whether she could submerge with a full breath, fin and swim straight up, and pop out high enough to hook her arms and elbows over the lip of the shaft. It was a very good thing that they had floored the shed with plywood. She would have no chance at all trying to claw her way out of the hole over slick ice.
It would be the height of black irony, she thought, to have saved herself from dying as Merritt and Guillotte had intended only to freeze to death two feet from the surface. There was still the possibility that one or both of the others might be up there waiting for her. If they were, she would fight, of course, and probably could overcome Merritt, though the encumbering dry suit would be a huge disadvantage. She would have no chance against Guillotte.
She needed to push herself deeper into the shaft, as deep as possible until her buoyancy overcame her strength, but her mitted hands could find no purchase on the smooth ice walls. She unbuckled both of her dive computers from her left arm and held one in each palm, straps around her knuckles. Each computer was worth $2,000, and using them as imitation claws would destroy them, but this was not the time to be worrying about money. The computers had rectangular metal cases with sharp corners and edges. Her hope was that when she slapped them against the ice wall, they would dig in and grab enough to let her push herself down a couple of feet, then repeat the action until she had gone as deep as her buoyancy allowed.
If that worked, she would propel herself upward with fins and arms. Their energy, plus that of the buoyancy, would have to shoot her far enough out of the shaft. If not, somebody would find her floating right there in the hole, frozen solid.
56
“I’ve never been on a warrant service before,” Barnard said. He was sitting in the front seat of a white Ford Expedition with mirrored glass all around. Bowman was driving. A salt-and-pepper team of deputy U.S. marshals, Dolan and Taylor, sat in back. Dolan was the salt, Taylor the pepper. It was, Barnard had to admit, exciting in a way he had not felt for a very long time.