The Lucifer Gospel

32

They reached the wreck at fifty-five feet, following the anchor line from the dinghy on the surface down to where it stood hard against the current, the cast aluminum mushroom of the anchor itself tangled in the old twisted cables of a lifeboat davit amidships on the starboard side. The wreck was gigantic, a massive torpedo shape in the green-blue water, the dark hull clear against the white sand of the ocean floor. It seemed to stretch forever, the stern hard against the reef, the weed-and-shell encrusted bow jutting out slightly into the long sandy chute leading to the channel. The wreck was corkscrewed, the bow tilting downward, the amidships section and the stern still intact but rolled slightly to one side. From where the line came down from the dinghy it was easy to see why the huge hulk had remained undiscovered for so long. High above they could see the choppy surface just off the reef. The weather had turned ominous overnight, but they’d decided to chance the dive anyway.

Hilts pointed upward and his voice echoed electronically in Finn’s earpiece. “She must have been rolled against the reef wall during the hurricane when she sank,” he said. “Over the years the tidal surge and the current carved out that lip-and-groove formation.”

Finn saw what he was pointing to; it was as though the water had scooped out a bed for the sunken ship to sag into, the overhang of coral throwing a long, broad shadow that would hide her from view. She could feel the suck and pull of the surge against the rebreather unit snugged onto her back plate. With the tide ebbing it was easy enough to counter, but she knew it would get steadily stronger as the dive wore on.

“Let’s get going,” she said. They’d been up since first light, planning the dive against the deck plans. They’d assumed, correctly from the looks of it, that the upper superstructure of the deckhouse, sundeck, boat deck, and promenade decks had pancaked into each other as she sank, like a building imploding, crushed by the weight of the two large funnels as they collapsed. According to the news reports there had been an explosion in the boiler room, but by the looks of the twisted plates and the hull it was the bow section that had torn away.

“Can you tell where we are?” Finn asked. She turned slowly in the warm water, looking up and down the confusing length of the immense vessel. Her weight belt kept her poised, negatively buoyant in the blue-green ocean. She moved her arms back and forth in a slow, sweeping gesture, just enough to keep her upright. At a guess she would have said they were somewhere ahead of where the bow funnel had been, partway between it and the forward mast.

“Somewhere just behind where the bridge would have been,” Hilts answered.

“That means we have to head back toward the stern,” she said. “According to the plans the main gangway doors and the lobby were a hundred and sixty feet from the bow.”

“Fifty feet back,” Hilts said with a nod. He unclipped a Sea Marshall Diver’s Beacon from his vest, attached it to the anchor line and set the pulse light flashing. If either one of them got turned around or the weather turned bad quickly, the light and the 121.5-megahertz signal being transmitted from the device would lead them back to the anchor line.

They swam slowly to the edge of the collapsed deck and Finn stopped suddenly, brought up short as she found herself suddenly looking down to the ocean floor as the hull dropped away. The sense of size was almost dizzying; even under water it was almost enough to give her vertigo, regardless of the fact that she couldn’t actually fall off the edge of the ship.

“Intense,” said Hilts, treading water beside her.

She nodded and launched herself over the side, her legs and hips moving in a smooth undulating technique that was meant to reduce silt disturbance. She planed down the side of the hull, breathing evenly, enjoying the full face mask and the fact that she didn’t have to keep a mouthpiece clamped between her jaws. The oddest sensation was the ebreather’s lack of bubbles. The simple, even hissing of the unit and the boiling sensation of the bubbles’ release around her was vaguely claustrophobic; it was almost too quiet. On the other hand, the silence let her glide through the local schools of bluefish and cobia almost without notice. In the distance she could see a smaller group of silvery barracuda swimming in their distinctive, nervous zigzags, but she ignored them; she knew the needle-toothed creature’s reputation was built more on appearance than actual danger. On the rare occasions that the predatory fish attacked humans it was because they’d been attracted by some glittering piece of jewelry or a brightly reflective watch.

She planed down, aware of Hilts beside and just behind her. She kept her eyes to the left, watching the weed-and-barnacle-covered deck plates, the steadily strengthening surge moving the wrack back and forth like waving fingers. Regular lines of portholes ran off into the distance, most of them still intact, the thick glass covered in a crust of silt and growth, the cabin interiors on the other side of the barrier dark and unwelcoming. The ship was dead, not even a ghost; this was no Titanic with the specters of a thousand passengers still hovering nearby; this was a burnt-out hulk.

