I went over first with the lines. After inflating the gurney and positioning the Achilles, I waited for the ladies. Maggie was second in, and Hannah followed. She was the first to disappear beneath the surface.
Until you've actually been there, it's hard to imagine. The underwater world just off the Tiger Reef defies description — a world of ever intensifying colors and mind-bending silence. At 30 feet, we checked each other's tanks, made a minor correction on Maggie's flow meter, tested the halogens and took a practice EDM reading. Maggie spotted a lumbering pokerfish and took several shots of him with the Nikonos.
At 60 feet we could see the stern of the Garl. Hannah gave us a "wait here" signal and made the first descent to check it out. While she was doing that, I was trying to learn how to breathe. I also managed to time the lady. It took her less than three minutes to stir up a pattern of sediment near the gaping hole in the stern. The signal was clear enough. On the third tug of the line, Maggie gave me a sassy little salute and headed down.
We had already started to attract some attention. Three small reef sharks had congregated off to my left. For the moment they were content to dart in and out of the shadows of the reef overhang. I was so preoccupied with them that I didn't notice a stingray undulating by until he was within ten feet of me. When I pulled out the strobe gun and confronted him with it, he went the other way, gliding unevenly in his hiccupping motion until he disappeared in the dim distance. Beneath me, a giant jewfish lumbered along, oblivious to all the commotion.
Meanwhile, both Maggie and Hannah had disappeared into the huge hole in the hull, and I could see the occasional refraction of Maggie's halogen as she bounced the powerful beam around the interior of the old ship. The reef sharks, timid at first, had moved in a little closer to me, and I poked one of them in the nose to stem his growing curiosity. It worked. He darted down and away as if I had offended him.
Still concentrating on my breathing, I took a reading on the EDM, scrolled my own situation as well as the ladies', made a time check and waited. When I looked up I saw it.
At first it wasn't much more than a shadow — a moving shadow. It was adjacent to the gash in the heavy metal plates of the Garl's fantail. I adjusted the float scale on my stabilizer jacket, let go of the lifeline and pulled out the strobe gun again. By the time I got a good look at him, I had a lump in my throat the size of a baseball. The sucker was big — I mean really big — 15 feet, maybe bigger, slate gray and black-eyed. I counted six big gills. Everything Hannah had said about "sharks that haven't even been catalogued yet" came screaming back at me.
My first thought was to get the hell out of there. The second was a little more rational. It was concern for Maggie and Hannah. What if they came blissfully swimming out of the number three hold and ran smack into him?
Our friends at NASA had loaned boss man Bearing one competent lady, but this wasn't what she was trained for, and there was no way of knowing just how much diving experience the lady really had. And, at a depth of 80 feet, your options are limited. I considered trying to tap out an impulse signal to Queet on the surface in the hope he could trigger a warning for the ladies. Thinking that would take too much time, I considered trying to divert the intruder's attention, but that solution dimmed in a brief moment of reflection. The diversion tactic turned out to be little short of suicide.
It's strange how you get a gut feeling about a situation, but this six giller didn't appear to be curious, nor did he seem to be out for a casual prowl through his territory. Quite the contrary — he looked agitated and aggressive. His patrol circle was getting smaller and smaller, and at one point he went so far as to ram his massive blunt head into the plates of the Garl. The more Maggie's light danced around the interior of the wreck, the more he quickened his pace.
It took a while, but I finally managed to swallow the baseball and marshal my senses. Something made sense about getting closer to him where I had some options. I tucked the strobe gun back in my belt and started digging for the small fluttering device Hannah had described on the surface. She had declared it to be painfully simple; one button activated it, the other propelled it. I twisted the small mechanical dial on the CO 2 cartridge, hit the "on" button and prayed like hell. The shark had spotted me. The device clicked twice and fluttered into action, moving in an erratic pattern, spewing a sickly looking trail of oily crimson.
Right then and there I muttered a little prayer of thanks for all the engineering schools who turn out the folks who dream up these lifesaving devices. The shark had bought it and sprinted after it.
It was now or never. Still clutching the lifeline, I headed for the disembowled cargo hold number three. I met them coming out. Maggie was frantic. She was having trouble breathing. She pointed back into the darkness, righted herself and focused the halogen. There was no mistaking what it was. Behind her, a bloated, shredded and salt-bleached body undulated eerily in the water as though it was being manipulated with wires. The torso was still intact, but ribbons of ripped flesh danced away from it in the shifting, swirling patterns of water. A small school of darting blue and green fish feasted on the remains. Some large shark had gotten there first; both legs had been ripped off at the midpoint of the thigh. I stared back in stunned disbelief at vacant holes where eyes had once been and recognized what was left of the face. It was a helluva way for Crompton to die.
5
It was a long way from the spit and polish of a mahogany paneled corporate boardroom, nevertheless the Prometheus team had assembled for the sole purpose of assessing our first look at the watery resting place of the Garl. I was still trying to get over the shock of finding Crompton, and at the same time adjusting to the fact that the best diver in Jamaica wasn't going to be a part of our effort.
The graphic images of what the underwater world could do to a man was going to be carried around in my fevered mind a hell of a lot longer than I cared to admit.
In the foreground I could hear Hannah's near monotone delivery, patiently reviewing the facts and figures from our first excursion into the innards of the old tub. She was backdropped by the brooding, shrouded island which in turn was silhouetted against the brilliant Caribbean horizon. Equally disconcerting was the awareness that the rusting, partially dismantled Garl was no more than 80 or 90 feet directly below us, and at the far end of the reef the Bay Foreman was unwillingly keeping the old German derelict company.
Hannah had her charts spread all over the aft deck, some weighted down with conch shells and others with pieces of marine hardware.
"This is the fantail. It's wedged into a crevice in the coral at a forty-five degree angle, up against the reef proper. The stern juts out and away from the barrier and the ruptures in the hull are located here." She was sketching a crude depiction of the smaller section of the freighter directly on the chart and pointing out exact locations as she went along.
Sargent, Queet and Maggie were all squinting into the glare of the sun trying to follow Hannah's dancing pencil. Huntington, for the most part, exhibited a distinct lack of interest. I suppose to his way of thinking, there wasn't much he felt he could offer the mission until we were actually able to produce a cylinder.