Almost instinctively, Floyd put down his trowel and began moving toward the figure. As he did so, Mike lifted an arm, pointed to somewhere over on his right, and then began walking in that direction, beckoning Floyd to follow.
It is a golden rule of diving safety that you always do everything in pairs. Diving on your own, without someone to help if you get into difficulty, is how accidents happen. Strictly speaking, Floyd staying on the seabed even for the minute or so it took the Bear to take a tray of specimens to the surface and come back was already stretching the rules. Swimming off somewhere without telling your diving partner where you were going was … unthinkable.
But for some reason Floyd did not think about it. Mike was beckoning him to follow, and he did not hesitate to do exactly that. His friend was walking at a pace that required Floyd to swim at full stretch to keep up, and although he wondered where they might be going and why, he still followed. He followed, even when the regulator on his wrist told him that the tank of air on his back was now using its safety reserve. Ignoring the warning, he just kept following while Mike kept beckoning him on.
He had been swimming for almost twenty minutes when Mike finally came to a halt in an area of seabed where the sand was littered with coral outcrops, rocks, and undulating seaweed. Calmly seating himself on a large section of coral, he pointed to something beside him. Floyd swam over to investigate. Looking closely, he saw that Mike was pointing at something wedged in a crevice, and when he reached down and took it out, he found it was a small metal button.
That’s it? Floyd thought. This is why you made me follow you? So you could show me a button?
Mike smiled, then pointed upward. Glancing at the gauge on his wrist, Floyd realized he had only a few minutes of air left—and then felt Mike’s hand on his elbow, pushing him, physically pushing him, directly up toward the surface.
It was only as he took his first breath of fresh air that Floyd realized how bizarre his behavior was going to look to the others on the boat. Indeed, how bizarre it had actually been. Mike had disappeared somewhere on the journey to the surface and, when he scanned the horizon, Floyd could see no sign of the We’re Here. He wasn’t even sure precisely in which direction it lay, so trying to swim back to it was probably not the best method. With a sigh, he switched on the little radio beacon Dr. Lamont made all the divers carry, which would send a signal indicating where he was so that they could come and pick him up.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait. It could, he reckoned, be a while before anyone noticed the signal, then it would take perhaps another ten minutes to winch up the anchor and get under way, and the same time again to cover the mile or so to pick him up. Dr. Lamont wouldn’t waste diesel traveling at anything faster than eight or nine knots, so he probably had about half an hour before they came to retrieve him. Half an hour in which to try to think how on earth he was going to explain his behavior—and try not to think of how angry Dr. Lamont was going to be when he appeared.
He was wrong about the timing. It was barely a minute before the white hull of the We’re Here was visible on the horizon, its bow ploughing through the water at a distinctly uneconomic speed, and only a few minutes more before it hove to alongside, with most of the crew peering anxiously down over the rail.
“Throw him a line,” called Dr. Lamont. “Let’s get him in! Fast as you can!” He looked down at Floyd. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine!” shouted Floyd.
Someone threw him a rope and he was hauled toward the stern of the boat where a dozen hands were eagerly waiting to help pull him aboard.
“Easy now … Give him room to breathe … You’re sure you’re OK? Sit him down over here …”
More pairs of hands were unstrapping his tank and removing his mask and peeling back his wetsuit. It was not quite the angry reception Floyd had been expecting.
“You’re not hurt or anything? Really? You’re all right?”
That was Charity, her face white and worried only a few inches from his own, looking as if she had recently been crying.
“Here, drink this …” The Bear was thrusting a glass of brandy into Floyd’s hand. “By God but you had us worried!”
Floyd was too embarrassed to speak. How could he have been so stupid? Of course they were worried. A team member disappears underwater without a trace for more than twenty minutes—what else could they be but worried? And they all thought there must be a reasonable explanation. How was he going to tell them that he’d caused all this panic because he had been following an invisible friend?
“I’m sorry if I worried you all, I … I …” He searched for the words that would explain convincingly about Mike and realized there weren’t any. “I decided to go for a swim,” he finished lamely.
“I told you!” That was the Bear again. “I told you he wouldn’t just sit there!”
“It was risky.” Dr. Lamont was smiling down at him. “But you did the right thing. It’s still out there, circling the site. You’d never have got up if you hadn’t moved.”
“I told you he’d swim for it!” The Bear beamed around triumphantly, his plaited beard shaking with pleasure. “I told you! He’s smart, this one!”
It was a while before Floyd pieced together the story of what had happened on the surface while he had been busy following Mike on the seabed.
It had started when the Bear had swum back up to the boat with the tray of mollusks. He had passed it to Natalie, who was manning the safety rope, and was about to dive back down when he saw the shark.
Marine biologists are not, as a rule, bothered by the sight of a shark. If anything, their natural inclination is to swim toward it for a closer look. This particular shark, however—it was a large adult Isurus—was, the Bear noted, heading straight at him with a speed and a sense of purpose that made him decide to get out of the water. Fast.
