Deep Shadow

TWENTY-THREE

THE NIGHT WAS COOL, NOT COLD, BUT PERRY HAD used a towel to wick gasoline out of the generator and built a deadwood fire at the edge of the lake while he bickered with King about who was going into the water to help me with the jet dredge.

They were both afraid, although King was better at hiding it. And he had the fake leg injury to use as an excuse.

“Don’t blame me, blame yourself for trusting Jock-a-mo,” he had told Perry more than once. “I’d handle the hose if I could—hell, I’ve done it! But I can’t, so it’s up to you.”

They had left me facedown at the edge of the lake, hands and ankles tie-wrapped again, while they collected wood. It didn’t take long because they were in a hurry now that there was a chance that Arlis would hike to the dirt road and flag down help. They decided it would take the old man at least two hours to make it to the road, then another half hour to get to the highway, which left them with some time to help with the salvage work before they had to get in the truck and try to intercept him.

“We can give it an hour, but not a minute more,” Perry had finally agreed—one of the few things that he and King hadn’t argued about since Arlis had escaped.

I wasn’t so sure. Arlis was too smart to follow the trail we had cut. There was too much risk of King and Perry catching him, plus it would be shorter to hike cross-country, through swamp that was too soft for the truck.

Arlis Futch and I had had our differences over the years—the most serious having to do with a woman the old guy had had a crush on—but I didn’t doubt his courage or his skills as an Everglades hunter.

When the fire was going, the cons finally cut me loose, then tossed me the remains of an open MRE. I hadn’t eaten anything but the crackers they’d given me, so I ripped open a foil pouch and had vegetarian chili as the men continued bickering. I would need the energy before the night was done.

King and Perry were a painful pair to watch. If some scientist had melded prison genetics with random bad luck, the two could have served as a template. Backdropped by flames and sparks that soared starward, the men resembled absurd rodents, their silhouettes becoming more animated and their voices louder as they squabbled, until Perry finally said, “Okay, okay! I’ll get in the goddamn inner tube. But I known damn well you’re faking!”

“I wish that was true,” King replied, sounding suddenly pleased. “I can barely walk ’cause of that son of a bitch, which is all your fault and you know it.”

“Oh . . . bullshit,” Perry yelled. “But don’t think the cut’s gonna still be fifty-fifty because it’s not. The cut has to be sixty-forty if I’m doin’ extra work. What do you think about that, smart-ass?”

Unperturbed, King said, “Perry, you drive one hell of a hard bargain! I guess I got no choice, now, do I?” He didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm, and there was a smile in his tone when he turned toward me and lied, “We’re discussing our part of the take—not yours, of course.”

I didn’t bother answering. I was watching Perry, who had begun pacing. With the rifle angled over his shoulder, he resembled a toy soldier now. Maybe the man had run out of amphetamines or possibly he had recently swallowed a few more, because his voice was quivering when he spun toward King and screamed, “You always get your way, don’t you, you son of a bitch? Well, at least I won’t screw up the job like you did. But you’ve got to agree to one more thing before I do it. And you’re not gonna weasel out of this one.”

“I’d do anything I could to help you, you know that,” King replied. “Just name it.”

“If I go in that goddamn water, I get sixty percent, which we already agreed on, plus you’re going stand right there by the generator ready to haul me back to shore if I say the word. You promise?” He was talking about using the power cord as a towline.

King said, “Afraid something’s gonna swim up and bite you on the ass, Perry?”

“I mean it! Unless you promise, I ain’t going in that goddamn lake. If I say the word, you’d better by God haul me in quick.”

King had been limping unconvincingly—it was his way of teasing Perry with the truth—but now that he’d won the argument he stood on two straight legs and said, “You know you can trust me, old buddy. When have I ever let you down?”

I crumpled the aluminum pack and tossed it next to my gear. “Let’s go,” I said. “You two have wasted enough time.”

All I cared about was getting back to the tunnel and finding Will Chaser and Tomlinson. I no longer had Arlis to worry about, which was freeing. When I was out of bottom time, whether I had found Tomlinson and the kid or not, I would surface quietly and then drown the man on the inner tube—Perry, apparently. If King tried to shoot me, I would submerge and crawl out on the other side of the lake. After that, I would play it by instinct.

I buckled on my BC, checked my regulator, then picked up the night vision mask. I noticed that Perry was unbuckling his trousers. He wasn’t in a hurry, but he was going through with it, which surprised me.