“There,” she said finally, pulling up short and pointing ahead and down. A dark hole gaped in the side of the hull. It was close to a perfect square, the edges softened by a dense mat of sea growth. “The main entry hatch. It’s wide open.”

“They would have taken off the passengers through there while they still had the time. Easier to load the lifeboats from here.”

Both Finn and Hilts were carrying high-intensity twin lights, one lamp fixed to their back plates, the other clipped to their belts. Both were powered by battery packs that had a charge life of almost two hours. They switched on and the entranceway was suddenly lit up brightly. They had agreed on position and protocols the night before, so there was no need to discuss it again now. Because Finn was smaller, Hilts would go first to assess their best route; if he could get through a space, then it stood to reason that Finn could follow. Finn on the other hand would be the one keeping track of the time, regularly checking the dive computer dangling from her vest. It would be easy to get so far into the wreck’s interior that they would run out of time; it would be up to her to call the cutoff point no matter how close they’d come to their objective.

“Top to bottom,” said Hilts. “We start with the Vatican guy.”

“Augustus Principe, the bishop. Upper Promenade Deck, Gelderland Suite. Cabin number seventy-one.” Finn reached down, pulled up the dangling computer on her vest, and set the elapsed time function. The computer would let out a loud buzz at the halfway point-their signal to turn back, no matter what. The digital display began to count down. “Go.” She dropped the computer. Hilts eased forward, keeping his swim-fin motion to a minimum to reduce disturbance of the accumulated silt that had settled on board. He kept one hand extended, sweeping his hand light back and forth. Finn came in behind him and a little above, pacing herself to him.

Ten feet inside the entrance was a pile of debris, rotted wood, metal, and a pile of something that might have been a heap of life preservers, now reduced to a layer of black muck forming an environment for half a dozen kinds of weed and deep-sea undergrowth. In the light from Hilts’s lamp Finn could see that there had once been a set of interior doors that swung on a central hinge in the middle of the entranceway.

Hilts kept moving. Finn followed him into the interior of the midships lobby. A school of small, flashing fish turned and slid quickly away from the searching light. There was a faint haze of hanging algae in the water. On the walls, covered with silt but still clearly visible for what they were, Finn saw a series of aluminum ornaments, each one depicting a different zodiac sign. She’d seen pictures of how they’d once looked in Mills’s photo albums. Once upon a time the walls had been wood-paneled and the deck covered in some sort of nonstick tile, but all of that had long since been eaten away, leaving nothing behind but a dark, unwholesome vegetable skin. On the left the light picked out the open counters of the chief steward’s office and the purser’s office. The night before they’d discussed the possibility of checking the purser’s office, but eventually had decided against checking it out. The purser would no doubt have a safe, but it was unlikely that Devereaux or even his colleague, Bishop Principe, would have kept anything valuable there. They’d check it if they had the time, but only as a last resort.

Above their heads the false ceiling had sagged, revealing a tangle of pipes and electrical conduits. Some of the panels had collapsed and others looked half melted. The heat from the fire if not the fire itself had reached this far. They pushed a little farther, passing what appeared to be Sagittarius. A door sagged. Hilts shone his light. A row of empty dentist’s chairs looked into a row of blank, silt-covered mirrors.

“Barbershops?” Finn guessed.

“Or beauty salon,” Hilts responded, his voice crackling in Finn’s earpiece. Another few feet and they had their answer. A second room and a second row of weedy chairs. A further scattering of armchairs tangled in a heap. Mirrors cracked from side to side, silt and muck inches thick on the floor, visible here and there in patches of black and white geometric tile. A chessboard. There’d been a postcard in one of the souvenir books. This was the men’s barbershop, which meant the first had been the women’s beauty salon.

“Stairway next,” Hilts’s voice murmured in her ear. “I’m going to attach a line if I can find a tie-off.”

“Hey!” Finn yelled, pulling up, a dangerous flash of livid green appearing out of the corner of her eye.

