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by Randy Wayne White

  Then one of our three safety lines got fouled in the starboard prop. Bobbing around beneath a brass propeller sawing at a rope wasn’t fun. The prop’s blades were sharp and the propeller dropped like a guillotine as each wave swept past. As I was cutting the rope, I swung my head to avoid the prop and the driveshaft caught me on the side of the head.

  Great. Blood in the water and a new scar.

  It was after 3 P.M. by the time the boat was positioned and our gear was ready. Everyone aboard had a copy of the dive plan; presumably, they’d gone over it. Even so, I risked offending my pals by insisting on a meeting to review. The maxim sounds as stuffy as a spinster teacher: Plan your dive and dive your plan.

  I don’t care if I did seem officious. The term recreational dive is one of those fun misnomers, like recreational sex. Both, if approached recklessly, will put you in the hospital with something penicillin can’t cure. Or in the grave.

  Under the covers, spontaneity is good. Underwater, spontaneity is usually bad.

  Tomlinson, Jeth, and I would dive. Safety was our only imperative. Salvaging items from the bottom was secondary, I told them.

  Along with standard dive systems—inflatable BC vests, gauges, weight belts, regulators, and tanks—each of us would wear heavy gloves, carry a waterproof light, an inflatable six-foot distress buoy, and also a strobe light attached to our BCs. We could activate the strobes below or above the surface by screwing the lens cap tight.

  I didn’t have to tell Jeth and Tomlinson that I am aware of at least six people—divers and fishermen—who’d still be alive if they’d carried little pocket-sized strobe lights with them. Both men knew. They’d lived it.

  The wreck wasn’t deep, only forty feet. Jeth and Tomlinson were using standard tanks and air, so their maximum safe bottom time at that depth—three atmospheres, for the sake of calculating—was eighty minutes. They could expect their air supply to last around an hour or so but, to be on the safe side, we’d stay down for no longer that forty minutes.

  An extra safety cushion was that I was using an Azimuth rebreather system with a nitrox gas mix. If needed, I had a maximum safe bottom time of more than three hours.

  Arlis would remain aboard the Island Gypsy, standing by with the additional tank and regulator I’d rigged to a safety line clipped to a big red rubber buoy. If he needed to communicate with us, he would start both engines. The sound of rumbling engines is unmistakable underwater.

  The most likely emergency was that our anchor would pull free—the signal for that was to rev the engines at steady three- or four-second intervals, like blowing a whistle. The signal meant: Grab a line and prepare to be dragged along the bottom. Surface slowly.

  The emergency signal—or diver recall—would be several short staccato revs of the engine.

  Arlis bristled when I told him he had to wear a safety line and a life jacket while we were underwater. “I ain’t never worn that crap, and I never will.”

  I was tempted to tell him to stop behaving like an irritable old asshole…and realized I was getting a little irritable myself.

  Instead, I reminded him what we all knew but seldom stopped to think about: In rough seas, if we got separated from the boat the odds were against survival. In all likelihood, we’d probably never be found. If Arlis fell overboard and we surfaced one minute later? No more Arlis. If he fell overboard and the boat pulled anchor? We would all die.

  The water was warm—eighty-three degrees. Even so, tropical hypothermia, a little-known phenomenon, gradually slows the heart until it stops. Hypothermia wasn’t the primary danger, though. It was the size of the waves and the water color. Under these conditions, it would be unlikely to find a lone swimmer.

  I’d tossed a sixty-foot safety line off the stern, a six-foot Styrofoam noodle attached. I pointed at it now. “Have a look.” The noodle was orange, but it was invisible except for a microsecond when it was buoyed to the peak of a wave.

  In these seas? For a swimmer, the fatal edge of visibility was thirty yards. Even from the top of a wave. Any farther and the boat would vanish, probably never to be seen again. Nor would a swimmer be visible from the boat.

  Thirty yards of separation—that was the distance to the abyss.

  “You are wearing the damn safety line,” Jeth told Arlis. “And a life jacket, too.”

  A moment later, Jeth saw the Viking hounding toward us, and added, “Sonuvabitch.”