“Leave your clothes on,” I told him. “The water will seem cold at first, but your clothes will add some insulation. You’ll warm up faster. Hey—there’s a jacket in the truck. You should wear it.”

“A jacket?” Perry asked.

I said, “It’s mine. You’re welcome to use it.”

“You’re serious.”

I was tempted to say, Dead serious, but instead I told him, “You’ll need the insulation.”

“Like dressing for cold weather, huh?” Perry said. “I never heard of that working in water.” As I looked at him, I was struck by his expression. Illuminated by the fire, the man’s face was pale, his eyes wide. He resembled a frightened child. Maybe the children he had murdered had exhibited similar reactions.

I said, “We’re in this together, right?,” as I carried my fins and the extra gear into the water.

Nearby, King was starting the generator.

King had the rifle now, I noticed. The man had been right about Perry.

Perry wasn’t very smart.

Fifteen feet was only three strong strokes with my fins, but the world beneath the surface was so different that I might have traveled the distance between the earth and the moon. My vision narrowed, and isolation stripped away the filters from my senses. Hearing became a survival tool.

Because of that, I froze momentarily when I heard what by now was a familiar sound: the distant thump and slap of something big breaching the water’s surface. I had been arranging my gear next to the lake bottom’s most recognizable feature—the prehistoric tusk, near where the buoy was tied. My head swiveled as I searched for the source.

It was King again, I decided. He had probably found something else to push into the lake. Another one of his adolescent jokes, and I thought, It will be his last.

But what had he used? There weren’t any more handy truck wheels, so maybe he’d rolled a chunk of limestone into the lake. If the rock was big enough and if it hit me, it could mean the end of my search—possibly the end of me.

I spun toward shore. Through the green lens of the monocular, I focused on the jagged incline where the wheel had appeared but saw nothing. Next, I checked the surface fifteen feet above. I could see the silhouette of the inner tube, Perry’s legs dangling over the side, the contour of his fins gray against the emerald, star-speckled sky. I could picture the man shivering with fear and cold as he waited to play out the hose when I signaled him by giving a tug.

Perry wasn’t much of a swimmer, so he had seated himself in the big rubber doughnut like a kid at a water park and paddled out using the spare fins. For the last several minutes, he had been floating above me motionless, too scared to move.

Perry hadn’t caused the noise I’d heard, that was for sure. It was something else.

I considered using the underwater spotlight to check the area. The monocular was effective for a radius of about fifteen feet, but it would take the light’s thousand lumens of white LED to pierce the darkness of the lake basin.

Using the spotlight, though, was a bad idea, I decided. I could see nothing tumbling down the incline toward me, and a flashlight would only screw up my night vision—yet I still felt uneasy.

I told myself to ignore the lingering paranoia I’d experienced earlier. Even so, my nagging inner voice repeated the same ancient questions: Was something out there, watching? Maybe a predator had sensed my vibrations, my body heat. Was something swimming my way?

I remembered the fear in King’s voice when he’d said, I just saw something go in the water. It was fucking huge, man!

His fear was real. He had seen something—but it was also true that King and Perry were easily frightened by the sounds of a Florida swamp at night. To King, a five-foot alligator would appear huge—or a monitor lizard.

I clipped the light to my BC and turned my attention to the jury-rigged jet dredge. The brass nozzle was gone, as well as the trigger, so I could no longer control the flow of water.

That was Perry’s job.

After taking a last look around, I signaled the man by tugging three times on the hose. Above me, I watched the inner tube rock as Perry stirred—and then I saw something that convinced me that King was still taunting us with his absurd tricks. I saw a spinning bright light appear in the sky—a meteorite, I thought at first. But the light tumbled downward, then slapped the water next to the inner tube, creating a shower of sparks.

King had pulled a chunk of burning wood from the fire, I realized, and thrown it at Perry.

Idiot.

The man reminded me of a spoiled child who got nastier and nastier if he wasn’t the center of attention. I imagined the two cons shouting at each other, exchanging threats—wasting time again—so I repeated my signal to Perry by jerking on the hose.

A moment later, Perry recovered enough to provide me a descending coil of slack. Soon, he opened the flow valve, and the hose jolted in my hand, writhing like a snake. I waited until I had the thing under control, then swam to the mound of sand that now covered the mouth of the karst vent.

King. I had never met anyone I had disliked so intensely, so quickly. For now, the best way to deal with the man was to ignore him.

I focused on my work.

