The Danger

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Adventurer’s topside dive station was an odd place for a communications center. The roar from the compressors in the gas shack made it nearly impossible to hear. But Henri, Star, and Dante bent over the console, listening to every word from seven hundred feet.

The divers had been out of the bell for an hour already, and they still hadn’t been able to locate the wreck site.

“Don’t you remember?” Star said urgently into the microphone. “There was junk scattered all the way down the slope, but the main shipwreck landed on kind of a shelf.”

“Well, we found the slope,” Adriana reported, her voice distorted by helium. “We just can’t find the shelf.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find it?” Dante demanded. “The coordinates are right, the depth is right—”

“It’s a little dark down here, Dante,” Kaz squeaked, annoyed. “I can’t even see Adriana and English unless there’s a light shining right on them.”

“But it’s there,” insisted Dante. “It has to be!”

“Enough!” English’s voice was stern, despite the high tone. “This is not the time for the debate. We search. And if we find nothing, we go home. Alors, this is all we can do.”

“But Cutter’s getting Tin Man tomorrow,” Dante reminded them. “That’s in seven hours!”

Star pulled him aside. “Let them work in peace,” she said in a low voice.

“That’s in seven hours!”

“They know that,” she assured him. “But scaring them isn’t going to help them find anything—”

Dante wheeled away from her and faced Henri. “I want to go down there.”

The dive master frowned. “English says—”

Dante cut him off. “I see things that other people don’t. I’ll find that wreck site.”

“No way,” said Star. “You don’t take a guy who isn’t comfortable diving and send him to seven hundred feet.”

“You do if he’s the only guy who can find a billion dollars!”

“It’s too late anyway,” Star told him. “We’ve only got one bell.”

Dante pointed to the lift basket that hung on the smaller winch next to the crane that controlled the bell. It was to be lowered to the wreck site to be filled with treasure. “It’s going down anyway. What’s the difference if I hitch a ride on it?”

“You must descend very slow,” Henri said thoughtfully. “Two hours, maybe more.”

“Yeah, right,” Star snorted at Dante. “You’re afraid to scuba dive, but you can sit in a cage for two hours watching the water around you turn black. You won’t make it, Dante. You’ll freak out and do something stupid. And then you’ll get yourself killed for sure.”

“You think I want this?” Dante snapped. “You think I want to risk my life and spend four days decompressing? I’d be thrilled to stay topside while everybody else dives. But I’m the guy who can get it done. End of story.”

Henri took Dante to get suited up while Star reported the change of plan to the divers.

“I forbid this!” exclaimed English.

The three interns told him about Dante’s color blindness. “He only sees in black and white,” Adriana explained, “but he can spot shadings underwater that nobody else can. If anybody can find that wreck, it’s him.”

English was still skeptical. “And the boy, he is not frightened?”

“He’s terrified,” Star admitted. “But I’ve never seen him so determined.” She sighed. “I wish I was going down with him.”

“You must be more careful what you wish for, mademoiselle,” the guide told her solemnly.

Dante clung to the lift basket to keep himself from shaking. Just gearing up for this dive was enough to bring on panic. The bulky dry suit constricted him as if he had been mummified, and the Rat Hat reminded him of a medieval torture device. Dangling at the end of the umbilical, he felt like a worm on a hook.

It was not a smooth and even descent. Instead, he was being ratcheted to the depths in a series of ten-foot drops. In between, the basket would stop for ninety maddening seconds. This allowed him to adjust to the pressure, until it was time for the winch to jerk him downward once more. It was frustratingly slow, but that wasn’t the worst part. Waiting for the halted basket to move again was the worst kind of mental strain.

At least he wasn’t bored. Thanks to the Rat Hat’s comm. system, he could listen in on the other divers as they searched. Henri gave him constant updates on his breathing mix, which changed the deeper Dante got. And Star kept him busy by asking, “How’s it going down there?” with every grinding of the winch.

“Oh, great,” Dante muttered, his voice Mickey Moused by heliox. “An electric eel just wrapped around my helmet, and now I’m picking up Radio Australia.”

Many fathoms below, Kaz chuckled. “Good one.”

“Can it, rink rat,” Star grumbled. “I’m just trying to make sure the guy’s okay.”

“Of course I’m not okay,” Dante told her. “I’m diving, aren’t I?”

The blackness began around three hundred feet and, by five hundred, Dante felt as if he were suspended in ink. His hand torch provided some visibility. But the cone of light it squeezed into the void seemed to shrink the deeper he got.

It’s like being blind. Did he really have a prayer of finding the wreck site in this nothingness?

He spotted the floodlights on the bell long before the other divers were able to see him. By this time, he had been in the lift basket so long that he wasn’t sure his stiff body could even move. But it did and, at 680 feet, he allowed Kaz and English to haul him out of the tight mesh.

English carefully detached Dante from the topside hoses and tethered him to an umbilical from the bell. This would enable him to return to the surface in the pot with the other divers when the mission was over.

Okay, time to get rich, Dante thought.

The ship they believed to be the Griffin had rained debris all the way down the slant, before coming to rest on a tilted ledge at seven hundred feet.

Find the ledge and you’ve found the treasure.

He joined the search, tracking back and forth over the featureless slope. He could not have imagined such terrible visibility.

You could swim past a five-star hotel if it wasn’t right in your light.

“What do you think?” asked Kaz. “Are you seeing any more than the rest of us?”

“Black is black,” Dante replied gloomily. “In color or black and white.”

In fact, he was probably seeing less than anybody. His glasses were slowly but steadily fogging inside the Rat Hat. He squinted in concentration, focusing on the dim oval his torch projected onto the muddy grade. Another hour passed. It seemed like a week.

As he panned the endless parade of sand and muck, a round object raced through his field of vision. The others might easily have missed it. But in the gray-on-gray world of Dante’s color blindness, shape and texture were everything. He backtracked and picked up the circular form.

It was a metal plate, pewter probably. Definitely very old.

Heart pounding, he shined his light to the left. There was nothing but the underwater moonscape of the seafloor.

Huh? But where’s the —

Beginning to despair, he turned to the right.

The wreck of a seventeenth-century ship winked into ghostly existence in the murky beam.

He tried to call “Guys!” but he began to cough, choking on his own excitement.

“Dante!” cried Kaz. “You okay?”

“I found it!” Dante rasped through hacking and helium. “The shelf! The wreck!”

“Don’t move,” ordered English. “We come to you.”

“Okay.” Dante couldn’t take his eyes off the remains of the old vessel. It was almost as if he expected the site to disappear the instant he looked away. Dishware, bottles, muskets, and helmets littered the angled plateau, along with larger items like anchors and cannon barrels. Ballast stones were everywhere. Half-buried timbers poked out from the bottom silt, all that was left of the spine of the wooden craft.

Now the hard part, he thought to himself. Finding treasure in this mess.

He dropped to his knees, digging an arm experimentally into the soft muck of the shelf. He cleared it away, and aimed his light into the hole. An unmistakable yellow glow shone back at him.

Dante Lewis was staring into a vast pile of gold bars.