Deep Shadow

by Nick Sullivan

  “You look like a puppy… fetching his master’s slippers,” she gasped, catching her breath.

  He spit the rubber shoes from his mouth and sucked down lungfuls of air of his own. “I think… you won…”

  Emily shook her head, a big toothy smile on her face. “I’m gonna call that one a draw. Did you do a pullup on the bow?” she asked, sounding impressed.

  “Something like that.”

  She looked at him, something else in her eyes now, and he watched her gaze travel down his dripping body. She caught herself, and blushed.

  Boone slipped his toes into one of her flip flops and flipped it into the air with a quick flick of his foot. “Here, catch!” She did, smiling again. Boone picked up the other one and approached her, giving her a playful bop on the head with it before handing it over. “All right, skipper, show me how to properly bring the boat in.”

  “Check the oil, cabin boy!” she said, scrambling up the ladder to the flybridge.

  Boone knelt and raised the deck hatch, performing a quick check of the oil while Em started the engines, idling them while running her systems check. Grabbing the boat hook, he went to the bow and snagged the mooring line, waiting for Em to give the go ahead.

  “Right-o!” she called down.

  Boone released them from their mooring and began putting the fenders over the side. Emily brought the boat in smoothly—she really was the best skipper the dive op had. In short order, they were alongside the dock, Boone effortlessly tossing looped dock lines onto the cleats before stepping across and tying proper cleat knots. Emily killed the engine.

  “Ah good, you let Emily drive,” called an oddly accented voice. Boone looked up to see Frenchy the Belgian wheeling the cart of dive tanks Boone had loaded out to the dock. “Frenchy” wasn’t French… and he wasn’t Dutch. He was Belgian. But not Flemish Belgian, oh heavens no, he was Walloon, by God! When a vacationer had asked about his accent he had told them he was Belgian; Bonaire being a Dutch island, the visitor had made a perfectly reasonable assumption and made the mistake of suggesting he was “practically Dutch”. This led to an overly passionate dissertation on the cultural groups of Belgium. Clearly it was a sore spot for Thomas Dupont, so naturally the dive staff treated it like blood in the water, and henceforth dubbed him “Frenchy the Belgian.” Far from being offended, Frenchy took the name in stride, and the moniker stuck.

  “Hey Frenchy, conditions look good today!” Boone finished tying off and went over to grab his T-shirt.

  “Yes, weather report is excellent. I’m going to go open up the shop. We’ve got at least eight today. Several requests for the Hilma Hooker, so you’ll go there first.” As Emily hopped down to the deck, Frenchy addressed her. “You’ve got the two teens you trained last week, the brother and sister? Stay close to them.”

  The Hilma Hooker was a wreck dive and quite deep, so this was a sensible precaution. “No prob. They’re smart kids and were excellent students, but I’ll keep an eye on ‘em.”

  As Frenchy went back to the office, Boone grabbed a couple tanks, noting that there were two tanks of Nitrox in the cart. Costing more than an air fill, the special mix contained less nitrogen and more oxygen, increasing bottom time and reducing the risks of decompression sickness. Looking over his shoulder, he watched Emily toweling off near her pile of clothes. She had let down her hair and was drying it, her arms aloft with the towel. Toned and tanned, she was a stunning young woman. And now it was Boone’s turn to blush as she caught him staring.

  She gave him a knowing smirk and tossed the towel perfectly, draping it over his face.

  The divers began to arrive and Boone and Emily soon had their hands full. Their boat captain had called in sick, so Frenchy the Belgian was going to be their skipper—although he’d almost certainly let Emily drive. Boone planted himself on the gunwale and helped the divers aboard while Emily grabbed their gear. In addition to the two students from last week there were four regulars from the condos and timeshares who were fairly self-sufficient, and two new divers were supposed to join them today. Emily guided a boy and girl to their gear.

  “Here are your tanks. Lemme see you put on the BCDs.”