  I t was Augie and Oswald all alone in the big white boat with the flybridge tower, bright chrome and red canvas, and outriggers swaying. Half a million dollars of fiberglass, electronics, five-star amenities, and serious naval architecture.

  “The guy is such an asshole!”

  Not unusual to find one aboard a vessel like the Viking.

  “What pisses me off most,” Jeth added, “is that we spent—what, more than two hours?—rigging for this dive, and they don’t have to do a damn thing but anchor, put on their tanks, and swim down to the wreck.”

  That seemed to be their plan. As dive plans go, though, it was a bad one.

  Tomlinson, Jeth, and I were suited, tanks on, fins in hand, ready to roll off the stern. But we waited, watching the Viking rocket toward us, throwing geysers of white spray. The boat came in much too close and fast, Augie backing the throttles at the last moment and sledding away. The wake he created hit us like a freight train. It nearly tossed Arlis over the transom.

  “You low-life Yankee ’bagger! I’ll gaff you like a fish if I see you at the marina!”

  Arlis was in a mood.

  The Viking’s flybridge towered above us; Augie appeared smug and professional up there, looking down. The boat was equipped with a PA system for communicating with dock-hands, and we watched him put the microphone to his mouth. “You’re anchored on my wreck and this is the last time I’m warning you. The wreck my boat found and we’re claiming it. Legally.” His voice boomed over waves; his Wisconsin accent magnified, as he added, “You people will learn not to mess with us. One of you already found out.”

  I assumed he meant me. But why the nasty, knowing slyness?

  When Arlis replied with his middle finger, Augie looked pleased. “My uncle talked to our lawyers this morning and that’s what he said to say if you were here. Admiralty law. Look it up. The laws of marine salvage and a thing called the law of finders. Which means you’re trespassing…dumbasses.”

  I looked at Tomlinson who was smiling and shaking his head as he spit into his face mask. “It’s called the law of finds, not finders,” he said quietly. “Nothing to worry about. The wreck’s ours, if we do this right. I’ve got the whole business scoped; all this deal needs is for us to add water.”

  He glanced up at Augie and tried to lighten the mood. “Cheeseheads,” he said. “It’ll take evolution another three hundred years before they should be allowed to mate south of Chicago.”

  I was watching Augie maneuver the sportfisherman into the wind, preparing to anchor. Oswald had disappeared belowdecks and reappeared carrying two BC dive systems, as Augie hit a button and their anchor plummeted into the water. Immediately, he killed the vessel’s engines and hurried down the ladder to his pile of scuba gear.

  Augie hadn’t set the anchor by hand; he didn’t wait until his boat swung tight on its line, an indicator that the anchor would hold—temporarily, anyway.

  It looked like they were both going in the water. No one above to make sure the boat was still there when they surfaced.

  I looked from Jeth to Tomlinson, then Arlis. Even the old man managed a bitter smile.

  “Augie doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, does he?”

  Jeth said, “He’s dangerous in a way that gets other people hurt.” His tone suggesting that we should get moving before Augie had a chance to hurt us.

  We got in the water, Jeth, then Tomlinson following me on the surface as I pulled myself along the safety line toward the red and orange buoys that outlined the wreck below.

  I ’d just found something interesting
when, above, Arlis fired the engines and gave the emergency recall signal.

  The object I had found was metallic looking, heavy, and shiny. It was buried in the sand, only a rectangular edge showing. Hard to say with confidence because of the murky water, but it appeared to be golden in color. No barnacles, no benthic growth, and it hadn’t tarnished.

  Gold is one of a very few metals that retains its pure color after long submersion in saltwater. What else could it be?

  Gold.

  I had made a couple of attempts to dig the object free when I heard the diesels start. The staccato bursts were jolting.

  Emergency. Arlis repeated the pattern, revving the engines. Unmistakable.

  The visibility was so poor that I had to hold my dive watch against my face mask to see the luminous numbers. We’d been on the bottom less than twenty minutes.

  I touched my hand to the bottom. We weren’t dragging.