Disturbed by the movement of the divers or perhaps the light, a huge green moray eel surged up out of the ooze and silt beneath one of the barber chairs, huge teeth bared in its beaklike head. A yard long and shaped like a thick, fleshy sword blade, the bright green horror twisted between them, snapping its powerful jaws, then whipped away into the gloom at the edge of the cone of sharp illumination thrown by Hilts’s light. The moray, had it struck, could have easily taken her hand off. Even a small laceration could have led to a vibrio bacterial infection that could cause gangrene within hours.

Finn let out an explosive breath, fogging her mask for a few seconds. Her pounding heart began to slow to something like normal again. She gritted her teeth and kept on swimming, turning toward the wide staircase that opened before her, caught in Hilts’s light. Who knew how many sharp-toothed horrors lay along the path of their explorations.

“Tuesdays with moray,” she muttered, embarrassed by her jerking reaction to the eel.“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” Finn answered. “You had to read the book.” She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s keep on going.”

Hilts nodded. He unclipped the Dive Rite primary reel from his vest, attached it to the end of the aluminum stairwell banister, and clipped the no-snag device back onto his vest. It held two hundred and fifty feet of braided nylon line that would guide them back to the main lobby on their return if their visibility was obscured by too much silt.

The stairway had been tilted almost to the vertical by the sinking of the ship. Debris had rained down from above, mostly ceiling panels and small pieces of furniture. The remains of a chandelier were strewn down the steps, barely recognizable in the weeds and muck. There was even more algae here, suspended in the water, caught like gently swirling dust motes in the seeking beam of their lights.

They reached the top of the stairs without incident and eased their way down the narrow corridor to the left. Over time the ceiling tiles, loosened by the collapsed decks above, had torn free, releasing the plumbing pipes and cables running through the narrow space. They swam forward, frog kicking rather than using a flutter stroke, but even so the silt thrown up by their passage soon reduced visibility to almost nothing. Hilts kept his light on the starboard line of doorways, most of which yawned open. Ten minutes brought them to suite seventy-one.

“This is it.” Hilts rubbed at the dark algae that covered the sagging door, revealing an engraved rectangular plaque screwed to the metal surface. The deeply etched lettering was still faintly visible: GELDERLAND. The photographer swung the beam of his light into the entrance. “Looks messy. Careful.” He reached down to his vest, unhooked the reel and looped the nylon line around the straight handle of the door and let the reel fall. He headed into the room with Finn behind him.

A fire, a hurricane, and nearly half a century underwater had taken their toll. In the old photographs Finn had seen an image of what had passed for sophistication in the early 1960s: modern-looking tufted vinyl chairs arranged around a glass-topped circular plastic table and a thin, Mondrian-patterned carpet in vivid colors, king-sized bed with a padded vinyl headboard, long, low Swedish Modern bureaus with long, low matching mirrors, wood-veneer wall covering in burled walnut that was actually printed fiberglass, and a row of four portholes, square rather than round, for no other reason than being different.

The publicity shots showed women wearing yellow cocktail dresses, drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes in holders while their men stood by with smiles on their square-jawed faces, usually holding a modern straight-stemmed pipe in one hand and a cut-glass tumbler of some amber liquid in the other.

Things had changed.

There were no men in tuxedos or women in cocktail dresses; they’d fled the burning vessel a long time ago. Coat hangers, the waterlogged ruins of an old suitcase, and some kind of curtain material hung on a row of plastic hooks in the little foyer inside the entrance. The floor was thick with muck and sediment. Farther in, the room was almost impassable and the visibility virtually nonexistent. Their lights passed over floating pieces of what might have been the old padded headboard; the office-style easy chairs around the table had disintegrated into the thick layer of dark silt on the deck where the Mondrian carpet had rested, and the fiberglass wall paneling had peeled away from the hull plating, heated red-hot in places according to the survivors. Aside from the remnant of the vinyl suitcase, there was no sign that anyone had ever occupied the cabin.

Finn pushed against the inner door frame of the foyer and glided across to the low chest of drawers. She tried to pull open one of the compartments and the entire piece of furniture silently came apart in her hands. There didn’t seem to be any surface not covered with a layer of algae or slime. There was nothing in the drawer except more silt.

“There’s nothing here,” said Hilts, swinging the light around. “If there had been it would have disappeared a long time ago.”

Finn checked her dive computer. They’d been down for more than an hour. It was time to go. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “We should still see if we can get to Devereaux’s cabin at least.”

