We were doing everything by the book—a book I had personally modified to add additional layers of safety net. Then the sky fell. Literally.
Tomlinson had found the spiral of fossilized ivory, and he had waved us over to look. The tusk was, indeed, an ancient and articulate relic to gaze upon. That’s when Will Chaser made a rookie mistake. I compounded the mistake by allowing him to do it. The kid was having trouble neutralizing his buoyancy. To steady himself, he thrust his hand into a rock crater and pulled. The lake’s basin was honeycombed rock, a delicate latticework of limestone. Will’s not a big kid, but he’s all muscle and sinew, and the pressure he put on the latticework was enough.
I didn’t see it coming, nor did Tomlinson. The man is relaxed and at ease in any situation—with the possible exception of an encounter with police—and he has great instincts. But he was in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. A microsecond before I reacted, my pal’s Buddha eyes narrowed, aware and thoughtful, then widened, alerted by sound and the changing water pressure from above. But too late.
In the slow explosion of silt, I was thinking, This can’t be happening, as I kicked free of the landslide.
It happened.
For a panicked few seconds, I raced away from the murk, staying just ahead in clear water, as if I might suffocate if the silt engulfed me. The reaction was not befitting a marine biologist who has logged hundreds of dive hours.
Me, the so-called expert diver—but that’s exactly what I did. It’s the way our brains work. When darkness triggers the flight mechanism, we bolt for light because light means safety. It means freedom . . . and air.
Air, suddenly, was something that was in limited supply.
We had been exploring the lake’s shallow perimeter for thirty-seven minutes. Because I’m obsessive when it comes to safety, and because I was the most experienced diver, I’d insisted that we not go deeper than thirty-three feet, which is the minimally more dangerous demarcation between two and three atmospheres.
The lake was a geological oddity—a teardrop-shaped pool, central Florida, northwest of a crossroad village named Venus, three miles from the nearest dirt road. We’d had to bushwhack across plains of palmetto scrub and pasture, cutting a track for Arlis Futch’s big-tired truck. It had taken all morning and part of the afternoon.
The lake sat between two ridges, a natural basin with cypress trees on the southern perimeter, then a pocket of cattails to the north where the lake narrowed. Beyond lay a marshy expanse of saw grass and cypress trees, a variety of Florida swamp where reptiles of every variety thrive, and so most people avoid such areas for a reason.
The lake consisted of an acre of water, which is about the size of a football field. It was manageable, I thought.
The water was clear and shallow in all but one dark area. There, the bottom funneled downward, vanishing into depths that were linked to the surface by pillars of silver light.
A “bottomless lake” is the colloquial term but inaccurate. A “cenote” is what similar sinkholes are called in Central America. A thousand years ago, Mayan priests dropped gold offerings into their depths—they gifted the heads of their enemies. Such places were considered holy. Ojos de Dios. The Eyes of God.
This lake was, in fact, the uppermost promontory of a water column that connected with the Floridan Aquifer. “Underground river”—another colloquial term. It was the safest of places to swim and dive, if you didn’t stray too deep . . . and if there weren’t man-sized gators in residence.
There were no gators. We’d made sure of that.
Alligators are, of course, a concern when diving the lakes and rivers of Florida. Because Arlis, a state-licensed hunter, had heard rumors that an oversized gator sometimes inhabited the lake, we took special precautions. I had done the research to confirm what I remembered and what Arlis swore was true: Alligators have a bottom time of two hours, max, usually much less. So we had watched, and waited, circling the lake several times. The precaution put us in the water later than we expected, with only an hour of good light left.
So what? It was the prudent thing to do.
I went in the water first. I did a lap across the lake and back, wearing a mask so I could have a look at the bottom. Tomlinson joined me on a quick bounce dive. Then we checked out Will’s scuba skills before continuing. It was only the boy’s second open-water dive, but he demonstrated more confidence than most hobbyists and more poise than at least a few so-called pros.
Even so, all the beginner protocols were in effect, plus the standard protocols employed when diving a remote inland area. We had brought the requisite emergency gear, in case we had bad luck, along with some basic salvage equipment—in case we had very good luck.