  Boone looked back aboard—Emily was overseeing her teenage students as they assembled their rigs. Normally, Rock Beauty Divers was a “valet operation” but she clearly wanted to be sure they knew their stuff in case they wanted to go shore diving. She was observing as the brother and sister slid the Buoyancy Control Devices—BCDs—onto their tanks.

  “Close!” Emily said. “But lift the back of that vest up. See how low it’s sitting on the tank? You’ll be bonking yourself in the back of the head down there. Here, slide it up a tick. Good job, Bill, now you won’t get dain bramaged.” She addressed the sister, “Becky, you get your weight settled?”

  “Yes, Em. I added a two pounder and I think it’s perfect.”

  “Sweet as! Doublecheck when you hop in and if you need to add or subtract, we can do that before we descend, k?”

  She’s really good with them, Boone thought. He had trained countless new divers but Em had a gift with the younger ones. He watched as she checked one of their computers, a look of concentration on her face as she cycled through the settings. Boone found himself focusing on her perfect teeth biting her lower lip.

  “Hey Boone?” Frenchy called out from the pier. “You want to help our guests?”

  Boone turned. There were two tall men standing there, gear bags and BCD vests held efficiently.

  “Sorry, I didn’t hear you guys walk up.” He reached out a hand to help.

  One of the men waved him off, politely. “No worries, we’re old hands at this.” He and his buddy stepped easily from the dock to the boat and made their way to the two Nitrox tanks at the stern. They looked like brothers, one blond, the other with reddish hair, both with a little gray starting to show. They were over six feet and looked to be in their forties, their weathered complexions hinting at a lot of time spent in the sun.

  “Okay, that’s everybody I think,” Frenchy said, stepping aboard. “Boone, do a roll call.”

  Boone went down the list and they had everybody. The newcomers were Ron and Rick Claassen. “Claassen? That’s Dutch, right?”

  “Yeah. Well, Mennonite,” the blond one, Rick said. “The folks we come from, you’d have to go back to the sixteenth century to find any of us in the Netherlands.”

  “Mennonite, huh?” Boone said. “You’re allowed to scuba dive?”

  Ron laughed. “We’re not practicing, so yeah.”

  Boone picked up a familiar accent from the two men but before he could ask about it, Frenchy called down from the flybridge for him to cast off. He did so, tossing the lines across the gunwale to Emily, who quickly secured them. In short order, the Kleine Dancer was motoring south to their first dive of the morning, the Hilma Hooker.

  Samarkandi listened carefully to the sound of the engines—the rhythmic pulse was smooth. “Increase to ten knots!” he shouted forward from the engine room.

  “Ten knots, you got it, hoss!” Lenox called from the helm.

  The pitch of the engines rose and Samarkandi listened again, occasionally pressing a hand against a surface, watchful for any irregular vibration. The engineer would have preferred a full shakedown cruise, but it was only a matter of time before the Cartel de los Soles realized something was amiss, and when they realized it, so too would the Venezuelan Navy. Zougam had allowed the Uzbek to run a full systems-check but insisted it be complete by early afternoon.

  “Twelve knots!” Samarkandi called out. Lenox confirmed the order, and as the revolutions increased, Samarkandi ran through a mental checklist. The periscope and snorkel, radio, and GPS receiver were all functioning properly. They had next tested the sub’s ballast tanks over a patch of sandy bottom and though they didn’t approach the maximum design depth, everything functioned exactly as it should. Operati
ng the engines on battery power alone had been successful; the batteries appeared to be holding their charge but he would need to test that over time. The sonar appeared to be suffering a software glitch, but he was confident he could restore functionality. He headed forward, joining Lenox at the helm. Glancing down, he smiled at the old-style compass, floating in its fluid. Always good to have an analog backup in case of a systems failure, Samarkandi thought. As an added bonus, it was also useful for quickly determining the direction to Mecca when it was time for prayers.

  Aboard the Zil were six men: besides Hamid Samarkandi, there was the head of the terrorist cell, Sulayman Zougam, the Oukabir brothers, Rachid and Sayyid, the Venezuelan convert Mohammed Martinez, and the Trinidadian Lenox Bua. The latter was currently manning the helm.

