The Discovery

CHAPTER THREE

Star sat on the deck of the R/V Hernando Cortés, watching the harbor at Côte Saint-Luc disappear in the glare of an overpowering Caribbean sun.

“The reefs northeast of the island are pretty spectacular,” called Captain Vanover from the cockpit. “They’re part of the Hidden Shoals of the French West Indies. Best diving in the world.”

Star felt a shiver of excitement. “I know!” she exclaimed. Not from personal experience. But before this trip, she had read everything she could get her hands on about the coral formations around Saint-Luc. This was a great opportunity and she was going to make the most of it.

Kaz, Dante, and Adriana were already struggling into lightweight tropical wet suits. And struggling was the word for it. They looked like three fat ladies trying to squeeze themselves into undersized girdles. Were these guys divers or circus clowns?

Star could slip into a wet suit as easily as putting on a glove. It was a three-second job for her, bad leg and all. Her secret: liquid dish detergent to lubricate her skin. The thin rubber material slid right on.

She made a face, still smarting over Dr. Gallagher’s assumption that she couldn’t possibly be a diver. People were such idiots about handicaps. They stared at you, pitied you, tried to smooth the way for you. For Star Ling, that limp was normalcy. A mild case of cerebral palsy, that was all — a certain amount of weakness on the left side. She couldn’t remember, of course, but her very first step had demonstrated that limp. It was a part of her and always had been.

It wasn’t nothing. She didn’t delude herself about that. She wouldn’t win any footraces or dance with the Bolshoi. But in the water, everything changed. There was no weakness, no asymmetry. She had felt that on her first trip to the county pool, age four. And she still felt it every time she slipped off the dive platform of a boat. The laws of physics that held her back on dry land melted away in a rush of familiarity and comfort that seemed to say, “You’re home.”

Her eyes wandered aft, where Captain Vanover’s lone crew member was hefting heavy scuba tanks as if they weighed nothing. Menasce Gérard was a hulking six-foot-five-inch native dive guide who went by the puzzling nickname “English.” No one seemed less English than English, a young West Indian man whose first language was French. Secretly, Star had assigned him a different moniker — Mr. Personality. The guy was just about the most humorless human being she’d ever encountered.

They’d been on the boat for nearly half an hour, and he had yet to crack a smile. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could confirm that he had teeth, since he rarely opened his mouth at all. He answered most questions with a series of gestures, shrugs, and grunts.

That didn’t stop Adriana from spewing a line of chitchat at him. Maybe that was how things worked at whatever snooty country club her family belonged to. You kept talking without bothering to notice that you weren’t getting any answers.

“But why do they call you English?” Adriana burbled on. “You’re French, right? I mean, people from Saint-Luc are French citizens.”

English barely shrugged as he checked the pressure gauges on the cylinders of compressed air.

“Your name isn’t English,” she continued. “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to call you that.”

“Will you give it a rest?” Star groaned. “I once knew a guy named Four Eyes who didn’t wear glasses. So they call him English. What’s it to you?”

Adriana wasn’t ready to drop the subject yet. “Well, were the English ever on Saint-Luc?”

At that moment, the enormous guide chose to break his silence. “Yes — and no.”

“Yes and no?” Dante queried.

“Saint-Luc, this is always French. But, alors, in the old times—” He shrugged again. “Yes and no.”

“He means everybody was everywhere in the Caribbean, way back,” Vanover supplied. “Pirate crews came from all nationalities. Merchants too. There were raids, shipwrecks. You could never be sure where an Englishman or anybody else might end up.”

“But in those days a shipwreck was pretty much a death sentence,” Adriana pointed out. “None of the sailors even learned how to swim. That was on purpose. They preferred to drown immediately rather than prolong the agony.”

“Thank you, Miss Goodnews,” put in Kaz, stashing his dive knife in a scabbard on his thigh.

