Deep Blue

by Randy Wayne White

Ford pulled off the night vision monocular and handed it over. “Keep watch for a while. My eyes need time to adjust before I switch on the sonar.”

  Through the lens, a billion stars became an infinity of pearls. Satellites appeared and dragged a glowing grid across the void. The moon, half full, shimmered above the western horizon.

  No sign of boats afloat or things that fly, so Tomlinson studied the electronics suite when it came to life. According to the GPS, they were 31.89 miles from Sanibel Lighthouse in eighty feet of water.

  This was important. They had left the territorial waters of the United States—the twelve-mile limit—far behind. The U.S. exclusive economic zone, however, extended two hundred nautical miles from the Florida peninsula. Maritime law was something he and Ford had discussed because of what might or might not happen if Julian’s people showed up.

  A bank of glowing LED screens offered more data. The chart plotter indicated it would be 2.2 miles before they should begin a serious search for the Captiva Blue Hole. The bottom was hard sand. On sonar, it showed as a flowing scroll of red. Fish—there weren’t many—appeared as series of sideways V shapes. Once, however, a school of bait was so tightly grouped, it scrolled beneath as one giant living mass.

  “How do you know it’s not just one big damn fish?” Tomlinson asked.

  “Stop worrying about that shark,” Ford replied and dropped the boat off plane. “Get the marker ready. I’ve been out here a couple of times and it’s not easy to find.” Then raised his voice to tell the dog, “Stay.”

  Pete was a regular little soldier, depending on who gave the orders. Tomlinson had to give the stubborn hulk his due.

  Like plowing a field, back and forth they went, while the screens fed information. The Blue Hole wasn’t an address you could punch into a GPS even though they had the numbers. It was a hole in the Earth, not large, and shielded from sonar by a limestone ledge that covered all but a crevice.

  Even with the monster boat’s high-tech equipage, it took a while.

  “You ready?” the biologist called over the engine noise.

  Tomlinson held an orange buoy connected to two hundred feet of line and a ten-pound weight. When told, he dumped it over the side. In the glare of a spotlight, the buoy fluttered while the line deployed, then drifted still.

  They anchored, drifted back. On the sonar screen, a scrolling red bottom was suddenly breached by a chasm of deepest blue.

  There it was: the opening to an archaic spring ninety feet below.

  Tomlinson dropped two safety lines, with Cyalume sticks attached incrementally. The sticks throbbed like fireflies until they vanished into the depths. Ford focused on getting the drones ready, then his dive gear, which, for some reason, included a metal ammo box.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Plastic explosives,” the biologist replied. “Don’t touch.”

  It was an hour before first light—five-fifty a.m. on the seventeenth day of Christmas.

  At fifty feet, Ford’s buoyancy compensator vest began to compress. The more it compressed, the faster he descended from starlight into blackness. He popped some air to slow his descent and illuminated a little dive computer. The green-and-yellow tank strapped to his back contained nitrox gas, a mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Nitrox extended his bottom time. At one hundred feet, he had twenty minutes. Any longer, he would have to make a decompression stop.

  Ford set the alarm for sixteen minutes, to err on the side of safety, and continued to descend fins first. Diving solo was dangerous enough.

  Clamped to his mask were twin LED lights, one over each ear. When his depth gauge read seventy feet, he activated the lights and panned full circle. A school of amberjack glittered like gold at the edge of visibility. Barracuda drifted as motionless as rungs, and a single hammerhead shark—not big, a skinny eight-footer—trailed the jacks.

  Below his fins was a moonscape of sand, rubble, and sea fans. The drones were already there, a few yards apart, attached to the rope that guided him down. Each was harnessed to a cement block, a Cyalume stick, and an air bag. The bags could be inflated by pulling a string or with a regulator.

  If the wrong people tried to bring them to the surface, it would be the last thing they ever did.

  Under electrical tape, molded to both fuselages, was a glob of C-4 plastic explosives. Not much. In Tampa, the man he trusted had provided one standard block in a Mylar wrapper. The stuff had the texture of modeling clay and weighed about a pound.

