“See plenty of couples in my line of work,” Holloway told him. “Don’t see too many who opt to stay in different bunks, though.”
Sara scoffed, collected her clothes in her arms, and headed into the bathroom to change.
Blake, on the other hand, marched into the hall in his checkered boxer shorts and got in the captain’s face. “Mind your business. I won’t tell you again.”
Sara held her breath, positive that Holloway was about to deck him. She pleaded for mercy with a silent glance and he accepted with a confirmation nod like, sure, but only because you asked.
“What are they doing out here?” Sara asked.
Holloway brushed past Blake, taking her question as an invitation to answer. And enter. He sauntered close, a sleeveless arm brushing against her shoulder blade with a bit too much familiarity. She held her arm in place, taking deep breaths through her nose because his musk was a calming combination of a rugged day’s work mixed with salt water.
“You see it from time-to-time,” Holloway said. “Preventative steps taken by our government, intended to alleviate situations that could blossom into crises. They bring doctors, scientists, trainers into areas that desperately need them.”
Sara thought of the woman who’d gone screaming into the ocean with plague blood dripping off her face, remembered the mother who’d taken Blake’s gauze like it was a blank check, and thought maybe they could afford to send a little more support this way.
“They also keep watch for pirates,” Holloway said. “This area’s got more than a few.”
“Have they seen any?”
“Pretty sure they’re looking for one,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Went on my share of raids in the service. Compounds where the bad guys stashed weapons, money, all the things needed to fund and support their ops. Orders were always the same. Kill your targets. You remember the faces of your men in those situations. And when these guys came aboard, they had those same eyes. Hard and cold. Killing eyes.”
“Pirates,” Sara said with an exasperated laugh. “Making this part of the world worse since the beginning of time.”
Out of the corner of his mouth, Blake smiled.
Fifteen
They made camp on an uninhabited island off the coast of Nosy Be. A jagged circle of sand and dirt no larger than the size of a parking lot. Enough space for five men to steal some sleep.
Kaahin assured them there was nothing to fear in these waters. That superstition plagued the shadows of their collective mind, and that such fear was a prison.
His four men had nodded like they understood, then went to sleep. Each of them tossed and turned well into the morning.
The more time Kaahin had to reflect, the worse he felt about the waters around Madagascar. There had always been whispers. Growing up, he’d heard them. Things glimpsed off the coast. Boats gone missing without explanation. The Malagasy people talked about the evil beneath the surface. Deep down, Kaahin had always wondered when he might see this for himself.
You went a remarkably long time, he thought.
He sat in sand, knees to his collarbone, staring at the undertow that continued pushing out eager tide. He felt a deep, nesting shiver as his thoughts tried to forget about whatever was out there.
This was his career and he’d grown accustomed to the uncertainty. In every man’s life, there came a time to quit. And it was up to every man to figure out for himself when that time was. Were the fates screaming at him to do exactly that? How many more close calls could he afford?
Kaahin clenched his jaw. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the water, blacker than tar. The dark and shifting body lifted and fell like it was alive and breathing.
“Not yet,” he whispered, glancing over the rising and falling breaths of his slumbering men.
Sixteen
“They’re not moving,” Sara said. It was her one contribution to the conversation.
Everyone aboard the Frozen Cocktail stood against the curved bow, watching as they approached a floating yacht that looked more like a spaceship. They couldn’t see the ship so much as the neon strobes flashing across the hull, lighting the water around it.
Hot pink, bright purple, electric blue. Even at this distance, the wind carried excited laughter and thumping bass right to them.
“Everyone out there’s smashed,” Blake repeated, throwing a dismissive hand.
Holloway stood quiet beside him, his cheeks flaring as he considered the variables.
Isabella’s words echoed in Sara’s mind. As much as she wanted to liberate the poor girl’s memory, there were louder thoughts weighing heavily. Mainly, she didn’t trust anyone aboard this ship to not rob them blind.
The party yacht was precisely where they needed to go: A little further inland. There were sixty eyewitnesses on that boat who would wonder what in the hell the crew of the Frozen Cocktail were doing.
“That boat go out every night?” Holloway looked at Sara to answer.
“Every other,” she said. “We were going to do it.”
“Again,” Blake said. “Who cares about a bunch of drunks?”
“The people who need to get that boat back to dock for the night aren’t drunk, pal. And they already know we’re here.”
The Frozen Cocktail’s bowsprit pointed toward Madagascar’s shallows in the distance beyond the party yacht. It pointed to the jutting pylons that lifted out of the Indian Ocean like fangs.
Zanahary’s teeth. Under which they were going to find a tongue.
The next conversation was how they were going to go about finding it.
“We’re going down there,” Blake said. “Kahega and I.”
The guide nodded slowly and handed his rifle back to Sara. She took it this time, allowing its weight to distribute through her.
“Ya’ll have talked this through, huh?” Holloway said.
Blake and Kahega swapped nods.
The Frozen Cocktail sliced water until the party yacht thumped just a few hundred feet off the portside.
“How do you know what you’re even looking for?” Sara said.