There was a reason we had brought salvage gear.
All divers enter the water in hope of finding something, anything, unexpected. Our hopes were more specific. We knew exactly what we were after—just as we knew how unlikely it was that we would find what we hoped to find.
We each carried a waterproof flashlight, as well as dive slates for communicating, miniature emergency air canisters holstered to our tanks and one inflatable marker buoy per diver. Will and I also carried knives. But Tomlinson, being Tomlinson, did not.
Once we were beneath the surface, we moved in a pack of three, no swimming off alone. I had modified the old rule of thirds to be doubly safe. When a pressure gauge indicated a tank was half empty, no matter whose tank, we would surface as a unit. That was our plan.
As an additional safeguard, Arlis remained topside, equipped with a cell phone and a handheld VHF radio, ready if needed. He had bristled at my decision that he couldn’t join us on the dive.
“Marion Ford,” he had complained, “I’ve spent more time on the water, and underwater, than you three boys put together. Diving this sinkhole was my idea. Now you’re tellin’ me I let you have all the fun? Ain’t no safer diving in the world than a puddle like this! And who the hell’s gonna mess with my truck way out here?”
Valid points—or so it had seemed at the time. What could possibly go wrong on a calm, winter afternoon, diving a parking lot-sized sinkhole in the remote pasturelands of central Florida?
“The buddy system just gives bad luck a bigger target.” Tomlinson had said that before we entered the water, rolling his eyes as I laid out the rules. It was a look I’ve come to know too well. It summarized his amusement and impatience with my linear, logical efforts to defuse destiny and to impose order on fate.
In this case, as it turned out, the man was right. He often is, although I seldom admit it.
Will’s air tank was half empty when Tomlinson found the mammoth tusk. I know because I checked the kid’s pressure gauge—1490 psi, it read—before gliding over to take a closer look. The tusk protruded from the ledge, curved and singular, as dark and dense as Chinese scrimshaw. It resembled an ivory question mark, broken at the base.
The elephant tusk was an unexpected find. It was not an uncommon find. The largest mammoth skeleton on record was recovered from the Aucilla River, to the north. At nearby Warm Mineral Springs, a lake only fifty miles to the west, archaeologist divers regularly found bones from mammoths, sloth and saber-toothed tigers. They have also found artifacts and human remains that date back twelve thousand years.
Human artifacts, found at Warm Mineral Springs, are so old, in fact, that they have challenged the theory that all Homo sapiens arrived in the Western Hemisphere via the Siberian land bridge.
Unexpected accessibility to the past—it’s one of Florida’s most compelling qualities. The state’s history lies in delicate layers. The layers ascend by decades, and then aeons, from sea level downward. The peninsula is, in fact, little more than a sand wafer, rooted to skeletons of sea creatures that lived and died long before Africa’s first primates dropped from the trees.
The geological term is “karst topography.” The landscape appears flat and monotonous, but that’s an illusion. The Florida peninsula is, in fact, an emerging plateau,
honeycombed with voids and vents, caves and underground waterways. Travelers on Interstate Highway I-75 have no idea that, beneath them, are cave labyrinths still being mapped by speleologists—“cavers,” they prefer to be called. These men and women ply their passion in darkness, night or day, equipped like astronauts, using battery-powered scooters—diver-propulsion vehicles—to extend their range.
The invisible complexities of water and rock—another aspect of Florida that I find compelling. Check the Miami Herald or St. Pete Times. Several times a year, there’s a headline about a section of road, or an entire home, disappearing into a sinkhole. Without warning, the earth’s crust implodes, exposing a world of subterranean ridges and valleys. Gradually, rain and underground springs fill the hole. The geological latticework vanishes beneath the surface. History appears briefly, then disappears. A new lake is formed.
The formation of sinkholes is increasing because Florida’s aquifer is overstressed by the water demands of Orlando and Tampa. Underground passages that were once filled with water are now only partially filled, so the interstices below cannot support the weight above.
