The Discovery

CHAPTER EIGHT

No! Star thought desperately. Impossible! I’m not breathing out of a tank!

The truth came to her in an icy shot of fear. A kink in her hose! Her air supply must have caught on something — a knob, a handle. But where? A frantic glance toward the back of the cabin revealed only darkness.

She tugged gently but insistently at the hose, hoping to jar it free. The life-giving gas would not come. Come on! She yanked harder, knowing all the while it was a bad idea, that she was likely to foul the supply even further.

Star Ling was such a confident diver that when panic came, the feeling was completely alien to her. Her first inclination was to spit out her mouthpiece and shoot for the surface, but when she tried to crawl out the opening in the gun turret, her tether line held her back. She was trapped in this submerged metal coffin.

She pulled out her knife and began to flail blindly behind her, but she couldn’t see anything in the billowing storm of silt.

It was the glint of the steel blade in the gun turret that told Kaz something was wrong. When Star saw him swimming toward her, she realized he was her only hope. She gestured madly with her finger across her throat — the diver’s signal for no air.

It seemed to take forever for him to get there. Water acts as a magnifying glass, she reminded herself. He looks closer than he is.

The thought was little comfort. She was close to unconsciousness, her field of vision darkening at the edges. She struggled to stay alert. Would this hockey player even know what to do when he reached her?

He’s paddling with his hands, for God’s sake! A mistake right out of Diving 101!

And then he was right there. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his mask and realized just how far gone she was. Her face was ashen, her eyes bulging in horror. She could not hold on much longer. The blackness was overtaking her.

Kaz sucked hard on his regulator, then spat it out and forced the mouthpiece between Star’s blue lips. The delicious blast of air snapped her back from the edge of the void. She breathed deeply, fighting to keep herself from hyperventilating.

Kaz crawled in through the opening in the turret and searched the floor of the plane. He fanned the water to disperse the curtain of silt. When he spied her regulator, he grasped the problem immediately. The hose had wrapped itself around the bombardier’s joystick so tightly that the flow of air had been cut off. The snarl was complicated further by Star’s safety line, which was tangled up with the air supply and also snagged on a hook above the bailout hatch. Kaz used his knife to cut the line, then freed the hose and breathed from the mouthpiece.

Star watched him in wonder. The boy was an awkward diver, but in this crisis, his actions were swift and decisive. Must be the hockey training, she thought grudgingly. She hated to admit it, but Bobby Kaczinski had very probably just saved her life.

She could feel herself trembling in spite of the warm water. The incident had rattled her — but not enough to keep her from grabbing another handful of bullets as they exited the plane.

They surfaced beside the Brownie and held on, rolling with the choppy seas.

Dante was already shouting as he spat out his mouthpiece. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t tell anybody what happened!” Star ordered. “Not Cutter — nobody!”

“What did happen?” asked Adriana. “It looked like you got stuck in that plane.”

“If they don’t trust our diving, they’ll ground us in a heartbeat!” Star persisted. “Promise!”

Kaz was thunderstruck. “Is that all you’ve got to say? You could be dead right now!”

“I got in a jam and my partner helped me out of it,” Star insisted. “That’s how the buddy system’s supposed to work.”

“This is only my fourth dive!” Kaz sputtered. “My second in the ocean! What if I messed up? They don’t teach that in scuba class, Star! What if I didn’t know what to do? I’d have to live with that!” The image of Drew Christiansen, lying prostrate on the ice, came to him, and he fell silent. How much guilt could fit on one conscience?

“Don’t you realize what we just saw?” cried Star. “People dive their whole lives and never find a wreck!” She turned to Dante. “That’s some set of eagle eyes you’ve got! Maybe we’re all crazy and water really is purple.”

“I just” — he paused, uncomfortable — “got lucky.”

“A German plane!” exclaimed Adriana. “Maybe it’s from one of the famous bombing runs on Curaçao. It’s a real find for the historical community.”

“It’s a real find for us,” Star corrected sharply. She unzipped the pouch on her dive belt and came up with the handful of bullets. “And we’ve got the artifacts to prove it. I can’t wait to rub these in Cutter’s face. Let’s see if he treats us like a bunch of tadpoles now!”

Since the Ponce de León was combing the reef with its sonar tow, the four had to wait on the floating Brownie for the research vessel to pass by. Dante spotted it almost immediately, a tiny blip in the heat shimmer on the horizon. Twenty minutes later, the ship was pulling alongside them.

Kaz saw Chris Reardon first, half asleep in the stern, a fishing rod in his hand, trawling for tuna over the gunwale. “Hey, Chris!” he called.

Reardon let out a loud belch, but otherwise gave no indication he’d heard.

“Get that rod out of the water!” a sharp voice ordered him. “You’ll skewer one of the kids!”

Marina was rushing down to the dive platform to help them aboard. She frowned at the two marker buoys bobbing in the waves. “I know there are a lot more caves than that.”

“Dante found a wreck!” Star panted.

The researcher’s eyes were instantly alert. “A wreck?”

“A World War II airplane,” Adriana supplied.

