Deep Shadow

NINETEEN

NEAR THE ENTRANCE INTO THE KARST TUNNEL, AS I reached for the mammoth tusk to steady myself, I stopped and listened, aware that something large had entered the water somewhere above me.

It wasn’t close and it wasn’t loud, but the object had weight. The awareness came to me as a feeling, not a linear observation. Water, displaced by mass, exerts an expanding wave of pressure. I sensed the subtle force before the vibration registered in my ears.

My first thought was that Perry had forced King into the lake to help me with the jet dredge.

But, no . . . it wasn’t King. I had heard only the percussion of entry, no amateurish thrashing and splashing. It wasn’t King and it certainly wasn’t Perry.

It was something else—something not human, I felt sure. An inanimate object possibly. It could have been a boulder or a chunk of tree trunk. I pictured King throwing something big into the water, another attempt to irritate me. In him, humor took the form of harassment when violence wasn’t an option.

Maybe so, but he hadn’t thrown a chunk of wood. Wood floats. Whatever had breached the surface now continued to move. I could hear it, descending rapidly down the lake’s incline. It made a scraping, clanking noise that was impossible to identify.

I wedged the extra gear close to the marker buoy’s line, grabbed my underwater spotlight and looked up, paying attention. If it wasn’t a joke, I needed to know what was coming toward me.

Through my naked eye, the lake’s surface was a lucid obsidian disk. It was vaguely luminous and star speckled. Through the green eye of the monocular, though, stars glittered brightly against an emerald sky. I could see the silhouette of the marker buoy above and the silver thread of rope that anchored it.

I had done a full turn before I finally saw what was making the noise. It was large and dark and symmetrical. It appeared to be descending at an angle, following the slope of the lake bottom, coming fast in my direction.

I closed my right eye and touched my fingers to the outer ring of the monocular, trying to focus on the object as it drew closer. It wasn’t easy to track, because the thing was gaining speed as it descended. Automatically, I began sculling backward in retreat—an instinctive response that was silly. I was running away, even though I didn’t know what was coming at me.

For a moment, I believed my first guess was right: I thought it was a chunk of rock pushed into the water by King because it was like watching something tumble downhill. The thing wobbled and bounced and kicked up sand, snaking its way toward me like a drunken skier on a vertical slope.

In my right hand, I had the big underwater light. I didn’t think I would need it because of the night vision system, but I used the spotlight now, swimming on my back so I could maintain visual contact. As the thing rumbled closer, I kicked harder—but then it abruptly slowed, then stopped. I watched it wobble and spin, and then it fell onto its side, kicking up another explosion of sand.

I stopped swimming and righted myself. I painted the object with light until I was sure of what I was seeing. I was breathing hard, I realized. Arlis Futch’s warning had spooked me, which now caused me to feel stupid. I had overreacted to a threat that didn’t exist.

I swam over and took a closer look. Near the mammoth tusk, where I had left my extra gear, lay the steel wheel from the shredded truck tire. It was thirty pounds of metal, minus the rubber.

King had done it, of course. He had pried the thing free of the tire, then rolled it into the lake to scare me. I had been wrong about the rock, but my instincts had been right about King.

Some people feed on the destruction of others. They are emotional scavengers, and their feeding assumes aspects of frenzy even when it ensures their own doom. But King would never find out that he had succeeded in scaring me. The man had sealed his fate when he’d sabotaged my attempt to help Tomlinson and Will.

I switched off the spotlight and secured it to a D ring on my BC. Because I’d had to use the light, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust before using the monocular again.

As I waited, I found myself glancing over one shoulder, then the other, studying the vacuous emptiness of an underwater lake basin at night. King’s joke had jolted my system with adrenaline. Now I felt a lingering buzz of paranoia.

Was something out there? Something that could see me without being seen? It is an ancient fear, the wellspring of all monsters and religions.

My intuition whispered, Yes, something’s out there. It was a feeling I had, a premonition of danger. Perry had seen something big in the water, his reaction was proof. The strange undertone in Arlis’s voice when he’d warned me was additional proof and even more compelling.

Intellectually, though, I knew that premonitions are nonsense. Intuition and lottery numbers are memorable only if they pay off, but both are fast forgotten when they fail to produce.

I don’t buy either one.

I went back to work.