  Half of the block was still aboard the boat.

  Ford had already inserted detonator cords, tipped with crimping sleeves—hopefully, not long enough to be seen with a remote underwater camera. In his vest pocket were four tiny detonators. Two were pressure-sensitive. They would be set to go off as the air bags neared the surface. He didn’t want to damage the ancient spring, just get his message across. The other two detonators were electronic and synced to the same ultra-high-frequency signal. They could be activated from a boat or even a low-flying plane.

  First, though, he had to find the crevice.

  His dive computer had no GPS—satellite signals can’t penetrate more than a few feet of saltwater. But he had an electronic compass that pointed him to a spot he estimated was twenty yards away. Dragging the drones, he set off down a tunnel of light not much wider than his shoulders. Rubble and sea fans transitioned to an area of sand so fine, it blossomed around him in a cloud. Bad for visibility, but a sign he was heading in the right direction.

  Blue holes in the Gulf were conduits to inland lakes, rivers, and aquifers. For eons, freshwater had percolated through this sand and, over time, had ground it to powder. Another indicator was a reduction in buoyancy—objects sank faster in freshwater. There was also a chilly thermocline change.

  The crevice couldn’t be far.

  He stopped and checked his gauges: only twelve minutes of safe bottom time remained. He filled a small vial with water for testing, then continued on, pulling the drones along the bottom. It was a clumsy process that produced a sandstorm. Sand boiled around his mask and caused his own flashlights to blind him—the equivalent of driving through a snowstorm at night.

  He switched off one light, changed the angle of the other, but still couldn’t see worth a damn. So he killed the second light, too, and proceeded blindly with the compass as his only guide.

  This darkness was a void without borders. Sound and touch, taste and temperature, became reference points. Large fish, when frightened, explode to flight with a crackle of muscle density. He heard several big fish spook off. Grouper, most likely. This suggested there were rock hiding places ahead.

  He removed the regulator and tasted the water. It had a sulfuric bite and wasn’t salty. In the 1500s, Spanish ships had stopped at blue holes in the Gulf to replenish their water supply. Underground rivers had gushed like fountains in those days. This was no longer true. Five centuries of dredging, building, and diking had damaged Florida’s aquifers, but a trickle of freshwater still flowed here.

  Something else he heard: sonar pings and whistling—a pod of dolphins or porpoise, he guessed—moving rapidly toward him. There was nothing unsettling about that.

  I want to dive this place when I can see, Ford thought, then consulted the glowing gauges attached to his BC vest. Depth: 92´. Bottom time: 9 minutes 45 seconds and ticking. According to the compass, he’d stayed on track, so he had to be within a few yards of his destination.

  He dragged the drones closer, reached to turn on a light—and that’s when a wall of water hit him with the impact of a passing truck. The current tumbled him forward, then down into the denser gravity of a freshwater space without bottom. But there were ledges. His tank clanked off rocks; limestone abraded a knee and his right arm. Two bursts of gas into his BC slowed his fall. A third burst stopped it. He hung there suspended, disoriented, until he switched on the flashlights.

  He was
in a cave of sorts. Below his fins, a column of water angled into an earthen gloom. Above was a limestone awning that opened out into night . . . but two glowing Cyalume sticks told him the drones were up there on the lip of the crevice.

  The Captiva Blue Hole. He’d found it. But what the hell had caused a jet-stream current so sudden and powerful, it had knocked him down?

  He thought about the pod of dolphins he’d heard pinging. Maybe they’d come flying past in silence and one had rammed him. Or . . . the collective force of their wake had done it.

  Nothing like that had ever happened before.

  Ford gathered his composure by consulting gauges. Depth: 105´. Bottom time: 7 minutes 20 seconds and ticking. The glowing numerals of his watch—a Graham Chronofighter—told him it was six-forty a.m. Only a few minutes until first light.

  There was still a lot to do.

  He kicked his way to the lip of the crevice. Just inside the ledge was a concave area large enough to hide the drones from any diver not using a telemetry guidance system.

  Perfect.

