Deep Shadow

TWELVE

WHEN THE LIMESTONE OVERHANG COLLAPSED, I LET go of the jet dredge hose and tried to swim free of the chaos, but there was no escaping what followed.

Water, displaced by tons of rock, pushed a descending ridge of pressure that was stronger than any squall I had ever experienced. I felt like a seed being ejected from a grape. The shock wave hit me, tumbled me, then jettisoned me downward but also toward the concave wall of the lake and out of the path of the largest limestone slabs.

Smaller rocks caught me as I descended. I covered my head with my arms and kicked hard, riding the expanding pressure away from the worst of it, surfing the shock wave toward what I hoped was safety. The hiss of my regulator added a rhythmic counterbeat to the random clatter of rock colliding with rock and clanking off my air bottle. I continued swimming hard until the noise had ceased.

When I was safe within the great hollowed convexity of the lake’s northern wall, I stopped and turned, straining to see through the silt. I hadn’t intended to bring the entire overhang crashing down, only the midsection, but maybe the strategy had worked. Will and Tomlinson had been trapped somewhere inside the porous outcrop. It seemed likely that now, for better or worse, they were free. But where?

I checked my gauges. I was at forty-five feet and still had three-quarters of a tank of air. I had plenty of time to wait for visibility to improve, but my partners did not. They had now been underwater for one hour and seven minutes. If the collapse hadn’t freed them, and if they were not already swimming toward the surface, it seemed probable that Will was dead. And Tomlinson . . . ?

The possibility of Tomlinson being dead—actually dead—was beyond my grasp. It refused to take root in my brain. The man had the sensibilities and instincts of a cat—the morals, too—which added credibility, however perverse, to the expectation that he was entitled to more than just one life. Even our history argued against the inevitability that Tomlinson would in fact one day die.

“There are ghosts at this marina,” he was fond of saying, particularly after blending some illegal stew of weed and fungi, then chasing it with state-licensed rum.

Ghosts—ghosts at the marina, ghosts at home in Dinkin’s Bay. He spoke of the things fondly as if they actually existed. I didn’t believe it, of course, but at least the setting was acceptable. The marina was home. His boat and my lab were simply extensions of Dinkin’s Bay, familiar outposts that would be suitable places for our haunted specters to reside, if such things were real.

Not here at the bottom of a lake, though. Not in a place so far from the sea—and not linked to a random series of events that had been catalyzed by two equally random losers, King and Perry.

I began kicking toward the surface, left hand extended as a bumper, the silt so thick that my mind had nothing to process but internal data as I calculated my friend’s chances.

Tomlinson is never easy to assess or predict, and it was no different now, particularly after this chain of disasters. Tomlinson’s idea of a tough workout was swimming a case of beer out to his boat. To him, hangovers were the only variety of endurance sport worthy of his participation. And, up until the last week, he’d been a habitual ganja smoker.

Could he still be alive?

Possibly, I told myself, because it was also true that the man was a meditation guru, a master of breathing techniques. Living aboard a sailboat kept him fit, all leather and sinew, despite his devotion to excess and debauchery. Because of this, he might have another five or ten minutes of air left.

Tomlinson dead? No, it couldn’t happen. Bad enough was the probability that Will Chaser was gone, a tough teenage kid who, for no rational reason, seemed targeted by bad luck and fated to die young.

At twenty-eight feet, the water began to clear, although debris was still raining down—kept in suspension by the aftershock possibly or the result of miniature landslides from the last remaining truncated section of the overhang.

Beneath me, I could see a jumbled darkness that was a small mountain of rock. I decided that I would do another bounce dive if I didn’t find Will and Tomlinson somewhere above me, but it would be the last place I looked because if they were on the bottom they were dead. There was no way they could have survived a collapse so massive. It was possible that even the plane wreckage was now buried. Not that it mattered. The plane, the prospect of finding more gold, were meaningless to me now.

I continued swimming toward the surface.

Above me, striations of light showed that the northern section of limestone bridge was gone. All that remained was a cavernous space from which silt boiled—the same dark silt that earlier had reminded me of volcanic ash.

