The light continued, deep into the stern of the ship’s 251-foot hull, all the way to the very end, where the engine room had once been. Once there, the light stopped. It remained perfectly still. It didn’t make sense. Every minute they spent at this depth was adding up to hours of decompression time. No one simply waits inside a shipwreck, even if they’re trying to shift contraband.
Had the diver become trapped in the wreck?
It was enough to convince Tom to follow the diver inside. He carefully swam toward the hatchway, keeping his own flashlight switched off. Inside the lower level of the pilothouse, he spotted the open hatchway to the right, and swam through.
Mentally, he pictured the long passageway leading to the back of the ship, where the engine room had been. A faint glow of light radiated from a passage beneath a set of stairs. Tom descended two back to back metal stairs, until he reached the working deck of the old Steam Tramp — where men had once toiled to feed the boilers for hours.
He kicked his fins gently, trying not to disturb the thick layer of dark silt. The water was currently crystal clear, but he had no doubt that would all change in an instant if the silt became disturbed. He glanced at the end of the tunnel. A bright light was fixed at the end of it. The light no longer flickered. Its beams were fixed, shining away from him. Behind the light, he just made out the shadow of the diver. The man seemed completely still. There was a chance he’d made a mistake with his gas mixture and was no longer conscious, or even dead.
Tom swam faster, making a mental map of his surroundings as he moved. It was a single straight passageway, two sets of metal stairs, an open hatch, a small rectangular entrance compartment within the base of the wheelhouse, and then an open hatchway to the outside world. He could make it in the dark, if he had to. If things went bad, he could do it without laying any guideline down. Urged onward with the hope that he might still have a chance to save the diver, he raced toward the light. Drug smuggler or not, the stranger deserved a chance — if not for himself, but because he might provide the only link to the Senator’s son.
Tom was within arm’s reach of the diver. He took in the diver’s open eyes, which stared vacantly directly at him, his limp body, and guessed in an instant the man was already beyond hope. There was no rise and fall of the diver’s chest, suggesting he’d already stopped breathing. Tom reached out to grab him.
But his hand never reached the man.
Instead, Tom watched as the stilled diver suddenly came alive. The diver’s lifeless hands became animate and squeezed the twin throttle triggers of his sea scooter. The headlight brightened and shot past Tom, through the hull, like a bullet. It raced along the passageway and up through the stairwell, heading toward the open hatchway. The electric motor of the sea scooter whirred as it went past him. In seconds, the crisp, clear water was churned by the sea scooter’s propeller, and ninety years of silt was spread through the water like an impenetrable mist. The now distant flashlight turned into an obtuse blur, before total darkness extinguished the light completely.
Chapter Ten
Tom switched his own flashlight on immediately.
But it made no difference. The silt permeated everything. Its fine dust particles merely reflected his own light, confining him to the same visibility of darkness. He couldn’t see his own hand in front of him if he held it up in front of his dive mask.
The mental map of the J.F. Johnson’s interior hull shattered.
Fear rose in his throat like bile and he felt the unaccustomed symptoms of claustrophobia envelop his world. In seconds his clear vision had been completely tainted and all points of reference stolen. Neutrally buoyant, his world was spinning. He tried to grasp something ahead, feeling with his hands as a person suddenly blinded might, trying to form a new mental map.
Unable to reach anything, he turned his attention to simple priorities needed to keep himself alive. He breathed in, working to consciously slow the process and avoid hyperventilation. Making a conscious decision, he savored the icy cold Trimix, as it entered his mouth and passed down through his windpipe into his lungs. He felt his chest rise gently, and his belly expand subtly. His diaphragm relaxed, and the gas slowly left his lungs.
His eyes couldn’t see anything in front of his mask, but that didn’t mean he was completely blind, either. The heads-up-display still provided a series of gauges. His eyes scanned those numbers. At the current rate of consumption, his gas volume meant he was capable of spending another three hours and five minutes at this depth. It wasn’t gas volume that concerned him. At 36 degrees Fahrenheit, he would suffer from hypothermia and freeze to death well before he ran out of breathable gas.
Tom eased his breathing. He could hear the sound of his heart thumping in the back of his head. At this rate, his metabolic rate would skyrocket and he would burn through his gas supply. He needed to stop himself from sliding down the slippery slope of panic.
Locked in the interminable space and unsure if he was facing upward or downward, Tom quickly released all air from his buoyancy wing. Air bubbles ran downward past his eyes and a moment later he felt them run past his feet. He then started to fall toward the ceiling.
He grinned.
It was the first major development he’d made toward extracting himself from the deadly labyrinth in which he’d been confined. Tom adjusted his position until he felt level, and eased the last of the air out until he sunk to his knees. He extended his hands outward, until they reached the steel wall of the hull.
He stopped and treasured the achievement for a moment, took a couple of slow, deep breaths in and then reached up to his facemask. His gloved hands ran across the sealed top until it reached a single pliable switch. He depressed the rubber. It acted like the mode button in a car and changed the instrument panel exhibited on the heads-up-display. It showed an array of dive-tables, depicting his maximum bottom time and decompression obligations. He pressed it again and the mode now displayed the outside water temperature and temperature inside the dry suit. Just looking at it made him feel chilled to the core. He depressed it again and his heads-up-display now showed a digital compass.
The arrow pointed North.
He cast his mind back to the bathymetric maps he’d studied earlier that day of the J.F. Johnson shipwreck. It was positioned almost precisely in a North-South direction, with the stern pointed North and the bow planted due South. He took the new information and added it to the mental image of the interior of the shipwreck he was drawing.
He turned to orient himself, level with the ground in a southerly direction. Tom felt a new surge of hope. More than hope. He was enjoying the challenge, reveling in the discipline that cave diving and wreck diving demanded. The very reason he’d gotten into the sport years ago.
Running his gloved hand along the side of the hull and his trailing fins just above the ground — occasionally allowing them to make contact and confirm that he was still moving parallel to it — Tom began swimming along the passageway.
It took less than five minutes before his hand caught the edge of the steel railings that formed the base of the internal stairs. He added gas to his buoyancy wing until he started to ascend, using buoyancy to guide him and ensure that he was moving in the right direction. Keeping hold of the railing, he was able to follow it up two separate flights of stairs.
At the top, the thick layer of silt was slightly thinner. He was starting to make out things. Part of the railing, a single step, his hand in front of his face. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. He followed his mental picture of the hatchway and fixed his flashlight at the wall. Moving right up to it, he spotted that it was nothing more than hull. He turned to the right and stopped. There in front of him, his eyes caught the L-shaped lever used to lock and open the now closed hatch.