  “She handles smoothly,” Lenox said.

  “Of course she does,” Samarkandi said.

  “Is everything working?” Zougam asked, his voice betraying nervousness.

  “Patience, brother,” the engineer said. “I have much to do in the time you have given me. So far, things look promising. Let us head into open water—I want to test our top speed and test depth. I will get the sonar functioning and then we will test that as well. For that I will want a reef system. Set a course north-northeast. The southern tip of Bonaire will do nicely.”

  “All right, folks, we’re moored above the most famous wreck in the area, the Hilma Hooker. In 1984, this two-hundred-forty-foot ship was towed into port in Bonaire with engine trouble. When customs inspected the ship, they found 25,000 pounds of marijuana behind a fake bulkhead.”

  Boone was leaning against the flybridge ladder, giving his portion of the dive briefing. Alongside him, Emily was applying her artistic skills to a whiteboard that was attached to the back of the ladder, a multitude of colorful dry erase markers protruding from between her fingers, the green marker clenched between her teeth. Boone continued with the backstory of the wreck.

  “The authorities took the twelve and a half tons of pot out of town and burned it in a remote spot on the north end. The story goes that the winds were southerly that day, and for twenty-four hours, Bonaire was the happiest island in the Caribbean.”

  “Or the most paranoid,” Emily mumbled around the pen in her mouth, eliciting chuckles from the dive group.

  Boone cleared his throat and continued. “The Hilma Hooker sat at the main pier for months while the authorities tried to find the true owners of record. There were some suggestions that the ship might make a great artificial reef, but until its ownership was determined and the drug case was closed, the authorities could only wait. The ship was in such rough shape that they decided to tow it to an anchorage well clear of the port. In less than a week, the leaky ship sank, and Bonaire got its best wreck dive. Em, take it away.”

  “Right-o!” Emily finished her drawing and gestured at the whiteboard. “The Hooker is lying on its side at a depth of a hundred feet. Our profile won’t allow for too much time on the bottom, but this dive is aces, I promise you! We’re on the north mooring so we’ll descend to her stern. From there you can travel along the ship, heading for the bow. This vessel was not a planned recreational wreck so it is not safe to penetrate, but you’ll see plenty of interesting fish—keep an eye out for grouper and a big school of tarpon, and if you’re lucky, you may spot Chompy.” She pointed at a green shape on her whiteboard drawing and looked at the two teens.

  “What’s that? It looks like broccoli,” the girl said.

  Boone snickered and Emily smacked him on the arm, looking offended. “That’s Chompy!”

  “Who’s… Chompy?” the boy asked, a tiny note of apprehension in his voice.

  “Chompy is the Hooker’s resident green moray eel,” Boone said. “About six feet long, head like a pit bull, but he’s totally friendly.”

  “How do you know Chompy’s a ‘he’? Have you checked?” asked Emily.

  “You’re the expert on all things green, why don’t you look into it?”

  “Anyhoo,” Emily returned to the briefing, “once you reach the bow, come up slowly and then travel along the shallow side of the boat back toward the stern. You shouldn’t spend much more time than ten minutes or so on the sandy bottom, so be sure to travel back at that shallower depth, yeah? Everybody got their computers?” When everyone responded in the affirmative, she continued. “Good, pay attention to them. Once you come back to the stern, ascend slowly along the mooring line. Take your time, we don’t want any angry beeping computers complaining about going up too fast, yeah? Three-minute safety stop at fifteen feet.”

  “Be careful if you grab the mooring line during the ascent,” Boone interjected. “You will see little white-tipped, branching growths here and there. Those are hydroids and they will sting you. Use the line as a guide when you come up but try to avoid grabbing it unless you need some stability. Em, your mask clearing instructions, if you please.” He winked at her. He loved this bit.