  Visibility was good now that the sandstorm had abated. Using a crimper, he joined two detonators to each drone and secured them with tie wraps. In the world of explosives, introducing electric current provides a spooky moment. That’s what he was doing, activating power switches, when he heard a rhythmic thump-thump-thump from ninety feet above, which startled the hell out of him at first.

  When he heard it again, though, the thumping assumed a Morse code pattern: thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump-thump-thump. Over and over, in groups of three.

  Geezus. Was Tomlinson sending him an SOS by beating on the hull of the boat?

  More likely, the Zen hipster had gotten bored and was dancing, stomping the deck, to tunes by the Stones, or the Troggs doing “Wild Thing.”

  Wild thing . . . thunk-thunk-thunk . . . you make my heart sing.

  That seemed to fit, but it didn’t matter. Bottom time: 2 minutes 30 seconds.

  Ford went back to work. When the detonators had been activated, he set the switches to 0.00, which was one atmosphere of pressure, then armed all four. God help the diver who failed to hit the Deactivated button before surfacing.

  It was different with the remote detonators. Punch in a three-digit code. Boom!

  • • •

  Tomlinson was sitting at the console, monitoring the radar screen and anything else of interest. The biologist had been down about ten minutes when another massive school of fish registered on the sonar. At the same instant, the boat jolted as if slapped by a wake, then listed and rolled on unseen waves.

  “What the hell!”

  He jumped to his feet and grabbed a flashlight. His first thought was that Ford had done an emergency ascent and crashed into the hull. He probed an area near the stern and was relieved to see nitrox bubbles pooling near the safety line. Ford had been in the same spot for several minutes.

  Unless . . . unless he’d had to jettison his tank for some reason. It was possible.

  Tomlinson circled the boat, alert for movement on the surface, which was oily calm. To the west, the Gulf was waxen. The moon was melting into an orange sea. In the east, the first pale rind of daylight had appeared. Nearby, a school of dolphins or porpoises plumed a single silver geyser toward the fading stars. That’s all he saw. No sign of his friend.

  Ford had told him not to turn on the underwater lights, but he did anyway. Two dazzling banks of LEDs floated them in a lucent pool that faded to black twenty feet below. Nothing down there but crabs adrift and the tiny glowing insect eyes of shrimp.

  He was moving toward the bow when the retriever put its front paws on the portside gunnel and made a grunting noise while he stared at the moon.

  Tomlinson started to say, “Piss in that box—” but stopped when he saw what the dog saw. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered and stepped back.

  Speeding toward them out of the moon was a tall, black vertical object that cleaved the surface and displaced a wall of orange water. It was a football field away but closing fast.

  A periscope, he thought, because that’s what he’d anticipated: Julian in some kind of super-yacht or his own private submarine. “Think bigger and richer,” he’d told Ford.

  “Get down, Pete,” he hollered, but the damn dog was vibrating, similar to a growl, and didn’t budge.

  Seventy yards, then fifty—the thing kept coming, on a collision course, and was soon close enough for Tomlinson to realize it wasn’t a periscope. It was a dorsal fin.

  “Shit-oh-dear. It’s her.”

  Dolly. The great white shark that had surfaced in the area more than three weeks ago. She was eighteen feet long and weighed more than a ton, according to news stories, but looked bigger now, much bigger, in moonlight, and had to be doing twenty knots.

  A gun. Ford always had a gun hidden somewhere. Tomlinson lunged for the console and spent a frantic few seconds searching, but couldn’t stop himself from taking another look. He stood, turned, and Dolly was there, her six-foot dorsal at eye level, a waterfall streaming from her back.

  Tomlinson hollered, “Hold on,” to the retriever and prepared for impact . . . but there was no impact, just a mountainous rush of water that tilted the boat sideways. It took a moment to understand. The shark had sounded.

  He rushed to the starboard gunnel and looked over in time to see a massive shadow that angled downward. The dog saw it, too, and leaped over the side, swam in a confused circle, then dived headfirst in pursuit but only managed six or seven feet before it surfaced. All of this visible in the underwater lights.

  “Doc’s down there, you idiot. Get your ass in the boat. We’ve got to warn him.”

