by Lee, Rachel
All she could do was watch him swim the few feet to the buoy. When he reached it, he paused and looked back, giving a little wave. Then he was swallowed by the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
It was as if he had never been.
He went because of Callie. As he stood there looking over the side into the dark depths of the Atlantic, Chase had seriously wondered if he was going to be able to make himself do this. He could feel sweat breaking out under his wet suit, and fear tied his stomach into knots. No, he wasn’t going to be able to make himself go.
Then he looked one last time at Callie, and knew he had to do this. For her. To help her brother. And to make himself whole for her. If he did any less, he would fail her.
Going over the side was the hardest thing he had ever done. Going under was even more difficult.
But the first thirty feet of the dive weren’t bad. Enough light penetrated that Chase felt little except the unexpected joy of diving again. After that, though, it got steadily darker, and with the darkness came a resurgence of his fears. He had to remind himself to breathe, to keep the pressure in his lungs equalized, had to remind himself to clear his ears. One of his sinuses twinged, and he wondered if he had a blockage. A quick, sharp sniffle eased it though.
As the water grew darker around him, the pressure increased, and the feeling of being closed in began to trouble him. What had never bothered him before bothered him now, and he was painfully aware of his vulnerability.
He shouldn’t be making this dive alone. He was violating a cardinal rule of safety, and he was grateful that it hadn’t occurred to Callie to get stubborn about it. All that stuff he’d handed her about it being perfectly safe and his being excessively cautious went out the window the instant he came down here alone. But he didn’t trust anyone else enough to ask him to make this wild-goose chase with him. So there he was, following a buoy line down to a depth that could kill him in a few seconds if anything went wrong.
That didn’t make him brave, it made him dumb.
But he didn’t want to think about that right now. Having a dive partner hadn’t saved him last time. And this time he was relying on nothing and no one but himself and his own preparations—and the sea.
He felt her all around him, holding him in her watery arms, squeezing him as he went deeper, cutting him off from air and light. A spear of panic shot through him, and he paused in his descent, forcing himself to be calm, to breathe.
The light on his helmet cast a glow in the water around him, but beyond that glow there was only darkness, and the sense of shapes moving out there. Fish, of course, maybe some eels… Nothing to fear.
But he feared it anyway. At a hundred feet he seriously thought about heading back up. He was only halfway down, and his fear of the darkness was beginning to strangle him. The camera banged against his leg, startling him, but he battered down the fright. Just the camera.
He’d done this hundreds of times, he told himself. Nothing had changed. There was nothing out there that hadn’t been out there on all his previous dives. The sea didn’t want to kill him. The sea was supremely indifferent to his invasion.
Except he felt as if he was being watched. And he probably was, he told himself. Fish were probably out there wondering what this light was. The image of perplexed fish drove his fear back, and he resumed his descent, checking his dive watch and his air gauge. Doing fine.
But foot by foot as he continued his descent, he became more and more aware of how alone he was. Fear crawled out of the increasingly cold water and latched on to his spine. He forced himself to ignore it, even when it soured his mouth and made his heart pound.
There was nothing to fear but fear itself. He’d had that hammered into him back in SEALS training, and he chanted it silently to himself. Nothing to fear but fear.
Then a dark shape loomed out of the night of the sea. He had reached the bottom of the line.
Callie thought she was going to scream from the tension. Nightmare visions stalked her, filling her head with all the kinds of trouble Chase could get into. Her eyes searched the horizon, fearing that a buildup of storm clouds would suddenly appear. She imagined him getting fouled somehow in the buoy line, or caught in the wreckage below.
“How long is he going to be?” she finally asked Jeff.
“I don’t know. He had several ascent plans worked out, depending on how long it takes him to examine the wreckage. The longer he’s down, the slower he comes back up. He didn’t think it was going to take more than an hour, though.”
“What if it does?”
“Then it does.” Jeff faced her. “Callie, he knows what he’s doing. The real danger here is if he comes up too fast, and he’s not going to do that. He showed me how he did his dive calculations—”
“When did he do that?”
“This morning while you were showering. My point is, he added extra time into the decompression stops. He’s not even going to cut it close.”
That should have relieved her, but other worries came to mind. “How’s he going to get to those tanks we’ve got hanging over the side if he follows the buoy line? He’d surface first.”
Jeff shook his head. “There’s plenty of light down to nearly thirty feet, sis. He’ll be able to stop following the buoy line long before he gets up to ten feet. He just has to swim over to the bar, and the boat’s shadow in the water will be an obvious guide. Believe me, he can do it.”
But when she looked over the side, the water appeared opaque to her, nothing visible except the surface. It would look different from below, she told herself. From below he wouldn’t be blinded by the sunlight glinting off the water.
The water was getting choppier, wasn’t it? But she couldn’t be sure, and she tried to tell herself it was her imagination. There were no clouds anywhere, and the wind didn’t seem to have stiffened at all. Of course, a large storm system somewhere out there could be making waves here even when it was too far away to see.