“Okay,” said Hilts. He swung around, his fins sending up a blur of silt from the floor. The beam from his light glinted on something beneath him.

“Wait,” said Finn. She reached blindly down into the haze of newly disturbed muck, hoping that there wasn’t another eel lurking in the dense ooze. Her fingers touched something hard. She grabbed it, pulling upward. Hilts tilted the light onto the object.

“I’ll be damned,” said Hilts’s voice in her ear. “A big gold crucifix.”

“Better than that,” said Finn. “It’s a bishop’s Pectoral Cross. The question is, where’s the bishop?”

“Maybe he left it behind.”

“If I remember correctly, they’re not supposed to take them off.”

“Let’s try Devereaux’s cabin.”

“All right.”

Finn stuffed the six-inch-long gold cross into her dive belt and swam after Hilts, following him out of the submerged cabin. Hilts gathered up the Dive Rite reel and they began retracing their route, moving silently back through the gloomy corridor, rewinding the line as they went in a ritual that dated back to ancient Crete and the silken thread that saved Theseus from being lost in the Labyrinth. Even though their fins had kicked up the ooze to almost zero visibility on their way in, they made their way back to the central staircase and the Main Deck foyer without any difficulty.

Hilts waited, suspended above the stairwell, moving languidly, waiting until Finn rejoined him. They dropped down the tilted stairs, keeping just away from the silt-and-algae covered walls. The farther down they got the worse the visibility became. Somewhere between the time of the fire and the present a whole section of the A Deck area below the Main Deck had collapsed, pushing tons of debris along the canted corridor like garbage down a chute. They reached the A Deck foyer and could go no farther; the stairwell was completely jammed with sections of wall paneling, tangles of pipe, and enormous amounts of unidentifiable debris, all of it made even more dangerous by the choking weed and silt. Even if it had been physically possible to tunnel through the barrier of junk, there was no telling what had taken up residence in the deadly barricade over the years.

“Now what?” said Finn. In front of them were the smashed double doors leading into the main dining salon. On the other side of the foyer it looked as though there had been some large mosaic made of colored tiles, most of which had fallen out over time. On either side of the mosaic were the brass doors of the two elevators serving the amidships section of the ship. Hilts swung the beam of the light into the dining salon. In the pictures, the original Princess Oriana Dining Room, named for the opera, was a lavish, two-story, domed monstrosity complete with an eight-piece orchestra and yellow tufted leather ceiling. There was seating for five hundred at a time, and somewhere with a series of hidden escalators for the stewards to retrieve orders from the kitchens below. Now it was a murky waterlogged cavern, the carpeted floors rotted to soggy, crab-infested destruction, the leather ceilings long decomposed, the remains hanging in long organic strings like the putrid entrails of some massive sea creature’s innards. The tables, all bolted to the floors, were still there, their linen cloths long gone, the padding of the chairs no more than muck. The orchestra balcony hung like an empty eye socket over everything. No ladies in yellow dresses, no officers in dress-white uniforms solicitously lighting politically incorrect cigarettes; the tomb of a vanished era of elegance.

“This place is really starting to give me the creeps,” said Hilts.

Finnlifted her computer and stared through her mask. “We’re running out of time. We can check out Devereaux’s cabin, but we’d better be quick about it.” Both of them could feel the distinct tug of the tidal surge as it swept through the giant wreck. It was much stronger than it had been when they first approached the ship.

“How long?” asked Hilts.

“Fifteen minutes in, ten on-site, fifteen back, no more,” Finn answered.

“Gotcha.”

“How do we go in?”

“The elevator shaft, like we agreed.”

“Can you get the doors open?”

“I can try.” Hilts took the lightweight Dutch Guard titanium diver’s pry bar off his belt and pushed across the lobby, skimming lightly toward the ornate brass doors, now deeply pitted with corrosion and dark with oxidization and plankton slime. Finn followed close behind.

They paused in front of the doors, Finn using her hand light this time, throwing a patch of illumination on the tarnished barrier before them. Hilts used his hand to wipe a small patch clean in the center and fitted the hook end of the bar into the crack. He pulled but the effort simply swung him around in the water, raising a cloud of silt.

