“Good luck!” Blaine shouted.
Without missing a beat, she sat on the edge of the boat, facing into it before she slowly tilted backward, flying head over heels into the water.
After the amusement-park fall into the water, Peta quickly oriented herself, dumped the air out of her vest, and turned facedown, away from the light and the path of her ascending bubbles. She kicked smoothly, straight toward the bottom. With the press of a button she started the timer function of her dive watch, then looked at it to make sure the seconds were ticking down.
While she was traveling to the bottom, she kept her air mix heavier on oxygen than she would have it when she entered the cave. She’d have to check depth and cut back the oxygen to something around a 15 or 16 percent mixture—quickly. If she took too long to do that, the excess oxygen would turn toxic in her bloodstream.
To get her mind off the dangers of the dive itself, she focused on how to find Brousseau. It occurred to her that the oil rig team had probably planted markers when they got to the bottom, showing the direction to the cave. A rip current could play havoc with marking poles, but if they were still there, she could follow them straight to the deep hole…and Simon.
The light began to fade, and with it the colors. Everything settled into a murky gloom. She took a quick glance at her depth gauge. Sixty feet. It would soon be time to turn on the headlight. She checked her time…passing three minutes into the dive. She was tempted to push it, kick a bit harder, but she resisted. It wasn’t just a question of speed. She knew she could swim faster than Simon. The problem was, if she did push herself, the exertion might make her breathe too fast. If she did that, the oxygen-nitrogen mix would be wrong no matter how she tried to balance it, which would makeher the one in need of saving.
That was another danger she didn’t need to focus on.
Her depth gauge was nearing one hundred feet, the edge of the recreational dive limit, when she saw something dark ahead of her.
She reminded herself that this was no rec dive.
Thinking, hoping, that the dark shape was the first outcropping of the sea floor, she turned on her light. Its pale glow caught the floating soup of “snow” in the water, making the tiny falling debris shine around her like fireflies.
Ahead of her, the shape moved, closer than she’d thought. The blackish grayness changed, and she saw her light reflected against white teeth. She thought of the hand symboclass="underline" making a fin with your hand to warn other divers.
Except there were no other divers down here. Nothing alive here at all except for her—and the shark seemed to have noticed that fact.
24
The few things Peta knew about sharks rushed into her mind, like life preservers bobbing to the surface after a wreck. The most relevant thing she remembered was that most sharks didn’t want to have anything to do with mankind—or womankind. Even the supposed man-eaters, the great whites, the tigers, and worst of all a rogue hammerhead separated from its pack, dined infrequently on humans.
Eyes locked on the shadowy form of the shark as it grew larger, Peta kicked back. She knew she was sucking her air mixture too heavily. Nitrogen would start building up. That’s not a good thing, she told herself, but there was this bigger problem….
The shark that was coming right at her. A blue shark, she guessed, acting completely out of character.
She had two choices: stay perfectly still and hope the shark did a flyby, or do something to make it reconsider its current course. Preferring the latter, she reached down to her thigh and pulled out the rusty dive knife.
The shark was only meters away, resolute in its intent.
Peta held the knife with the handle facing away from her, blade pointing toward her. She pulled her arm close, holding the knife in tight.
There was a theory among divers that hitting a shark on the nose sharply made it back up. Especially, so the theory went, if it really didn’t have you in mind for dinner. If it did, the theory was probably useless.
A meter away the shark, a gray bullet now, rocketed right at her chest, its eyes expressionless black dots.
For a moment she thought her arm was moving too slowly to catch it, but the handle miraculously hit the shark directly on its piglike nostrils. If she survived, she’d be sure to tell the experts what they could do with their shark theories.
The creature didn’t stop. If anything, the handle acted like a jolt of energy. The blue shark rammed her hard, the force of it shoving her to the side and knocking her regulator from between her teeth. A giant bubble of air exploded from her mouth.
She did a sidearm recovery of her regulator, popped it in her mouth, and sucked in the mixture. When she looked up to find the shark, she saw it trailing away, as if its eyes hadn’t seen her at all. A crazy undersea driver, a hit-and-run expert sailing on to his next victim.
Peta hung in the water for a moment to take stock of the damage. Her buoyancy control vest looked as if it had been shredded by the abrasive skin of the shark, but she realized that it had looked the same way when she’d put it on. Undoubtedly, the result of a zillion tourist dives. Otherwise, she was fine, and she was wasting time she didn’t have.
She continued her dive down to the hole. To Simon.
Just past 120 feet, she found the bottom.
She was very close to where the drill had entered the seabed. Swimming by, she noticed that the test well itself had been sealed with concrete. The entrance to the cave couldn’t be more than eighty feet away. Nitrogen narcosis would normally kick in if she lingered at this depth, but this dive was not about lingering. She had to find the cave and take an express train as deep as it went. Once there she’d have to quickly cut back her oxygen in time to prevent problems. That way at least she wouldn’t go crazy with the rapture of the deep. Although, she thought, she could probably do with a little rapture about now.
Right about then, she spotted a tall marking pole left by the drilling team at the edge of an undersea rift. The markers were usually used to track where samples were taken, or places to test for underground oil. In this case, it was a pointer to Simon’s destination, the underwater cavern.
She didn’t like cave dives, not at normal depth, and certainly not at a tech-dive depth. Once you were inside, your options closed. You lost both light and maneuvering room. One of her best friends once did a deep underwater cave in the Yucatán. They fished him out dead the next day.
She looked at the narrow entrance. Tight, but roomy enough to swim in.
Damn you, Simon, she thought. You should have known better. You shouldn’t be in there. You’re too old; it’s too dangerous.
Time to cut the oxygen—and fast. She reached behind and lowered the oxygen to below 20 percent, while bringing the nitrogen and helium mix up an equal amount. She took a breath. The air tasted a little metallic but otherwise fine.
Finding no further reason for delay, she kicked into the mouth of the cave. Her small light barely caught the walls, and she heard the clank as her tanks scraped the top. The cave twisted and turned, and she tried to check her depth gauge, but there was no room to reach behind and grab it.
She felt the familiar pull of a deep dive: stress, anxiety. It’s okay, she thought. Calm down. Focus. No problems here. I’ll just hope I have a good air cocktail going for this depth, because if it isn’t good, it could be too late for me to tell. Disorientation will hit, confusion, and it’ll be underwater mouse-in-a-maze time. And the maze always wins.
Stop it, Peta! Focus! she screamed inside her head.
She came to a fork in the tunnel and looked around. No Simon, no bubbles. Which way to go? One hole narrowed. No way he could have made it through that one. She looked at the other; the walls were smooth, almost polished. That seemed strange. They should have been rough, with coral fingers reaching out like the ones behind her. Instead they looked shiny. She wondered if it could be something volcanic.