  The dog continued doing what it was doing while Tomlinson wondered, Warn him how?

  A screen in the electronics suite drew his attention: sonar showed a massive blue blob at fifty feet . . . then sixty. The shark was diving. He stood fixated and watched, yet also noticed a new blip on the radar screen. A boat—or a low-flying plane—was approaching from several miles away, also on a collision course.

  That snapped him out of it. “You can’t make this shit up,” he yelled and rushed to the stern.

  Near the boarding ladder, his dive gear was ready, laid out in an orderly fashion. He grabbed the BC vest, then realized there wasn’t enough time. Doc was due to surface soon—in three minutes, according to the bezel of his watch.

  There was only one option: Morse code.

  He stomped the deck with a series of SOS warnings while yelling to the dog, “Get your crazy butt in the boat.”

  Then he checked the horizon for a boat or low-flying plane, wondering, What next?

  • • •

  When Ford looked up into the glare of lights and saw a massive fish coming at him, he ducked into the crevice and watched it rocket past. A series of low-frequency whistles pierced his rib cage while a jet-stream wake banged him against limestone.

  This explained what had happened earlier.

  He waited. The animal made another pass, this time slow enough for his flashlights to provide a better look. The white saddle patch near its dorsal was as distinctive as the animal’s size—almost twenty feet long and at least two tons.

  It was an amazing encounter, but the delay had extended his time on the bottom. A short decompression stop was protocol—probably unnecessary, but he did it anyway; clung to the safety line at thirty-three feet, where the boat’s underwater LEDs provided a dome of visibility. He floated suspended in space for two minutes and regretted not having a camera when the creature swam past again.

  Wait . . . he did have a camera, but he’d never used the damn thing. It was built into his cell phone–sized dive computer. When the creature made a fourth pass, he fired off a dozen shots. Some looked pretty good. After another two minutes, he kicked to the surface, where he was surprised to see his dog in the wa
ter and that Tomlinson was not dancing, just frantic.

  “In the boat, man, get in the damn boat,” he yelled. “Holy shit, the size of that thing—but don’t panic. Panic, man, your splashing might attract her. But”—he cupped his hands to be heard—“I might be wrong!”

  Ford, smiling, played dumb. “Wrong about what?”

  “Hurry up.”

  “Was it a shark?”

  “Huh?”

  “What did you see?”

  “Jesus-f’ing-Christ, just move your ass, Doc. Please?”

  It was morning twilight, the sun not yet up, but a corona of bronze rimmed the east. Ford submerged and did a slow three-sixty, seeing demarcations of blue funnel into black, a few barracuda on the periphery, a sparkling cloud of bait. Then got a scare himself when something grabbed his dive vest from behind and pulled him to the surface.

  It was the dog. The retriever had retrieved its owner.

  “Get away,” he said, while Tomlinson yelled dire warnings if he didn’t get his butt in gear.

  Ford thought, I should savor this. It was because he knew something Tomlinson did not: this might be the last time he saw his friend—or the dog, for that matter. So he kicked past the safety line, then took his sweet damn time at the transom while he boosted the dog aboard. Next, he handed up a sack of gear, his scuba rig, but remained in the water while he asked, “Did you see a shark? The only shark I saw was a hammerhead and it wasn’t big enough to worry about.”

  Hilarious, Tomlinson’s reaction. “What part of get your ass in the boat don’t you understand? I mean it. Now. A thing that size can bite your legs off in one pass. Here . . .” Tomlinson extended his hand.

  Ford ignored it; instead, belly flopped over the inflated collar into the boat. He grabbed a towel, sat there, with fins, the mask on his forehead, wearing a shorty wet suit. “It couldn’t have gone any smoother down there.” He looked east. “Sun’s just coming up. We’re right on time.”

  Tomlinson’s expression: Have you lost your mind? “You didn’t see it? That thing had to have blotted out the sky. Hell . . . I could see from up here. She swam right past you at least twice and you just hung there like soap-on-a-rope. No, dope-on-a-rope. And don’t get me started on that idiot dog.”