“Need to get some kind of purchase,” he muttered, and tried again, this time lifting one leg, slipping off the big Dacor flipper and putting his bare foot against the frame of the doorway. He heaved again and the door separated, a dark split appearing. Finn swam forward, hooking the light back on her buoyancy vest, and helped him pull the doors fully open. She unhooked her light and Hilts switched his on as well, leaning into the shaft and throwing the beams downward. The light showed an empty shaft, thick with floating plankton that seemed almost to have a breathing movement as it rode the invisible surges and currents in the water.

“Looks clear,” said Hilts.

“Don’t forget the reel; that stuff in there looks as thick as soup.”

Hilts nodded, put his flipper back on and retied the safety line to a jutting beam on the side of the elevator shaft. He swam into the shaft proper, reached up, and then adjusted his vest compensator.

“Going down,” he said, grinning through the mask. He sank slowly into the shaft as the deflated vest reduced his buoyancy. Finn waited until he was clear of the doorway, then followed him into the shaft. She hit the yellow punch button on her vest, heard the gargling, bubbling hiss of escaping air, and then began to drop even deeper into the sunken hull of the old wreck.

The A Deck elevator doors slid open with no difficulty, and Hilts and Finn swam easily out into the foyer. This was the first full accommodation deck with no shops or dining facilities. Toward the bow were two corridors, port and starboard, with inside cabins down the center. Devereaux had been down on the passenger list as occupying cabin 305 along the left corridor, which now stood directly in front of them.

They pointed their lights down the dark tunnel and saw nothing but a few weeds and a thin layer of sediment and silt over everything. There was no sign of fire or damage, which made sense since the origin of the disaster lay far astern in the after-boiler area. Trailing the safety line behind him as it spun off the reel on his belt, Hilts eased himself across the lobby and down the dark passage, careful to disturb as little of the silt on the deck as possible. A narrower side passage to the left led to cabins 319, 323, 320, and 324. The doors were all open, the cabins beyond dark and forbidding, cluttered with the ruin of their rotted interiors. Next came three singles in a row, 315, 313, and 309, with matching inside cabins on the other side of the hall. Once again the doorways to all of these were open.

“Almost there,” said Hilts quietly. They swam a little farther. The door to Devereaux’s cabin-305-was firmly closed.

“Strange,” said Finn. “According to all the reports the crew went from cabin to cabin making sure no one was left behind.”

“Which is why all the doors are still open,” commented Hilts.

Finn swam forward and grasped the door handle. She pulled it down but it remained in place.

“Jammed?” said Hilts.

“Feels like it’s locked,” Finn responded. She tried again. Still nothing.

“Let me,” said Hilts. He moved in beside her and tried for himself. “You’re right.”

“Use the bar,” Finn suggested.

Hilts nodded. He took the titanium pry bar off his belt and jammed it into the seal of the door just at the level of the handle. He pulled hard and there was a soggy crunch. With his free hand he tried the handle. It moved downward. He pushed and the door opened, swinging inward.

“Who locks his door when the ship is on fire?” asked Finn, hovering behind him.

“Let’s find out,” Hilts said. “Give me a time check first.”

Finn consulted her dive computer. “Ten minutes starting-” she hit the elapsed time button-“now.”

Hilts put the pry bar back on his belt, switched on his hand light and moved into the cabin, pulling himself in on the doorframe. In the old brochure for the ship Finn had seen at Mills’s home on Hollaback Cay, the A Deck cabins were quite a bit different than the larger room occupied by Bishop Principe. As well as the simple size difference, Devereaux’s cabin was the mirror of Principe’s, with the little vestibule on the left rather than the right. Beyond the coat rack and suitcase storage area was a second door that led into the cabin proper. Beyond that was a pleasant bedroom/sitting room area with a large wood-paneled wardrobe against the aft bulkhead and a dressing table and mirror against the forward wall. The bed itself was located under a pair of small, square portholes looking out onto the sea, or in the present case looking out over the abyss of the reef edge down to the distant ocean floor. Hanging from an overhead track was a nylon privacy curtain much like the ones around a hospital bed.

Directly opposite this was the entrance to the bathroom and the second bed. In between the two beds was a sitting area occupied by a pair of vinyl-covered armchairs and a small, round, plastic-topped coffee table with an image of a compass rose laminated under the surface-the logo of the Acosta Line, seen everywhere from bar coasters and menu covers to the carpeting on the floor of the dining rooms.

