Night Diver: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  About a kilometer out, the wind came up, chopping the oily-looking water into sharp little waves that rode on top of the underlying swell. The workboat had to push hard across the dull surface of the sea, aluminum hull smacking as it hit the chop kicked up by the sudden exhalation of wind.

  “Would you mind backing that down just a bit?” Holden shouted to her. “I’d like to be able to dive when I get there.”

  She realized that she was pushing the boat at a speed better suited to calm water. It made for a rough ride, and no doubt his thigh was already aching from the dropping air pressure.

  “Sorry,” she said, slowing so they could talk without shouting. “I wasn’t thinking. Well, I was, but not about speed.”

  “So what were you thinking about?”

  “The fact that people with vertigo aren’t afraid of heights as much as they are tempted to jump. To fly. I understand that. Being on the sea again. Us. Do you think there’s a chance for us?”

  He almost smiled, because he’d spent a great deal of time before dawn, listening to her breathe, holding her, thinking.

  “What is it they say in America,” he asked. “All in?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m all in, Kate. The rest is your choice.”

  Wind gusted, pushing hard at the hull. She responded with automatic movements on the controls, evening out the boat’s motion.

  “Do we have a shot at the real thing?” she asked without looking at him.

  “I didn’t know we’d been feeling a false sort of thing.”

  She gave him a smile that turned upside down. “That isn’t what I meant. It’s just . . . the rest of it.”

  “The complication called life.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d love to promise you it will be easy, but then, easy isn’t worth much, is it?”

  Her smile righted itself. “No, it isn’t.”

  “You were heartbreakingly brave at seventeen.”

  “I was scared to the bone.”

  “That’s what bravery is, love. Doing the right thing no matter how much it frightens you.”

  Before she could say anything, her pocket cheeped. She steered one-handed and pulled out her phone.

  Holden saw tension draw her face before she even answered.

  “It’s Grandpa. He hates phones. He never—”

  Abruptly she slowed the boat so she could hear over the engine. As she listened, her tension redoubled at the strain in his voice as much as his words. Then she went pale to her lips. When Holden gently pushed her away from the controls, she barely noticed. He took her seat, checked the dials automatically, and looked toward her.

  “We’re on our way,” she said to her phone. “Ten minutes. Maybe a bit more. The sea suddenly went choppy.”

  Her hand shook as she pocketed the phone. Only then did she truly realize that she and Holden had switched places.

  “I can drive,” she said. “It will be hard on your thigh, but—”

  “I’ll drive. I can brace myself more effectively when I know precisely what’s coming. Shore or ship?”

  “Ship. Larry’s sick. Grandpa called for a helicopter evacuation.”

  “Dive related?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Holden nodded and pushed the throttle as high as the boat could safely go given the water conditions. The scarred hull came up on plane and raced toward the unseen ship, assuring Kate that he knew what he was doing with the controls and the limitations of the workboat.

  Safe wasn’t the same as comfortable. Bursts of spray peppered over the windscreen and swirled to get both her and Holden damper than the humidity already had. She was forced to brace herself so that she didn’t fly out of her seat, but she didn’t complain. She felt like they were crawling, wanted to tell him to speed up, yet didn’t say a word. It wouldn’t be safe to go any faster, which meant Holden wouldn’t listen to her.

  That’s why he took the pilot seat, she realized. How did he know?

  Then she realized that her hands were quivering despite their grip on the dash. He must have seen how shaken she was before she even knew herself.

  Larry, she thought, wanting to scream like the engines. What happened to you? Don’t you dare be really hurt.

  And she was afraid down to her soul that he was.

  Damn the ravenous sea!

  Yet even as she silently raged, she knew it wasn’t the sea. It was choices, human choices, the freedom to be stupid that took so many lives.

  A black helicopter with black pontoons churned by overhead just as they saw Golden Bough’s outline condense out of the thickened atmosphere on the horizon. The aircraft would reach the ship within two minutes. The workboat would take longer and be much harder on the occupants.

