Night Diver: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Chatham had quite a bit to say on the subject of sour beer.

  Holden pretended to listen while keeping an eye on his surroundings.

  “ . . . all we have to show for it is pails of junk that won’t pay for the cost of shipping them to England!” Chatham yelled.

  “I do believe that is why this is called treasure hunting,” Holden said, smiling as he echoed Kate’s words. “The outcome isn’t guaranteed.”

  “You are there to make sure we come up with more than pails of junk.”

  Holden sensed someone approaching behind him. He turned just enough to catch the red flash of Kate’s hair.

  “I’m here to judge the efficiency of the dive,” Holden said crisply. “Considering the monetary handicap Moon Rose Limited is working under, the operation is reasonably efficient.”

  “What about theft?” Chatham asked.

  “Has Ms. Pinkham found anything dodgy in the dives she has reviewed?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Has anything else appeared on the black market?”

  “No,” Chatham said reluctantly.

  So you called me to vent your spleen. Lovely, Holden thought. AO must be crawling up your arse.

  “Farnsworth has been working overtime to catalog what the divers have found,” Holden said.

  “I get the reports,” Chatham said sharply. “I don’t see gold or precious gems, and bloody little silver from the wreck of the Moon Rose. Why don’t they use the device they call the ‘mail box’ again?”

  “It’s expensive to run, mucks up the clarity of the water, and stands a good chance of destroying any fragile artifacts on or close beneath the surface debris, which really upsets the scholars who—”

  “Sod the scholars. We need to pay for this dive. Tell the divers to quit farting about and get to work.”

  Holden thought about inviting his superior to fly down, suit up, and grub around in the crevices of the sea’s vast twilight zone for bits and bobs of gems smaller than his fingernails, but he held his tongue. People who didn’t dive simply couldn’t grasp the difficulties involved.

  “Diving is a tedious, dangerous, costly undertaking,” Holden said calmly. “You would get better odds of return on your money in Monaco.”

  “The Crown does not gamble.” There was frost on every syllable. “Are they using the siphon yet?”

  “Not that I’ve seen. In some situations a siphon is inefficient. In all cases it costs petrol to run. As you well know, the captain is extremely limited as to expense money.”

  “Not my problem. Adding to the Crown’s coffers is. See that those lazy bastards get on with it.”

  “Would you rather I suit up and dive than oversee operations ashore and aboard?” Holden asked.

  “Bugger,” Chatham muttered. “Carry on. I have a report to prepare for my superiors. They will not like it.”

  Holden shut down the phone and put it in one of the pockets of his cargo shorts. When he turned, Kate was there, watching him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Defending us against your boss.”

  Holden wondered how much of his defense had been due to his growing interest in her, but all he said was, “Chatham isn’t a diver, much less a salvage diver. He has no way of actually understanding the difficulties involved. Also . . .” Holden realized what he was about to say and closed his mouth.

  “What?”

  The turquoise eyes watching him with something very close to trust made a knife turn in Holden’s conscience.

  Sod it. Of all the people involved, she deserves the truth.

  “The contract my superiors gave Moon Rose Limited was a glass of salt water handed to a man dying of thirst,” he said roughly. “Chatham has no pretense to serving any higher purpose than greed.”

  “Kind of like Bloody Green,” she said. “Until he met a woman who was worth more than gold and gems.”

  Holden’s fingertips traced the softness of Kate’s cheek and the strength of the bone along her jaw. “Men have done many things, both stupid and sublime, for a special woman.”

  Her heart stuttered. Then she did what she had been wanting to do for days—she ran one fingertip around the line of his sensual lips. “The same could be said about women.”

  “We’re both mental, you know that,” he said softly. Then he touched her fingertip with his tongue.

  Watching his eyes, she put that same fingertip against her own tongue. “Yes.”

  Two crew members called to each other in a liquid creole that was a meld of English, French, and Spanish, all of which had held the islands of the Caribbean at one time or another.

  The wheelhouse door opened.

