Deep Shadow

FIVE

IF I DO SOMETHING WRONG, JUST TELL ME, I’LL fix it . . .

Will had meant what he’d said, yet I was the one who had screwed up. I had allowed him to jam his hand into the rocks and topple the delicate scaffolding of underwater limestone.

Will had told me, I count on myself all the time, so I guess you can, too . . .

What did it matter, if I couldn’t count on myself?

When the ledge collapsed, burying Will and Tomlinson, I compounded the mistake by panicking. I bolted from the scene, swimming ahead of the murk, until my intellect finally subdued my instincts. It took only seconds, yet I was already berating myself, as I drew my knees up and thrust out my hands to stop my momentum.

I did an about-face and swam into the cloud of silt, kicking hard toward where I’d last seen Tomlinson and the boy. Because visibility had gone from bad to impossible, I extended my left hand as a bumper.

First, though, I paused long enough to check my watch. I had to mark the precise time of the landslide. If Will and Tomlinson had not already wormed themselves free, they had a finite amount of air remaining in their tanks. If they were trapped, I needed to know how long I had to get them out.

We had been underwater thirty-eight minutes, according to the chronograph on my new dive watch. That wasn’t a large or forgiving window.

Will, the novice, would have consumed more air than we had. That was predictable. He might have as much as twenty-five minutes remaining or as little as ten, depending on how he now handled the shock of being caught under the rocks.

Tomlinson would deal with it more calmly. The man is benignly neurotic, as high-strung as a poodle during the normal course of his abnormal life, but when events turn sour, and the sky begins to fall, the man changes.

I’ve seen it often enough to know.

When the pressure’s on, Tomlinson withdraws into some ancient retreat inside his head. His voice softens, his mannerisms slow. He exudes an unaffected calm—a serene acceptance that is sometimes comforting but occasionally maddening.

What I hoped was that the guys had already dug their way out of the pile. I hoped they were now kicking their way toward the surface with nothing more than a few bruises and cuts to deal with. If true, the landslide was something we could laugh about later.

After a full minute of kicking through the murk, though, I began to have my doubts. With each stroke, I expected to collide with remnants of the fallen ledge.

I did not.

I changed direction, certain I would hit bottom. Wrong about that, too. So I recalculated, and made another attempt to find the ledge, both hands extended, feeling my way.

Nothing.

I was disoriented. The sediment was so thick there was the illusion that I was descending, not traveling on a level course. The silt, as it boiled around me, appeared to be siphoning downward, too.

Or was it illusion?

I swam blindly for another few seconds before I stopped, and told myself to calm down, to think. I checked the depth gauge attached to my buoyancy compensator vest—a BC. The gauge was a simple recreational-dive computer, with a needle and precise green numerals. Even so, visibility was so poor I had to hold the thing against my mask to read it.

48 ft.

Damn it!

It wasn’t an illusion. I had been descending. Without landmarks to guide me, I’d been following the lake’s rim downward toward the mouth of the underground river.

My brain analyzed the inference. If silt was being drawn downward, there was a reason. It meant there was a subtle, siphoning current. I had been swimming with the same current, following the path of least resistance.

I took two slow, measured breaths. Because I no longer knew up from down, I cupped my regulator and watched the bubbles. Next I jetted a burst of air into my BC, then followed the bubbles slowly toward the surface, exhaling as I ascended, left hand extended above my head, right hand holding the pressure gauge near my mask.

When I got to twenty feet, visibility had not improved. I purged my BC until buoyancy was neutral, then hung suspended for a few seconds. Where the hell had the lake’s bottom gone?

I spun around, searching . . . and was instantly disoriented again.

Granules of sand swirling before my eyes assumed the pattern of distant stars . . . then zoomed closer, thick as a soup of protoplasm. I knew I had to surface to get my bearings. When I burped more air into my BC, it reacted with a thrusting space-shuttle jolt and began to transport me upward.

At ten feet, I stopped again, surprised by another thunderous rumble. Water conducts sound more efficiently than air. The rumble came from beneath me, vibrating through flesh, resonating in bone.

Another landslide?

No. The sound was different, an abrupt thud of weight, then a mushrooming silence. If a massive slab of limestone had collapsed, it might make a similar sound.

I waited, dreading confirmation. The confirmation arrived via an upward surge of displaced water and a blooming cloud of darker sediment.

