The Deep

CHAPTER SIX

Aboard the R/V Ponce de León, the noise was earsplitting, far louder than it was underwater.

The device was known as an airlift, but Cutter and his team called it Diplodocus. The long, thick hose stretching over the gunwale of their boat into the water resembled a sauropod dinosaur, its long neck drooping in a lazy arc as it drank from some Jurassic lagoon.

The contraption was basically a souped-up vacuum cleaner, strong enough to suck chunks of coral all the way from the ocean bottom. It was definitely not a toy. It had the power to break up limestone, or to rip a person’s arm clean off. Handling the airlift’s nozzle was no easy task. Reardon had to dive with weighted boots and a sixty-pound lead belt to avoid being tossed about at the end of the massive hose.

Their work was as exhausting as it was boring, but this was the only way to excavate a shipwreck long buried in a living reef: First, use Diplodocus as a blower in order to blast the weakened coral to bits, kicking up all the mud and artifacts trapped underneath. Then, vacuum up the debris and search for something of value.

That was what Cutter and Marina were doing. The backwash from the airlift was deposited into a huge wire-mesh basket that floated off the Ponce de León’s stern. Load by load, the two treasure hunters winched the tons of broken coral on deck, combing painstakingly through it, breaking up larger chunks with hammers.

So far, they had recovered a great deal of items in this way — ceramic cups, bowls, and plates, glass bottles, brass buttons and medallions, rusted metal nails, hinges, pulleys, buckles, musket shot, and cannonballs. Old ballast stones littered the deck of the research vessel. An anchor and the coral-encrusted barrels of two cannons lay out of sight in the ship’s hold. They had found every sort of artifact — with one exception.

“Where’s the treasure?” roared Cutter, tapping at a lump of coral with half a saucer encased in it. “We didn’t go through all this for a boatload of broken dishes!”

“The kids found a piece of eight,” Marina pointed out, tossing a ball of grapeshot on top of a pile of the stuff.

“Yeah, one coin out of a king’s ransom,” Cutter said disgustedly. “Nuestra Señora de la Luz was packed with silver and gold. That fleet carried the wealth of Asia and South America for an entire year! Where is it?”

Marina frowned. “Can we be sure this is Nuestra Señora de la Luz?”

“It has to be. Every knickknack we pull up is Spanish in origin. There was only one galleon lost off Saint-Luc in the mid-seventeenth century. Most of the treasure fleets took the northern route, via Havana and the Florida Straits.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to dig harder.”

He signaled Bill Hamilton, captain of the Ponce de León, who activated the winch. The small crane hoisted the basket up off its raft, and another load of debris hit the deck between the two treasure hunters.

Cutter stared. Buried amid the coral fragments was a dive mask.

“Chris!” Marina shouted.

They rushed to the gunwale and peered below. Reardon wasn’t technically scuba diving. He was breathing through a long hose connected to a Brownie compressor that floated beside the boat. Marina grabbed the safety line and gave two sharp tugs, the UP signal.

They waited — a breathless wait.

Marina looked nervous. “Decomp?”

Reardon had been on the bottom at sixty-five feet for nearly an hour — long enough to start thinking about decompression. Maybe he had paused during his ascent.

The alternative was too awful to think about: If he had somehow gotten his head caught in the airlift’s nozzle…

And then Reardon broke the surface with a splash. His swimming was awkward because of his heavy belt and boots, but he managed to struggle to the Brownie.

“What’s the problem?” he called.

Seeing the mask on their partner’s face, Cutter and Marina exchanged a confused glance.

Marina cupped her hands to her mouth. “Did you see anything down there?”

“Are you kidding?” came the reply. “When that monster’s on, I can barely see my hands in front of my face.”

Cutter turned to Marina. “This is a popular dive spot. That mask could have been there for years.”

She examined the faceplate, molded plastic, and rubber headband. There wasn’t a speck of coral, algae, or anemone growth anywhere.

“Yeah, probably,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.

After some frantic searching, the divers were able to locate their DPVs in the murky water. Adriana never found her mask.

