Ten Thousand Islands

by Randy Wayne White

  “Then I’ll talk. I’ll tell you.”

  A soft, slow smile of awareness came on Parrish’s face as he said, “No, you ain’t. You just using your brains to buy time,” and he leaned toward me slightly, straightening his arm, and I collapsed into the sand just as he fired—thWAP—and scissored his legs out from under him as the gun fired twice more.

  From the distance, I heard the voice of Ted Bauerstock yell, “Don’t shoot him in the face!” as I rolled onto Parrish, fighting to control his hands. I smashed his jaw open with a glancing fist still gloved by the heavy mask, but he kept his arms moving, swinging them around, firing randomly—thwap, thwap, twap—so close to my head that I was deafened, ears ringing. I had to get some distance between us.

  I shoveled a handful of sand toward his eyes, rolled to my feet, sprinting hard toward the lake and dived, pulling myself deep into the water as the trajectory of bullets traced scimitars nearby.

  I’d noticed a dock and diving platform on the other side of the lake. It was maybe sixty, seventy yards away—not an easy distance when wearing shorts and a shirt. I didn’t swim fast. I swam with long, slow strokes, conserving my air. Glided until I’d nearly stopped before I stroked again. Didn’t matter. I couldn’t make it the whole way.

  I surfaced to grab a breath and Parrish was already shooting at me—now standing on the dock that was my destination. Slugs were slapping the water so close that I could feel the explosion of compressed air as they slammed past my head … then I felt a stunning impact that nearly somersaulted me in the water. I’d been hit….

  I swam downward, downward, feeling the dreamy unreality of shock. I touched my hand to the area of my right ear, a throbbing slickness. No, I hadn’t been shot in the head. My glasses were gone and so was the skin off my ear. I realized the face mask I’d carried had slid far up my arm. I pulled it on and cleared it, looking toward the surface: a lens of light above, a blurry gray sky beyond.

  Parrish was waiting up there. Surface, and I would die.

  I pivoted and looked below.

  What I saw was surreal; a scene from a nightmare.

  The interior of the cenote was shaped like the mouth of a volcano. The sides were sheer, dropping quickly to thirty or thirty-five feet, the green boulders there creating a second, narrower rim.

  On the lip of that rim, spaced at random, were four … no, five decomposing bodies attached to the bottom by cement blocks and anchor chains. Enough flesh and clothing remained to maintain buoyancy, so that the bodies floated upright, arms above their heads as if on crosses.

  There were also two cars, both of which had snagged on the ledge as if hanging from a cliff.

  One of the cars was black and rusted, had moss growing on it.

  The other was a white Honda that I recognized immediately.

  It was Nora’s car, air bubbles still escaping toward the surface….

  In training, we used to play a game. Dump the spent tanks and work your way to Destination X by finding and breathing trapped residual balloons of oxygen we called air pockets.

  Anyplace people dive, you will find air pockets. With conventional tanks, a diver uses less than ten percent of the air he inhales. The rest is exhausted through the regulator as waste, then vanishes on the surface or is trapped in little caverns of rock, there for the taking by an air-starved swimmer.

  A great place to find really big air pockets is a sunken boat … or plane … or car.

  I swam down to the car, already aware that someone was inside. The car was tilted forward, its back axle caught on a limestone ridge, the front of the car hanging over the purple abyss. Windows were open.

  I got a good grip on the right, rear window and pulled myself down. The glass of my mask had cracked badly, was leaking water. I had to clear it again before I could see the back of a woman’s head, short dark hair undulating in the cenote’s updraft.

  First things first, though. I turned and looked up into the car, then pulled myself through the window far enough so that my face was pressed against the roof molding and the rear windshield.

  There was air there. A couple of cubic feet, anyway. Enough to last several minutes. I hung there breathing, resaturating my lungs, then looked as I touched my fingers to the woman’s hair and pulled her head back. I had to fight the reflex to vomit and an overwhelming horror.