  Kate jumped back like a kid with her hand caught in a cookie jar. “I’d better get to work.”

  Holden glanced up at the wheelhouse, saw no one watching, and went to see which divers were going down this morning. When they came back up, he would be the one to go through their diving gear, checking for any concealed packets of gems or coins or chain. He hadn’t found any yet, and he liked the job about as much as he would going through other people’s soiled underwear, but he did it every day.

  And every day Grandpa Donnelly watched him like a bald bird of prey.

  Ah, trust, Holden thought sardonically. Such a satisfying way to work.

  There were times when he really missed the camaraderie of dismantling mines.

  Holden reached the stern dive area while Larry was double-checking Mingo, the lead diver. He was cocky as always, closing his red-and-black dive suit while talking about the women waiting ashore for his special kind of sexing, and making side bets with his brother Luis, the second diver going down.

  “The gold, she is already mine,” Mingo said.

  “The gems are waiting for me,” Luis said. His grin flashed. “Just like your women are.”

  “Ha!” Mingo fastened a dive computer on his left wrist and clipped a second computer to a leash on his suit. This was the ship’s computer that every diver wore and handed over at the end of a dive to Volkert for downloading. “The women, they know who can ride them all night.”

  Luis adjusted the position of his own computer on his wrist. Like most of the divers, he also wore a watch in case the computer failed and the backup ship’s computer on his leash didn’t agree with the flagged stages of decompression. Properly timing each stage of decompression was the difference between health and death.

  Mingo gave the computer screen a final loving wipe with a soft cloth that Larry handed to him.

  “Oh, beauty, you be worth more than the ship, yes?” Mingo crooned.

  Larry didn’t rise to the familiar bait.

  Holden assessed Kate’s brother, knowing that he was under a lot of pressure. Larry’s color was bad, and his hands were slow and sometimes unsteady. His breathing was a bit too rapid.

  Holden wondered if the other man had been drinking himself to sleep. Nothing in Larry’s files indicated a real problem with alcohol, but that didn’t mean much. Hard drinking was only noted when it got in the way of the job.

  “You sure your mix is good?” Larry asked Mingo. “You haven’t even checked it, and you’re diving a lot of hours.”

  “I be getting the bonus for first gems,” Mingo said, his smile brilliant against skin darkened by sun and genetics. “You see.”

  “You won’t be getting anything but sick if your air mix is bad,” Holden said.

  Luis snickered.

  Mingo gave Holden a look out of dramatic dark eyes that had lured many a local girl astray. “I be good.” He tugged the cuff of the neoprene mask around his face, pushing his black curls behind. When he spoke again, his Caribbean accent was barely a whisper. “This is my own special blend. Minimized compression and decompression is my specialty. Higher time efficiency. More salvage.”

  “He’s right,” Larry said. With a grunt he heaved a silvery tank onto Mingo’s back so that the diver could secure it. Sunlight glinted against the tank
’s countless nicks and scuffs and scratches.

  “Don’t mind the looks,” Larry said to Holden. “Only new tanks are shiny. As long as the old tanks are clean inside, no grease and corrosion, they’re solid. If you’re worried about these tanks exploding, you’ve been watching too many movies. It takes a hell of a lot of force to make one of these babies blow.”

  “I am reassured,” Holden said gravely.

  “It’s the special blends inside that cost,” Larry said.

  “That was noted on the bills you submitted when asking for an advance on expenses.”

  “So tell me, boss man,” Mingo asked Holden mockingly, “should I be using a normoxic blend? We’re not going all that far down.”

  Holden looked at him. “Just as long as it’s not a moronic blend, which would suit you.”

  Larry shifted and busied himself checking straps and buckles on Luis, who was watching Holden and Mingo warily.

  “What did you just call me?” Mingo asked Holden.

  “A moron, because you suggested using a normoxic blend at the surface.” Holden’s voice was neutral, almost bored. Mingo had been pushing him at every opportunity. It was time to push back.

