Deep Shadow

TEN

I WAS UNDERWATER NEAR THE EDGE OF THE DROP- off when I felt the hose go taut, as if King, his fins still visible above me, were a fisherman setting the hook and I was a fish.

The strike was so unexpected that it yanked the PVC nozzle out of my hand. It also caused me to drop the air bottles I was carrying, two aluminum tanks plus regulators, all roped together. Because the tanks were full, they sank as if they were made of solid steel.

I had been looking for the crevice where earlier I’d wedged the yellow air bottle. I wanted to plant another tank in its place. Instead, I watched the tanks clank against the lip of the drop-off, tumble briefly down the side, then accelerate, stems first, toward the lake bottom, regulator hoses flailing, where they hit another ledge, plowing up twin clouds of silt, then continued rolling downward into an unseen crevice.

What appeared to be the lake’s bottom, fifty feet below, was not the deepest part of the lake. I guessed there would be a maze of vents and crevices down there, inclining gradually toward a water vein that si-phoned into a river two or three hundred feet below the earth’s crust.

King had intentionally yanked the hose from my hand, and I thought, That’s one more reason the man won’t leave here alive.

If I hadn’t been so desperate for time, I would have been tempted to surface, snatch King from behind and drag him down, down, down into the mouth of that underground river. In my imagination, I could picture a man-sized fissure, a perfect spot to wedge King’s body.

Maybe later.

Yes, later . . . And later I would have to decide what to do with King—and Perry, too. For now, though, I had to play by their rules while I focused on rescuing Tomlinson and the boy.

“If you try anything stupid,” King had told me as I got ready for the dive, “Perry will start carving up Grandpa.”

Arlis, too far away to hear, hadn’t seen Perry grinning as he pulled my Randall knife from his belt and flashed it around like a movie swordsman.

I knew that failing to return with a sack full of gold would catalyze the same reaction. I would have to deal with that, too. But later.

For a moment, I considered leaving the bottles where they lay. A scattered blossoming of bubbles, leaking from the limestone, told me that Will and Tomlinson were somewhere beneath me still breathing. They couldn’t have much air remaining.

No way of knowing exactly how much time they had left.

Objectively, though, I understood that it would take me several minutes at the very least to carve enough sand and rock away with the jet dredge to free them. Excavating required too much time, and there was too little air unless I recovered the tanks.

In my mind, I inspected a rapid-fire chain of scenarios. By spending a minute or two now retrieving the tanks, I might well provide Will and Tomlinson with an hour or more of air later when I found them. It could mean the difference between life and death. Maybe one or both of the guys were injured. Maybe their legs had been pinned beneath boulders. What good would it do to find them only to have them die after sharing the last of my air?

I checked the time. Tomlinson and Will had been underwater for fifty-six minutes. Nine or ten minutes left, counting their spare air bottles. That gave me all the more reason to go after the tanks.

I purged air from my BC and angled downward, swallowing to clear my ears as I descended. Visibility was good now. I could see largemouth bass nesting in shallow sand craters, a school of bream butterflying among the branches of a waterlogged tree limb. I also saw a big alligator gar fish hanging in the depths as dark and motionless as a barracuda—the biggest

I had seen so far, maybe five feet long.

Maybe that’s what Perry had seen. Magnified by the lake’s surface, the fish would have looked man-sized to someone like him.

As I descended beyond the ledge, the lake basin bulged wider like the bowl of a brandy snifter. It was the typical geology of a sinkhole, or what is sometimes called a “karst window”: a small, watery mouth atop a globular basin that then narrowed beneath a protruding ledge. The ledges were probably remnants of a karst bridge that had once crossed the subterranean river.

As I traveled deeper, though, I realized that I was wrong about the shape of the lake. If the basin had been surveyed and plotted on graph paper, a vertical slice would have resembled an irregular hourglass more than a brandy snifter. Because the karst bridge had collapsed at the center, it projected twin limestone wings toward the middle of the lake and created an hourglass-like stricture.

The bottles had tumbled down a ravine, their resting place screened from my vision by depth and also because the protruding limestone shielded the bottom from sunlight. The twin wings, or overhangs, were fifteen to twenty feet thick. They were jagged at the ends and similar in most ways, although the northernmost wing where Tomlinson and Will were trapped was the thicker of the two. I found that reassuring because the overhang was sufficiently thick to contain karst chambers—possibly even a vent—that the two could have followed to an air bell.