“Look!” Star thrust a fistful of coral-encrusted bullets in Marina’s face.

Marina stared for a moment, and then her supermodel’s features relaxed into an amused grin. “Star, that’s not—”

But Star was already limping toward the main companionway, calling, “Tad!” The others followed her, wet suits dripping.

Tad Cutter was seated at the foldaway table in the galley, poring over an endless data printout on continuous form paper.

“There’s a plane down there,” Star told him excitedly. “A German bomber.” She slammed the machine gun bullets onto the computer.

Cutter looked from the bullets to their earnest faces and laughed — full-throated guffaws that filled the salon.

“Hey!” Star was insulted. “You may think we’re a bunch of pests to be ignored, but we know what a plane looks like!”

“No!” the team leader managed, struggling to regain his control. “You guys are right. There’s a plane down there. But it’s not from World War II.”

“Yes, it is,” Adriana insisted. “A Messerschmidt bomber, propeller driven, with a swastika and German cross markings. The Nazis used them in the Caribbean against Allied oil-drilling operations.”

“And that’s exactly what the movie was about — a German bomber that crashed into the sea,” Cutter informed them. “The studio folks built an exact model of a Messerschmidt, towed it out here, and sank it on the reef. That’s what you found. Not a wreck — a Hollywood set.”

Star’s face fell the distance between an undiscovered wreck and an underwater phony. The others looked on in dismay. A minute ago it seemed as if they had earned the respect of Cutter and his crew. Now they were nobodies again.

The blond man picked up one of the bullets. “This isn’t nearly enough coral growth for an artifact from World War II. After sixty years, the whole shell casing would be covered, most likely. This looks about right for three years on the reef — the time since that movie got made.”

Marina appeared at the companionway. “Don’t take it so hard. You’re not the first divers to find that plane and think it was something special. I doubt you’ll be the last.” She smiled. “There are a lot of caves down there. We’ll need you back in the water as soon as possible. Use the oxygen to help you outgas. It’s topside — the tanks with the green labels.”

Since the body absorbs some of the nitrogen from compressed air at depth, it was important to expel that nitrogen before diving again the same day. Breathing pure oxygen sped up the whole process.

On deck, Dante pulled a tank from the rack, struggling under its weight.

Kaz frowned at the other boy. “She said green labels.”

“Yeah?”

“These are red.”

“Oh — right.” Embarrassed, Dante fumbled with the cylinder and dropped it. Kaz got his foot out of the way a split second before the heavy metal hit the deck.

Dante grimaced. “Sorry.” That was becoming a pretty useful word for him. Sorry for nearly shattering your toe; sorry for handing you a tank of God-knows-what that might have poisoned you; sorry for spotting the plane that almost became Star’s tomb. There was no question about it. He stank at this internship. And not just the diving part. Everything he did around here turned out to be wrong.

Kaz hauled out four of the oxygen cylinders and the divers divided them up. He placed the clear plastic mask over his mouth and nose and turned on the valve. “It isn’t so bad, right?” he asked, his voice muffled. “I mean, we look like idiots, but they still want us to tag caves for them. At least we didn’t lose our jobs.”

“I still say something’s fishy about that,” put in Star. “We’ve got two markers in the water. Have any of those guys even bothered to record their positions?”

In answer, a loud snore came from the stern of the boat, as Reardon continued his hunt for a prizewinning tuna.

Adriana placed the mask over her face and then withdrew it, licking her dry lips thoughtfully. “The only thing that bothers me is that they’re supposed to be doing a sonar scan, right? Mapping the reef. But the data Cutter’s studying isn’t sonar data.”

Kaz snapped to attention. “It isn’t?”

“One summer, the British Museum had a team searching for ancient Roman artifacts in the Thames River — shields, helmets, armor. They used a side-scan magnetometer to pick up signs of metal underwater. Well, the data from that scan is exactly like the data on Cutter’s table.”

Star snapped her fingers. “They’re looking for something in the ocean. Something metal.”

Dante was confused. “Then why do they want us down there marking caves?”

All at once, a wide smile of understanding appeared on the slight girl’s face. “It’s bell work!”

“Bell work?” repeated Adriana.

“When I was in fifth grade,” Star explained, “my teacher always put a few math problems on the board for when we came in after the bell. It wasn’t stuff we had to know — not on any test or anything. It was just supposed to keep us busy while she finished her coffee in the faculty room. That’s what this cave thing is all about — they’re keeping us busy while they’re searching!”

The four divers exchanged solemn glances. Could it really be true? They knew Cutter and his team had little respect for them, but could the researchers be manipulating them this way?

Kaz broke the uneasy silence. “Okay, let’s say both you guys are right. They’re jerking us around, keeping us busy doing nothing, while they’re scanning the Hidden Shoals for metal. That still doesn’t answer the biggest question — why all this secrecy? These people are scientists working for a top institute. Why can’t they just admit what they’re after?”

Adriana flipped her wet hair out of her face. “It seems to me,” she said slowly, “that there must be something very special about their work.”

Dante raised an eyebrow. “A government contract? Maybe top secret?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But whatever it is, we’re mixed up in it now.”