  Holden didn’t need conversation to know what was going on behind Kate’s haunted eyes, so he concentrated on getting to the ship as fast as he could. When they finally pulled alongside, the helicopter was waiting a short way out, sitting up on fat black pontoons. It was old, almost antique, with a bubble-shaped cockpit and a body that was more empty space and framework than aluminum paneling. With its rotors turning lazily, the helicopter looked barely airworthy.

  A crewman who was probably a med tech finished fastening a gurney to one of the pontoons, then slid a plastic cover over Larry, protecting him from stray water. The rental skiff with Grandpa piloting it was tapping gently against the big pontoon, held in place by the wind and the old man’s skill on the water.

  The pilot was seated, shouting across the open cockpit with Patrick Donnelly. Her tank top fitted over her lean body and her multiple neat braids were tied at her nape, out of the way of the helmet she was getting ready to put back on.

  Grandpa’s voice carried across the waves. “Move! You gotta get him to shore fast!”

  Holden brought the tender alongside the fiberglass rental Kate’s grandfather had used to ferry the patient over to the helicopter. Even through her worry, she noticed that Holden made the tricky maneuver look easy.

  “Take the controls,” he said.

  The instant she did, he moved to the gunwale rising and falling against Grandpa’s boat. Timing the swells, he crossed over into the other boat in a single flowing movement that didn’t jar either small craft.

  Kate watched, impressed. Switching between two watercraft must have been part of his ABCD training. He made it look easy. It wasn’t.

  “ . . . fly barely above the waves,” the pilot was saying in a clipped British accent. “Until we are certain about the cause of the patient’s condition, we have to assume the bends. If you want to take responsibility for him, we can fly up high, but standard procedure says we stay real low for evacs of scuba accidents.”

  When Grandpa opened his mouth to answer, Holden cut him off. “She is correct,” he said. “Kate will take the workboat and I’ll take this skiff. You fly in with Larry. Your information about him will be more up-to-date than anyone else’s, including Kate’s.”

  Grandpa turned on Holden as though happy to find an outlet for the emotions strangling him. “Who the hell are you to—”

  “I’m a former navy diver,” Holden cut in, nudging the older man away from the boat’s controls. “We’re wasting time. Crewman,” he snapped.

  “Yes, sir,” the man said automatically, responding to the authority in the stranger’s tone.

  “When your patient is secure, help Mr. Donnelly aboard,” Holden said.

  “But the Golden Bough—” Grandpa began.

  Kate heard. “I’ve already piloted the ship solo in a storm worse than this one is making up to be.”

  For a few tense moments, Grandpa chewed over his choices and she held her breath. He’d left the ship in someone else’s care only once before, when he’d been too out of his head with pain and fever to object. When he had awakened after emergency surgery, it was to the news that his son and daughter-in-law were dead. Larry had been with him then, had helped him to cope. Though neither of them ever spoke aloud about it
, both remembered it. Despite their occasional arguments, Grandpa loved Larry as he loved nothing but the sea itself.

  And now he had to choose.

  Grandpa muttered a few ripe words while he timed the swells and chose his moment. Then he stepped from the gunwale up onto the pontoon with the speed of a man half his age.

  “Hand up that valise,” he ordered Holden.

  Holden looked down, grabbed the battered leather valise from an open locker, and managed to get the small suitcase up to the old man without either of them going for a swim. Grandpa squeezed Larry’s plastic-covered shoulder and climbed into the helicopter.

  “Which hospital?” Holden asked the pilot.

  “Saint Swithin’s in Kingstown,” she said. “They have a pressure ward. It’s old, but like this bird, it does good work.”

  The pilot put her helmet on and waited while everyone strapped in.

  Carefully Kate backed the workboat away, giving Holden room to do the same. As soon as they were out of range, the helicopter rotors speeded until they were nearly invisible. There was a moment of hesitation while the pontoons broke the embrace of salt water and then the aircraft shot aloft. Flying very low toward the island, the helicopter quickly became a noisy black dot heading back toward shore.