  “I no say nothin’ ‘bout surface. But I be fast enough goin’ down to suck on a normoxic can straight off the deck.”

  Holden’s phone vibrated, telling him a new message had come in. He pulled it out.

  “Check his mix,” he said to Larry without looking up. “That sort of manly idiocy kills divers.”

  “I do it before. Me!” Mingo said, pointing at his chest.

  “You underline my estimation of your intelligence,” Holden said, working over his phone. “Frankly, I doubt you should decant your own mixes.”

  “Back off, Cameron,” Larry said, double-tapping Luis’s tank in a signal that he was ready to go. “You can read up real fast on mixes on that fancy phone of yours or you could get out of the way and let us work.”

  “Mixes?” Holden’s black eyebrows lifted.

  He turned the phone so Larry and Mingo could see a photo of a blue-eyed, blond little girl with straight hair smiling devilishly through the gap in her missing front teeth. Her skin was pearl dusted with freckles. Next to her was a boy with curly black hair, brown skin, and teeth missing from his smile. The boy had Holden’s striking eyes.

  “My niece and nephew, fraternal twins,” Holden said. “Quite a handful for my brother and his wife.”

  The other men looked astonished that Holden was related to anything human. Then they smiled.

  “Oh, she be heartbreaker,” Mingo said.

  Larry smiled in spite of himself. “The look in her eyes reminds me of Kate before . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Holden knew Larry was thinking about the death of his parents. If Mingo knew, it didn’t show in his expression. Holden pocketed his phone.

  “Chitchat aside,” he said to the diver, “we all know that your dive computer is going to talk to the little compressors on your back and shunt around the proper amounts of helium so that you don’t get nitrogen narcosis, unless you deliberately bugger it.”

  Mingo looked at him, but there was humor instead of malice in his eyes. “I could do it without the little box.”

  “The little box is what allows you to enjoy a longer life expectancy than you have any right to, which will no doubt please a lot of ladies in St. Vincent.”

  Mingo laughed.

  Larry gave a final check to the diver’s equipment and double-tapped on the tank.

  Mingo fixed his mask in place. His fingers went to the hand-sized silvery box on his wrist, made a few adjustments so that it would start counting the instant he hit the water, and went in flippers first, dropping like a rock thanks to his weight belt.

  “He’s a better diver than the wages I give him,” Larry said. “So is his brother.”

  That’s not saying a great deal, Holden thought. “From the looks of it, you’re thinking of employing the siphon today.”

  “Weather isn’t giving me much choice.”

  Both men looked to the horizon. The difference was subtle, like someone was slowly, slowly dimming a light. Nothing would happen today, perhaps not even tomorrow. But the storm was strengthening, sending ripples through the ocean, changing the way Golden Bough rode at anchor.

  Sensing another presence, Holden glanced up. Grandpa Donnelly was looking at the same horizon, his fingers clenched on the rail until his knuckles stood out like white stones. Then he turned away and went back into the wheelhouse.

  “Grandpa will oversee the siphon,” Larry said. “If you want to watch a lot of sand and muck pumped into the barrel, feel free. If you want to help fish out anything worth keeping, you can pay for your room and board.”

  Since Holden hadn’t smelled alcohol on the other man’s breath today, he assumed that fatigue was dragging on Larry.

  Or the realization that this dive was a dead loss.

  CHAPTER 9

  AN ENGINE HOLDEN hadn’t heard before ripped into noisy life at the stern of the ship. Diesel smoke poured out an exhaust, then largely disappeared as the engine warmed up. A few minutes later, a stream of sand, salt water, silt, and debris began gushing into the large barrel on the stern.

  Grandpa Donnelly brushed past Holden and went to stand near the dredge receiving bay, which was a huge tub six feet across with walls about a foot high, formed out of stainless steel. One side was open like a dump truck’s back. The whole bin could be levered up and spilled overboard once the muck had been checked for artifacts.