  I gave two sharp tugs on the rope that was our search line. Tomlinson and Jeth both gave two sharp tugs in reply. They were okay.

  What could be wrong?

  So far, the dive had gone without a hitch, even though conditions were awful. We were only six feet apart, spaced incrementally along the rope, yet I couldn’t see anything but the yellow cones of my partners’ flashlights through the murk.

  Which was okay. The plan was still workable because we were using a keep-it-simple-stupid search technique.

  The search line was connected to the anchor line. Kick slowly over the bottom and the rope would rotate us in a circular pattern, like pencils in a protractor or spokes on a wheel. Complete a circle, then move farther out toward the circle’s perimeter. Gradually, we’d progress to the end of the rope, covering the wreck site in orderly six-foot swaths.

  Easy.

  It was the best way I knew to explore a wreck in near-zero visibility. And we were on a wreck, there was no doubt about that now—the remains of a boat, not a plane.

  Our signal for Come look was three sharp tugs on the rope. Jeth had been the first to call. He was on the inside lane of the perimeter, holding his flashlight close to something he wanted us to see. Frozen in a swirl of lucent silt was the boat’s propellers, both still connected to driveshafts. There were a few barnacles on the props and some new benthic growth—but not much, considering the pitting done by electrolysis.

  This wreck had been insulated by sand. Buried, then uncovered by the recent hurricane. I had no doubt about it now. Anaerobic: the word for an environment that has no oxygen so cannot support the crawling, boring, sessile creatures that destroy wood and bone and scar metal.

  The gilded rectangle of metal I’d just discovered also had no barnacle scars. I’d used my left hand to dig around it, but sand collapsed into the hole. Tried again using my blunt-tipped dive knife. Contact with the object made a distinctive soft tink.

  It was definitely metal. Soft metal.

  The thought came into my mind again: Gold?

  Silly. Scuba divers don’t find gold lying on the bottom of the seabed. That’s fairy-tale stuff. Except, of course, for Mel Fisher, and Kip Wagner, and Alan Eckert, and…

  I had found a couple of old-style bottles. They were in my mesh dive sack. And a corroded blob that was handgun-sized.

  But gold?

  Jeth had found German coins here, so why not? I used my knife and dug faster around the object, trying to expose enough to get a grip on the thing before the sand collapsed once again.

  That’s when Arlis started the engine and gave the emergency signal. Diver’s recall—we had to surface immediately.

  I had no way to mark the object. An inflatable buoy would’ve been swept away by waves. So I left it. I gave a sharp tug on the rope followed by a steady pull—time to surface—then followed the rope, hand over hand, toward the pale pulsing strobe light that marked where our search line and the anchor line intersected.

  I was on the outside perimeter of our search wheel. I moved slowly over the bottom, aware that Tomlinson was only a body length in front of me; Jeth a body length ahead of him. I stopped for a moment and jettisoned a squirt of residual air from my BC to maintain negative buoyancy. I wanted to make certain I didn’t ram Tomlinson from behind.

  That’s when something big came out of the gloom and rammed me. Hit me high near the shoulder, knocked the mask crooked on my face. I could feel a slight suctioning draft as whatever it was sped by.

  A few minutes earlier, I had felt an unexpected bump on my thigh. Thought it was Tomlinson’s fin.

  Ahead, I could see the foggy corona of two flashlights.

  The thing that had hit me wasn’t Tomlinson.

  It came into my mind that it might be Augie and his squash-shaped friend, Oswald. They might be dumb enough to charge around forty feet beneath daylight. But did they have the courage?

  I doubted it.

  I straightened my mask, tilted it, and exhaled through my nose to clear the mask. When the water was gone, I shined my light to the left, then the right. The color of invisibility was a silted gold that began and ended at my faceplate.

  Nothing.

  But something was out there. Something big. Circling, maybe. Or turning right now, building speed to hit me again.

  I told myself not to panic, stick with the plan. This was like being on a beach in a lightning storm. There was nothing I could do to prevent from being struck, so why worry?