“Dear God,” whispered Hilts, his light sweeping around the room. The room was almost exactly as it had been half a century before. The locked door had kept out most of the marine life visible in the rest of the ship, and unlike an older vessel like the Titanic, most of the fabrics and materials used in the Acosta Star were synthetic and not as prone to decay. The result of this was that the only sign of the passage of time was a fine layer of silt and sediment over everything, rather like a layer of sheeting over the furniture in an empty house. The only obvious symbols of decay were the human remains on the bed.

The cartilage and the tendons holding the bones together had long since been eaten away and the skeleton had fallen apart, but enough shape remained to show the curled-up fetal position of the body. The long bones of the leg were bent, the ribs had fallen into a yellowing pile, and the arms were brought up almost as if the man had been in prayer at the time of his passing.

“Who is it?” Finn said, floating closer to the pile of bones scattered on the sagging bed. Above her the remnants of the nylon privacy curtain waved in the currents like old shrouds.

“Devereaux, presumably,” said Hilts. “Someone locked him in his cabin by the looks of it. Either that or he committed suicide. Looks like cause of death was asphyxia. He didn’t burn to death or drown.” The photographer moved lightly above the bed and checked the portholes. “They’re dogged shut; he couldn’t have opened them without a pipe wrench.”

“He was a Catholic. I doubt if it was suicide,” Finn said, turning her light and shining it across the room to the far wall.

“I guess we’re fifty years too late to find out whatever his secret was,” said Hilts.

“Maybe not,” Finn said quietly, her light falling across the little round table. “What’s that?”

The surface of the table had a skin of silt and sediment, but there was obviously something underneath. Finn waved her hand back and forth just above the tabletop, unsettling the thin layer and dispersing it.

“Playing cards?” said Hilts, looking confused behind his mask.

“I bet they’re Kem brand,” said Finn. “My father used them when he played bridge on his digs in the jungle. They’re made out of cellulose acetate or something; that’s why they haven’t disintegrated.”

The cards were tucked into the aluminum rim of the table in two groups, like poker hands, faceup. One set was at the top edge, the other set to the left. The top set had six cards, the set on the left had five. “He wasn’t playing poker, that’s for sure,” said Hilts, looking down at the cards.

“He wasn’t playing any game,” replied Finn.

“A message?”

“He was locked in here, he knew he was going to die, and he took the time to do this. He had to have had a reason.”

“A three, an eight, another three, a pair of twos, and a five in one hand, a pair of eights, the jack of diamonds, and another pair of twos, clubs and spades.” He paused. “What kind of message is that?”

“The only one he could leave. We just can’t decipher it.” She checked her computer again. “And we don’t have any time left. Take some pictures and let’s get topside.” The suck and blow of the current was beginning to take its toll in the cabin, pushing sediment up and obscuring visibility.

Hilts nodded, unzipped the big ninja pocket on his vest and took out the compact DC500 Mills had purchased for him in Nassau. He took a full set of general pictures of the cabin using the internal flash, then concentrated on the table and its two hands of cards. “There’s something else there,” said Hilts, pointing to the center of the table. Finn waved her hand, sweeping away more of the brown sandy grit, and a gleaming line of gold appeared.

“It’s a chain,” she said, picking it up. It was a little more than two feet long, the links finely made. The clasp was still intact but there were two end links torn open. “It’s as though someone tore it off someone else’s neck,” said Finn.

“Take it and let’s get going,” Hilts replied. He took a shot of the dangling chain and then Finn stowed it away in her vest. Hilts stowed the camera again, then turned and made his way out of the cabin, Finn holding her light so that it shone over his shoulder as he reeled in the safety line on their way back. Even in the lower corridor the increase in the tidal surge could easily be felt, and now there was the steady booming sound transmitted down to them as heavy waves hammered into the side of the reef. By the time they reached the Main Deck foyer again the surge had become truly fierce, the current pushing them from one side to the other, slamming them against the bulkheads as the ocean breathed through the gaping entrance doors. The weather on the surface was clearly closing in. Finn thought about the rubber dinghy and the half mile of sea that lay between them and landfall at the lighthouse.