The landslide had caused a section of the lake’s bottom to collapse. I knew there was a chance that Will and Tomlinson had been swept deeper by the implosion.

I surfaced in a rush. When I’d broken free of the murk and pushed the mask back on my head, I used fins to do a fast pirouette, examining the lake’s surface. I hoped to see Tomlinson and Will floating nearby, laughing in the winter sunlight, already recounting their brush with death.

Instead, the lake was a solitary disk, wind-rippled, empty.

I checked the time. Forty minutes, I’d been down. At the max, Will had twenty minutes of air left, Tomlinson thirty . . . if they were still alive.

I faced the lake’s southern shore, searching for our vehicle. It was a four-wheel-drive Dodge Ram truck, parked on a cypress ridge, fifty yards away across the water. I began calling for Arlis Futch and expected to see him exit the vehicle, hands on hips, still in a foul mood because I’d made him stay ashore.

The truck’s door was open, but there was no sign of the old man. There was no sign of life, period, save for a pair of loons V-ing toward the lake’s far rim and the ascending whistle of an osprey that wheeled overhead.

I cupped my hands and yelled, “Arlis? Arlis! Call nine-one-one!”

I waited before adding, “Tell them we need an emergency response team. Arlis! Rig the jet pump and start the generator!”

Silence.

Above, the osprey tucked its wings and dropped like a boulder. The hawk crashed the water’s surface, splashed wildly for a moment, then struggled to get airborne, gaining speed, its claws dripping . . . but empty.

“Arlis! Do you hear me? Goddamn it . . . Arlis Futch!”

Near the vehicle, a rabble of crows scattered above the cypress canopy, black scars animated on a blue sky. Something beneath the trees had spooked the birds. If Arlis was somewhere back there in the cypress grove, he wasn’t answering.

Tomlinson and Will had to be beneath me. Somewhere. There is no such thing as a bottomless lake, so I would find them. Somehow.

I cleared my mask, purged my BC, then piked downward. I let the weight of my legs push me toward the bottom.

Years ago, diving a sinkhole in the Bahamas, I swam down through a pea-soup murk only to suddenly bust through into a globe of glacier-clear water. It was like entering a crystal vault from above. The light was muted because of the gloom, but visibility was flawless.

On that occasion, I had pierced the aqueous lens of an underground spring. Fed by ocean currents, the outflow of water created a bubble of clarity. It was like discovering a secret world.

Something similar happened now, as I descended, although the change in clarity wasn’t as abrupt. Sediment was dissipating, visibility improving. It was surprising because there hadn’t been enough time for the murk to settle. It suggested that clear water was now flowing into the area from below. Perhaps the landslide had uncovered a spring.

At ten feet, I observed a vague, stationary darkness take form. It was the lake’s shallow perimeter. The ledge that held the prehistoric tusk had stood fifteen yards from the rim of a drop-off. The sandy rim remained—a relief to see a familiar landmark—but the bottom had changed. The rim soon assumed color in patterns of gray and white. I was peripherally aware of varieties of fish—bream and immature bass—that had been drawn to the disturbance.

As I drew closer, I could also see that the bottom hadn’t just changed, some of it had vanished. A section of ridge the size of a car had imploded, taking the ledge with it. From the appearance of the crater, the area beneath it had dropped about ten feet. The elevated wall had collapsed atop it and was now a mound of oolite and sand. The area was littered with fossilized oysters. The oyster shells were the size of footballs.

Then I saw something else I recognized: the prehistoric tusk. It lay bare on the sand. The thing was twice as long as I’d supposed. It was six feet of black ivory, spiraled like a corkscrew.

I swam downward, spooking fish as I approached, and lifted the tusk—it was heavy. I waited a moment, ears adjusting to the pressure, then let the artifact drop. It made a satisfyingly hollow thud. The vague percussive sound told me that the bottom was porous, not solid.

Good.

It gave me hope.

First things first, I had to mark the spot. I pulled a dive marker from my vest and secured the nylon cord to a rock near the tusk. I inflated the marker, then watched it rocket to the surface.

From a calf scabbard, I removed my dive knife. Normally, I would have been carrying something cheap—more than one diver has died because he dropped an expensive knife and chased it into the depths. But this was to have been a shallow-water dive, so I was carrying a treasured possession. It was one of the last survival knives made personally by the late Bo Randall of Orlando. The handle was capped with a machined brass knob. I used the handle now to tap on the tusk, then straightened myself to listen, hoping to hear a response.

