Unease began to seep into her usual confidence. This was not going the way she’d planned it. She’s lost the gold bar, the proof of their find. The lift basket was out of reach, and English had destroyed Tin Man’s lighting array. Now she was working blind.
“Give it up,” Cutter pleaded. “You’ve already gotten us mixed up in one murder.”
The words were out before she could hold them back. “Do you really believe I thought somebody was going to get killed? All I wanted to do was flub the dive!”
“But why?”
“Because we were losing!” she raged. “We’re still losing! To a bunch of snot-nosed kids!”
“It’s just money, Marina. It isn’t worth people’s lives.”
“It’s a billion dollars!” she shot back. “It’s worth anything!”
Inside the armored suit, she stiffened like a pointer. There in the black void of the deep ocean, a faint light flickered.
The missing intern.
The plan came together in her mind. She would trade this teenager for the bar of gold English had taken from her. It wasn’t too late! She could claim this treasure yet.
As her finger operated the miniature controls for Tin Man’s thrusters, Tad was still raving about how it was all over, and she should give herself up.
She cut the comm. link. He had nothing to say anymore that would interest her.
Kaz came awake, shivering with cold. He remembered the altercation with Marina in Tin Man, recalled clearly the savage blow she had dealt him.
But why am I freezing to death?
He wriggled within his dry suit and felt no warmth from the hot-water tubes that crisscrossed the fabric. The hit he had taken must have damaged the heating hose in his umbilical.
What about communications?
“English?” he ventured. “Guys? Topside?”
No answer. Comms. were out, too.
With awareness, fear also returned. He could see nothing in the inky sea except for the bell, hanging in a corona of light. There was no sign of the others. Were they waiting in the pot or out looking for him? And Marina? Had she gotten away with that gold bar?
He panned the sea with his light, but the small torch barely made a dent in the blackness.
Then the glowing bell disappeared, and the huge dark shape of Tin Man loomed over him, claws reaching.
He fled right out of his weighted boots, leaving them rooted in the mud. As he swam, he realized with a sinking heart that he would never outrun Tin Man’s thrusters. He needed a hiding place. But where?
He was nearing the point where the shelf ended, and the ocean floor sheered up into the slope that marked the edge of the Hidden Shoals. He was just about to douse his torch and try to lose himself in the darkness when he spotted it — a large gash in the joint formed where the ledge met the grade. Switching off his light, he kicked his way inside.
The darkness was total, almost choking him. The terror of the moment was truly paralyzing, for he knew that he would never see Tin Man’s powerful pincers. He would not realize the hunter was near until he was already taken.
There he cowered, hugging the mud bottom for any trace of warmth, listening to the chattering of his teeth and — another sound. Was it the whir of Tin Man’s thrusters? No, it didn’t seem to be mechanical. It was more like a low, steady gurgling.
What could it be? There’s nothing down here!
After what seemed like an eternity, he worked up his courage and switched on his torch.
What he saw turned his limbs to lead and brought him to his knees in the sand. The opening in the sea floor formed a large grotto with a silt bottom and a rocky ceiling. The gurgling turned out to be an underwater vent that sent an explosion of bubbles coursing through the cave. But it was not this natural phenomenon that churned his stomach to Cool Whip.
It was the sharks.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kaz knew a lot about sharks. Their cold black eyes, torpedolike bodies, and gaping jaws full of razor-sharp teeth had haunted his dreams as far back as he could remember. His phobia had been cranked higher and tighter over the years by a personal library of books about the notorious sea predators, constantly read and reread. Kaz knew, for example, that all sharks had to swim to survive. There was only one exception to this rule: when an underwater vent created a stream of bubbles that could aerate the gills of a “sleeping” shark.
There were six animals assembled along the path of bubbles, hanging perfectly still. Five were blue sharks, ranging in length from four to seven feet. It was the remaining one, the biggest, that drew his eyes and filled him with unspeakable horror.
Clarence, the eighteen-foot tiger shark of local legend. Two tons of destructive power, with a mouth large enough to swallow a fourteen-year-old hockey player whole.
For weeks, the interns had pondered what had kept this monster in the waters around Saint-Luc while other tigers wandered the oceans. They had questioned what had lured it from the abundant food of the reef down to the empty depths. At last, the mystery was revealed — this vent, this special place.
Yet there was no moment of enlightenment, no finger-snapping understanding. Kaz realized too late that his light had been shining directly into Clarence’s unhooded black eye. The crescent tail moved first — just a twitch. That muscle contraction traveled all the way along the eighteen-foot body. The head swung toward him, giving Kaz a view past the forest of serrated teeth, clear into the predator’s cavernous gullet.
He felt his grip on reality starting to slip away. In that instant, he forgot Marina in the one-atmosphere suit, and a billion dollars in treasure. His universe became, quite simply, the nine feet of water separating him from his ultimate nightmare — to be ripped apart and devoured as prey.
And then the mouth opened like a garage door as the huge shark attacked.
Kaz did the only thing he could think of. He tried to insert himself into the floor of the grotto. To his immense shock and relief, there was a space for him, a fine groove in the rock beneath the silt. He wriggled into it, thinking small.
The flat snout slammed against his hip. Impact. Pain. He waited for the crushing bite, the tearing wrench of the monster’s jaws.
It didn’t come. The sawing teeth could not reach him! He switched off his light and huddled in the tiny niche, smothering in his own bottomless dread.
Go away. His mind could conjure up no other words. Go away, go away, go away. Shaking with hypothermia and fear, he clung to his hiding place with mindless intensity. He didn’t think about the others, the bell, rescue. Here was safe; here was good. That was all that mattered.
Time passed. Seconds? Minutes? There was no clock on his terror.
It happened without warning, not a hiss, not a click. The supply of breathing gas to his Rat Hat simply stopped.
No!!!
His first notion was completely irrational — that Clarence, unable to pry him from the gash in the rock, had bitten through his umbilical in order to draw him out.
Impossible! A shark’s too dumb to come up with a plan like that!
Amazingly, the crisis forced his unreasoning panic to the edges, leaving room for rational thought. This was a diving problem. He was trained for that. Kaz carried a backup tank of heliox for emergencies just like this one. But he would be unable to reach it without coming out of the crack.
With a silent prayer, he switched on his torch. The blue sharks still slumbered in the bubble stream. There was no sign of Clarence.