Silently the couple angled their way across the lobby, fighting against the bursting current as it tried to push them tumbling back. Finn knew that their margin of safety was slowly slipping away. Another ten minutes or so and they’d be in real trouble. She’d heard a hundred stories of divers who were within sight of the surface but doomed never to reach it because they let their dive run too long. No air was no air, and the human body could only survive for so long before the lungs sucked a fatal dose of drowning seawater. At least with the rebreathers they wouldn’t have to make decompression stops after such a long period on bottled air.

“Getting bad,” Hilts commented, trying to pull and glide his way to the entrance. He finally reached it. Finn came in behind and above, hanging on to the upper edge of the broad hatch in the side of the ship. Outside the sea had darkened perceptibly, the sun from above cut by at least half. The strength of the tidal surge plucked at their buoyancy vests, the harsh current moving first in one direction, then rebounding to the other. There was roughly a ten-second pause of relative calm between them. “We’ll have to time it exactly right if we want to get back to the anchor line in one piece,” instructed Hilts. The line was snugged around the lifeboat davit four decks up. If they missed the calm between the surge and its backwash they’d either be slammed mercilessly against the hull or swept out into the channel. Finn had always been curious about traveling to Cuba, but not enough to be a waterlogged corpse washed up on one of her white sand beaches.

“What about a safety line?” Finn suggested.

Hilts shook his head. “Too much drag. It would slow you down. Just wait for the pause and then swim like hell. If you feel the return stroke coming, find something to hang on to, quick, got it?”

“Got it.”

They waited in the entranceway as the surge poured in through the opening, sweeping them back. As it faded Hilts hit the green full buoyancy button on his vest and shot out through the hole, rising quickly out of sight. Hilts counted to herself. At ten she tensed and waited. The surge came again, passed through, heading for the wall of the reef, and then the movement stilled again. Finn hit the green button on her own vest, kicked hard and rose up through the water, watching for Hilts’s waiting figure by the anchor line. She decided on her way up the huge, curving side of the hull that if he wasn’t there she’d simply keep on going up to the surface and pray she’d arrive within a reasonable distance from the inflatable. She tried not to think of the hundred other possibilities, none of them good.

She kept her mask up as she slipped up the barnacle-and-coral-encrusted side of the ship, keeping herself well off, trying to judge the strength of the surging current at her back, wondering if she had enough time left before it smashed her against the hull. With her vest at full rise, the shells and fire coral with its poisonous, jellyfish stingers and its spiky exoskeleton would tear her to ribbons. Suddenly the line of the open deck appeared and there was Hilts, hand out to grab her just as the surge hit, pushing them both hard. Finn managed to weather the beating of the surge using her free hand to hang on to the anchor line and then it was momentarily calm again.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she said, her breath coming harshly.

“I was having my doubts there for a second as well,” Hilts replied, the sound of his voice crackling and breaking up in her ear with a hiss. “And we’re not out of it yet.” He let go of the line with one hand and pointed upward. Finn stared. Fifty feet above them the water was in a torn fury, the vortices of the waves smashing in all directions, filling the water with bubbling turbidity. Finn knew the surface was quickly turning into a nightmare. The approaching storm was almost upon them; they had to reach shelter soon or they’d be in very bad trouble.

“We’ve got to get topside-now,” she said.

“No argument from me,” agreed Hilts. “Let’s go.”

They waited for the next surge to pass then followed the line up to the top, hanging on with one hand and guiding their progress with the other. Amazingly the inflatable had ridden out the rising weather and hadn’t swamped. Finn’s head broke the surface and she saw that things were worse than she’d thought. Through the beaded water on her face mask she could make out the far horizon. It was a black horror of scudding clouds that seemed to rise up like a terrible wall. They’d surfaced in the middle of a raging, moaning gale, and from the looks of the horizon the gale was only a taste of much worse to come. She tugged the mask up and over her face as Hilts reached the surface beside her. Both of them clung to the dangling side ropes of the dinghy as the cold rain lashed at them with talons of icy spray. Suddenly, impossibly, there was the sound of a bullhorn close by. They turned toward the sound and stared in disbelief.

It was Rolf Adamson, fifty yards away, standing spread-legged on the corkscrewing rear deck of a Viking 56 supercruiser yacht with the name Romans XII across the transom. He had the bullhorn in one hand and a pump-action shotgun dangling from the other. “Mr. Hilts, Miss Ryan! Please! You must come out of there instantly, I insist! You’ll catch a chill if you’re not careful!”