Fluttering down through the ash, I noticed, were several glittering objects. They were bright as fireflies. The particles formed a sparkling, descending pointillism that spun through the silt, raining down on me. Still swimming, I held out a hand and caught one.

It was a gold coin.

I looked at it for a moment, then caught another. There were dozens of the things. They appeared to gain speed as they fell.

I pocketed two of the coins but ignored the others. I didn’t need the flashlight to identify them. I knew what they were. They were more hundred-peso coins, stolen from the Cuban treasury.

Arlis had been right. He had found Batista’s gold plane.

Looking up, rays of late sunlight pierced the murk, I could make out the silhouette of the tractor-sized inner tube and King’s idle swim fins. The man was still up there, waiting to see if I was alive or dead and if I had found more gold.

But his were the only fins visible, which told me that Will and Tomlinson hadn’t made it to the surface. It gave me a sickening feeling seeing only King, and I slowed my ascent as I reassessed. If Tomlinson and the boy weren’t above me, then they were somewhere below me. Either that or they had disappeared into the porous limestone wall of the lake.

Thinking that gave me hope—but not much.

A jagged indentation marked where the overhang had broken free. It was a vertical crater the size of a closet. It looked as if a giant molar had been extracted from a limestone jaw. I knew I was in the right area because, surprisingly, the coiled ivory mammoth tusk appeared through the swirl of silt. It rested only a few yards from the crater, undisturbed, on a platform of rock that now constituted the edge of the lake’s shallow rim. The extra tank was gone, though, freed by the tremor, and had to be somewhere on the bottom.

There was no need to go looking for it now.

Probing ahead with my flashlight, I swam through black detritus, my hand extended. Visibility was so bad I had to find the inside wall of the crater by touch. If I pressed my face mask within a foot of the wall, I could make out coral patterns on gray limestone and dinosaur-sized oyster shells.

High on an inside corner, I discovered an opening. It was a karst vent less than two feet wide. I poked my head inside, feeling the limestone hard against the back of my neck. It took me several seconds to figure out that the vent angled downward, an incline as steep as a child’s slide.

I considered pulling myself into the hole to see where it led, but an act so risky demanded some thought. Entering an overhead environment underwater is almost always a bad idea and often fatal. I knew from reading, and from friends, that more than a hundred divers had been killed in Florida’s caves in recent years and an unsettling percentage of the victims had been cave trained and well equipped. I was neither, so the decision wasn’t an easy one.

Unless the bodies of Will and Tomlinson lay under a ton of rubble on the bottom, there was still a chance that they had been trapped in and protected by a similar vent. Even though visibility was poor, I could see that the area was a catacomb of holes and crevices.

With so many conduits available, it was possible that they had clawed and dug their way into adjoining chambers and were now far from the site of the first landslide. If so, those chambers might be linked to the vent I had just discovered. In fact, considering the location, it could have been the very place where they had been trapped to begin with.

I made a low pass over the sandy plateau. There were now no bubbles to be seen. That should have been enough to convince me, but I couldn’t let go of the hope that Tomlinson and the boy had followed one of the limestone corridors to safety.

The opening to the vent I had found, though, was so damn small. Would they have risked it? I tried to squeeze my shoulders into the hole, but the pillar valve on my tank stopped me, clanking against the rocks. Even if I had removed my tank, the space would have been too tight. But Tomlinson and the boy were both smaller than me. If they were desperate— and they were desperate—they could have forced their way into the thing and followed it.

I backed out of the hole and tapped my flashlight on my tank, hoping for a response. Several times I signaled, but there was no reply.

It was as telling as the absence of exhaust bubbles, but I refused to accept that silence as proof, either.

If they had followed the tunnel, I reasoned, they might be too far away to hear me. It was possible. If the vent actually did connect to a series of other tunnels and adjoining chambers, they could be a hundred yards or more from where they’d originally been trapped. In this part of Florida, there were underground labyrinths that traveled for miles before they dead-ended.

Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely. But I wanted to believe it, so I became even more determined to search the tunnel.