I couldn’t find the opening to the karst vent. It made no sense. What the hell had happened during the last two hours? The mammoth tusk was where I had left it, close to the vertical crater, and the line to the marker buoy was still hanging straight. Nearby, the bottom looked unchanged, but the opening to the tunnel had vanished.

Impossible. Has there been another landslide?

I considered switching off the night vision monocular and using the spotlight again. But visibility wasn’t the problem, I decided. More likely, I was disoriented—everything on the water, and underwater looks different at night—so I gave myself a couple of minutes to get my bearings.

I positioned myself at the edge of the drop-off. I faced the remains of the limestone ledge and reconstructed the bottom in my memory.

Finally, I figured out what had happened. Sand and shell from the top of the crater had funneled down and covered the entrance.

I swam to the approximate area and began digging with my hands. For every scoop of sand I removed, it was replaced by double the amount. I found a sliver of oyster shell and began probing until I found an area where I could bury my arm up to the shoulder without hitting rock. If it wasn’t the exact location of the tunnel entrance, it had to be close, so I marked the spot with another inflatable buoy.

For several more minutes I attempted to dig but finally gave up.

Damn it!

Now I really did need the sand dredge, which meant I would have to depend on King once again—if Perry could talk the man into getting into the water.

Before moving on, I decided to try to signal Tomlinson and Will. I had been reluctant for a simple reason: I feared they were no longer alive to answer.

Using one of my smaller flashlights, I leaned over the spare tank and banged out Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits. I did it several times, then switched off my night vision and settled myself in silence, listening.

I didn’t expect an immediate response, but I got one.

The signal I received was faint, very faint, and as surprising as it was galvanizing. I heard a series of eight bell notes repeated several times.

It was Morse code for “fine business.” Everything was okay. Tomlinson, at least, was still alive. Suddenly, I was no longer tired.

There was no mistaking the distinctive pattern, but where was it coming from? The signal seemed to seep out of the rocks around me instead of from a specific location or direction. If Will and Tomlinson had escaped into the karst vein, how far could they have traveled?

I pulled the spare bottle closer to the marker, wincing as I imagined myself reentering that black hole, with its lichen gloom and shadows. I rapped on the tank, then pressed the side of my head into the sand and listened.

When Tomlinson responded, the metallic clanking was slightly louder.

Yes. They were somewhere in the karst passageway, which they had followed it a long distance, judging from the sound. Their air had to have run out more than an hour ago, so I’d been right. They had found an air bell or a breathing hole.

I attempted to parrot Tomlinson’s “fine business” message—maybe it would buoy his spirits. Next, I muled the rest of the gear and placed it near the marker as my brain worked out the details.

I needed the sand dredge, but I couldn’t surface right away. Part of my deal with Perry was that I would present him with proof there was more to salvage—and a reason to make King help me with the hose.

Finding more coins would take time, but that’s what I had to do. I wished now that I had grabbed a few extras when I’d had the chance and hidden them for later.

Carrying the spotlight but not using it, I began swimming slowly along the drop-off searching the bottom. I had seen several coins lying in the sand and I was confident I could find at least a few. Question was, would it be more effective using the monocular to search or the spotlight?

I tested both, then decided the light was better. Maybe it would cause the coins to glitter in the distance.

I switched off the monocular. Using oyster shells, I marked off the beginnings of a grid, trying to swim a straight line as I counted off the number of times I kicked with my right fin. Ten strokes would equal about twenty yards—a big search area at night, but I was counting on luck to help me.

I gave myself a time limit. One coin or a dozen—however many I found—I would surface after ten minutes. I would give the coins to Perry, who would then order King back in the lake so he could help me with the hose.

It seemed like a workable plan: Find a few coins, then swim straight back to that damn hole and blast it clear with the dredge. But I had ignored a fundamental reality when it comes to diving: It is never, ever easy to find something underwater even when you supposedly know where it is.

Seven minutes later, when I was about to give up, still empty-handed, I stumbled onto a vein-rich pocket of gold. It was in a little basin of oyster shells and sand where largemouth bass had fanned out a nest. The spot produced a dozen Cuban coins. I found five in a heap, the others scattered nearby.

As I kicked toward the surface, I stashed six of the coins in a mesh pocket inside my wet suit just in case I needed them for later.