  It was Della Copeland, not long dead. But her eyes were gone.

  This had been a nice woman. She’d worked at a place where people loved her. More importantly, she was Dorothy’s mother.

  Where was Nora?

  I looked. Nowhere in the car. I took another few bites of air, then looked outward through the clear water. Was hers one of the anchored bodies?

  No….

  Judging from their streaming hair, there were three woman and two men, skeletal heads showing mandibles and teeth, cavernous eye sockets tunneling out from pale flesh. One of the men had black, Indian hair; cheap slacks, a white shirt, a red cigarette pack showing through.

  Darton Copeland.

  Ted Bauerstock had managed to murder the entire family.

  The second man was the diver Bauerstock had mentioned. The man, he said, who’d gone down but never resurfaced.

  No wonder. The diver was chained by the ankles, still in his dry suit. Considering the circumstances, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Not in this graveyard. No way they could ever let him leave after what he’d seen. They’d lured him in with money, used him, then murdered him. The fact that a supposedly experienced cave diver hadn’t used a dive partner had made no sense. Now I understood.

  The diver’s mask was pulled down around his neck, a black hole the size of a dime in his cheek; a black hole the size of a half-dollar on his neck. Entrance and exit wounds. He’d been shot from above, or maybe while he was kneeling. His buoyancy compensator vest had been slashed too … but the BC was built around the black modular walls of a closed-circuit, multigas system known as a rebreather.

  The ridged hose of the regulator floated higher than the diver’s head.

  What were the chances there was still oxygen left in the tank.

  Probably pretty good. One of the big advantages of a rebreather is that you have a much, much longer bottom time than with a standard, open-circuit scuba rig.

  I’d trained with one of the earlier systems, a Drager—a chest-mounted rig. Unlike the newer systems, it was used for shallow-water diving only.

  Could I figure out how the thing worked?

  I didn’t have much choice. I had to try.

  I hyperventilated until the car’s air pocket was nearly spent, then I swam across the black abyss. Got a grip on the dead man’s elbow. The first thing I did was grab the regulator hose and check the valve on his mouth piece. If the valve was open, the system was flooded and ruined for me or anyone else. I’d have to surface and take my chances.

  The valve was closed.

  Next, I found the standard scuba single-hose pressure gauge. The needle was on zero. He was either out of air, or his tanks were shut off. Attached to the rebreather pack were two spherical canisters slightly smaller than volleyballs. The canister to his right should have been for oxygen, the canister to the left for a diluent gas, maybe helium.

  I reached behind him, turned the valve on the oxygen tank and watched the needle jump to 700 psi. On a standard open-circuit system, that wasn’t much air. On a rebreather, it would be good for a couple of hours.

  I fitted the regulator into my mouth, opened the valve and snorted out through my nose; snorted again, hoping to hell not to taste caustic soda lime.

  Nope, the air was good. Just to be certain, I pulled off the computer panel Velcroed to his wrist. Held the ON button down until the LCD screen activated. Saw that it was 4:09 P.M. October 5 and that I was at thirty-nine feet with 708 psi oxygen remaining and an onboard diluent gas supply that was fifty percent maximum.

  This guy had been doing some serious deep diving.

  I also saw the heads-up light was reading a caut
ionary yellow, so I hunted around until I found the bypass valve and dumped a little oxygen into the system. I watched a bead of green light replace the yellow, now indicating I was getting an approximate number of oxygen molecules in the mix of gas that the unit was computing.

  I floated there for a moment, breathing easily. I didn’t have to worry about them seeing bubbles on the surface because a rebreather exhausts almost none. My mask was still leaking badly, so I took the dead man’s, cleared it with no problem.

  What else did he have that I might be able to use?

  The knife scabbard strapped to his leg was empty. They’d probably taken that before they killed him.

  There was a small strobe light tied to one of the three pockets on his vest. I couldn’t imagine why I’d need that. I opened the first two pockets and found nothing but a tiny bottle of Clear Mask. I opened the third, saw something gold and shiny….