An air bell—I still wanted to believe that such things existed.

I checked my depth gauge as I kicked downward.

68 ft.

Under the northernmost overhang, the lake bottom narrowed and then bellied wider—wider than the actual circumference of the lake. It was like an opening into a gymnasium-sized hollow that extended beneath the cypress trees where we’d first parked the truck and possibly under the swamp beyond. There, the bottom of the lake appeared to flatten—I had to guess—at a hundred and fifty feet.

I still couldn’t spot the damn bottles, so once again I considered returning to where we’d found the mammoth tusk and getting to work.

No . . . I had read too many accounts of cave divers, trapped or lost, who had died because their rescuers had panicked and made fatal miscalculations. The rescuers had rushed to help instead of methodically hurrying to help. There was a difference.

I knew that decompression wasn’t a concern for me because recovering the bottles amounted to a fast bounce dive—although there were inherent dangers with any bounce dive that exceeded a hundred feet. I would risk narcosis if I descended too fast, and, in the resulting confusion, there was also a chance of overbreathing my regulator. I had to pay attention. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a foolhardy thing to attempt. But I had to do it. I needed those tanks. My dive computer would automatically compute the short amount of decompression time required—close to zero, I guessed—and I would spend that time using the dredge, cutting my friends out of the rocks.

At one hundred and thirty feet, I saw the tanks. Both had come to rest among a pile of rubble created by falling rock and surface debris—roots of a long-dead cypress tree, silt detritus . . . and two cow skulls, too, amid scattered rib bones . . . and what looked at first like the crushed remains of an automobile.

Someone had dumped a car here? That struck me as unlikely. It had taken us two hours to hack a trail wide enough for Arlis’s four-wheel-drive truck. Why would someone come clear out here to ditch a clunker?

Descending toward the tanks, I didn’t slow as I pulled out a palm-sized LED flashlight and painted the bottom with light.

It wasn’t a car, I realized. It was the fuselage of an airplane. And I thought, My God—Arlis was right.

As I drew closer, details revealed themselves, frozen in white wafers of visibility. I saw twin twisted propellers . . . then twin windowless sockets that opened into the plane’s cockpit. Soon, I could make out the shape of a broken wing that was mud coated and angular. In the gray depths, the wing appeared as symmetrical as a gigantic bird feather.

I was looking at a cargo plane. An old DC-3 possibly.

Under any other circumstances, it would have been cause to celebrate—even if it wasn’t Batista’s gold plane, it was an extraordinary find.

But not now.

I looked at my watch, feeling the weight of water on me. As my chest worked harder to suck air, I could hear the muted pinging of my own air exhaust, the sound compressed by five atmospheres of pressure.

143 ft.

It was no place to linger—and not only because of the depth. Tomlinson and Will had been underwater for fifty-seven minutes now. Logic and experience told me that soon—very soon—Will would attempt to draw a breath, but his regulator would not respond. If the teen was in a place where he could move his arms, he would have his emergency bottle ready. The same was true of Tomlinson—he, too, was almost out of air. When trapped underwater, the demarcation between a lifetime and a spent life is one long, terrifying minute. Because of King’s antics, I was cutting it way too damn fine.

When I got to the bottles, I grabbed the line hitched to the valve stems and kicked toward the surface, forcing myself to ascend no faster than my own chromium-bright bubbles.

I couldn’t hurry. It was suicide to hurry. To pass the time, I allowed my eyes to assess the unexpected geology of the sinkhole, as viewed from below. Unexpected because, for the first time, I could see that the plane, when it crashed, had compromised the integrity of the limestone hourglass. It had cleaved a massive wedge from the overhang above me. As a result, the stone stricture into which Tomlinson and Will Chaser had disappeared, although thick at both ends, was perilously thin at midpoint.

If I made a mistake with the jet dredge, if I cut too deep or in the wrong place, the lake basin’s entire limestone scaffolding could collapse.

Tink . . . tinka . . . tink-tink.

I had returned to the place where we’d found the mammoth tusk, and Tomlinson was signaling me again.

Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits.

It had become his audio signature. He was still alive, but his tapping sounded more urgent now. It wasn’t my imagination.

Ninety seconds—that’s how long it had taken me to retrieve the tanks and return to the rubble that marked where the limestone ledge had once been.

I didn’t waste time responding.

