“Then you dive with him.”
“Don’t worry, I will. Tell me something. Ever do this before, go off on a hunt for a good pearl bed?”
“Like this? No. But then”—Bakali laughed—“never found a ship of dead men before, or pearls bigger than my cojones.”
And even Sam had to laugh at that—though the images from the death ship, then the fire, seemed to be some line they had all crossed. A line crossing over to something now strange, deadly.
He didn’t like it.
And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
Bakali looked over the side. “Sure can see good down there. Be good when we dive.”
But Sam had lifted his eyes to the horizon. Ahead—a line of clouds.
“Hey—see that? What’s that you think?”
Bakali took the unlit cigar out of his mouth. “That? I don’t know. Clouds?”
Sam looked at the low-lying clouds. They didn’t go from one end of the horizon to the other, but instead seem centered at one spot.
“I don’t know. Clouds go…up. These look like they’re just hanging there. Hard to tell unless we get closer. But does look weird, no? Like a wall of fog rising from the sea.”
“It will blow away. Things usually do out here. Except in typhoon season. Then, you know what? You might as well jump in the water with those weights around your neck and let them drag you right down to the bottom. Typhoons out here…they’re killers.”
“Hey! Hey everyone!”
Tommy yelled from the bow. “I just saw this big flying thing under the water, the size of car. God—what—”
Bakali answered. “Probably a manta ray. This is their kind of water. Not too deep, good reefs for lots of fishies for them to feed. Probably wasn’t that big though.” Then to Sam. “Kid gets excited, hm?”
Sam looked over the starboard side but didn’t see anything.
But then the ship slowed. He and Bakali looked up to the wheelhouse.
The ship slowed…and then stopped.
Captain Rosa came out. “We drop anchor. Come on, everyone get moving.”
And the crew, led by Ernesto, started hurrying to lower the ship’s twin anchors.
Rosa came running down to Bakali and Sam.
“These are good waters to dive. Maybe sixty…seventy meters. No more. This could be a good place.”
Sam stared at Rosa’s eyes. Gambler’s eyes, Sam guessed. Used to following his hunches.
“Should I suit up?” Bakali said.
But Rosa shook his head. “No. Help get the ship moored.” He looked at Sam. “You, and your young friend. You go down first.”
Sam stood up. This was a job, and Rosa was the boss.
“All right. I was wondering. You see that?”
He pointed at the fog bank.
Rosa gave it a cursory glance. “Not bad weather. Looks like fog.”
“Ever see any fog like that before?”
Rosa gave it another look. “No. But this place here—it is barely on the charts. Maybe there is land there. Some land, usually some fog.”
Sam looked at it. That might explain it. But the fog hadn’t moved. In the beautiful, blue sky day, without a cloud in the sky, with a steady gentle wind from east. The clouds, the fog bank stayed in place.
A wind like that should do something…but the fog bank looked like it was painted onto the sky.
“We’re going down?” Tommy said.
“Yes,” Rosa answered. He patted Sam’s shoulder. “You two. Maybe we get lucky here. When you see the big fish, sometimes the reefs are good, it’s good eating for them.”
One of the crewmen shouted something in Portuguese from the stern. Rosa nodded. “Okay—the stern is secure. Get into your suits. Go bring us some luck.”
Sam looked at Tommy. Just one great adventure for him. And they walked over to the compressor, to the two tenders waiting to put their heavy dive outfits on them.
Tommy was ready ahead of Sam, so he moved to the metal platform first. His tender, a short grizzly man who spoke no English, fed him the tubes while Tommy clumsily stepped onto the platform and sat down on the heavy iron-mesh bench.
He gave a thumbs-up to the tender, who relayed the signal to the man working the winch. The platform started moving into the air, and then over the railing until it was suspended over the brilliant water.
Sam’s tender carried his helmet to him and then started to place it over his head, fitting it snugly onto the places where it would be bolted.
The man worked quickly then, tightening the bolts corroded from years of brine and diving. When the wrench wouldn’t move any more, he placed the lead horseshoe on Sam’s shoulders. Forty pounds of deadweight, and that—along with the boots and the weights at his midsection—would give him a speedy ride to the bottom.
The tender tapped Sam’s faceplate.
Sam gave him a thumbs-up.
The metal platform had been brought back having disgorged Tommy, already rocketing to the bottom. Water streamed off the platform as they lowered it to the deck with a loud thud.
Sam stood up and walked to the platform, and sat down on the bench. Another thumbs-up to the tender, another relay, and the platform started up. Except this time it rose a bit wobbly, and Sam guessed he had plopped down off-center. He grabbed one of the trusses connected to a bar that ran along the top of the platform. He shifted his weight to the right.
That seemed to steady it. Sam leaned down and watched the platform sail over the railing. Then he could see the ocean below him, a bit less clear with the faceplate fogging up. That should clear once he hit the water…though he had had dives where the main faceplate had a perpetual foggy smear. Could ruin a dive. And that could easily add to the danger level. A bit of fog, and you missed stuff.
The platform lowered, until Sam sat waist deep in water.
It was time for him to step off and go down.