  Coiled by the barrel was about one hundred feet of six-inch-diameter black rubber hosing that could be used as needed, depending on the depth of the dive. One end of the hose was manned by Luis on the bottom. On top, the siphon was run by its own diesel engine to create the suction required for the process. Sand that was sucked up from the sea below the siphon’s mouth went up through the hose and poured out onto the stainless steel grate. Grandpa Donnelly grabbed a short rake and began separating out chunks that looked promising.

  “Going to the whip, are you?” Holden asked the elder Donnelly, pitching his voice to be heard over the racket.

  “Not much time left in this race. The weather is going sour.”

  Holden looked at the horizon where the storm would appear. It had changed very little from previous days, but his thigh was still aching. Nothing definitive, simply an early warning of changing pressures. The more steep the changes, the more likely a weather shift.

  And the pressure had been shooting up and down like a yo-yo in the past few days.

  “The scholars at AO are going to curse,” Holden said looking at the sludge.

  “We’re recording the sector Luis is siphoning on camera,” Grandpa Donnelly said impatiently. “It’ll have to do. There’s no time for titty fingers anymore. Your bosses can have treasure or they can have some bullshit papers published in places no one reads.”

  “Actually, AO will be pleased. Going through the siphon’s output is a lot faster than having divers fan sand with their fingers until their air runs low.”

  “Scholars,” Donnelly hissed. He pulled a cold pipe out of his pocket and clamped the stem between his teeth. “They act like the sea bottom never changes unless humans muck it up. Any fool knows that the bottom is alive, and living things move and change all the time.”

  Farnsworth popped up from his belowdecks workshop. “Heard the siphon. Anything?”

  “Noise. Burning fuel. Salt water,” Donnelly said curtly.

  Something pale flashed among the muck. His hand shot out with surprising speed. “Pottery.” He tossed it into one of the buckets standing by the barrel.

  Farnsworth started to record it on his small computer tablet, then shrugged. No point in being meticulous with a siphon at work.

  A few minutes later the rake turned over a several links of gold chain.

  “Retrieving it,” Farnsworth said.

  He picked up the bit of jewelry, held it up to the camera that was
recording the dredging area, and popped the gold into a clear plastic bag that was already marked with the date, hour, and sector being siphoned.

  For a time, watching the siphon was fascinating—the gush and swirl of water, the clink of coral debris, the occasional fragments of pottery or ancient wood that began to decompose the instant it struck air.

  “Any sense of what the wood was used for?” Holden asked Farnsworth.

  “Feels like wet cardboard and is about as anonymous in small pieces. Could have come from a trencher, a bucket, a spar, or a crumbled chest that once held gems and gold. And wouldn’t that be lovely?”

  “It would go a long way toward making AO smile,” Holden said.

  Donnelly said something about “god-rotting vultures.”

  After the first hour the constant noise and swirl of water became almost numbing. The occasional spurt of pottery, or the even more rare gleam of metal, did little to shake the dreamlike trance of the men watching. Yet nothing escaped the old man’s experienced eye.

  Green flashed and tumbled in the barrel. A large-knuckled hand shot out and closed around the stone, pulling it free. Slowly his hand opened. A thumb-sized crystal spear of gemstone glowed in unearthly beauty.

  “Emerald,” Farnsworth said. “Uncut.”

  Donnelly nodded. “Spaniards killed a lot of Indians in the mines. Royalty loved emeralds. On the treasure galleons, the officers smuggled their own gems aboard. It was a perk, like wine at meals.”

  “Some historians,” Farnsworth said absently, his mind captive to the intense green crystal, “speculate that ships sank due to the excess tonnage of silver and gold smuggled by the crew.”

  “Greed is always deadly,” Holden said. “And so very human.”

  Word of the emerald went through the ship like a shock wave. Everybody but Volkert appeared to gawk at the valuable bit of crystal and speculate on its worth. Donnelly allowed it for a few minutes, never taking his own eyes off the barrel where the siphon disgorged a continuous stream of sand, silt, and water.

  “Go back to work,” Donnelly said without looking up. His hand closed around the emerald, concealing it.