Normally, a diver climbing out of the water onto the boat had to first remove his fins, so that his feet would fit on the ladder hanging over the stern. Then, halfway up the ladder he would pause to remove his mask, take the breather out of his mouth, and unclip the weights from around his waist before finally heaving himself back on board.
With the shark bearing down on him, the Bear did none of those things. He simply hauled himself upward using the strength of his arms, and just managed to lift himself clear of the water as the shark, its mouth gaping open to reveal an impressive array of teeth, swept past inches beneath him. As Natalie helped heave the Bear into the boat, it was already turning to come in for another attack.
An Isurus, or mako shark, is one of the very few species that will attack humans, and they can swim at an astonishing pace. They have been known to reach speeds on an attack run of sixty miles an hour, and adults like this one can be up to twelve feet long and weigh the better part of half a ton. It makes them, if they do decide to attack, a formidable threat.
Natalie’s shouts had brought most of the rest of the crew to the stern of the boat from where, as she and the Bear explained the situation, the shark was still visible. It was swimming in a circle around the We’re Here, just below the surface, at a distance of about ten yards. While everyone was relieved that the Bear had been pulled to safety, the real concern was for Floyd. As Natalie pointed out, if he tried to come up while the shark was still circling and it behaved as aggressively toward him as it had toward the Bear, then he could be in serious danger.
“When’s he due?” asked Dr. Lamont.
“Not for seven … eight minutes.” The Bear looked at his watch. “But he’s going to start wondering where I am soon, isn’t he … ? He could come up at any time to find out what’s happened.”
“Someone needs to tell him to stay down there,” said Charity, “until it’s safe.”
“We’ll lower a message board,” said Dr. Lamont. “And a spare tank of air in case he has to stay down a bit longer.” He paused. “And I want someone to get back in the water. We need to know if that shark goes for anyone, or if it
was just the Bear it didn’t like.”
An Australian crew member called Warren volunteered to test the water. He was already suited up, ready to take over as part of the next shift, but had got no more than half a leg in the water before the warning shout came that the shark had turned and was racing toward him.
It raced with equal speed toward the message board and the spare air tank that they lowered over the side but, after a brief investigation, ignored them and went back to circling the boat. The message board warned Floyd about the shark and told him to stay on the seabed until he got word it was safe, but there was, worryingly, no indication that he had read it. If he had, surely he would have signaled the fact by giving a tug on the rope?
The alarming possibility was that Floyd, last seen cheerily digging on the seabed with a little cloud of sediment obscuring his view of the events around him, might still have no idea what was going on sixty feet above him. With low cloud cover, visibility underwater that day was not good, and unless he had been looking in the right direction, there was no guarantee that he had even seen the spare air tank they had lowered or read the message that was tied to it. Any minute now, still happily unaware of the danger, he might decide to return to the surface to find himself at the mercy of an extremely aggressive Isurus.
Someone had already been dispatched to bring up the rifle that was stored in one of the rope lockers, and Dr. Lamont had detailed two of his scientists to haul out the shark cage from its storage space in the bow. In a pinch, he thought, they would be able either to kill the shark or send down someone in the cage to rescue Floyd.
Several minutes later, the crew member detailed to get the rifle returned with the news that, although he had found the gun, the key to the steel ammunition cupboard seemed to be missing. The crew members dispatched for the shark cage had had better luck and were soon to be seen assembling it on deck, but this was, as everyone knew, a task that could take anywhere up to an hour.
And the shark was still circling. Every few minutes, someone on the team would try to slip quietly into the water, but the result was always the same—an instant and astonishingly fast attack. By now, the worry was that Floyd had not come up. It was several minutes past the time when his regulator should have told him to come to the surface, but there was no indication of why he had not come up or why he had decided to stay on the seafloor. He had not used the safety rope to signal he was in difficulty. There was no indication that he had found the spare tank of air with its attached message, and although he probably still had another ten or fifteen minutes of air, this lack of communication was the most worrying thing of all.
“I think he swam away,” said the Bear. “He saw the shark, and he swam away.”
It was an encouraging thought if it was true, but the Bear seemed to be the only one who believed it.
Eventually, and in sheer desperation, Dr. Lamont and the captain gave orders to slip the anchor and sail north. The mako shark’s aggression toward humans is believed to be because it sees them as rivals for its food supply and is attempting to drive them away. If they moved, Dr. Lamont reasoned, maybe the shark would go with them, herding them out of its territory so that when Floyd did come to the surface the shark would no longer be there.
Nor would anyone else of course, and the idea of leaving Floyd behind, even with an inflatable dinghy ready for him to climb into when he surfaced, did not sit well with some of the crew. But there was no time for debate. No time even to raise the anchor, which was simply abandoned as the We’re Here cut the cable and headed north.
It was a difficult decision to have made, and even worse was the news that it had not worked. The shark was being tracked on radar by Warren in the wheelhouse, and he reported that not only had it failed to follow them but it seemed to have gone deep. It was no longer swimming near the surface, but down on the seabed circling precisely the area where Floyd and the Bear had been digging.