The captain was genuinely impressed. Like the others, he had pegged Adriana as a rich kid who happened to dive because she collected hobbies the same way she collected designer clothes. “Not a lot of people know that,” he said to her. “Been reading up on the Caribbean?”

Adriana flushed. “My uncle is a curator at the British Museum in London. I’ve spent a couple of summers working for him. You pick stuff up.”

Her brow clouded. This year the job had fallen through because Uncle Alfie was in Syria on an archaeological dig. Worse, he had been allowed one assistant, and had chosen Adriana’s older brother, Payton. That had left the girl at loose ends, which was a condition never tolerated by the Ballantynes. Adriana’s parents spent their summers traveling to hot and trendy places to rub elbows with supermodels, dukes, rock stars, and dot.com tycoons. In all the years she could remember, there had been no summer vacation that she or Payton had spent with the family.

Adriana had a mental picture of her parents shopping their daughter to every museum and research outfit that was prestigious enough to deserve a Ballantyne. Good thing her scuba certification was still current, because Poseidon was about as prestigious as it got. She’d naturally assumed that her family’s connections had cinched the job for her, but now she wasn’t so sure. None of the others seemed any more qualified than she was, except maybe Star.

As they approached the boundary of the Hidden Shoals, Vanover cut power, and English climbed up to the crow’s nest to scan for coral heads that might present a danger to the boat. Here on the reefs, it was not uncommon for towers of coral, reaching toward the sun’s nourishing light, to grow until they lurked just below the surface. Over the centuries, many a ship had been fatally holed by such a formation.

At last, they anchored, and preparations for the dive began in earnest. Kaz thought the equipment checks would never end. Tanks charged? Weight belts on? Compressed air coming out of the regulators? Buoyancy compensator vests inflating and deflating properly? It was just like certification class, where they treated you like kindergartners. Did divers ever dive? Or did they spend all their time getting ready?

Dante broke rule number one by trying to walk with his flippers on. He fell flat on his face, nearly smashing his Nikonos underwater camera, which was tethered to his wrist. English helped him up, looking at him pityingly.

Finally, they took to the water, gathering on the surface to pair off.

Kaz spit into his mask to prevent it from fogging. He placed it over his eyes and nose and inhaled to create the watertight suction. He bit down on the regulator and deflated the buoyancy compensator around his neck until he slipped beneath the waves, squeezing the nosepiece of his mask and blowing out to equalize the pressure in his ears.

Underwater. This was only his third dive, and each time he was amazed all over again by this silent alien world, so close at hand, and yet so hidden. People talked about “escaping” into a book or movie. But this was real escape. Down here, hockey was a million miles away, an obscure pastime attached to another life.

His two certification dives had been in cold, murky Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto. So the clear sunlit seascape beneath the surface of the Caribbean was dazzling. The visibility seemed almost infinite, but that wasn’t the astonishing part. It was just so busy down here, so alive! Steven Allagash’s wall-size fish tank was a foggy wasteland by comparison. Thousands of fish of every shape, size, and color darted in all directions.

A tiny, brilliantly striped angelfish ventured up to investigate him. Kaz was fascinated. The curious little creature seemed completely unafraid of the much larger animal that had invaded its ocean. It continued to nose around the bubble stream that rose from his breathing apparatus.

All at once, a shadow passed overhead. In a flash of sudden violence, a round, fat grouper swooped down like a dive-bombing eagle and snapped up the hapless prey.

Whoa. Sorry, guy. Got to keep on your fins. It’s a jungle out here.

Almost as an afterthought, he looked around for Dante, his dive partner. To avoid wearing his glasses underwater, the photographer sported a prescription dive mask that distorted his features into a mountainous nose under saucer-wide, staring eyes. It was a shocked, almost crazed appearance. Kaz chuckled — and swallowed water in the process. Concentrate, he reminded himself with a cough.

Dante was obviously very impressed by his surroundings, because he was firing off pictures of every shrimp and minnow. Six minutes into the dive, the photographer was officially out of film.

