"Let's go," he said, untying the outboard. "The others are already out there. This will be our first dive of the day. We had to do some provisioning of both the house and the boat this morning. We'll only get a couple of dives in this afternoon, but it will be better than nothing. Khmais has gone home for the November seventh holiday, and Gus has come down with a whopper of a cold, so we're even more short-handed than usual. It's terrific you've come along. You can keep watch while we're diving, and help Hedi with stuff on the deck." He gave my hand an extra little squeeze as he helped me down into the boat.
"Reinforcements," he called as we pulled up, and Hedi flashed a grin.
"Okay, Ron, are you and I first?"
"Fine with me. I'm ready to go," Ron told him. "Hello again," he said to me, reaching over to shake my hand. In his early twenties, with dark brown hair and eyes, he had a pleasant, easygoing manner, relaxed with people and confident in what he was doing. I liked him.
"I didn't know you were a diver, Briars," I said. "I thought you were just the archaeologist on this job."
"What do you mean just?" he said. "I'm a marine archaeologist, that's what I am. I dive, and I do archaeology. Check the pressure in the tanks one more time, will you, Hedi?" he said, stripping to his trunks and starting to pull on his wetsuit. He was in pretty good shape for a guy his age, I'd have to say.
"Three thousand psi, all tanks," Hedi said. "You're ready to go. I've calculated the time you can be down, and Sandy's double-checked it. Are the stage bottles in place?"
"Yup," Ron said.
"What are stage bottles?" I asked.
"Two full tanks with regulators are attached to our anchor line about twenty feet down," Ron said. "It's just in case we need more decompression time than we have air. We can switch to the new tanks at twenty feet and stay there for a while until it's safe to surface."
"Ron thought he saw something yesterday we should check out," Sandy explained to me. "You know our scanning equipment isn't working, so we've been towing the divers behind the boat to have a look. There's a drop-off of several feet here. We've anchored close to the edge. It has a bit of an overhang, so we couldn't see too clearly. Visibility here is good, about seventy to ninety feet, but the overhang blocked the view. So Briars and Ron are going to do some wall diving. They'll go down the face of the drop-off and see what there is to see."
"How far down are they going?" I asked.
"Maybe a hundred fifty feet, max," she said. "We think there might be a ledge at about that depth. Okay, ready to go? Timers set?" she called to the two men. Both nodded and went over the side.
"Okay, now we keep a lookout," Sandy said. I kept my eyes riveted on two tracks of bubbles. Several minutes went by. "They'll be getting down there by now," Sandy said, checking her watch. "Should be at about a hundred ten, a hundred twenty feet by now. They'll only be able to stay down for a few minutes, then they'll start back up, stopping at various depths to decompress."
I found myself feeling nervous for them. I'm a good swimmer, life-guarded summers as a high school student, but there was something about going that far down with a little tank of air strapped to your back that made me feel uncomfortable.
Suddenly I saw first Ron and then Briars surface.
"Trouble," Sandy yelled. "Get them," she said, grabbing at my arm. "I'll get Ron, you get Briars."
I was over the side, shoes, clothes, and all, almost without thinking, swimming as fast as I could for Briars. "Briars," I cried. "Say something!" But he didn't move. I slung my arm over his shoulder and across his chest and hauled him back to the boat as fast as I could. Hedi was already raising anchor and the engines were revving when Sandy and I reached the ladder. I tried to push Briars up on the deck, but he was too heavy, and it was all I could do to keep his head above water. Hedi rushed to help. It took a tremendous effort on everyone's part, Sandy and I pushing up from the water, and Hedi pulling as hard as he could from the boat, to get first Ron, then Briars, to the deck. "Briars is breathing," I gasped. "What'll I do?"
"Get him lying on his left side with his feet slightly higher than his head if you can," Hedi said. "We'll need to get him to a recompression chamber right away." Sandy helped me roll Briars into position.
"My God, my God," she kept saying, over and over. I turned to see Hedi doing CPR on Ron.
"We've got to get to shore," Hedi yelled. "Sandy, call for help. Lara, can you do CPR?"
"Yes," I said, kneeling beside Ron. "Get going."
One, two, three, four, five, I counted, pressing down on his chest. Now breathe, I told myself, pinching his nose and opening his mouth. Breathe, one, two. Again. One, two, three, four, five. Keep going, don't quit.
I checked his neck for a pulse. There wasn't one. Don't stop, I told myself again. Don't give up. And I didn't, as long as it took to get to shore, and the waiting medics. But I knew we were too late.
"I filled those tanks personally," Hedi said late that night at the hospital, his fists clenched tight. "I filled them last night so we'd be ready to go whenever Briars could get away."
"We don't know it was the tanks, Hedi," I said, soothingly.
"What else could it be if both of them got in trouble? And now Ron's dead! And Briars . . . What could have been wrong? I checked the pressure again this morning, and then one more time when Briars asked me to. Everything looked fine." He buried his head in his hands.
A doctor came over to us. "You may see Mr. Hatley now, but just for a few minutes."
"I can't talk to him," Hedi said. "This must be my fault. Please, you go."
Briars did not look good. He'd aged ten years in a few hours, and he no longer looked robust, just pale and ill. There didn't seem much point asking him how he felt, so I said nothing, just took his hand and held it.
He tried to smile. "Ron?" he said.
I shook my head, and he turned away from me. I squeezed his hand.
"What happened?" I asked at last.
"I don't know," he said. "Everything seemed to be going just fine. Then with no warning at all, at something over a hundred or a hundred twenty feet, I felt kind of strange: My mouth was tingling and there was a ringing in my ears. Then I could feel my face twitch. I looked over at Ron and realized he was in trouble, too. I signaled him to head for the surface. I nailed the power inflator for my buoyancy compensator to take me up fast, and that's all I remember. I must have blacked out almost immediately."
"Your tanks are being tested now," I said. "Hedi thinks it must have been his fault."
"I don't believe that," Briars said. "He is, if anything, overly cautious. He follows diving protocols to a fault. He checked the pressure in the tanks before we went in, and I know he filled the tanks personally from our own compressor."
"Maybe there was a bad mixture in the tanks? Some chemicals or something?"
"I don't know what that would be. We only use compressed air. We don't use nitrox or other mixtures because by and large we're working too deep for that. I just don't know what could have happened."
"Please, madame," the nurse said. "You should leave now."
Briars looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. "I'm going to have to call his family. I can't bring myself to do it. I can't do this again."
"Rest, Briars," I said. "We'll talk about this tomorrow."
"I'm almost certain it was an embolism that killed that young man," the doctor said. "We'll know for certain tomorrow."
"How could that happen?" I said to Hedi.