It was a tense ride back to the station. The interns barely noticed the spectacular colors of the reef, or the multitudes of creatures that darted around, agitated by the airlift’s tempest. All thoughts were riveted to their near miss. No serious injuries, and Reardon hadn’t seen them. But it had been close. Too close.

Star’s eyes never left the glowing dial of the compass on her dive watch. She led the way until she reached one of the fixed navigation lines that fanned out from PUSH. There they turned left and followed the white rope until the familiar shape of the habitat appeared out of the blue.

Dante was last up the ladder, but he was already babbling excitedly the instant his mouth cleared the water in the wet porch. “Man, what hit us, an underwater tornado?”

He was interrupted by a low, muffled banging.

Adriana started. “What was that?”

But there was the sound again, like someone knocking on glass.

Dante peered out the viewing port.

“Who are you looking for?” Star asked in an amused tone. “The Avon lady?”

And then a loud, tinny amplified voice blared, “No! Over here!”

The four interns jumped. Dr. Ocasek peered out at them from the round window of the station’s decompression chamber.

“Sorry to startle you,” the scientist chuckled through the intercom. “I know you weren’t expecting to find me in here. I have to rush topside.”

In PUSH language, rushing meant getting there seventeen hours later. It took that long for the chamber to bring an aquanaut back to surface pressure without risk of the bends — decompression sickness. The interns would have to go through the same treatment when their stay was over.

“I thought you were here for another week,” Kaz said.

“It’s kind of an emergency,” Dr. Ocasek admitted. “A small explosion in my part of the lab up there. I can’t understand it. My experiments hardly ever explode.”

“Is it safe for us to stay here on our own?” Dante asked uneasily.

“Oh, they’re sending someone else down. I assured them that you kids are totally independent. But you know what a worrywart Geoffrey can be.”

“Right,” said Kaz. They were certain that Dr. Geoffrey Gallagher couldn’t have cared less about the four of them. If Poseidon’s director was worried, it was over the bad publicity that would fall on the institute if anything happened to four teenagers on their guest staff. That kind of black eye might even shut down production of the documentary film that was going to make him the next Jacques Cousteau.

They shrugged out of their gear and filed through the pressure hatch into the station proper.

“You’ve got to be more careful,” Star admonished Dante. “You almost spilled the beans in front of Iggy back there.”

Kaz was shocked. “You think Iggy’s in with Cutter and his people?”

“Of course not,” Star replied. “But if we keep quiet, there’s less chance of word getting back to Cutter that we’re onto him. For all we know, Iggy is Poseidon’s number one blabbermouth. We don’t want him spreading it around that Reardon’s down on the reef with something that nearly blew us up.”

“I think that thing was an airlift,” Adriana said. “Some of the underwater archaeologists at the British Museum use them, but only as a last resort. They’re so strong that they sometimes smash more artifacts than they collect.”

“They smash innocent by-swimmers too,” Dante added.

“We were lucky,” Adriana said solemnly.

“How do you figure that?” asked Kaz.

“An airlift works like a vacuum cleaner. We got to Reardon when it was blowing out, breaking up debris. If we’d come along when the nozzle was set to suck, somebody could have gotten killed.”

“That’s our treasure they’re vacuuming,” Dante complained bitterly. “If they get rich off our discovery — ”

“They won’t,” Star promised. “But first we’d better see exactly what they’ve found over there.”

“What are we going to do?” challenged Kaz. “Swim up and tell Reardon we’re stealing back our shipwreck?”

“No,” replied Star, “we wait till he goes home and then steal it back.”

“But you know Cutter’s schedule,” Dante protested. “He’s on that reef from the crack of dawn till after dark. The only time to avoid him would be the middle of the—”

The others stared at Star in dismay. Was she suggesting that they navigate all the way to the excavation and back again in the inky blackness of underwater night?

She looked at them pityingly. “They’re called lights, guys. Maybe you’ve heard of them.” A broad grin split her delicate features. “And just wait till you get a load of the ocean at night.”