Over aeons, Florida’s sea level rises, recedes and rises. It’s true now. It was true a million years ago when the tusk that Tomlinson found had been used to forage and to fend off saber-toothed tigers. It was also true twelve thousand years ago when, possibly, a prehistoric man had squatted beside the same limestone ridge, puzzling over the same ivory artifact.
Some anthropologists believe that man’s fascination with dragons dates back to contact with survivors of the dinosaur era. Florida is a natural funnel, the historic conduit, of wandering predators. It has lured dragons of many varieties over the last twenty thousand years. Tomlinson had, indeed, stumbled upon one. Not the woolly mammoth—our dragon was the fragile limestone ledge.
After I’d gotten a good long look at the tusk, I backed away so Will could get closer. I didn’t protest when he jammed his big teenage paw into a limestone vent to steady himself. I should have motioned him away. Instead, I held up five fingers, then gestured with my thumb. To make it plainer, I scribbled on my dive slate, Surface in 5.
Will had replied with a look of irritation, but then nodded as I made room. Tomlinson was grinning beneath his mask, ponytail drifting weightless, his expression saying, Look what I found!
The circumstances were about as benign as they get. We were only fifteen feet beneath the surface. We had safe reserves of air and an hour of daylight. The lake perimeter was so shallow, we could have searched it using snorkels instead of tanks. But it was good practice for the three of us as a team, I’d told myself, in the unlikely event that we actually found what we hoped to find. The prehistoric elephant tusk was interesting, but we didn’t need three people to salvage it—if Tomlinson had chosen to disturb the thing, which would have been out of character.
That’s another sport-diving protocol: Look but don’t disturb. But we hadn’t come to this lake as sport divers. We were on a mission, of sorts, although the kid was the last to know.
It wasn’t until just before we entered that water that Arlis Futch gave us a nod, meaning it was okay to finally tell Will Chaser the truth about why we were here.
Tomlinson did the talking—not just because the man is talkative by nature, although he is. He served as our spokesman because he was one of the few adults that the teenager seemed to like and trust.
Tomlinson made it short and sweet. He told Will that we hadn’t trucked forty miles inland, carrying scuba gear, a generator and a jet pump, plus sundry supplies, to search for fish, or fossils, or to catch specimens for my lab.
No, nothing that simple.
“We’re looking for an airplane,” Tomlinson had explained, enjoying himself, “but not just any airplane. Fifty years ago, a cargo plane left Havana. The plane was overloaded. It probably got caught in a storm, and it crashed south of Tampa. No one’s ever found it. Arlis thinks it went into this lake.”
“Overloaded with what?” Will had asked, interested, but with a teenage reticence to display enthusiasm.
I watched the boy’s eyes change as Arlis fished a hand into his pocket, extended his arm and said, “Maybe these.”
The man was holding two gold coins. They were hundred-peso coins, struck in the 1920s. José Martí’s profile was on the obverse side. REPUBLICA DE CUBA was stamped on the back. Even though we were outside, standing in the middle of nowhere, Arlis had shaded the coins and kept his voice low. Treasure hunters tend to be a noisy, talkative bunch until they think they’ve actually found something. It’s only when they turn quiet that I take them seriously.
“I’ll tell you the details later—if there’s need for that,” Arlis had said to Will. “Depends what we find. A few weeks back, I bought this chunk of land. About ten acres—lake included. It cost me more money than I have, but that don’t mean lawyers and cops won’t get involved down the road. Either way, you’ll be cut in on the profit—today only, I’m talking about. And that depends on what we find, and how long you work, and how hard you work. That sound okay with you?”
I was still watching Will’s expression. He and Arlis hadn’t liked each other from the start. Arlis was quick to give orders, and the teen was slow to comply. Halfway to the lake, Will had bristled at something Arlis had said, and he had called him a “mouthy old redneck.” Will had said it to the man’s face—not something a man like Arlis Futch would normally tolerate. I had thought that was the end of the boy’s afternoon dive.