  I reached, felt a hard surface that was smooth, warmer than the water, and I pulled out a medallion made of gold, the cross and concentric circles similar to those on the totem. At the top, through the hole, was a broken clasp, one link open.

  The diver had found it. But why hadn’t he told them? Why hadn’t he turned it over and got the bonus? I remembered Ted telling me that the reward his father had offered was way too small. Maybe the diver decided to try and sneak the thing out, make a lot more money by selling it on his own. Or maybe … just maybe the diver realized that they would never let him leave their property alive, and so he kept it as a bargaining chip … but had never been given the chance to bargain.

  I floated there, admiring the medallion; its weight and color and density. It was a stunning piece of jewelry. There was something almost hypnotic about the way light clung to the designs. But while I was holding it between thumb and forefinger, inspecting it, my grip on the diver’s elbow slipped … which caused my right hand to automatically scull for balance … and the medallion fell from my hands.

  I watched it for a sickening moment as it fluttered toward the black hole below, glittering like a fishing lure.

  Then I switched off the regulator’s valve and was after it, swimming hard, hard, everything a blur but that golden flash. I caught the medallion just before it went over the rim into darkness.

  Once I had the regulator in my mouth again, breathing easily, I put the medallion into the pocket of my fishing shorts. No more admiring it until I was safely on the surface.

  Nora would get a kick out of seeing the thing. I would present it to her with flowers and a bottle of champagne, perhaps.

  If she was still alive….

  It crossed my mind that Bauerstock or Parrish might be the extra-careful types. With all the bleeding my ear had done, they had to assume I was dead. But most bodies float. They might find another set of snorkel gear and take a look through the clear water, try to figure out why my body had yet to surface.

  I decided I’d better hide.

  I unstrapped the rebreather, mounted it on my own back, Velcroed the ruined BC across my chest, then released my breath so that I would sink. I descended down the wall, over the limestone rim into darkness. Felt the familiar sensation of stepping over an underwater wall—the sensation of falling, falling in slow motion.

  I drifted downward until the computer panel told me I was at 60 feet. Hunted around until I found a comfortable rock outcrop where I could wedge myself and relax.

  Negative buoyancy is an advantage of a closed-circuit rebreather. At this depth, zero decompression time was another benefit. Closed circuit meaning that nearly a hundred percent of the system’s gas supply is used. Each time I exhaled, my air was exhausted through a soda lime filter that scrubbed out carbon dioxide, then recirculated wasted oxygen back into the system. Gases were added depending on my depth and when the volume dropped below a certain minimum value. As long as the batteries that ran the onboard computer were good, I could stay down for a couple of hours.

  Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to stay that long.

  Water transmits sound more efficiently than air.

  Ted and Ivan had an appointment in Naples, a pretty Gulf Coast city that was more than an hour away by water.

  They would have to start their boat, and I would hear them.

  An hour and eighteen minutes later, according to the computer board, they did.

  25

  I surfaced cautiously, still wearing the rebreather. Came up beneath the dock, peering out. My teeth were chattering, my fingers puckered. Wind was in the trees, showing silver in the tops of palms, blowing sand across the lake.

  There was someone in the pavilion, a lone figure.

  The old brown Indio woman sitting there in her dark dress.

  She cupped her hands around her mouth and called something, her words muffled by the wind. She tried again, louder. I realized she was calling out in Spanish: They are gone!

  Who was she speaking to? No way she could know I was there.

  Apparently, she did, though, because she stood and began to find her way toward me, hands outstretched, feeling the air.

  Heard her say: I have been waiting for you.

  If a woman without eyes knew where I was, there was no fooling anyone else they’d left behind, so I dropped the scuba pack and scrambled up the bank. When a man climbs fully dressed out of a pool or lake, he frets about mundane things: sopping billfold, credit cards, treasured leather belt. I had something more pressing on my mind.