Blake and Kahega stared back like the answer was obvious. They were halfway into their wetsuits before either of them answered.
“That is the mouth,” Kahega said, referring to the stones poking out of the shallows in the distance. “The tongue will be directly beneath.”
“That leaves us, darlin’.” Holloway grinned. “We’re gonna radio our friends over yonder and sell them a woe is me story about how you missed that boat and just had to see the island from the water anyway.”
“What good does that do?” Sara said.
“Make them stop wondering before they even start. Tell them I’ll take fifteen percent off the trip if you really are a guest. Make them check. Then your identity’s confirmed and we’re legit.”
The divers finished gearing up and positioned themselves on the ship’s ledge.
Sara tried to think of a time when she’d seen her husband dive and couldn’t even recall a moment where he’d even swam.
“Hey,” she said, approaching and taking his rubbery hands in her palms. “Stay safe, okay?”
Blake pulled the diving mask over his eyes and dropped backwards into the water. He might’ve winked, might’ve smirked, it was too hard to tell because of all the gear blocking his face. But all she’d wanted was some verbal confirmation that they were the same people. Because this sure as hell didn’t feel like their life.
Sara watched the rippling black water disappear them as she swallowed pure a ball of stress. In that moment, she knew.
She was never going to see them again.
Seventeen
Blake kicked into the gloom and the world around him was in tunnel vision.
Kahega had cautioned against paddling too fast through the dark, but Blake was close to it now and eager to finish. He felt Sara’s trepidation overhead. Her contempt, a ticking clock that set him paddling with haste. Anything to finis
h.
Their lamplights sliced the murk, finding a jagged ledge growing out of the void before them. They had to swim up to reach it, shining their lights down past their flippers as they went. The ocean there was an impenetrable sprawl of dark green. Once they scaled the ledge their bodies went horizontal, floating over little cityscapes of coral.
Kahega flicked his light off and on to grab Blake’s attention. The guide swam a few body lengths ahead, schools of fish breaking around him. He unsheathed his diver’s blade as a jellyfish darted forward, though the creature had second thoughts and went cresting overhead.
Blake swam for Kahega’s beam, angled down on the ocean floor, resting over a natural formation between the bases of two stone pylons. Here were the “teeth” in question. Moss sprouted out along the rock face, mimicking the fleshiest part of a human tongue, though it was roughly the size of an airport’s tarmac.
Blake lifted his own blade in hand and kicked down on the tongue. His fingers brushed the soft surface as he checked for obvious points of entry. The men broke there, with Blake swimming back in the direction of the Frozen Cocktail while Kahega drifted further inland.
The tongue narrowed into a thin tip just a few feet away from the cliff’s edge. A small recession on the other side of the rock face ran directly beneath the tongue.
Had to be it.
Blake attempted to signal Kahega. A few clicks of the beam went straight up. But the guide was out of sight. No way of knowing if he’d seen it. Blake pressed his face against the entrance. It opened into a wider space he figured could accommodate him.
He thought about the hatred in Sara’s eyes. The disgust she had for him these last few days. He’d leveraged everything and couldn’t come up short now. So as much as he didn’t want to squeeze through this space that was roughly the size of a manhole, he’d rather die than climb back aboard that ship a failure.
Blake floated in. The dark here was even more oppressive. Like waking up in the middle of the night with your head wrapped in blankets. Blake clicked the light and realized it was already on.
No place to go but down. His claustrophobia tightened as he paddled blind through space that began to squeeze. All he could imagine was getting stuck down here. No guarantee that anyone would find him.
Blake tried to remind himself that somebody had come this far. Two people, according to Isabella’s letters. And one of them had survived the ascent back up without the benefit of a diving tank. It could be done.
Blake’s shoulders scraped the tunnel. His flippers got caught on some debris as he kicked, wrestling one of them off his foot. He kept going, thinking he’d snag it on the way back if he was lucky.
Not that there’d been much of that going around lately. He thought back to holding Sara’s smooth hands inside his as they exchanged vows underneath that pavilion. In awe of the way her gorgeous dark skin contrasted against the soft ruffles of her angelic wedding dress. He wanted to get back to the way she’d looked at him that day. And knew the only way was to keep diving.
But the cave refused to widen, even as the dead end loomed. His arm was stuck in a charging position, holding the light out in front of him. This cavern was no wider than a torpedo tube. He wouldn’t be turning around to swim out.
He was going to have to do it in reverse.
A red ruby lay inside a nest of seaweed at the very bottom. Beside it, the remnants of a human arm, broken bones at both ends—picked clean by a host of creatures throughout the years.
Blake reached for the ruby and closed his fist around it, feeling the adrenaline pump through him. He used his free hand to ebb backward, awkward, given his position.
This was a reverse climb. His body bounced around, scuba tank scraping the cavern’s ceiling as panic bubbles erupted around his breather.
He kept pushing, sliding, moving one inch at a time. No way of knowing how long it had taken him to get this far. Kahega had said the tanks would last about 45-60 minutes but it had been longer than that, hadn’t it? Was he about to run out?