He was signaling, I knew, because he’d heard me as I wedged one of the bottles into the crevice below the rubble and then opened the air valve a half turn. There was no need for me to answer the man. Soon enough, he would hear the jet dredge cutting through the sand above him. He would know that I was doing everything I could to get him and Will back to the surface.

The decision I now had to make was an important one: Where should I start digging?

After anchoring the second spare tank nearby, I located the hose to the dredge. It hung in a limp coil beneath the inner tube, where I could see King’s legs dangling. I swam to the PVC tube, checked the brass nozzle to make sure it was clear, then touched my finger to the makeshift trigger and tested the thing.

The sudden pressure caused the handle to kick in my hand as water jetted out the nozzle, an expanding swirl of bubbles that had the velocity of a dentist’s drill.

I removed my finger from the trigger and began to search for the best area to begin excavating. I wanted to locate the exact spot where Will and Tomlinson’s bubbles sparkled up through the limestone base . . . But there was no single exit point that I could find. The air ascended from several areas of rock.

That was okay. I told myself it didn’t matter. Even if I had found a precise exhaust point, it was no guarantee that it marked the location of my friends. Like water through a leaky roof, air bubbles traveled the path of least resistance, following angles and curves, until they found an opening. The guys might have been directly beneath their bubbles, but just as likely their bubbles had traveled many yards before finding a porous area through which to ascend.

It was also possible that Will and Tomlinson had moved from the spot where the ledge had collapsed. They could have burrowed into some unseen crevice or followed a karst vent, seeking an exit, leaving a trail of trapped air bubbles behind them.

I swam to the drop-off to get one last overview of the limestone overhang. If I excavated too close to the fragile midpoint, the whole slab might shear away. I chose an area slightly inland from where the ledge had collapsed and decided that it was safer to dig from the side of the overhang instead of directly downward.

I bled every bit of air from my BC to ensure negative buoyancy, then pulled on the hose, telling King that I needed slack. I dreaded the man’s response, but I was prepared when he attempted to yank the thing from my hands again.

I tugged twice more, battling my temper and still wrestling with the temptation to surprise the man from behind and break his neck. There is a type of person who teases and taunts but always with an exacting sense of boundaries. King was one of those, and he must have sensed he had pushed me to the limit because suddenly coils of hose dropped down from the inner tube as he provided me with enough slack to work.

I raced to the edge of the overhang and used my left hand to anchor myself to a slab of limestone before squeezing the jet dredge’s trigger. The PVC pipe jolted; the hose began to snake, writhing with pressure. When I touched the brass nozzle above the rock, sand exploded around me. The laser jet of water plowed a furrow that smoked like a lighted fuse.

I began cutting at a slight upward angle, attacking the overhang as if peeling an orange. Rock and sand appeared to melt away, creating a slow landslide that dropped beneath me as I progressed. Because it was important that I knew how my work was affecting Tomlinson and Will, I stopped after only thirty seconds. After a long pause, I tapped the nozzle of the dredge against my air bottle. Eight taps—probably not timed correctly, but Tomlinson would know what I meant.

The letters E-R. Everything okay?

Tomlinson’s response was barely audible, but I received eight taps in response.

Weird. It sounded as if he was now farther away . . . or deeper into the overhang. Maybe they had found a widening interstice—a keyhole passage. It suggested to me that they had moved from the site of the initial collapse. Perhaps they were following a tunnel—a tunnel that led to the surface—or even a cave that contained an air pocket. It was possible, and I hoped it was true.

More likely, though, if they had actually found a vent large enough for them both to negotiate, the tunnel would angle downward toward the subterranean river, not upward toward the surface.

As I began cutting again, I glanced at the murk below my fins, thinking about that possibility. At its narrowest point, the remnants of the limestone bridge were no more than twenty feet thick. Maybe I had been wrong to try excavating from the side. Would it have been wiser to attack the overhang from beneath? I imagined myself cutting through rock and sand until my friends literally fell to safety.

My eyes moved back and forth, monitoring the trench I was digging while also considering the geology of the lake.

No . . . I couldn’t risk excavating from beneath. It was smarter to stay where I was. I had seen the ledge from the vantage point of the wrecked plane. The lake’s hourglass scaffolding was too fragile, already compromised by the plane crash. Cutting from below would be like sawing through the load-bearing beam of a house. The entire structure could come crashing down.