A black silence descended on the crew when they received this news, though the Bear was still insisting that he thought Floyd would have swum away.
“He’s smart, that boy,” he muttered to an ashen-faced Charity. “I’m telling you, he already swam away. Early on. He swam away!”
His face a grim mask, Dr. Lamont had just given orders for the boat to return to the diving site when a shout from Warren said he was picking up a signal from Floyd’s radio transmitter, a mile and a half to the east. Within seconds, the We’re Here had turned and was heading in its direction with every ounce of power that her EMD diesel engines could provide.
The story came out in bits, with everyone chipping in their own comments and contributions—everyone that is, except Charity. She sat beside Floyd on the bench, not saying anything, but with her body pressed firmly against his and holding one of his hands tightly in her own.
Dr. Lamont told her to take Floyd below and check that he was all right—she was the one with the most recent first aid training—but once belowdecks, instead of checking his condition, she simply wrapped her arms around him and burst into tears.
When Floyd asked what the matter was, she responded by kissing him with some passion while still crying, only breaking off occasionally to say between sobs, “I thought you were gone. I thought I’d lost you. I couldn’t bear it if I lost you …”
Floyd, in between kissing her back, assured her that there was no way she was ever going to lose him, and in the following hour said a good many other things besides.
When the two of them eventually reappeared on deck, it was to find the We’re Here back at her diving site, with the Bear sitting up in the bow with a rifle—the key to the ammunition locker had eventually been found—and the news that the shark seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived.
“Not a trace of it anywhere!” said Dr. Lamont cheerfully, walking briskly across the deck toward them. He looked carefully at Floyd, and then at his daughter. “So how’s the patient?”
“He’s all right,” said Charity. “In fact … he’s very all right.”
“Is he?” Her father looked thoughtfully at Floyd, and then his gaze traveled down to where Charity was still firmly holding Floyd’s hand.
“Good,” he said, his mouth twitching into a smile. “I’m glad to hear it.”
And he set off back to the stern of the boat, where Natalie was attempting to organize lowering the shark cage into the water.
That night, Floyd and the Bear had the middle watch—the four hours after midnight—and the two of them sat on the benches set into the bulwarks of the bow of the We’re Here and talked. They talked about what had happened that day and about how easily it could all have turned out so differently, and then Floyd talked about the miracle he was still trying to absorb, of discovering that not only was he in love but that the girl in question felt the same way about him.
“I suppose, in a way, I ought to be grateful to that shark,” he said. “If it hadn’t turned up when it did, Charity might never have realized how she felt about me.”
The Bear looked at him, a puzzled frown on his face.
“It was thinking that I might have died or something,” Floyd explained, “that made her realize that she … that she cared about me. Before today, she hadn’t the least idea.”
The Bear was still frowning. “She told you that?”
Floyd nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” He leaned back and looked up at the stars hanging bright and clear in the night sky. “I mean, we’ve always liked each other, and we had this sort of thing when we were fifteen, but …”
“But you didn’t know?”
“No. Neither of us did!”
The Bear let out a long sigh.
“And there’s me been telling everyone how smart you are,” he muttered.
In a sense, that is where this story rightfully comes to an end. It is, after all, the story of Mike, and that occasion on the Mouchoir Bank was the last time that Floyd saw him. Since the day Mike led him to safety, striding across the seabed and beckoning him
to follow, Floyd has not seen so much as a glimpse of the friend who, over the years, played such a decisive role in his life. Dr. Pinner still writes now and then to ask if there has been another appearance, but the answer is always the same. Like the mako shark on that fateful day, Mike seems to have vanished as suddenly and completely as he first appeared.
But there are, perhaps, a few more things to add before this story is properly complete. Not least is the fact that, if you talk to Charity, she will tell you that Mike did in fact make one more appearance that was, in its way, every bit as remarkable as any of the others.
And before that, of course, there was all the business with the button.
It was Dr. Pinner who suggested it might be a good idea to take a closer look at the button. Floyd had sent an email to the psychologist the next day, detailing his latest encounter with Mike and asking if he had an explanation for how an imaginary friend could appear in sixty feet of water and lead you to safety from a shark that you did not even know was there.
In his reply, Dr. Pinner said he wondered if the whole thing might not have been the result of some unconscious recognition of danger, rather in the way, he said, that animals were known to flee before an earthquake or a fire. Perhaps some part of Floyd’s mind had registered the danger signals even before he was consciously aware of them and “produced” Mike as the quickest and most convincing means of telling him that, to be safe, he needed to be somewhere else. It was only an idea, he added. The truth was that he found it every bit as mysterious as Floyd had.
But he did say, at the end of his email, that he thought it might be worthwhile giving the button to which Mike had led him some close examination.
It’s possible, that it’s no more than an interesting memento of an extraordinary day, but in all your previous encounters with Mike, almost everything he has said and done has turned out to have some wider significance. I think it might be worth getting someone to look at the button, particularly if it has some symbol on it. It may be that there is an additional message to be found there.
Mike Page 12