Black Sun

CHAPTER 29

Danielle punched the keys on the dive computer to calculate their time available underwater. Air use, type of mixture, and decompression stops would all be factored in. While she worked on the details, Hawker took off his shirt and began hauling the gear from the equipment locker.

She glanced over at him. His shoulders and back muscles formed a broad V that tapered down to his waist. His muscles went taut as he stacked the heavy tanks by the boat’s stern rail.

His tanned skin was marred with sets of scars: an old knife wound that traveled down from one shoulder blade, road rash or shrapnel scars on his right side, and two small, circular scars that she guessed were bullet wounds. As terrible as it might sound, she thought, they suited him, the way the beat-up old helicopter and the rusting jeep suited him.

“Don’t get too distracted,” McCarter said, catching her.

“Right,” she replied, somewhat embarrassed.

“Don’t worry,” McCarter added. “I caught him staring at you earlier. He almost fell off the boat.”

“Good,” she said, smiling to herself. “I’d hate to think I was losing my touch.”

She turned back to the computer. If the depth finder was correct, the sea floor was a sandy plain eighty feet below. But at the spot where Yuri had begun screaming, the depth finder had registered successive pings ranging from fifty-five to seventy feet. Something was down there rising out of the sediment: a reef, the remnants of some island or some type of construction.

She stepped to the front of the boat for some privacy and changed into her dive skins, a thin, formfitting suit of Lycra, similar to a neoprene wet suit but designed for warmer water. Dive skins were good against abrasion and didn’t affect buoyancy, like neoprene suits could.

With the suit fitting like a glove, Danielle sheathed a four-inch titanium knife around her calf and then walked to the back of the boat. Hawker stood there, wearing dive shorts and a rash-guard of a shirt. He was examining their masks.

The full-face diving masks had radio communications built into them and a miniature head-up display that projected depth, time, and compass direction on the top right corner of the mask, like a modern fighter pilot’s helmet.

They had cost a thousand dollars apiece and when added to the two diver propulsion vehicles, or DPVs, the twin aluminum tanks, the setup came to twenty grand or more.

“I see where our budget went,” Hawker said.

“I had these flown in yesterday,” she said. “The boat … well, I had to make do with what was already available.”

Hawker lifted the tanks onto her back.

“We’re using nitrox,” he said referencing a special mixture of oxygen and nitrogen that allowed divers to go deeper, and stay down longer.

“Forty percent mixture.”

For a dive into eighty feet of water they didn’t really need nitrox but she hadn’t known what the depth of the site would be, and if they found something in deeper waters she didn’t want to go back for new tanks.

“With the nitrox we can do an hour and ten minutes without decompression,” she explained. “Max time on the bottom is two hours, saving thirty-two minutes for decompression on our way up.”

Hawker set his watch and heaved his set of tanks up onto his shoulders.

She turned to McCarter. “I programmed a waypoint into the GPS. Don’t delete it. You’re going to drift a little, even with the anchor down. You’ll need to be able to home in on that spot if we need a pickup.”

“I thought you had radios in the masks,” he said.

“We do but the transmitters are not as powerful as the one you have on board.” She motioned to the surface unit.

“We’ll be able to hear each other and you, but once we go deeper than thirty feet you won’t be able to hear us.”

McCarter nodded and Danielle pulled on her mask and went over the side, splashing into the warm Caribbean water.

Hawker followed and a moment later they were both in the water, testing out the DPVs: torpedo-shaped machines with stubby wings and handlebars that resembled a motorcycle’s.

Cruising through the gin-clear water of the gulf, Danielle activated the head-up display. A series of brilliant green lines formatted on the glass of her mask like some kind of high-definition video game.

Depth: 4, Bearing: NNW (323), Temp: 88, Time Elapsed: 1:17.

“Which way?” Hawker asked.

“We need to head back under the boat and follow the one-oh-seven bearing.”

And with that she peeled off to the left like a dolphin turning away from the pod. Hawker followed and the two of them tracked back underneath the boat, heading for the hidden rise in the sand half a mile away.

As she flew through the water, Danielle heard Hawker’s voice over the radio, doing a bad job of impersonating Jacques Cousteau. “And zey dove into zee murky depths, in search of zee giant octopus. Although it was not so murky as zey expected and zey weren’t really diving zat deep.”

She smiled to herself. Seawater absorbs and scatters light fairly rapidly but as they passed through forty feet it was bright and clear and pristine blue. With the light-colored, sandy bottom, it would only be slightly darker at eighty feet.

From the corner of her eye she saw Hawker pull up and turn.

She backed off the throttle and the two of them hung there, floating in zero g.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He pointed into the distance.

“Sharks.”