The dredge had lost a lot of its pressure, but the jet was still powerful enough to peel away layers of soft bottom as I searched for the tunnel. Around me, as I probed with the hose, sand and silt exploded, forming a cloud as dense as smoke. Visibility dropped from excellent to zero. Soon, I had to work by feel.

With my left hand, I found what I hoped was the upper lip of the tunnel. I used my weight to burrow downward, the hiss of water meshing with the bell-sound exhaust of my own regulator as I excavated.

Because I was operating blindly, my fingers became adept at identifying chunks of limestone or fossilized shell. I removed the debris mechanically, tossing it aside. Five times, though, my fingers also found the slick, dense weight of coins. They were unexpected, but finding them provided me no pleasure. I slipped them one by one into the pocket of my BC. Before I surfaced, I would hide them with the others that were still in the mesh pocket inside my wet suit.

I kept an eye on the time—not an easy thing to do, but I could see the orange numerals if I held my watch against the faceplate of my mask. I had clicked the trigger of the Chronofighter just before submerging, so I knew exactly how many minutes had passed.

It took me five minutes of digging to confirm that I had indeed found the karst opening. Ten minutes later, the opening was only slightly wider than my shoulders, but that was good enough. I tugged on the hose again, a series of two sharp pulls, which was Perry’s signal to close the valve.

He didn’t respond immediately, and I thought, Now what?

After several more attempts, though, I felt a couple of tentative tugs in reply. Moments later, the hose went limp. I pushed the coils aside. Because visibility was so bad, I kept my left arm anchored to the tunnel’s entrance and waited for the siphoning current to clear the water.

It was strange to kneel there, underwater, anchored to a rock, my visual world reduced to a random swirl of sand granules that banged against my faceplate. Above me, below me and on every side, there was a void of sensory data that caused a dizzying interchange between my eyes and brain as they struggled to extract form from the murk.

I had switched off the monocular soon after starting the jet dredge—there was nothing to see, so why waste the battery? Now, though, I clicked the switch downward, which powered the monocular but not the built-in infrared light. The darkness that encircled me was transformed into a boiling green cauldron of silt.

My arm still anchored in the tunnel, I did a slow three-sixty. Soon, I could see my watch if I held it a foot from my face, which told me visibility was improving. A minute later, I could see the vague outline of my own fins.

I looked toward the surface and told myself to relax until the water had cleared. As it did, I expected to see the familiar silhouette of the inner tube and Perry’s dangling fins. Instead, I saw something that startled me. It was an animated darkness, the size of a small plane, off to my right. The thing was fast moving—and its shape and its behavior impossible to assess.

I pulled my body close to the tunnel opening and watched as the thing drew nearer. It was an animal, I realized, an elongated crocodilian shadow snaking toward me and gaining speed. I decided it was an alligator—maybe the gator that King had seen entering the water earlier. It could be nothing else.

I was fumbling for the oversized spotlight to use as a shield when suddenly the animal slowed and turned. I couldn’t make out details. I could see only its massive silhouette. The shape was visible for a few seconds, but then it melted into the gloom.

I was so surprised that I had stopped breathing. I drew three fast breaths as my brain replayed what had just happened. The animal had been descending, moving from my right to my left like a shark banking downward for an attack. Then it had disappeared. Why—and where?

I stood, with my fins on the bottom, and gave it a few seconds, then I leaned over the tunnel’s opening, straining to see.

Nothing.

I did another careful three-sixty, silt swirling before my eyes, and I soon began to wonder if I had imagined the damn thing. I’ve seen monster alligators in my life, but none the size of the thing that had just buzzed me. And the shape didn’t seem quite right, either.

So . . . perhaps I had been wrong. Maybe a plane had swooped in low, throwing a shadow, as it checked on the lakeside fire. Or possibly I’d seen a school of baitfish, moving past me in a dense cloud. In zero visibility, the human brain will scan randomly like a frozen computer, attempting to impose form on chaos.

I comforted myself with similar reassuring explanations, but I didn’t believe any of them. I had seen something. It was an animal. A reptile of some type or possibly an oversized alligator gar—a freshwater fish that grows to three hundred pounds. The thing had been descending toward me, swimming fast, but then it had veered away.

Why?

Once again, I recalled the fear in King’s voice when he’d said that he’d just seen something huge slide into the water. That suggested that it was a gator, not a fish. A big gator was a threat I had to take seriously.

It’s a popular fallacy that infrared light can pierce fog, smoke and silt, but it’s not true. Even so, I touched my fingers to the monocular and switched on the infrared. Maybe the invisible beam of light would extend my range of visibility.