Even through his mask and a cloud of bubbles, English’s disgust was plain. Impatiently, he grabbed the two novices each by a wrist and began to swim them toward the reef. Off to the side, they could see the girls moving in the same direction.

As the reef loomed up, the detail of the coral formations began to come into spectacular focus. The colors were unbelievable, almost unreal, like the product of some Hollywood special effects department. The shapes were positively extra-terrestrial: huge plumes of lettuce coral; branched spikes of staghorn; mounds of brain coral the size of dump trucks, all stacked upon each other in a mountain that rose to a summit that was perhaps ten feet below the glittering surface.

Kaz checked the gauge on his diver’s watch and realized with some surprise that they had descended to forty feet, which was twice as deep as he’d ever ventured before.

Adriana reached out to touch the coral. In a flash, Star’s hand shot forward and grabbed her wrist. The experienced diver gestured with a scolding finger.

I knew that, Kaz thought to himself. The reef was a living organism, composed of uncounted millions of tiny animals called polyps. Even the slightest touch would kill the outermost layer of creatures, damaging the reef. Not to mention that the polyps would sting you.

English flashed the hand signal for descent and led them down to sixty feet, to the base of the coral edifice. Kaz adjusted his B.C. to neutral buoyancy to stop the descent. I could get good at this, he reflected, pleased to be developing a talent that had nothing to do with skating, shooting, and attempted murder.

Here the coral formations gave way to a variety of sea flora growing out of a firm sandy bottom — the Hidden Shoals proper. Life was everywhere, although not quite as colorful as higher up on the reef. At this depth, the sun’s rays could not fully penetrate the water. It was a land of twilight.

Kaz’s attention was drawn to a small hurried movement below. At first, it seemed as if the sand itself was boiling up into little aquatic dust devils. He angled his body so that his face mask was positioned just above the disturbance and took a closer look.

All at once, the swirling sand was gone, and a large eye was looking back at him.

“Hey!” His cry of shock spit the regulator clear out of his mouth.

It was amazing how loud his voice sounded underwater. And not just to himself, either, because Dante headed straight for him.

A dark slithering blob exploded out of the seabed, leaving a thick cloud of black ink in its wake.

“Octopus!” cried Dante, losing his own regulator in the process.

The identification was unnecessary. Kaz could see the eight undulating arms trailing behind the fleeing body. It was so fluid that the size was hard to guess — maybe a baby pumpkin at the center of a two-foot wingspan.

English flashed out of nowhere, placed himself in the creature’s escape path, and allowed it to come to him. He grabbed it by two flailing tentacles. Instantly, the thing turned an angry orange before cloaking itself and the dive guide in a second, much larger emission of ink.

Fumbling for his mouthpiece, Kaz lost sight of them, but caught a glimpse of English, much higher up, carrying his prize to the surface.

Dante pulled a five-by-seven underwater slate out of his B.C. pocket. With the tethered pencil, he scribbled a quick message on the rigid plastic, and showed it to Kaz. It read: DINNER?

Kaz just shrugged.

The dive guide was back almost immediately, but the dark face inside his mask yielded no clue as to the octopus’s fate.

At that point, the team had been down for half an hour. English directed them to another section of reef — a gradual upward slope where they could be closer to the surface when their air began to run low. It was important to ascend slowly to avoid decompression sickness. If a diver went up too quickly, the sudden lowering of water pressure was like popping the top on a soda can. Nitrogen gas in the bloodstream could fizz up like a Pepsi. It was no joke — the bends could cripple you for life or kill you.

As he watched the sunlit surface draw closer and closer, Kaz was growing increasingly comfortable. With every passing minute, technique and mechanics became more automatic, allowing him to enjoy the reef and its many inhabitants. If this keeps up, he thought, semi-amused, I could get to like scuba.

The thought had barely crossed his mind when he saw the silhouette. Alien, yet at the same time familiar, it was approaching from dead ahead — the triangular dorsal fin, the black emotionless eyes, the pointed snout.

Shark.