  By the time Kate and Holden tied off and got aboard the Golden Bough, the aircraft had vanished.

  “That pilot could show the helicopter crews I know a thing or two,” Holden said. “Most of them got up so fast that everyone was pancaked on the deck. To be fair, we were under fire at the time.”

  She smiled wanly, took a deep breath, and turned to what was left of the crew. Luis was splotched with dirt, sand, and water from working the siphon. Raul was out of his wetsuit and half dressed. Both men were pale beneath their skin’s natural darkness.

  “I quit,” Luis announced. “The dive, it really is cursed.”

  “Me too,” Raul said.

  “Again?” she said.

  “Nobody is going ashore until we know what happened,” Holden said, standing beside Kate.

  In silent agreement, she handed him the key to the workboat.

  “Talk or swim,” she said.

  Raul looked like he would rather swim, but a glance at Kate’s stance and Holden’s disconcerting eyes got the diver talking.

  “I don’t know much,” Raul said so softly he barely could be heard. Then, louder, “Larry, he say something over the com about feeling no good. We be down there, I don’t know, maybe an hour after descent, maybe less.”

  “So, no more than ninety minutes since you went in?” Holden asked, looking at his dive watch.

  Raul shrugged. “Larry, he go down quick. Me? Slow and easy, man.”

  “Go on,” Kate said through pale lips. “You were down there about an hour and then . . . ?”

  “He work the siphon and I work near. Then it sound like the siphon suck up something too big. Don’t know. I don’t see that. But I hear or maybe feel a big clack and he cry out on com.”

  “Was Larry all right up to then?” Holden asked.

  “He don’t say nothing, so I don’t ask. He be working fast. That storm, she be coming soon.”

  Kate made a sharp gesture for Raul to keep talking.

  “So I hear the funny sound and then Larry, he give me the wave.”

  In demonstration Raul put his arm out and bent the elbow. His hand was flat with the thumb pointing down. Then he brought the hand to his chest and tapped himself a few times.

  “Got it,” Holden said. “Universal dive signal for not good. No com required, just good visibility. Did you see the siphon stick?”

  “Just feel it like a demon banging,” Raul said.

  “Could it have come from Larry dropping the siphon onto something, rather than trying to suck up something too big?” Kate asked. “The suction could have made the metal mouth hit harder than you’d expect.”

  Raul shrugged. “I be busy steering him to coins and such, all pretty and shiny. I don’t watch him.”

  “Which grids were you working?” Holden asked. He hadn’t seen anything the least bit shiny and beckoning when he had been down.

  Raul wiped moisture off his face with a neoprene-covered arm. “He just tell me follow the siphon down. I do.”

  “Where’s your backup dive computer?” Kate asked.

  “Volkert take, same as always.”

  She headed for the dive center with Holden right behind her.

  “What about me?” Raul asked.

  “Stand by for orders,” she said over her shoulder.

  Kate hurried down to the dive center, shut off Volkert’s cocoon, and asked, “What grids were Larry and Raul diving?”

  “Larry was doing the real work. Raul isn’t much good underwater,” Volkert added, shoving a cookie into a mouth that was still half full.

  “Which grids?” Kate asked again, baring her teeth.

  He pointed at the screen that held all the grids. Two of them were highlighted.

  “Were they bringing up gold?” she asked.

  “Larry found it right on top of the ground,” Volkert said. “Then he started siphoning and Luis started whooping about coins. Then the siphon must have slipped or Larry dropped it. The old man shut it down and the divers started up. You want to see the .mpg files?”

  “Copy and send to my e-mail,” Holden said. “I’ll go over it. When was your latest weather update?”

  Volkert’s thick fingers moved with surprising speed over the computer keyboard. An inset appeared. “Two hours ago. Not good. Not bad. Unsettled.”

  “Right,” Holden said. “The captain may want us to dive again before the storm makes it impossible.”