  All true, but I didn’t experience a feeling of untethered freedom, as I had during the hurricane. I was scared. Something was out there in the gloom. Something that could see me with sensory precision. Something that had probably already noted the accelerated pounding of my mammalian heart. The fresh cut on my forehead would leave an unambiguous trail of blood.

  As I followed my partners up the anchor line, I expected to be hit again. I wasn’t.

  On the surface, as I allowed waves to sweep me along the safety line toward the dive platform on the stern, I expected to be hit from below. I wasn’t.

  As I hurried to vault myself out of the water, pulling my legs up into a fetal position, I decided that maybe it was that idiot Augie who’d crashed into me.

  It wasn’t.

  The forty-three-foot Viking sportfisherman had broken free of its anchor and was adrift. That was why Arlis had sounded the emergency recall. It had happened only a minute or so after Augie and Oswald, wearing scuba gear, had entered the water, Arlis told us.

  “They never even submerged,” he said. “When they saw the boat drifting, they took off swimming after it. But there’s not a chance in hell they caught up with that thing.”

  I had my rebreather system off by then, standing on the dive platform. The Viking was a pendulous splash of white in the distance shrinking fast.

  27

  Arlis was on the flybridge, already motoring toward our anchor, using the automatic wench to retrieve it, while Tomlinson, Jeth, and I stripped off our gear on the stern. I felt the Island Gypsy swing her beam to the waves and knew that we were free.

  “One of you boys get on the radio and raise Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard. Tell ’em to stand by. You other two, get up here. I need you as spotters. Whoa! First, pull the safety lines in, dummies! Do I gotta tell you everything?”

  Arlis wasn’t old and feeble now. He was his acerbic, irritable self—taking charge, which is exactly what he was supposed to do.

  When he realized that the Viking had pulled anchor and her two divers were adrift, Arlis had done something very smart. He’d reacted as only a person with his water experience would have. I had rigged a backup dive system—tank, regulator, and BC vest—and clipped it to a safety line. The safety line was tied to a red mooring-sized rubber buoy. If one of us had gotten tangled in rubble below, an emergency air supply was ready.

  Because the Viking was drifting faster than Augie and Oswald could swim, Arlis expected the two to turn toward our boat. Maybe they did—he wasn’t sure. He lost sight of them within seconds. When the two men didn’t reappear swimming toward our ves
sel, he realized the waves and current had taken them. They were adrift.

  Immediately, Arlis inflated the spare BC and tossed the backup dive system overboard. It was still attached to forty feet of rope and a rubber buoy. When the two divers realized they were in trouble, it was likely that they would inflate their BC vests. Their drift pattern would be similar to that of the backup air system. The red buoy gave us something visible to follow.

  We were following it now.

  “I’ll give you the wheel, if you want.”

  Jeth shook his head, and told Arlis, “You’re doing just fine.” He spoke without turning his head to look at the old man because he didn’t want to take his eyes off the water.

  Arlis nodded. “You made the right decision.” Sure of himself; his ego coming back to life out here in big water.

  That was fine with me. I liked his confidence. We needed it.

  We’d already divvied up search quadrants: I was on Arlis’s left, scanning the area ahead, and abeam the trawler’s port side. Jeth was to Arlis’s right, responsible for the right side. All three of us kept track of the red buoy ahead as it bucked from wave to wave.

  With each set of breakers, though, it seemed less and less likely that we would find the two men.

  I’d checked my watch when I felt us break free of our anchor: 4:27 P.M. By 4:40, I was losing hope. It seemed improbable that we hadn’t caught up with them in ten minutes. By 4:50, I was beginning to second-guess: Was following the buoy still the smartest thing to do? Augie and his partner would’ve stopped chasing the Viking after only a few minutes. They would have then turned into the waves and tried to swim in the direction where they hoped our trawler was anchored.

  Neither of them looked like long-distance swimmers. They would have soon tired. They had no other choice but to inflate their vests and resign themselves to the hope that someone would come searching for them.

  Their maneuvers would have changed the course of their drift. If our course was off by only a few yards, we’d already passed them. We needed to turn back and make another try.