For what seemed a long time, I worked hard, cutting deeper and deeper with the dredge, afraid to risk a glance at my watch. Internally, I was battling a welling panic. I vented energy by attacking the overhang, clawing away boulders and fossilized shell, ripping my way into the earth.

Finally, though, I knew I had to stop and assess. I looped the hose over my shoulder and banged the nozzle against my tank. Eight taps or nine—I wasn’t certain. My hands were shaking as I listened.

Nothing.

I signaled again. Then again. As I gripped the pipe, ready to continue dredging, I heard a very faint tink-tink-tink . . . TAP-TAP-TAP . . . tink-tink-tink.

It was Tomlinson, but only Tomlinson, and there was no mistaking the meaning of those nine distinct bell notes. He was now sending me an SOS. Emergency. Need help immediately.

Perhaps the pilot of the wrecked plane had sent out the same signal before crashing into this lake. It was a three-letter cry for help.

I checked my watch. The orange numerals seemed inordinately bright and stabbed at my eyes. Sixty-three minutes since we had begun what should have been an uncommonly safe dive on an uncommonly warm and calm February afternoon. The watch confirmed what I feared.

Tomlinson and I had been friends for so long, we had shared so many experiences, good and bad, that I knew he would not resort to an SOS unless he was at his end. Maybe Will was dying . . . or maybe the kid was already dead. Tomlinson would soon follow.

I shouted a pointless refusal through my regulator mouthpiece. “No!”

No—I wasn’t going to let it happen. Sometimes, the most dangerous option is the only option. I had made progress digging into the side of the overhang, but it was time for a more extreme approach. I had to risk cutting into the overhang from beneath. We were out of time, and it was my last best hope. Bringing the limestone bridge crashing down atop me was preferable to what I knew was the inevitable alternative. If I didn’t free them within the next minute or two, later, much later, I would have to wait while a recovery team retrieved the bodies of my closest friend and a sixteen-year-old boy who had already suffered too much trauma in his life.

I yanked hard on the hose, demanding slack, and realized as I waited that I was at risk of biting through my rubber mouthpiece. King’s instincts were still good, however. More coils of hose descended above me. Without pausing, I sprinted downward, kicking hard with my fins, towing the hose behind.

I knew that the thinnest section of the overhang was shoreward, midway. There, the composite of limestone and sand was only twenty feet thick. As I swam, I traced the contour beneath the wide ledge. Gradually, bands of sunlight that pierced the surface disappeared behind me. Ancillary light, mixed with water and shadows, created a turquoise gloom that soon enveloped me, but there was still enough visibility to make out details.

The underside of the overhang consisted of hardened marl and limestone. The facing was pocked like the surface of the moon. The formation suggested the slow-motion cataclysm that had formed our planet, the geological grinding of water, rock and wind over aeons.

When the plane had crashed, it must have been nosediving, because it had sheared off a pie-shaped wedge of the horizontal strata. Where the plane had made contact, the rock facing veered sharply upward, where the overhang had nearly been severed—a fault line.

I positioned myself beneath the fault line and jetted a few bursts of air into my BC—enough to create positive buoyancy. The vest lifted and anchored me against the rocks above. The hose was stretched so tight, however, that I couldn’t get a good working angle on the fault.

Once again, I tugged on the hose, demanding slack. Once again, I was prepared when King yanked hard in response. Instead of just a single, testing jolt, though, King continued pulling the hose, but now he was also kicking hard with his fins—he had to be, because I couldn’t stop his momentum. He began hauling me toward the edge of the overhang as if hauling in a fish.

I gripped the PVC pipe in both hands as he continued to drag me along the underside of the bridge. It went that way for several seconds, my aluminum bottle clanking as it banged against rocks. Finally, I managed to turn so that my fins were in front of me and I began kicking, fighting to reposition myself.

Above me, King was in an untethered inner tube. He had no leverage, only the swim fins I had loaned him, yet it wasn’t until I had freed one hand and jammed my arm deep into a rock vent that I finally stopped myself. As I battled, the strain on the hose was so great that I feared it would snap.

A rock vent . . .

In that instant, an image flashed into my mind: Will Chaser sticking his big teenage hand into a similar rock vent, then applying pressure as he tried to steady himself.

The image was detailed and luminous in my brain as I heard a sapwood-cracking sound, then a rumbling billiard-ball percussion.

I was still holding tight, one arm in the vent, one hand on the hose, when the ledge above me broke free. Then the entire overhang fell with the weight of a marble ceiling . . .