  “Yah, okay. How many come back up this time?” Volkert asked sarcastically.

  “Shut it and do your job.”

  Kate saw Holden head out of the dive center and caught up. “What are you going to do?”

  “Get my duffel off the workboat and dive with Raul.”

  “Why bother? A handful of gold coins won’t make a difference.”

  “You saw the grids where Larry was diving?” Holden asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When I dove with him yesterday, we were at the other end of the wreck and we didn’t see anything but junk. Today he was diving a part of the wreck that is about as far away from the old dive spots as he can get and still be on the grid. The place he chose for today looks like a pile of lava overgrown with coral, right on the edge of the drop-off, dodgy to dive. I want to know why he did it.”

  Kate had noticed the same thing and hadn’t wanted to think about it. It raised questions that made her queasy and answers that made her want to throw up. Chewing on her lip, reminding herself to breathe, she watched Holden retrieve his duffel.

  “Mingo has to be the thief,” she said when Holden returned to the deck.

  “Circumstantial evidence tends that way, but only if there was a treasure actually found and then concealed. We have no proof of that.” Yet, Holden added silently.

  That was what he would be looking for today, in a very rough patch of lava and coral and wreckage.

  “If not Mingo, then who?” Kate asked sharply.

  “Do you really need me to say it?”

  “No! It can’t be Larry.”

  Holden dropped his duffel and put his hands on her shoulders. “Since I arrived, I’ve watched hours of dive files featuring the divers who are still with us. Luis is an adequate diver, but doesn’t have the physical stamina or skill to work double shifts for this long and not get in trouble. Raul doesn’t have any feel for the water. He needs a keeper down there, especially since Mingo disappeared.”

  The stubborn expression on Kate’s face told Holden that he wasn’t getting anywhere he wanted to be.

  “Larry made all the dive assignments,” Holden said quietly. “Divers worked all over the grid except the place where Larry struck gold today.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything except Larry was diving the safer parts of
the wreck first.”

  Holden wanted to gather her close and hold her against the coming storm. But he couldn’t weather it for her. Nor could he make her accept his help. It was her choice to make, her life to live.

  “What if Larry was diving double shifts—one for the files in dry parts of the grid and one for himself where the valuable salvage was?” Holden asked gently. “It would explain his extreme fatigue.”

  “So would drinking.” Her voice was as flat as her eyes. Her tone said that she didn’t really believe what she was saying but had to say it anyway.

  “Perhaps. And perhaps oxygen toxicity took him down rather than the bends. The hospital will tell us.”

  “Oxygen poisoning?” she asked, startled.

  “When I was in Iraq,” Holden said, “sometimes a squad of five divers had to do the work of ten. I’ve seen men who drank too much and I’ve seen OTS. Larry didn’t stink of alcohol on his skin. He drank, but he wasn’t a drunk.”

  Reluctantly she nodded.

  “If Larry was ill, nobody else caught whatever bug he had during all the weeks of working in close quarters,” Holden said.

  She took a deep breath and nodded again. She didn’t like where he was taking her. She liked that Larry was in the hospital even less.

  “I have seen men dive until oxygen poisoning brought them down,” Holden said. “Larry looked like those men.”

  “I can’t believe my brother is a thief,” she said hoarsely. “Mingo, sure.”

  “Oxygen toxicity is like falling off a cliff,” Holden said, his voice level, relentless. “You can push against it and push it and still push and sometimes you don’t move the needle far enough. But one time you do, and then something bloody stupid happens down there.”

  “I won’t believe it until I see some kind of evidence. And I’m not in a hurry to look for it.”

  His smile was gentle and impatient and sad. “In your place, I’d feel the same. Give me permission to go through crew quarters and don’t watch while I search Mingo’s cabin.” To begin with. I’ll get to Larry’s, too, but I don’t have to force her to confront what is most probably true. I don’t want to be the messenger who destroys her world.

  For the second time.