I’d better get out of here.
But not without a souvenir — some kind of proof that she’d been there. Artifacts, the wreck divers called them. Plates and silverware from sunken ships were especially prized. But what to take from a plane? She couldn’t exactly snap off a three-hundred-pound propeller.
Once again, her eyes fell on the machine gun. A full strap of ammunition dangled from the carbine, waving lightly in the current.
She crawled rather than swam up to it, grasping holds on the floor of the cabin. Popping the shells out was easier than she expected — the old strapping fell apart on contact, and the bullets dropped into her glove. The thrill of their touch was almost tangible.
World War II in the palm of your hand, she reflected. Hey—
Fiddling with the gun had disturbed the layer of silt that covered the plane. A storm of swirling brown particles filled the turret. The bullets slipped through her fingers and disappeared.
Going after her prize was instinct. Any diver would have done the same thing. She ducked into the cloud as if bobbing for apples. That was when she felt it — no flow of compressed gas from the demand regulator between her teeth.
She was out of air.
CHAPTER EIGHT
No! Star thought desperately. Impossible! I’m not breathing out of a tank!
The truth came to her in an icy shot of fear. A kink in her hose! Her air supply must have caught on something — a knob, a handle. But where? A frantic glance toward the back of the cabin revealed only darkness.
She tugged gently but insistently at the hose, hoping to jar it free. The life-giving gas would not come. Come on! She yanked harder, knowing all the while it was a bad idea, that she was likely to foul the supply even further.
Star Ling was such a confident diver that when panic came, the feeling was completely alien to her. Her first inclination was to spit out her mouthpiece and shoot for the surface, but when she tried to crawl out the opening in the gun turret, her tether line held her back. She was trapped in this submerged metal coffin.
She pulled out her knife and began to flail blindly behind her, but she couldn’t see anything in the billowing storm of silt.
It was the glint of the steel blade in the gun turret that told Kaz something was wrong. When Star saw him swimming toward her, she realized he was her only hope. She gestured madly with her finger across her throat — the diver’s signal for no air.
It seemed to take forever for him to get there. Water acts as a magnifying glass, she reminded herself. He looks closer than he is.
The thought was little comfort. She was close to unconsciousness, her field of vision darkening at the edges. She struggled to stay alert. Would this hockey player even know what to do when he reached her?
He’s paddling with his hands, for God’s sake! A mistake right out of Diving 101!
And then he was right there. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his mask and realized just how far gone she was. Her face was ashen, her eyes bulging in horror. She could not hold on much longer. The blackness was overtaking her.
Kaz sucked hard on his regulator, then spat it out and forced the mouthpiece between Star’s blue lips. The delicious blast of air snapped her back from the edge of the void. She breathed deeply, fighting to keep herself from hyperventilating.
Kaz crawled in through the opening in the turret and searched the floor of the plane. He fanned the water to disperse the curtain of silt. When he spied her regulator, he grasped the problem immediately. The hose had wrapped itself around the bombardier’s joystick so tightly that the flow of air had been cut off. The snarl was complicated further by Star’s safety line, which was tangled up with the air supply and also snagged on a hook above the bailout hatch. Kaz used his knife to cut the line, then freed the hose and breathed from the mouthpiece.
Star watched him in wonder. The boy was an awkward diver, but in this crisis, his actions were swift and decisive. Must be the hockey training, she thought grudgingly. She hated to admit it, but Bobby Kaczinski had very probably just saved her life.
She could feel herself trembling in spite of the warm water. The incident had rattled her — but not enough to keep her from grabbing another handful of bullets as they exited the plane.
They surfaced beside the Brownie and held on, rolling with the choppy seas.
Dante was already shouting as he spat out his mouthpiece. “Are you okay?”
“Don’t tell anybody what happened!” Star ordered. “Not Cutter — nobody!”
“What did happen?” asked Adriana. “It looked like you got stuck in that plane.”
“If they don’t trust our diving, they’ll ground us in a heartbeat!” Star persisted. “Promise!”
Kaz was thunderstruck. “Is that all you’ve got to say? You could be dead right now!”
“I got in a jam and my partner helped me out of it,” Star insisted. “That’s how the buddy system’s supposed to work.”
“This is only my fourth dive!” Kaz sputtered. “My second in the ocean! What if I messed up? They don’t teach that in scuba class, Star! What if I didn’t know what to do? I’d have to live with that!” The image of Drew Christiansen, lying prostrate on the ice, came to him, and he fell silent. How much guilt could fit on one conscience?
“Don’t you realize what we just saw?” cried Star. “People dive their whole lives and never find a wreck!” She turned to Dante. “That’s some set of eagle eyes you’ve got! Maybe we’re all crazy and water really is purple.”
“I just” — he paused, uncomfortable — “got lucky.”
“A German plane!” exclaimed Adriana. “Maybe it’s from one of the famous bombing runs on Curaçao. It’s a real find for the historical community.”
“It’s a real find for us,” Star corrected sharply. She unzipped the pouch on her dive belt and came up with the handful of bullets. “And we’ve got the artifacts to prove it. I can’t wait to rub these in Cutter’s face. Let’s see if he treats us like a bunch of tadpoles now!”
Since the Ponce de León was combing the reef with its sonar tow, the four had to wait on the floating Brownie for the research vessel to pass by. Dante spotted it almost immediately, a tiny blip in the heat shimmer on the horizon. Twenty minutes later, the ship was pulling alongside them.
Kaz saw Chris Reardon first, half asleep in the stern, a fishing rod in his hand, trawling for tuna over the gunwale. “Hey, Chris!” he called.
Reardon let out a loud belch, but otherwise gave no indication he’d heard.
“Get that rod out of the water!” a sharp voice ordered him. “You’ll skewer one of the kids!”
Marina was rushing down to the dive platform to help them aboard. She frowned at the two marker buoys bobbing in the waves. “I know there are a lot more caves than that.”
“Dante found a wreck!” Star panted.
The researcher’s eyes were instantly alert. “A wreck?”
“A World War II airplane,” Adriana supplied.
“Look!” Star thrust a fistful of coral-encrusted bullets in Marina’s face.
Marina stared for a moment, and then her supermodel’s features relaxed into an amused grin. “Star, that’s not—”