  I touched my pockets.

  The pendant was still there.

  As she drew closer, I saw that she had something in her hand—my glasses. I’d lost them on the beach, but how had she found them? As I put them on, she said again, “I have been waiting for you.”

  I said, “Everyone’s gone?”

  “Yes. Everyone.”

  “Your name’s Bella.”

  “Yes. And yours is Ford.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know more than you realize, big man. I know they tried to kill you but couldn’t. I know that you swam into the eye of the earth and stayed as long as a fish. If your power is so great, perhaps you can destroy them. You found the amulet? The golden god?”

  “I didn’t find anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you did. You need not lie. I want to help you. I can feel the power of the amulet in you, but believe what I say: use it, but do not cling to it. Free yourself of the golden god the moment you are finished. It is evil and it will consume you.”

  I looked down into her face. Even with the wrinkles and sun damage, I could see that she had once been very beautiful. She kept her eyes closed tightly—a touching vanity. I asked, “The other woman, the younger one named Nora, did they kill her?”

  “No, I do not think so. He gave her the drunken potion to make her useful. He likes to use his women before he eats their souls.”

  In place of Borracho to describe the drug, she used a chilling Spanish phrase, cadavere vivo.

  “Then she must be on the boat.”

  “Yes. The girl and the large black man, the policeman. Both will be killed before they reach the city if you do not hurry. The policeman, I do not care about. But the woman, it would be a good thing, very powerful, if you could save her. There is a spirit in her. I felt her strong presence when she arrived.” The woman began to walk toward the pavilion, signaling me to follow. “Come. I have something that may help you.”

  She handed me a leather snap-open case. Inside was a 20cc glass syringe, very old, and a heavy-gauge, beveled hypodermic needle. The syringe was full of a dark liquid.

  “Borracho?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d rather have a gun.”

  The old woman smiled slightly, the contracting of facial muscles allowing me a brief glimpse into the white orbits which once held her eyes. “If there was a gun they did not lock, do you think they would be alive now? You will need a boat to go after them.”

  I said, “I’ve got a boat.”


  “I know. But they moved it so no one would become suspicious. The black man moved it there.”

  She gestured toward the river.

  I said, “You’re certain there’s not a gun around? The old man’s a hunter. If he keeps the guns locked, I could break in. Just show me where he keeps them.”

  She was shaking her head. Her expression said, Impossible. “He locks them in a steel safe. The safe is one whole wall of his study. It has a knob that clicks. Only he knows the way in.”

  What was I going to do? Finding them wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to stop them. There was one other possibility. I said, “What about chemicals? Do you have a gardener’s shed? A maintenance shed? The sort of place they would store gasoline, poisons, that sort of thing.”

  “If you want to poison them, why not use the drunken potion?”

  “That’s not exactly what I have in mind. Can you show me?”

  I followed her across the lawn to a concrete building the size of a garage. I had to use a brick to smash the lock off. I flipped the light switch and stepped into stale air that smelled of fertilizer and paint. I began to lift cans and jars from the shelves, looking at labels. It is no longer true that it is easy to make a bomb from common household products. However, it is very easy to make a lethal variety of explosives from chemicals and propellants purchased legally from a garden supply store. On the shelves, I found a particular mix of nitrate fertilizer, a bottle of ammonia, plus a very common kind of acid used for cleaning metals. I found a large thermometer, the mercury still in it. I found a bottle of ethyl alcohol, a box of coarse salt and a squirt bottle full of soap. There was a five-gallon can of gasoline, a couple of kerosene railroad lamps and several Mason jars that probably once held paint thinner.

  It was no longer a question of, could I mix together an effective explosive? The question was, what kind of explosive did I choose to make? And which would take the least amount of time? Explosives come in three basic forms: high-order explosives which detonate, low-order explosives which burn, and primers, which may do both. Nearly all combust so rapidly that large volumes of air are displaced faster than the speed of sound, and so a sonic boom occurs.