Nothing.

I tapped again, a measured series, then gave it a few silent seconds before leaving the tusk and swimming down into the crater.

A vein work of fissures thatched the crater’s limestone floor. Tendrils of gray silt vented upward from the cracks, as symmetrical as smoke on a windless day.

A volcanic effect.

It told me yes, water was flowing out through the latticework of stone. It also told me that the area beneath me was porous, not solid—possibly not heavy enough to crush two men.

Using the knife, I began tapping on the limestone, traveling along the bottom in an orderly way. Tap-tap-tap. I waited. Tap-tap-tap. I listened.

After several attempts, I abandoned the crater and followed its outer wall downward. At the edge of the wall, the bottom angled deeper. It dropped toward a funneling darkness: the mouth of an underground river.

Again, I went through the ceremony with the knife. Tap-tap-tap. Wait. Tap-tap-tap. Listen.

Twice, I worked my way around the wall, tapping, then waiting. When I finally heard a dull Tap-a-tappa-tap in reply, I thought I might be imagining it. I wasn’t convinced until Tomlinson added a vaudeville rhythm: Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits.

The sound was muffled but the source familiar. Rap an air tank with a knife—it was the same bell-like sound. It told me at least one man was alive. No . . . they were both alive, I realized. I was now hearing a duo of bell sounds: Tomlinson and Will both banging on their tanks.

Tomlinson didn’t carry a knife—it was irrational, but he never did—so he must have been using a flashlight or a D ring from his vest.

The clanging was steady, not frantic, which I found reassuring. My partners were trapped somewhere under the crater floor, beneath a plateau of rock and sand, but obviously they had room enough to move their arms. It suggested that they were in a crevice or in an underground chamber that had been covered by rubble

I unsheathed my knife and began to dig methodically, pulling away rock, digging at the bottom. It was mostly sand. Frustrating. Digging a hole underwater is an exercise in futility. If I scooped out two handfuls of sand, twice that amount sieved downward and filled the temporary hole. Thinking it might be more efficient, I grabbed a pan-sized oyster shell and used it like a shovel.

It wasn’t much better. Until I returned with the jet dredge, though, a shovel was my best option. I continued digging, burning my dwindling air supply, until the clanging signal from beneath the crater changed. It caused me to pause.

I heard an articulate TAP. Tap-tap-tap . . . TAP . . . tappa-tap. Over and over, with the same careful spacing. Some sounds were intentionally louder, it seemed.

I banged the oyster shell against my own tank, parroting the signal . . . then received a different signal in reply.

Tap . . .TAP . . . tap.

It was Tomlinson. Had to be. Tomlinson, the blue-water sailor, the maritime minimalist. He was attempting Morse code. The man had been studying code for nearly a year, inspired by a late, great friend who had railed against our growing dependence on technology.

I’ve been a devoted user of shortwave radios since childhood, but I’m not a student of Morse code. I know a few basic shorthand signals, but now was not the time to test my skills. We had less than twenty minutes of air left. Subtleties of communication would have to wait.

I returned to my digging, bulling chunks of limestone to the side, then using the oyster shovel to scoop a dent in the sand. I kept at it until a sound within the wall caused me to pause once again.

It was an alarm sound, the rapid clang-clang-clang of a fire bell. Tomlinson was telling me to stop digging.

Why?

I could think of only one possibility: My digging was somehow threatening the stability of the space that was providing them refuge.

Maddening! If I couldn’t dig, how did Tomlinson expect me to free them? After several seconds of silence, he tried Morse code again.

Tap . . .TAP . . . tap.

I forced myself to concentrate. The louder clanks, I decided, were dahs in Morse. The faster, lighter raps were dits.

Tap . . .TAP . . . tap.

Was it the letter R? Yes, an R. R is the most common Morse abbreviation. Even I recognized it. R stands for “roger”—“signal understood.”

It was Tomlinson’s way of beginning a dialogue.

I attempted a dit-dah-dit reply, then waited.

Once again, he tried to signal, but the letters wouldn’t take shape in my head. Because I didn’t understand, I let silence communicate my confusion.

