With a swelling wave of pressure, the boulder began to move, tipping out of the hole behind it and then coming straight down toward him. He backed furiously out of the way as the stone slid silently past him like a ship going down the building ways, grazing his chest and boots and rolling him in the water with its wake vortex. Then he was moving again, but this time, he was being sucked into a cave opening that had been behind the boulder. His tank and then his arms banged on the rock walls as he went in, rolling out of control, for a distance of about twelve feet before the cave narrowed to the point where the inrushing water pinned him to the walls. Finally everything settled down, and he could extract himself.
He paddled backward toward the entrance for a few feet while adjusting his diving rig and checking for problems. Everything seemed to be okay except his wildly beating heart. Then he focused on where his headlamp was pointing. The passage ahead was extremely narrow, but it was definitely a natural cave. More important, ten feet into the upwardly sloping passage he could make out what looked like a vertical stone slab. The slab was white in his headlamp light, not like the dark rock walls of the cavern at all. Bingo, he thought, and then remembered to look at his timer. Overtime.
He backed out and continued the ascent until his head bumped gently against the top of the drowned cavern. He looked for the reference light but could only see a faint, diffused glow well beneath him. There was no single point of light, just the glow. Idiot for not leaving a light in the entrance, he thought, as he fought down an impulse of panic. Then he regained control. His virtual depth was about two feet, so he had some time here, and still plenty of air. He swam around the rim of the cistern ceiling until he was pointed east again. Then he turned hard right and swam due south, trying to keep the glow directly beneath him. The first time he missed the line entirely and came up against the south wall. He turned left, went three feet or so, and then moved back out toward the center of the cavern, mentally trying to clamp down on his growing fear. The problem was that he was too far up above the damned light. If he didn’t find the line this time he would have to dive again, and that could cause him some nitrogen problems later. He needed to get out of the water and start the surface interval phase. He looked at his timer, which displayed an accusing zero on its dial.
He steadied himself and his breathing, took a careful bearing on the compass, and set out again, watching the glow of the light below. From every position, it looked like it was right beneath him. He swam all the way across again and found nothing. Dammit! Had the line broken? Was the light sitting down there on the bottom? Then he had an idea. He swam back out into what he guessed was the middle of the sphere and then followed his bubble trail to the top. At the ceiling, he watched in chagrin as the bubbles turned behind his shoulder, marching in a silvery trail, bouncing across the ceiling. He followed the trail and popped up in the opening thirty seconds later, feeling like even more of an idiot. The line to the light was, of course, still there. He spat out the regulator and then hoisted himself up onto the edge using the steel pipes.
Checking his watch, he found he had been down there for twenty-five minutes, well over the calculated bottom time. On the plus side was the fact that he had not been at depth for all of that. He should be okay from the point of view of getting the dreaded bends, with “should” being the operative word. It was almost one o’clock. He would rest on the surface for two full hours just to make sure, and then he’d go back down to explore that cave. He would take a fresh tank this time, although there was still air left in the first tank — and this time, he would light up the damned entrance hole! He turned around, fished his reference light back out of the cavern, and began stripping off his gear.
22
Judith was going through the motions of working midafternoon Friday when Professor Ellerstein called. He wanted to know how she was doing and how her first week back among the living had gone.
“Not too badly,” she said, suppressing an image of the previous evening. Not too badly, indeed. “It is an effort, though.”
“I understand, but it is a worthy effort. I will tell you that Strauss has noticed a difference. He is very pleased with your decision.”
“Well, good,” she said. “The meetings are still pretty boring.”
“Have you ever been to an exciting meeting, Yehudit?” he asked.
“Not here, Yossi,” she said with a smile,
“How’s the American doing, do you know?”
“Ah, yes, the American. Actually—”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’ve been seeing the American. He insisted on taking me to dinner to make amends for his indiscretion at Metsadá. I even went on a diving expedition with him, to Caesarea Maritima, which ended very badly.”
“The murder there? That German tourist? You were there?”
She told him the whole story, and that she’d spent the rest of the day trying to settle the American’s badly rattled nerves.
“Well, good for you, Judith. Good for you. Besides, he seemed like a nice man.”
“Yes, well, he is a nice man,” she said evasively. She’d told him about their day, but not their evening. “Although right now I’m not sure what he’s up to. We were supposed to get together yesterday, but he left a message that he was still upset over what had happened. That he’d canceled his final diving tours, which I totally understand. Then today, when I called to check on him, the hotel people say he’s not there. I’m thinking the police have come back, maybe he got sick, you know.”
There was an embarrassed silence at the other end.
“So,” she said, bridling a little. “You think it’s a brush-off, yes?”
“Um, well, I have no idea. It may just mean that he is walking around rubber-legged trying to get some fresh air. Like you say, after a night of hugging his toilet bowl.”
“I suppose,” she said, trying not to sound petulant, although Yossi’s tone of voice sounded a lot like that damned concierge.
“Perhaps I should check on him,” Ellerstein said. “Technically, I am his interlocutor here.”
“I suppose,” she said again.
“I’ll do that. Then I’ll call you back, at home, tonight.”
“You don’t have to do this, Yossi.”
“I want to, Yehudit. What do the Americans say — just to close the loop? I don’t know what is this loop, but I’ll let you know something as soon as I know something. Shalom.”
She hung up, a little relieved that Ellerstein was going to check on Mr. David Hall. It was something he could do that she could not, not without awkwardness. Then she remembered the dive shop. Maybe he had shown up today after all? She looked up the number and called the shop again. No, he had not shown up, and they had no messages. He did have four of their tanks, by the way, and they were just a tiny bit concerned about that.
“Four?” she asked.
“Yah, four.”
That threw her for a minute. They had taken four single tanks to their dive at Caesarea, but she was pretty sure they had all ended up back in the lovely instructor’s van. Why on earth would he have four of their tanks? That indicated either several dives or a couple of deep dives. She thanked the manager and hung up.