“How long was it supposed to take him to get all the way down?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. He said something about not being able to descend faster than seventy-five feet per minute, but I don’t remember his calculations exactly. You’ve got to equalize the pressure in your ears and stuff as you go down…” Jeff shook his head. “I’m no expert, Callie. Hell, I wish I’d copied the times he calculated.”
She wished he had, too. She would have liked to know where exactly Chase was as the minutes ticked by and her nerves stretched as taut as piano wire.
Her sense of foreboding was growing by the minute, and she tried to tell herself it was just her hatred of the sea. And maybe it was, but her mental arguments didn’t help the feeling of doom that was settling over her. She scanned the horizon as if she half expected to see some movie monster appear while the sun pounded her.
The silence was eerie. The only sound in the world was the creak of the boat as she rocked on the waves, and the lap of water against her sides. And little by little even that was going away as the waters began to calm.
“We should have put a safety line on him,” she said suddenly.
Jeff shook his head. “He said he didn’t need one with the buoy line.”
“Sure. As long as he can grab it.” Her scalp was beginning to prickle. “How long?”
“Twenty-two minutes.”
That was all? Time seemed to have turned to molasses, oozing by rather than passing. She gripped the rail tighter and told herself to calm down. Nothing was going to happen.
But almost as if the sea knew it was, they were suddenly becalmed. The wind stopped, the water smoothed out until the Lily was hardly rocking at all. Callie looked up at the sky and felt her heart thud as she saw a haze that hadn’t been there moments ago.
“The weather’s changing,” she said tensely.
Jeff nodded. “It doesn’t look bad, though. Just a haze…”
But she noticed he, too, looked around uneasily. The westerly winds almost never stopped blowing there.
That was when Callie saw the boat approaching them. “Look.” She pointed.
Jeff followed her finger. “What about it?”
“Is it coming this way?”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of boats out here, sis. I’d be surprised if we didn’t see one.”
Callie nodded, but she kept her attention fixed on the boat, trying to tell if it was approaching them. They might be out in the middle of the sea, but that didn’t ease her apprehensions any. Not when someone had tried to kill Chase once before. Not when someone had been trying to convince Chase he was losing his mind. Not when someone had killed Bill Evers.
For all they had been secretive about this dive, it remained that someone could have seen them set out this morning. Or someone could have seen Chase getting his air tanks filled.
She glanced at her watch and started praying.
The hole in The Happy Maggie was in the bow, just as he would have expected from Bruderson’s description. Just exactly as he had seen it in his dream. Chase photographed the damage, then took an up-close look himself.
The hull hadn’t been damaged from within, he realized. Something had damaged it from the outside, and the more he looked at it, the more he felt that an explosive had been used, deforming the hull inward around the gaping hole.
The Maggie had been sunk deliberately.
He took a few more pictures, then had the worst urge to go inside and see if the diamonds were still there. But he was almost positive they weren’t, and besides, going alone into a wreck would be an absolutely foolhardy thing to do. Too much could go wrong, and there’d be nobody there to help him.
He began his ascent feeling jubilant. Not only had he made the dive, but he figured he probably had enough evidence to help Jeff out. Of course, it wasn’t enough to guarantee anything, but it was a giant step forward.
But he’d made the damn dive. The water whispered around him, and dark shapes threatened to coalesce, but he’d made it without blowing his cool. He could stand the fear as long as it didn’t overwhelm him, and now it wasn’t even strong enough to do that. With each minute he spent down there, he felt himself growing calmer. Instead of remembering his terror last time, he was remembering all the good feelings he’d always gotten from a dive.
He had a few more rocky moments on the way back up, but they weren’t unexpected. Each time the darkness threatened to close in and crush him, he fought the urge to speed up his ascent and instead forced himself to stay right where he was. After a few seconds, the fear would subside again, seeping out of him and back into the cold, dark waters.
At sixty feet, he stopped, checking his dive watch, fearing that he was ascending too quickly. The stop wasn’t necessary, but he took it anyway, facing a new fear: that he might get the bends again. It was enough to make him pause at that depth longer than was reasonable, and as soon as he realized it, he began his ascent again. Staying down here would only add to his required decompression time, not help.
It was when he was at last making his safety decompression stop at ten feet, hanging on to the bar that he and Jeff had lowered over the side, that he heard and saw a boat approach. Realizing it was coming too close, he checked his air, and saw that he had more than enough left. Letting go of the bar, he swam directly under the Lily and waited to see what was going on.
Callie and Jeff watched the other boat approach, coming directly toward them.
“This isn’t right,” she said to Jeff. “Something’s wrong. We’ve got to warn Chase.”
“He can’t miss the other boat being here, sis. He’ll know.”
She looked over the side and saw the dark figure of Chase at the bar below. “He’s almost up. Look.”
“I don’t want to look,” he answered. “Stop staring, Callie. If these guys are up to no good, you don’t want them to know where Chase is.”
Her head snapped up, but she couldn’t help stealing another look downward. Chase’s figure had disappeared.
“He’s gone,” she said, her voice cracking.