Seconds later, as I continued scanning, I felt a shock wave of pressure behind me. It was as if a torpedo had shot past me. The wave caused me to duck and pull my body hard against the rock ledge. I don’t know why my first instinct was to switch off the infrared light but that’s what I did. It was an atavistic response; a limbic impulse to extinguish the campfire, to draw the limbs into a fetal position and then retreat into a dark place to hide.

My heart was pounding but my hand unaccountably sure as I unsnapped the spotlight and found the switch. The beam was blinding. Stupidly, I hadn’t first switched off my night vision system, so the intensifier tube automatically flared before shutting down to protect the precision optics as well as my own eye.

I extended the big flashlight and moved it around. Underwater, a thousand-lumen LED projects a beam that is as dense as a shaft of glowing marble. Maybe the light saved me . . . Or maybe there was, in fact, nothing from which to be saved. I was partially blinded, as I probed the darkness, so I couldn’t be certain of what I was seeing. For the briefest instant, though, I thought I saw a massive reptilian head in profile and a single glowing orange eye. The animal materialized on the far black rim of visibility and then hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to turn and face me.

It did not turn. Instead, it seemed to shrink as it descended into deeper water toward the bottom. And then it vanished.

I didn’t know what I’d just seen, but I was sure it wasn’t an alligator. So what was it?

Slowly, like a drunk approaching a mountain ledge, I moved away from the cave opening. I took a couple of strokes with my fins and then poked my head over the drop-off. The flashlight drilled a brilliant white conduit downward into the depths. I painted the beam over the bottom but was still alert to movement behind me.

It took a while for my eyes to adapt. Through a haze of silt, I identified an elongated darkness, which I knew was the fuselage of the plane. Then . . . I saw something that was too animated and well defined to be imaginary. I saw the fanning pendulum of what appeared to be a reptilian tail as the creature nosed itself into a limestone hole. The tail was miniaturized by distance, but I knew it had to be big—longer than a man.

Pushing the light ahead of me, I started downward to get a closer look. But then stopped myself.

Don’t press your luck, Ford. Leave it alone.

As I watched, I tried to convince myself that I was watching an oversized gator, but I knew it wasn’t true. More than anything else, it looked like the tail of a Nile monitor lizard—but that couldn’t be. Monitors didn’t grow to be thirteen feet long, and the animal I was watching had to be at least that big.

I extended the light downward as if using the beam to pin the creature to the bottom. As I did, a chilling memory flashed into my mind, and I pictured myself on the island of Gili Motang, in the Suva Sea, where my friend and I had been tracked by a reptile of a similar size.

A Komodo monitor? In Florida?

Even as I thought the word Impossible, I knew that I was wrong again. Florida was the perfect habitat for the world’s largest venomous lizard.

“Something lives in that lake that kills cows,” the land’s previous owner had told Arlis. I had smiled when I’d heard the story—me, a skeptic by nature and also by profession.

Yes, it was possible . . . possible that I was now watching an Indonesian monitor. In the remote pasturelands of central Florida, a Komodo-sized lizard wouldn’t just survive, it would thrive. An animal with its habits could live unnoticed for years, feeding by night and sleeping underground by day. With miles of tree cover and lakes connected by karst vents and tunnels, the topography was ideally suited to support just such a creature. On the islands of Indonesia, the giant monitors are more often obligate scavengers, reliant on the success of their pack. In Florida, though, there was no competition. Even an immature Komodo would soon ascend to the top of the food chain as an alpha predator.

My mind shifted to the three lizards that I had believed were Nile monitors. I had been surprised to see diurnal animals hunting well after sunset. I didn’t want to believe it, but I no longer doubted my eyes or the evidence—evidence that suggested that at least one adult Komodo lived in this area and it had reproduced.

That’s why the young lizards were out feeding at night.

Maybe the spotlight had saved me when the animal swooped in close. True or not, I gripped the light tighter as I watched the monitor’s tail stir the water twice more, then vanish into the hole. Another karst vent, most likely.

I glanced over my shoulder at the tunnel I was about to enter. I compared it with the location and the apparent angle of the hole into which the giant lizard had disappeared. If the hole beneath me was indeed a karst vent, the two tunnels ran roughly parallel. Even though they were separated by forty feet of limestone and sand, it was likely that they intersected at some distant place, perhaps far from the rim of the lake.

I couldn’t let myself dwell on it.

I had to find Will and Tomlinson—before the Komodo monitor found them.