  She broke into a knowing smile. “Of course!” Removing her ever-present sunglasses, she hooked them on her shirt and grabbed her mask. “Now, while you’re down there you may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of the underwater world. This beauty may cause you to spontaneously burst into tears of joy.” Emily started taking on a melodramatic, weepy tone. “If you find your mask filling up with your tears, just tilt your head back, tip your mask up just a crack and blow out through your nose.” She demonstrated in spectacularly hammy fashion and the divers laughed heartily.

  “Okay, folks,” Boone said, “I’ll be down there, wearing this little dive flag do-rag, and Meryl Streep here will be wearing the blindingly green fins, though they’ll look yellow down there. Pool’s open!”

  As Boone went to grab his well-worn wetsuit, Rick nudged him. “Funny gal you got there.”

  Boone grinned. “Cracks me up every day. Hey, you guys have Nitrox, so you can give yourselves a little longer bottom time.”

  “Thanks,” Ron said, “but we’ll probably come up with everybody else. We just like using it—feel a little less beat at the end of the day.”

  Boone noted Emily was helping the students gear up. “Em, I’ll head on down and check the current.”

  “Roger,” she replied, remaining focused on the teens.

  Boone grabbed his mask and dove in, swiftly freediving to forty feet. He could go much deeper but he just wanted to get a good view of the gorgonians on the reef north of the wreck. Once he saw what he needed to, he looked up at the boat. During the briefing, Frenchy had deployed the ladders and lowered the emergency regulator on its chain. If someone ran out of air, they’d be able to swim to that regulator and remain fifteen feet down while they outgassed the nitrogen that built up under pressure. Skipping a “safety stop” and shooting straight to the surface was always a bad idea—that was a good way to get decompression sickness, or “the bends”, a nasty condition when nitrogen bubbles form in the body, causing anything from mild soreness to seizures and death. It wasn’t an issue for Boone at the moment—freedivers almost never suffered from the bends, since they weren’t breathing compressed air and their dives were so short. Satisfied with the trickle of bubbles he could see coming from the safety reg, he let loose a gentle stream of bubbles of his own and returned to the surface. Hauling himself up on the swim platform, he saw Rick and Ron where already sitting on the pair of benches on the transom and were slipping on their fins—they both had beautiful split-fin models.

  Boone called out to Emily, who was pulling on her green and black shorty. “Current’s almost nil, heading south.” She gave him a nod and he turned to the brothers. “You guys look like you’ve done this before,” he joked.

  “Hit dive three hundred last month in Little Cayman,” Rick said, popping his regulator in his mouth and standing.

  “Only two fifty for me,” Ron said. He stood as well and then made several hand signals to his brother. Rick replied with
a rapid barrage of hand motions and Ron laughed through his regulator. Then, as one, they took giant strides off the stern and hit the water, signaling that all was well with a tap to the head.

  The head tap was a standard scuba hand signal, but that burst of sign language they’d used on the transom was something else. Is one of them deaf? Boone didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen them employing any sign language during the noisy boat ride to the dive site. Boone quickly slipped on most of his gear before lowering his BCD and tank into the water and jumping in, swimming easily into the vest. He always found it easier to do it that way.

  “See you down there!” Emily called, tying a green bandana over her ponytailed hair. Boone signaled OK and slipped beneath the surface, aiming for the wreck. He could see Rick and Ron descending leisurely, taking the time to equalize the pressure in the middle ear. Descending too quickly could result in a painful “squeeze”, or even a ruptured eardrum. The brothers were doing what most divers did—the Vasalva Maneuver—pinching the nose and blowing gently to “pop” the ears. Boone could equalize effortlessly by just working his jaw from side to side.

  He reached the Hilma Hooker ahead of the Claassens and looked up, observing each of his flock of eight as they made their descent, watching for any signs of difficulty. Nope, we got a good batch here. Looking at the brothers as they passed him, Boone saw that they were signing again in a much more elaborate manner than was employed by recreational divers. That’s definitely American Sign Language. Boone didn’t “speak” it himself, but from his time in Miami, he recognized it from the hurricane related press conferences that had sign language interpreters. Emily reached him and Boone pointed two fingers at his mask and pointed at the brothers. Look there.