If I’d had my knife, it would have been easier to widen the opening, but Perry had grabbed it soon after I’d taken the thing off. Instead, I clipped the flashlight to my BC, light on, and used my hands to rip away chunks of limestone. It wasn’t easy work, and I knew too well that I was inviting another landslide.

After a couple of minutes, I tried signaling again, then used the silence as additional proof that I was making the right decision. My partners weren’t dead, they had traveled too far to hear me. I had to get closer before signaling again.

The human mind is at its inventive best when misinterpreting data to support a specific hope.

I flipped the air bottle over my head, pushed it into the hole and followed, feeling the jagged limestone tear at my skin and wet suit. The vent widened, briefly, then narrowed as I traveled downward, walking on my fingers and not using my fins, which was the best way to avoid disturbing the silt.

The vent wasn’t much wider than a drainpipe. With the flashlight on, the rock walls were orange, encrusted with oxidized sediment. Exhaust bubbles, percolating around my faceplate, loosened the sediment, staining the water with a bloody tint. With the light off, the walls seemed to expand around me as if the shock of illumination had caused them to spasm tight around my body. I preferred the illusion of space so progressed in darkness.

Ten yards into the vent, though, I stopped, finally admitting to myself, This is pointless.

I didn’t want to believe that, either. Intellectually, I knew it was true, but my brain had latched on to a fanciful thread. It was the irrational conviction that Will Chaser had indeed recently been here in this same dark space. It was an intangible sensation . . . a feeling, not a thought. Tomlinson had been here, too, presumably, but it was the image of the boy that was strongest in my mind.

I told myself, That’s ridiculous. Absurd—you’re imagining things, Ford.

I knew that was true, too. Tomlinson was my closest friend. I barely knew the boy—why would I feel some sensory connection with him? Plus, there is no validity to a perception that has been catalyzed by hope alone—or by fear. That variety of skewed thinking was the source of all superstition.

After another ten yards, I stopped again and tried the flashlight. Its beam created a milky tunnel through the silt. Was there an opening ahead? I couldn’t be sure. I pressed ahead a few more feet before deciding that I was wrong. It was another illusion spawned by wishful thinking.

The vent was so cramped, I couldn’t move my elbows, but I could move my right wrist. Eight times, I tapped the flashlight against my tank. Not hard—I didn’t want to risk disturbing the rocks overhead. The possibility of being crushed was too real and the thought of being trapped here unable to move, biding my time until I ran out of air, was terrifying.

Three more times I signaled, but there was no reply.

It brought me back to my senses. Intellect displaced imagination, and I began to back out of the vent. As I did, I felt a sickening, visceral dread. It was an out-of-body sense of unreality. My movements became robotic as I paused to signal one last time, then waited in a roaring silence—a silence that became hypnotic, pounding inside my head. It communicated a single, throbbing reality: They’re gone . . . both dead. You can’t help them by killing yourself.

It was an unavoidable truth. I backed out of the hole, expecting the tunnel to collapse each time my elbow collided with a rock or when I had to brace a knee and apply force to lever myself backward another few inches.

When I was finally free, my mind functioned by rote as I continued exploring the area. I saw a few more coins, bright and solitary in the shallows. The sight catalyzed an irrational anger in me. Yes, Arlis had found Batista’s gold plane—so what? I had no idea if there was a ton of gold beneath me or if the treasure included only the handful of coins I had seen fluttering into the depths. It no longer mattered. The plane wreck had cost two more lives. Nothing was worth that.

I kicked toward the shallows, my eyes moving from the bottom to the surface still hoping for a miracle. Once again, I searched the surface, hoping to see two pairs of legs dangling, but there was nothing.

Now even King was gone. I could see the underside of the inner tube still tied to my marker buoy, the hose floating in a loose coil, but the jet dredge was unattended.

I nursed a momentary hope that the son of a bitch had drowned, but only because I was still in shock. As I began to recover, though, my focus switched from the death of my friends to how I would now deal with the skinny drifter, with his slicked-back hair and his smirking contempt.