The irony, of course, would be to die now that he had the key. Every instinct inside of him wanted him to thrash, to fight against the reality of his location. Blake was too scared, too eager to ease his way out. His lungs burned and his throat was swollen.
His arms dangled down the slope like Superman. He used the bottoms of his wrists to push back toward freedom as his legs ebbed freely, taunting anything that might have followed him inside.
Shit, don’t think like that, he chided himself.
He continued to ease his way up, slow and certain. He shut his eyes to find a groove, but the panic was so great that his entire body was in danger of shutting down. His mind ran to a dozen defeated corners, projecting possible fatalities. How he’d rip his wet suit and drown. How he’d puncture his scuba tank and rocket back down, doing a header into the dead end. Did tanks even work like that, or did movies lie?
Blake kept moving but only because he was too terrified to do anything else.
Beating that bastard Roche when nobody else could was everything. Blake inexplicably thought about the Canadian men the warlord had promised would die in exchange for this information and, even in his darkest moment, decided he didn’t care. Because every inch back up this incline meant he was closer to freedom.
His feet wiggled free at last. One final push of his wrists and his body was out. Blake gasped at the sight of freedom and did not dare procrastinate, pushing off the rocks and knifing straight back up to the tongue where he scanned the ocean murk for his partner.
But Kahega was nowhere to be found.
Blake ascended higher and threw the beam down, searching for his friend who wasn’t there.
He swam inland, clicking the light with increased urgency. Surely Kahega would catch sight of that.
Only stillness greeted him back.
It unnerved him like nothing else. Maybe Kahega had thought the same of Blake and returned to the ship. Besides, his tank had to be close to empty by now.
Blake squeezed the gemstone tight in his fist. It was the only thing that mattered.
He frowned at the sprawling emptiness and began paddling back the way he came, eager to reach the Frozen Cocktail.
Eighteen
“Gonna be down there a while,” Holloway said, watching them slip beneath the surface. “How about a game of cards?”
Sara leaned against the rails and watched the space where her husband had disappeared, wishing like hell she could stop worrying.
Worse, it was getting easier to imagine life without him.
Holloway’s forearms rested on the rail, a cigar nestled between clenched teeth. His company was better than no company, though Sara didn’t have the heart to tell him she hated the smell of those disgusting things.
“What do you suggest?” she asked.
Holloway stared at the resort party boat in the distance. “I radioed and told them I had you aboard. They offered to swing over and pick you up, but I declined.”
“Do you always need an excuse to be out here?” Sara asked.
“Maybe some people have questioned the intentions of my boat in the past,” Holloway said.
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Nothing like that, darlin’. I just like to make sure my Is are dotted and my Ts are crossed.”
“That’s what a criminal would say,” Sara said, to which the captain only laughed.
The wind shifted as the music from the party boat haunted the sky around them. “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang, straight off some 1970s ghost barge.
“You really are an unwilling participant in all of this?” Holloway asked.
“Jesus,” Sara said. “Even treasure hunters gossip like secretaries.”
“Everyone gossips like secretaries.”
True. All throughout Sara’s time at sea, everyone aboard commercial vessels, from ship captains to deck hands, got off on speculating above their stations. Whenever people said men didn’t gossip, Sara had a hundred old sea dogs to c
ite as evidence to the contrary.
“Have a drink with me,” Holloway said.
“Nah.”
“We’re locked in place until our boys surface.”
“I know that,” Sara said. “But I don’t trust you.”
“You shouldn’t.” Holloway used his finger to signal one minute and hurried off, leaving Sara alone with the cheeseball disco track that Kahega would’ve enjoyed.
Her eyes drifted back to the placid waters and her heart leapt at the thought of him.
Any number of things could go wrong down there. A dozen horror stories gleaned from listening to those same gossipy sea dogs: equipment malfunction, oxygen toxicity, or the bends.
For Blake, she worried most about a panic attack or nitrogen narcosis, both of which could cause him to become disoriented and lose his sense of direction. Hopefully Kahega would prevent that, but that was a lot of trust for a rogue who, frankly, deserved none.
“Shit,” she mumbled. She was thinking about Blake again. Her fingers curled the ship’s rail, giving the metal a frustrated squeeze.
Holloway returned with a bottle of J & B. “Told my men to shoot me if I get out of line.” The closest crewman waved and lifted his rifle overhead, as if to reaffirm the order. “So there you go,” Holloway said. “My best behavior. Now down the hatch.”
Sara gripped the bottleneck and set fire to her throat.
“Trust me yet?” The captain grinned.
“Oh hell no.”
“Aw.”
“I’m not stupid, captain.”
“I’d be over there talking to my man if you were.”
That same close by deck hand turned and threw a high wave that prompted Sara to laugh and return the gesture.
Holloway told him to keep watch for their divers, and then led Sara below deck. There was a small sitting nook just behind the entry ladder. She was wound tighter than a snake as she sat across from him. He maintained a gentleman’s distance as he divided the rest of the scotch between two plastic cups.
Sara was more than a little embarrassed by how much of her backstory Holloway knew. Kahega had of course filled him in on the immediacy of the situation—potentially volatile clients in a bind because her husband had pillaged their bank account.
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