"And I also know that two-thirds of it is teetering out over another one to two hundred foot drop-off."
"I think I can handle thirty fathoms," Hannah volunteered, "if I have some help."
"What kind of help?"
"A diving buddy — somebody to keep an eye open for our little friends with big fins, somebody to help me if I get in over my head."
The list was, as the old song goes, "dwindling down to a precious few." Queet had limited diving experience, and Sarge had even less. Maggie had already demonstrated that she wasn't up to looking eyeball to eyeball with sharks, and Huntington didn't even deserve comment. Hannah was looking squarely at me.
"What about gear?" I was stalling.
"We've got everything we need, and if we don't have it, we can get it. One of the entries in Lamillian's log pinpoints the exact location. If those things are in the stern section like he says, we won't even have to go down in the trench."
"Okay. What's our first move?"
"Get Sarge to take us down to the far end of the reef and come around to the leeward side. The minute we get around the tip we'll drop the ANGMQ units and start sounding until we pick up the Garl. We'll sort out the two images, take the smaller one and get a fix on it."
Hannah Holbrook didn't have any trouble taking charge. "Then what?" I asked.
"We'll drop the remote controlled halogens and see what it looks like."
As far as I was concerned, Hannah was beating around the bush. "Let's talk about the part where you and I have to go down there to retrieve those damn things."
"Well," she said, smiling, "the first thing you do is get into the gear…"
Somehow it didn't seem quite right to tell the gutsy lady that she was working with a devout coward. In my book sharks rank right along with jumping out of airplanes without parachutes, not to mention the fact that what little undersea experience I could lay claim to amounted to snorkeling along with Gibby at depths ranging up to ten feet. Since Hannah Holbrook didn't seem to be the kind of lady who wanted to hear about my idyllic past, I kept the facts to myself. After all, Lamillian's log didn't say how deep the water was where the stern rested; it simply said "shallower waters."
It didn't take Sarge long to put the lady's plan into action. The Sloe Gin weighed anchor and headed south along the outside of the reef while Hannah and Maggie checked out the gear.
In the meantime, I went up to the wheelhouse to find out what kind of luck Queet was having. As it turned out, he wasn't having much. He was still twisting dials and flipping switches, trying to get someone on Negril to patch us through to Mookie.
Sarge saw my consternation. "Always a lot of interference around the big island," he explained.
Having completed her other chores, Maggie stepped in carrying two cups of coffee. "You want — a talk about it?" she asked.
"Talk about what?"
"The fact that you haven't been down that deep."
"Life is just one big long learning experience," I said, tongue in cheek. "Besides, how did you know?"
"I read your dossier pretty closely," she admitted. "I was curious how you were going to handle the underwater aspects of all this. Then when you started talking about your friend Crompton, I figured you had all the bases covered."
"Without Crompton the bases aren't covered," I admitted.
"Don't you think you ought to tell Hannah? After all, she'll be counting on you down there."
"I can handle it." The answer was made up largely of ignorance and male ego. "The depth is one thing. It's those big ugly critters with the black empty eyes and the big mouths that scare the hell out of me."
Maggie gave me an exasperated look, took the empty cup out of my hand and left. She wasn't smiling. Just before she descended the ladder she looked back at me. "Answer me this, Mr. Wages. Suppose something happens to you down there. Just who the hell do you think is going to get us out of this mess?"
Maggie had a point. Queet knew some of the angles, but not enough to pull the mission off. The truth was that going over the side to play in the water wasn't half as disconcerting as some of the other things that had popped up in the last 24 hours. Bearing Schuster's so-called secret mission was anything but a secret. It was beginning to look like half the population of Jamaica knew about the Garl and its clandestine cargo. Added to that was the old boy's son, a fellow currently giving me the impression he would do anything to see that his father didn't get the cylinders. Then there was Crompton's mysterious disappearance after he had supposedly located the cylinders. That fact raised even more questions. Who had hired my old buddy — and why? This was no longer one of those situations where you can stick your head in the sand and pretend coincidence. Lamillian's log proved that the Garl was a lot more than just a derelict old wreck sitting in the shallows of Tiger Reef, waiting for someone to go down and plunder her. The log said "four cylinders." The bottom line was somebody knew as much or more about the Garl's cargo than any one of us on Schuster's so-called Prometheus team.
I made a hasty retreat from the world of speculation back into the present when I heard Sarge throttle back on the Sloe Gin. He was banking her off to our port side and in toward the southern tip of the reef. From where we were, you could look back at the misty shoreline of Big Doobacque and get the full sinister effect of the brooding clutter of coral and rock.
When Sarge came to a full stop, I went aft and helped Queet drop the sonar units while Hannah cranked up the Gilmore unit and tested the scope. Without looking up, she was shouting instructions. ''Lower… easy… a little more… two knots, no more."
There was an almost imperceptible surge in the engine, and the old girl's bow rose momentarily and settled back in the water. When Maggie scurried back with the remote-controlled halogens, she had a Nikonos draped around her neck.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?" I barked.
She smiled sweetly "Elliott," she cooed, "knock off the macho bullshit, or I'll tell Hannah she's going down into darkville with a green ass novice."
"But…" I started to protest.
"But nothing! I've been down sixty feet, and that's a helluva lot deeper than you've been. Besides, I know enough not to get in trouble, and I can help you two if you do."
While Maggie was getting her point across, Hannah was busy stacking regulators, wetsuits, stabilizing jackets, masks, fins and tanks next to the Achilles. When she finished, she looked up and smiled. "Now, team," she said, grinning, "all we have to do is find those damn cylinders."
It was late in the afternoon when we were finally able to verify that we had isolated the stern of the Garl. Hannah let out a girlish giggle.
"We're in luck," she said. "The skipper of the Foreman was right. Our target appears to be poised right on the ledge of the trench."
"You're sure we've got a valid reading?"
Hannah looked at me and winked. "Near as I can tell, it looks like no more than eighty feet." She peered into the water. "I'm almost convinced I can see her sitting there, telling us to come on down."
It didn't take us long to get in wetsuits and don the rest of the gear. Hannah, being the stronger of the two ladies, took the maze pack. Maggie was assigned photographic duties, and I was assigned EDM responsibilities, monitoring of the lines, shark lookout and gaffing duties. Hannah darted through the plan twice before we crawled into the Achilles. This mission was solely for the purposes of fact finding. Get the lay of the land, so to speak, and return to the surface to determine how and when we were going after the cylinders.
Luckily, I had some degree of familiarity with all of the equipment, except the synchronized dive monitor, but when Hannah explained it as being nothing more than the ultimate buddy system, I got the idea. At that moment I was damn glad I had invested in a scuba diving course in anticipation of a few days of frolicking in the water with Gibby in Bora Bora. Bora Bora never materialized, but the chance to use what I had learned in that course finally had.