“He probably went under the boat. Look, he’s not stupid, Callie. He’s probably as worried about this as we are.”
She looked at her brother and saw that his face was drawn as tightly as hers felt. Instinctively, she reached out for him and he took her hand.
“If…” She had to force herself to swallow and try again as her voice cracked. “If these are bad guys… let’s lie about Chase. Let’s say he’s not due back up for a half hour.”
“Why tell them anything at all?”
“We might not have a choice.”
His frown deepened, then he nodded. “Okay.”
“Oh, I wish I had a gun.” Turning around, she looked for anything she could use for protection, but saw only the boat hooks. She considered hefting one, then figured that if these guys were up to no good, they would have come armed. “Weapons. Come on, we’ve got to have some kind of weapon.”
“It’s not something I usually need when I’m fishing.”
“The flare gun!”
He nodded and went to the equipment locker, digging it out and loading it. “Maybe we should cut away the air tank,” he said. “It’s a dead giveaway that Chase is in the water. If we cut it away, we can always claim we’re just out here fishing.”
“But he might need the air.”
They looked at each other helplessly as the other boat drew nearer.
“He’s not using them right now,” Jeff said. “He must not need the air.”
Callie took another quick look over the side. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Putting his back to the approaching boat, Jeff untied the bar and air cylinder and let the rope go over the side. Callie watched it slip away, feeling her heart sink with it.
Chase watched the tank and bar fall away into the depths of the sea. There could have been no clearer message from Jeff and Callie. He checked his dive computer and realized he still needed another five minutes of decompression for safety’s sake. Hell!
The hull of the approaching boat was visible now, and he watched it come up alongside the Lily and stop. The engine cut out, and the sea was suddenly the only sound he heard, the gentle whispers of the water as she rocked everything within her embrace.
He glanced at his watch again. Three minutes. The boats bumped, the sound loud in his ears. That was no friendly approach, he thought, sure now that the second boat meant danger. Friendly boats didn’t pull up that close without permission, and he seriously doubted Jeff and Callie would have allowed it. Not when they were all so nervous about what might be happening. Not if they’d thought it necessary to dump his emergency tank.
He looked at his watch again. Two and a half minutes.
You can do it, the sea whispered in his ear. Christ, was he losing his marbles? Hearing the sea talk to him? But he looked at the watch again and began to run a rapid mental calculation. He’d built in more than enough time, of that he was sure. He could probably shave these last couple of minutes off without any problem.
But the thought of the bends nearly paralyzed him. Fear reached up and grabbed him by the throat, trying to strangle him. Even if he was in a safe window on decompression, he shouldn’t exert himself when he surfaced because exertion immediately after a dive could trigger the bends. But what choice did he have?
He forced himself to draw a couple of ragged breaths, then reached for the clasps on his harness. Callie was up there, and he needed to protect her. Nothing else mattered.
CHAPTER 20
Callie and Jeff didn’t move a muscle as the other boat pulled up alongside and bumped against the Lily. Callie could scarcely breathe. She knew what an Uzi looked like, even though she’d only seen them in the movies, and the man standing at the gunwale of the other boat was pointing one at her and Jeff. Jeff still held the flare gun at his side but fro
m the look on his face she could tell he realized it would be suicidal to fire it.
Nobody said a word. It was so eerie, she thought, to have this boat pull up alongside, to have a machine gun pointed at her, to watch as two total strangers threw over a line and tied the two boats together. This couldn’t be happening.
But it was happening, and it became suddenly, horrifyingly real as the man who was driving emerged from the covered bridge and faced them. Dave Hathaway. Chase’s boss. What was going on here? Did he maybe think they were trying to steal the diamonds?
She decided to assume anything except what the horror creeping along her spine was trying to tell her: that Dave was behind this whole mess. “Hi,” she called out, her voice wavering. “Is something wrong, Dave? What’s with the gun?”
Dave smiled. He had a very nice smile, white teeth in a tanned face. “I’m looking for Chase.”
She hesitated, trying to find a way to buy time. “Did he do something wrong?”
“He’s getting in the way. Tell your brother to drop that flare gun, or I’ll have my man shoot him.”
Shock struck Callie, running through her like ice water. Jeff dropped the flare gun instantly. The sound of it hitting the deck was like a death knell. There was going to be no happy ending here, she realized. Not if this man was willing to threaten to shoot them. They were going to die because he couldn’t afford to let them go now.
She had to find a way to buy time. If she could just win some time, something might occur to her.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded, feeling shock give way to anger as adrenaline began to surge through her.
“You’re getting in the way. All of you are getting in the way.”
“In the way of what? For God’s sake, if you’re going to wave guns at us, can you at least tell us what’s going on?”
Dave mounted the gunwale of his boat and jumped up onto the Lily. With a flick of the wrist, he signed the other two men to come over with him. They came one at a time, each taking turns covering Jeff and Callie while they made the crossing. The man with the machine gun moved to the stern, keeping the barrel pointed at Callie and Jeff.