He checked his other gear; dive knife on his belt, a coupled of bags for pearls should they get lucky, or for oysters if they wanted to sample any beds they found. But if they were looking for where the giant pearls could be hiding, those oysters wouldn’t fit in any bags.
Sam stood up. He checked that his air tubes and lifeline were free of the platform.
It all looked good. He stepped off the platform in the cumbersome suit and began his plunge to the bottom.
31
The Indian Ocean
THIRTY METERS, SAM THOUGHT.
Had to be closer to forty. Maybe more. And Rosa probably knew it. They couldn’t stay down long at that depth.
And Sam had to wonder…did Bakali know how deep it was? Maybe that’s why he wasn’t in any hurry to dive.
Let us test the water, and the depth, first.
But when Sam tilted his head down, he finally saw the bottom.
And something more.
A mammoth reef that seemed to stretch in all directions. Though the color faded at this depth, the visibility was so good that Sam could still make out the rainbowlike shadings, from giant barrel-shaped coral to twisting branches of treelike coral that looked like some ancient bramble.
He looked for Tommy, and saw that he had already moved to a sandy area, a valley between two mountains of coral.
Tommy raised a hand to Sam and waved.
Sam looked down.
He was going to land on the fringe of one of the coral brambles. Not a great place to land, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
He braced his legs, and landed on a few of the twisted branches, crashing down a foot to stop his plunge.
He looked around for the best pathway to the sandy bottom and Tommy.
He started moving—a bit like mountain climbing. But now his suit, though still heavy enough to keep him down, wasn’t so bulky that he couldn’t move over the coral, using his boots to kick and hands to grab.
In minutes, he stood a few feet away from Tommy.
And he saw what he didn’t see from atop the coral—the reason
Tommy hadn’t moved from the spot.
Sam took a giant stride off the last snarled mound of coral, snapping some of the beautiful arms in the process. But now he was on the flat sandy bottom.
Tommy’s arm pointed straight ahead.
To a bed of oysters that seemed impossible.
Giant oysters—about a dozen or so, all different sizes, but they were all big, a few gigantic. Most were open, exposing the meat of the oysters siphoning the water as the current fed the shellfish. The largest ones were the size of a kitchen table, and none was smaller than a dinner plate.
“Wow,” said Sam inside his helmet. Tommy couldn’t hear him, but for a moment Sam felt as though what he was looking at was so incredible as to be unreal.
Leading with his head, Sam came beside Tommy and patted his shoulder. He could see the kid’s grin through the faceplate.
Then they both trudged closer to the mammoth oyster bed.
Amazing, Sam thought, now only feet away from the ring of giant oysters. He scanned the puffy meat inside, checking for any signs of pearls hidden within. He tapped Tommy and told him to check a few of the other open oysters farther down the bed.
But so far, they all appeared empty.
Could it be that these oysters, so giant, didn’t produce pearls too easily?
A normal pearl would be lost in the slimy oyster flesh. Might be worth digging around in one, Sam thought, using his knife to cut through the meat.
The oyster would begin to close then—but his knife would quickly kill it, arresting the closing action.
Waste of a big animal, though he guessed the oyster wasn’t much of an animal. No eyes, no arms, no hands. Even a snail had more personality.
Sam’s personal joke made him grin.
For the moment his apprehension faded here. This was incredible and he was glad to be here—even if they didn’t turn up any prize pearls.
He turned in Tommy’s direction.
The other diver had knelt down, probably trying to get a good look inside the open oysters. They both had their lights on, but the water was so clear they really didn’t need them. It could be that the yellow light might catch a bit of the shininess hidden beneath the oyster flesh.
Sam leaned close to the largest open oyster, his light now squarely falling onto its center.
Which is when he felt movement right behind him.
Tommy, he thought. Maybe he found something. Sam started to turn around.
It was difficult to turn in a dive suit. Sam knew that you had to be careful not to give yourself too much momentum, or all the deadweight that you carried could send you corkscrewing around, then tumbling to the ground.
Still, feeling something move behind you, something brush the back of your legs, was enough of a feeling to make Sam hurry to quickly see what was there.
He tried to use his hands to balance himself, almost dancerlike, as he twisted around.
He expected to see Tommy.
That’s what he told himself.
Except some part of him knew it wasn’t Tommy. Perhaps the fact that he felt the movement, felt something behind him, somewhere near his thighs, his knees.
So despite his reassuring thoughts, in that second he turned…he knew it couldn’t be Tommy.
Sam’s outstretched hands helped him keep his balance. But when he saw what was there he almost forgot about managing his deadweight momentum.
The crab was a species he had never seen before.
But that wasn’t the thing that made him quickly take a step back. The crab was easily four feet long, and stood three feet high, even higher when it started to hold up its claws, mammoth pincers that rose another foot or two above its black marble eyes.
Eyes that looked right at him.
The crab waited, waving those pincers, twice the thickness of Sam’s arm, even in this bulky suit. Waving them, and snapping them open and closed. The shell of the crab rose to a dome, bubbled with bony sharp outcrops like armor.
Sam had no doubt this thing could pull him apart with those pincers.
