Quince looked sadly up to the rail of the Star and asked Coop, who, from his higher vantage point, could see through the surface glare better, “How far down is she? Any chance of recovering the bodies?”
“Don’t know,” Coop replied solemnly. “Her stern is broke off and still standing upended on the bottom. She’s shifting like she’s still got some buoyancy.”
Jack stood and peered down into the green gloom, “What did you say? Buoyancy?”
“Yeah, Jack.” Coop started to repeat his description of what he could see from the rail.
“For God sakes, man. Give me a length of iron bar!”
“What?”
“Bar, Coop, and be quick about it.” Seconds later he caught the bar, lowered to him by a line from the deck of the Star, and leapt into the water.
“Toss me a line,” he called back to his shocked associate, “then get Yanoo and Matoo in here each with a piece of pipe quick and have them go down and bang on the hull of the Spaniard, toward the stern.”
“An air pocket!” Quince yelled to the others. “Jack’s figured there must be an air pocket in the ship, or it would slide on down the reef.”
Jack gulped in air and made for the hull. Reaching it, he started banging furiously, then listened until his bursting lungs forced him to the surface. On the way up he saw the Belaurans heading down to follow his orders. As long as he held onto the rope, his head out of the water, there was no sound. Curiously, if he dipped his ears even an inch below the surface, he could clearly hear the Belaurans banging on the hull.
He took longer, deeper breaths this time and started to descend. Again he could hear the Belaurans banging as soon as immersed. Suddenly his heart began racing. It wasn’t the Belaurans. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the natives’ legs were kicking at the surface. The banging came from the wreck. He swam to where he thought the sound came from and began pounding like a madman. The returning sound seemed to emanate from all around him… he couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from but, by God, somebody was alive in there… it had to be Paul or Quen-Li. God, let it be them.
When Jack hit the surface and started gasping his discovery, the Brotherhood went into a frenzy of activity, talking, yelling, offering ideas.
“Let’s make another bell,” yelled Red Dog.
“I’m gonna dive for ’em,” Klett said. “Let me in there, me or Jack could make it down that far; gimme an axe.”
“Yeah, get some for the Belaurans, too,” yelled Coop.
In an even voice, Quince ordered silence. “Okay, lads, I know you’re excited but let’s put our brains together, not our mouths.”
Jack, still gasping in the water with the line in his hand, added, “We can’t just chop our way through the hull. If we hit the air pocket, we’ll let the air out and kill them sure. We have to approach by diving under. It looks to be about ten fathom to get beneath her.”
“I kin make a bell again, real quick,” Coop said.
“Not quick enough,” Quince said.
“How about something already made,” offered Mentor. “What’s the biggest barrel you got, Coop?”
“That brandy cask, I guess.” He pointed to a barrel that was roughly six feet in height and four and a half feet in diameter.
“That’ll do!” yelled Jack, as his shipmates helped him onto the deck. “We’ve got to act fast. Get Yanoo to run a line down to the lip of the upside-down bulwark and secure it, then invert that cask and weight it until she slides down the rope and stops at the tie-off spot. I can make it one way to the barrel as long as there is air in it when I get there.”
“I’ll find some thin line to put in the barrel, to use as a guide,” Klett chimed in.
“Right.”
Within minutes Jack had regained some composure by lying on his back and taking deep, easy lungfuls of air while his shipmates frantically went about their preparations. He tried to relax and heard the cheer when Yanoo reached the surface and said the line was now secure to the ship. The crew got the weighted barrel in place, then there was sudden silence after they let it go. It wouldn’t quite sink, and Jack heard Quince prevail in his opinion that they should just get the Belaurans and Klett to force it down for the first several feet if they could. When the air in the barrel began to compress from the weight of the seawater, it would start falling on its own. Quince was right; a cheer soon followed.
“Okay, Jack, we’re ready. Think ya can do it, lad?” Quince’s worry was reflected in the faces of the others around him.
“Got to,” was all Jack could think to say. “Hell, through no choice of our own, we’re probably the most knowledgeable people at diving in the whole damn Caribbean. We may as well use it to save our brothers.”
He couldn’t believe he was diving again. Things had happened so quickly in the last two days that they seemed unreal. Years of waiting and now, suddenly, he felt he had been given no time to prepare. Time meant nothing; he had no idea when he had slept last. He felt that his soul, following the calm of his long trip home, was now riding out the swells of a great storm, first dipping into the depths of loss and despair, then soaring with triumph and revenge, then back again. Now Paul, the person he felt closest to in the world, and Quen-Li, a part of his strange new family, might still be alive in the wooden tomb below.
Jack accepted the ballast rock Klett handed him to aid his descent. He took several deep breaths and dived beneath the surface, knowing from his experience in the Pacific not to rush. With one hand on the line, he slid down, letting the weight of the ballast stone do the work. He pushed any desire to breathe to the back of his mind, acting as if there was no limit to how long he could exist on a single lungful of air. It all came back to him at once—that squeezing sensation in the air pockets in his head, especially his ears.
He must keep clearing his ears before they hurt too badly. He grabbed his nose and blew. Success—a popping noise followed by relief. Then again, and now easier, again. In what seemed less than half a minute he was at the inverted wine cask.
Amazingly, he felt hardly out of breath. In one smooth move he grabbed the rim of the cask and pulled himself inside. As expected, it was less than half full of water, and he greedily sucked at the pocket of life-giving ether from the world above. Klett had tied the end of the coil of thin guide line to an eyebolt, and all Jack needed to do was grab the coil and head out on his search.
The upended ship was not as dark as Jack supposed it would be. Light poured in from rents in the hull, but he suffered from distorted vision. It was the question of the same damn blurriness they had never been able to solve in the South Seas. Still, he felt strong, and as he had noted before, breaths taken from this depth seemed to last longer. Now out of the barrel, he played the line behind him and swam up toward where the air pocket must be. At one point he banged into an inert form and recoiled when he realized it was the dead body of one of the Spanish sailors.
After ascending what felt like the right distance, Jack found himself in what seemed a hopeless tangle of wreckage. He felt an urge to release some of the precious air in his lungs—it had been dribbling out of his mouth and nose on the way up—and he wondered if that was because he had headed to shallower water after gulping “thick air,” as Paul called it, from the barrel. He secured the line to a timber and retraced his way to the makeshift bell. There would be no luxury this time for making mistakes or experimenting; he had to find the survivors fast.