King had intentionally sabotaged my rescue attempt, slowing me as we’d positioned the jet dredge. He had caused me to lose a precious ninety seconds when I’d dropped the spare tanks. It was King who was responsible for the final cataclysmic collapse that had taken Tomlinson and Will, probably crushing them both.

King. He had taunted and manipulated me, confident that I, like most people, would not stray beyond the boundaries of normal behavior. But the man had no idea who he was dealing with. King and Perry were both about to find out.

I realized that I was hyperventilating. The realization produced a reaction that I found perversely comforting. A cold flooding calm moved through me that was familiar. It leached color from the glowing orange numerals of my dive watch. It dulled the undulate sky above. The reaction gave me focus.

King was up there. Maybe the sound of the ledge collapsing had spooked him. Maybe he had simply attempted further sabotage by abandoning me.

It didn’t matter. The man was somewhere onshore, and I would find him. There was no rush now. King and Perry wouldn’t murder Arlis. Arlis was key to controlling me. They wouldn’t kill me, either—not right away, at least—because they needed me to recover the gold.

Gold. They had Arlis as leverage. But I had leverage, now, too. I had two additional coins in my vest and there were more coins on the bottom of the lake. Play it right and their collective greed would give me the opening I needed.

I’ll kill them both.

That’s what I was thinking.

My gauges told me that I had burned another quarter bottle of air while worming my way in and out of the vent. It was additional evidence that Will and Tomlinson had perished if they had jammed themselves into a tunnel.

Comparing open-space diving to cave diving is like comparing a game of paintball to actual combat. The same is true of wreck penetration. It’s not recreational sport, it’s an unforgiving craft.

An overhead environment sparks involuntary physiological responses. Pulse and respiration increase proportionally as visibility and space decrease. The fight-or-flight sensors become the brain’s primary supplier of data, and both the hypothalamus and the medulla begin a chemical dialogue with the spinal cord, releasing epinephrine to fuel a blooming panic.

If you’re human, you react, and there is no ignoring it. The responses can be mitigated only by a hell of a lot of training, preparation and experience.

If Will and Tomlinson had attempted to escape through a vent, their air consumption would have doubled, even at twenty feet. In all probability, they’d run out of air long before I had returned to the water.

Even so, I was reluctant to surface. I couldn’t give up without at least checking the rubble below. I dreaded the thought of finding the bodies of my friends, but the idea of leaving Tomlinson and Will Chaser here, alone, on the bottom of this remote sinkhole, was even more repugnant.

I checked my dive computer to confirm that I hadn’t accumulated a decompression obligation. I still had almost half my air remaining, and I needed time to think about how I would handle King and Perry when I surfaced.

No rush, I reminded myself as I kicked downward, descending headfirst into the blue. It had taken me less than two minutes to bounce-dive to the bottom and recover the spare tanks. Because of the depth, I couldn’t risk lingering. But neither did I have to hurry.

At a hundred feet, visibility began to deteriorate, but I could still decipher the shape of limestone blocks and shell rubble that comprised a new underwater hillock—the term mogote came into my mind. Silt spiraled downward into the hillside, the flow line defined by a sumping whirlpool vortex.

It would have been interesting to introduce the chemical fluorescein into the lake, then trace that brilliant green dye to its emergence points. No telling where this underground river flowed, and there were probably many exit points—adjoining sinkholes, flowing surface rivers, the Gulf of Mexico sixty miles west or even Florida Bay a hundred and fifty miles to the south. It was not only possible, it was a probability that had been well documented by Florida hydrogeologists.

At the top of the hillock, I paused and used my flashlight. The beam penetrated the murk below, a solitary white laser in which silt became animated, boiling like smoke from a subterranean fire.

After checking my gauges—105 ft—I followed the beam down the hillside, kicking slowly. I told myself that I was looking for more coins. They would be useful for convincing King I had discovered a great treasure. But I was, in fact, on a reluctant search for two bodies.