Tomlinson tried a different pattern. I heard: Dit-dit . . . DAH . . . dit. DAH . . . dit-dit-dit.

Three times, he sent it, before I recognized another common Morse abbreviation. F-B. It was short for “fine business”—the equivalent of “everything’s okay.”

Everything was certainly not okay. He was telling me they weren’t hurt—not seriously, anyway. So why had he sounded an alarm?

I tapped out the letter R in reply—“understood”—then listened to a string of louder, methodical bell notes. Instead of attempting to translate, I counted . . . counted four distinctive clangs, but the fifth—if there was to have been a fifth—was interrupted by a cascading clatter of rock and then a thunderous thud.

Another section of lake bottom, or possibly the interior wall of the crater, had collapsed—loosened by our clanging sound waves, more than likely.

I was blinded by another silt explosion, but this time I held my ground. I hung tight to a wedge of rock as the murk enveloped me. For a full minute, I waited for the unstable limestone to settle before I attempted to signal Tomlinson again.

This time, when he replied, the sound was much fainter. Either more sand and rock separated us or his location had changed.

I didn’t want to risk another exchange in Morse code. Sound waves are corrosive, and the lake bottom was too unstable. I needed the jet dredge.

A dredge is the underwater equivalent of a pressure washer. The one we had brought consisted of a generator, a heavy coil of hose that floated on a tractor-sized inner tube and a brass nozzle fitted into a three-foot length of PVC pipe. The thing shot a laser stream of water that would cut through rock and sand and was commonly used for setting pilings—or for treasure hunting. That’s why we’d brought it.

I had to get the generator going, prime the pump and return with the hose. I needed Arlis Futch’s help.

On the chance that Tomlinson and Will had, in fact, found refuge in an underground chamber, I located a crevice below the crater. It took a while to find one that looked to be about the right size. Without removing my BC, I popped a latch on the backpack, freed my air bottle and pulled it over my head. After I had inhaled a couple of deep breaths, I closed the valve, then purged my regulator before removing the pressure gauge and regulator hoses.

Full air bottles sink. Empty tanks float. Mine was half full, so it was easy to maneuver. I wedged the bottle into the crevice, valve up, and braced it with a chunk of rock. When I was convinced the tank was secure, I opened the valve a quarter turn.

A silver chain of air bubbles ascended from the tank. They began to disperse along the underside of the crater. The bubbles became as animated as ants as they probed the rock face, seeking vents and passages to continue their ascent. If there was a chamber above, the bubbles would find the open space and burst free.

I am not a cave diver, although I had explored a couple of caves years ago beneath an island off Borneo. But I’ve spoken with, and read about, Florida’s cave divers—an exacting, dedicated group that has lost more than one comrade to their collective passion for mapping subterranean labyrinths.

From these people, I had acquired a sense, at least, of the complex geology that defines the underwater karst catacombs that exist beneath the flatlands of central Florida. A small rock vent can lead to an ever-narrowing dead end, but it might also open up into a cavern. Caverns have been discovered beneath Florida’s flatlands that are the size of airplane hangars, vaulted cathedrals of limestone. Some were formed during the Pleistocene and had once been home to wandering families, human and animal, before the rising sea level flooded them.

I had heard that such caves might contain air bells—pockets of air—although I doubted the truth of it. Not in Florida, anyway. An airtight vault in rock as porous as limestone? It was unlikely.

Even so, wedging a bottle beneath the collapsed ledge was worth a try. Maybe, just maybe, Will and Tomlinson had been lucky enough to find an air pocket. Maybe, just maybe, I had provided my friends with additional air.

I started up with a few kicks of my old Rocket Fins. When I broke through the surface, I was already yelling for Arlis Futch.

This time, Arlis was waiting. He was standing at the edge of the lake, next to his truck, but his posture was oddly stiff. He was standing as if he were at attention. There were two men with him.

Where the hell had they come from? We hadn’t told anyone about the lake—Arlis had demanded secrecy—and the nearest road was miles away.

I had to clear my prescription mask and square it on my face again before I could be sure of details. Only then did I understand why Arlis was standing oddly. One of the men was holding a pistol to the back of his head.

The second man was also armed. He had a rifle pointed at me.

With his trigger hand, the man was waving me out of the water, calling, “Come up out of there, Jock-a-mo, and meet your new playmates. We got lots to talk about.”