To Arlis’s credit, though, he ignored the insult, but the two hadn’t spoken a word to each other until Arlis stuck out his big hand to display the coin. I could see that Will was surprised by Arlis’s offer—but no more surprised than I.
“You’re serious?” Will had said.
“About the lawyers trying to take it away from us?” Arlis replied. “Hell, yes, I’m serious.”
“No, about offering to let me help. No one said anything about a sunken plane.” Then the boy added, smiling, “But you don’t have anything to worry about. Not from me. I’m used to dealing with lawyers and cops. They don’t bother me a bit.”
Tomlinson was nodding his approval. Arlis liked it, too.
After that, there were no more surly teenage looks from Will, no more grumbling complaints and no more calling Arlis names. He believed the man. Will expected to find more gold.
Personally, I’d grown incrementally more certain there was nothing to find. I’d believed it right up until Tomlinson discovered the ancient tusk. During our half-hour dive, we’d done a random search of the perimeter, circling farther and farther from shore.
No sign of a plane.
Nor did we find the human detritus—beer bottles, old tires, fishing line—typical of such places. One exception: a crumpled Marlboro pack, suspended in silt. Otherwise, the place was pristine. It was a pleasant discovery that confirmed the lake’s inaccessibility.
It wasn’t until I backed away to give Will room to inspect the tusk that I saw something else that was man-made. Something that changed my mind about the lake . . . and the plane wreck.
Maybe.
I had glanced down to make certain my fins were clear of the bottom.
I didn’t want to murk the water. And there it was—proof we weren’t the first humans to breach the lake’s surface.
It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. On the bottom, lying in the sand, was another gold coin. Our fins had fanned the silt away. The coin was as yellow as molten brass. When I got a closer look, I saw that it was similar to the two coins Arlis had already found.
Diving to retrieve the coin is what saved me. It lured me away from the ledge. Bad luck, good luck—it’s all random. Because the kid and Tomlinson were focused on the ivory artifact, they didn’t follow me.
A moment later, I heard the ball-bearing clatter of rock on rock. One million years of limestone wall came cascading down.
As I raced ahead of the murk, I was already berating myself, thinking, How stupid!
How very damn stupid!
It wasn’t just because I had allowed Will to jam his hand into the delicate limestone. It was the whole situation that I regretted.
I, too, had made a basic mistake. Instead of following my instincts, I had allowed myself to fall under the influence of friends. One friend in particular: Arlis Futch.
TWO
THREE DAYS EARLIER, ON THE WARMEST, MANGROVE-SULTRY February afternoon in recent memory, Arlis had come clomping up my laboratory steps wearing boots, a coat, dressed for snow, and told me that, after years of searching, he’d finally found something very, very damn valuable. But it took us thirty minutes of verbal sparring before he finally told me what he’d found and where he had found it.
“It’s in a sinkhole,” he said. “A little bitty lake that’s shaped like a drop of water. It’s way the hell off the road, so nobody goes there. Ever, from the way it looks.”
Typical of the man.
Arlis is a talker, but, when he has something important, he measures out the information at a speed proportionate to the worthiness of his audience. The audience doesn’t have to be interested—and I wasn’t. Arlis kept talking, anyway.
The fisherman began his story obliquely, saying, “There’s a cold front coming. Feel it? If it weren’t for this norther blowin’ in tonight, we’d both be rich men by Tuesday. Friday, the latest.” He tossed it out there and let it hang.
It was a Saturday, Sanibel Island, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I replied, “Weather radio says the front arrives tomorrow, late. I was just listening.”
“They’re wrong—as usual,” Arlis had snapped. After several seconds of silence, he returned to the subject of getting rich, saying, “You can’t comprehend the amount of money I’m discussing, so I don’t expect you to thank me now.”
“Then I won’t,” I said. I was fine-tuning an aquarium, just beginning a new project. Sea horses. It wasn’t research, really. The sea horses were a tangent inquiry. Animals of a more academic interest were in two large tanks nearby: electric eels from the Amazon, via some pet-shop hobbyist who had released them into a ditch east of Naples.
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