As I descended, a peripheral awareness confirmed that the landslide had covered much of the plane wreckage. Only the nose of the plane was visible now. The vague geometrics of the cockpit windows were as bleak and unresponsive as the eye sockets of a skull. Atop the fuselage, I saw what may have been several more coins. Ironic, if they had come to rest here.

I wanted to swoop down and grab the things. It was pleasant to imagine myself showing King a fistful of gold while I searched his face for the greed that soon, I hoped, would allow me to lure him into the water, just the two of us alone, King and me.

No, I decided. Retrieving the coins was a bad idea. The desire to collect the things was an emotional response, I realized—a red flag at any depth below sixty feet. I was now at a hundred and ten feet, deep into nitrogen narcosis territory, where spontaneity can be a methodical killer. A few more coins, I decided, were not worth the risk of going even a few meters deeper.

Still using the flashlight, I started up, ascending more slowly than my bubbles, as I continued to search the rubble. I saw several more cattle skulls and another mastodon tusk—this one was a broken brown chunk of ivory, possibly the mate of the tusk that Tomlinson had found. I was tempted to take a closer look, but that, too, was irrational under the circumstances. It was another red flag, and I knew it was time to surface.

A few seconds later, though, I saw something that brought me to a stop. Protruding from beneath a slab of limestone was a lone black swim fin. I recognized it immediately. It was an old-style Jet Fin, similar to the Rocket Fins I wore. They were made of dense black rubber, open-heeled, heavy, wide and functional. I prefer fins that aren’t buoyant, and the same was true with Tomlinson. He had joked that wearing dated old fins was a style statement—our lone similarity when it came to such things.

It was Tomlinson’s fin.

I approached the thing slowly until I saw to my relief that the fin wasn’t attached to a foot. I lifted it, inspected it, then pried away a few layers of rock from beneath it, searching for the remains of my friend. I even banged out a signal on my tank before positioning the fin beneath my arm, then continued my ascent, my mind trying to fix the details of this lake, this moment, in memory.

Underground rivers are also referred to as “lost rivers.” I could think of no better description for this place.

According to my dive computer, I had accumulated a brief decompression stop at twenty feet. The obligation was only two minutes, but I would double that just to be safe. My gauges also told me that my air was low now, redlining at 1000 psi. I had very little time remaining.

As I kicked toward the surface, I looked for a comfortable place to wait while I decompressed. Water was clearer now where the overhang had broken away and that’s where I chose to stop, backing into the crater as if it were a cocoon.

I neutralized my buoyancy and carefully—very carefully—locked my arm into the vent to anchor myself. From that vantage point, I could see the jet dredge above, still unattended, and the mountain of rock below where a good, good man and a very tough kid had ended their lives.

Because I had only one free hand, I decided to store Tomlinson’s fin inside the vent until it was time to surface. I am not an emotional person, but there was something funereal and final about placing my pal’s fin, alone, in a space so dark. I couldn’t make myself do it and I stared at the thing as I battled an overwhelming flood of emotion that I suspected was normal dissemination. Grief, sorrow, guilt and regret. They are all variations on a common theme, and that very human theme is loss. Inexorable, inescapable loss.

The buddy system just gives bad luck a bigger target, Tomlinson had joked—but it was far more profound than a joke because this time he was right.

The man often was.

Three minutes into my decompression, just for the hell of it, I tapped my flashlight on my tank, eight slow bell notes, before clipping the light to my shoulder harness. It was the Morse abbreviation for F-B. Fine business. Everything’s okay. It wasn’t intended as a signal. It was offered as my farewell salute.

A moment later, though, I was shocked to hear—at least, I believed I heard—TAP . . .TAP . . .TAP in response. I was so startled that I dropped Tomlinson’s fin. As I lunged to grab the thing, I heard yet another clanging series of sounds. Much louder, it seemed.

Impossible.

No, the sound was easily explained because the source of the noise was me. I had clipped the flashlight too close to my tank so that metal clanked against metal whenever I moved.

By the time I figured it out, I had been decompressing for nearly five minutes and I was too low on air to waste more time. There would be no more futile signaling, no more imagined replies.

It was time to surface. King and Perry were waiting.