And though it was hard to read anything in those empty black eyes, eyes the size of an eight ball, Sam guessed that the crab’s reluctance to move away meant that it viewed Sam as food.
His right hand slipped down to the knife at his belt.
It was time to quickly give the crab something to make it reconsider its course.
Bringing his knife up to a good striking angle so he could jam it at one of those damn eyes, or maybe right into the mouth that, now, he could see was lined with what looked like tiny snapping bits, almost like the claws.
But he would have to attack that without having those claws catch him. How strong were they? Could they get his arm, crunch down, and snap it in two?
He brought the knife to chest level, ready to plunge it forward, when something unexpected happened.
The crab moved. He imagined that it would lumber slowly forward, that he would have plenty of time to thrust his blade right into the thing.
But no. It moved fast.
What was the word? Scuttled.
Like the blue crabs they’d drag up from the traps in Brooklyn, dumped onto the dock, and then moving sideways with amazing speed as if each and every one of them knew that their life depended on how damn fast they moved away.
Except this one moved forward.
Like dueling, it came right at Sam with its arms flying like twin rapiers.
And it was so much more mobile than Sam. It moved effortlessly, with an even, jerky speed.
Sam stepped back, then again, when his left boot caught on something.
His right boot went back, lifted, and then lowered down to steady him. But the surface that his right boot landed on was uneven, curved.
Sam started to fall to one knee.
His right foot sat on an uneven surface. But worse, in stumbling, in trying to balance, he lost his knife.
He turned to see it spiraling, end over end, falling into the sand. He’d have to take a step to reach it. He had to retrieve it, because he guessed on the next parry from the crab, it would lock those giant claws on him.
Suddenly, there was this tremendous, horrible pressure surrounding his right leg.
He looked back, and saw what had happened.
He had stepped back, and then on and into the giant oyster. The oyster’s reflex shut the giant bivalves on his leg. Shut tight, tighter until his leg was trapped. The pressure was painful, but not excruciating.
But he couldn’t move his leg, couldn’t get it out of the oyster, and most importantly, couldn’t get his knife.
He looked up defenseless, now trapped, and saw the crab, only about a foot away, as its dull eyes still studied him ready for the next, and final, scuttle forward.
32
The Indian Ocean
THE CRAB SEEMED TO BE hesitating before attacking, as if such a trapped specimen must be too good to be true. Its twin antennae waved in the current, and the oversized claws were still held high. But it didn’t move forward for the kill, at least not yet.
And Sam knew that the danger was not simply having those claws tear a chunk out of his leg. No, once they cut through his suit, the air pressure would drop, water could come in. If he couldn’t maintain air pressure in his helmet, he might get a “squeeze” from the pressure drop; his face would get plastered against the faceplate like butter being smeared.
In seconds, he’d be dead.
The claws came down. Sam saw the angled legs of the crab dig into the sand.
And then…
From behind the crab, Tommy knelt down.
Sam had been so focused on the creature that he didn’t even see Tommy move, didn’t see him kneel right behind the crab, the knife held high, and then plunge it down.
Tommy had both hands on the knife.
The blade was an inch and a half wide and sharp, with a serrated edge at its pointed tip. A substantial knife. But would it be able to pierce the thick, bulbous shell of the crab?
The giant crab moved; it reared back and then began a jump right at Sam—at the same moment that Tommy’s blade cut into the shell.
Sam almost expected the knife blade to bounce off, to slide away from the hard shell; or worse, break right off.
But the knife met no resistance.
Like a worm trying to avoid the inevitable hook, the crab twisted around, trying to get at whatever had hurt it. But Tommy had pulled the knife out quickly. He was kneeling and the crab could easily turn around and grab the kid’s torso with both claws, cutting the other diver in two.
But Tommy rammed the knife down again hard, and then again, until the twisting crab, demented with pain, crazed with the fact of its death, turned to Tommy…but too late.
It stopped moving even as the trio of holes on the top of its bulbous shell erupted with a flow of fluid from inside. The fluid, its blood or whatever, looked purple in the water, swirling around Tommy, swirling now around Sam.
Then Sam was brought back to his real problem.
He was trapped by the giant shell, the pressure constant, his leg feeling numb below where the oyster kept trying to use its powerful muscle to close, to protect the living meat between the two shells.
Tommy stood up, and walked to the back of the shell.
Sam could see the kid’s eyes, and a bit of a smile behind his faceplate.
Tommy had saved his life.
Sam could turn around and see what Tommy was doing.
The other diver hacked at the back of the oyster, at the seam where the two shells were held together.
And from the look of things, it wasn’t easy work. Flakes of the muscle, or whatever the tendon was that held the shells together, peeled away as Tommy sliced at the seam. It was slow going, and already they had been down too long.
Sam looked ahead and saw the dead crab, now inanimate, the trio of holes on top of its shell nearly done shooting their spray into the sea.
Another look back at Tommy, and Sam could see that the blade was finally going deep—he was getting somewhere.
And then, Sam felt it. The terrible pressure on his leg began to relax. Not completely but enough so that the pain lessened, and he could again feel his lower leg.
The Island of the Skull Page 13