He came at her hard, pushing Simon’s body ahead of himself like a battering ram. The panic was rising in her face, and he could see her gulping air as she hit the wall. Not good, he thought. You must breathe evenly when you’re diving this deep.
He noticed that his own breathing mixture felt thin and that he was gasping a bit from too much exertion. Unavoidable under the circumstances, he thought. He would check it later.
Keeping Peta pressed to the wall with Simon’s lifeless body, he moved his knife in a broad, sweeping arc and expertly cut the main hose from her regulator. Immediately the air mixture rocketed out. He shifted his grip to her BC to steady her as he cut her secondary hose.
She kicked at him. That was another downside of the subject of the work being aware of what was happening. Nothing alivewants to die.
Fortunately the water and the dead weight between them made her slow, inaccurate. It was too late for her as the twin jets of free air shot from her tanks and wedged her tighter between the dead body and the wall.
Blaine sheathed his knife, scooped up the specimen bag, and kicked his way back to the cave opening. He held the bag tightly in his hand, the prize for Frikkie.
A nice prize, with the added bonus that the witnesses would never see the surface again.
Death wouldn’t come all that quickly for Peta, but it would come. It was sad, really. She was a beautiful woman with a lot of fire.
He would have liked to have bedded her at least once.
25
Blaine moved slowly to the surface, taking his time. He didn’t let himself dwell on Peta’s struggle below. It wouldn’t have been pretty, but—by now—it was over. Time to be forgotten. She was quite beautiful, he thought again, and quite brave. Altogether rather remarkable.
Pity how things turned out sometimes.
At fifteen feet from the surface he slowed to a stop. Breathing a trimix made rest stops absolutely necessary to ensure that no bubbles brewed in his bloodstream as he changed pressure. It was always good to vent some internal gases at low depth. Like a race-car driver making a pit stop. If life had been different, that’s what he would have done: raced cars at high speed. He certainly had the balls for it.
Looking down, he saw a shape moving through the water. It circled coyly under him. His watch indicated that he had been at fifteen feet for only a minute—he should stay at this depth for another two minutes at least.
Beneath him, the shark described another circle, spiraling up his way.
Wouldn’t that be ironic? he thought. Get the artifact, kill Peta, and have a shark rip me to pieces.
He looked up at the hull of his boat. Enough of a rest stop, he thought, kicking toward it.
In moments, he broke the surface. The water had turned choppy and he could feel a breeze building up from the southeast. Little whitecaps slapped him one way and the other as he treaded water. He swam to the edge of the boat and latched on. Removing his vest and tanks in the water, he climbed on board and pulled up his gear behind him. In short order, with his wet suit unzipped to the waist, he had the engine going and had cast off from the rig.
He stuffed the specimen bag into his shorts. This was one prize he would keep very close to himself. He toweled the water from his hair, sat on the edge, and looked down, hoping to see the shark. Keep coming up for me, he thought, and I’ll put a damn bullet in your primeval head.
For a split second, he believed he could see it in the deep water below him, but then it faded and he guessed it had given up the chase.
He tossed away the towel, then eased back the throttle, prepared for a nice, leisurely cruise back to the shore. The boat belly-whapped on the choppy water, sending a cool spray shooting back at him. Feeling relaxed and satisfied, he brought out a silver metal box from under the foredeck hold, popped open the latches, and removed his sat phone. After turning it on, he said, “Frikkie.”
The phone dialed automatically. He could hear the whirring ring: once, twice. Come on, he thought. You have to be there. This is what you’ve been waiting for.
“Yes?”
“I got it.”
“Good. Correct that.Great . Take care with it.”
Blaine smiled. “It’s as safe as my family jewels, Frik. I tell you, though, it is a strange-looking thing. I do hope it was worth that beautiful woman’s life.”
“Wait! What did you just say?”
“Peta. I thought it might be tidier if she didn’t surface to ask questions. Seemed like a nice place to leave someone buried. She and Simon kind of disap—”
“Go! The hell! Back! Now!”
“What?”
Even as Blaine spoke, he started cutting the wheel of the boat, turning around. It rocked as its own wake hit it from behind, and for a moment the propellers cut at air. Then he gunned the throttle.
“Are you going back?”
“On my way. Now tell me—”
“You idiot. Did I tell you to kill her?”
“No, Frikkie, but it seemed like a…how you say…no-brainer. Why would you—”
“Because she still has a piece of the artifact, you fool!”
The Venezuelan let that sink in. This was not good. People rarely screwed up on Frikkie more than once. They didn’t live that long.
“You’d better hope to God she’s still alive down there, Blaine. And if she isn’t, you’d be better off not coming up again yourself.”
He didn’t respond. He could only think that it had been a long time since he’d left her in the cave. The best chance that she was alive was if she was somehow able to breathe the free-flowing gases from her tanks. Slim possibility of that, but a possibility nonetheless.
“Are you at the rig yet?”
“In thirty seconds, Frikkie. I’ll go down. I’ll see.”
“She’d better be alive, Blaine. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
Blaine shut off the call and, one hand holding the wheel, grabbed his fins and suited up again.
Peta saw the precious mixture gushing out of the cut hoses like streams of water from the mouth of a crazed snake.
If something like this happened during a rec dive, she could just hold the free-flowing hose up to her mouth and breathe while she ascended. This deep, though, that wouldn’t work. With the air shooting out so fast, there was no way it would last long enough for her to get out of the cave, even if shecould sip the air like that.
Her second option was drowning. Already, she was feeling a little glow in her chest, the beginning of that amazing reflex that would eventually demand that she open her mouth and breathe, no matter what was touching her lips. She would suck in the water, putting an end to that crazed demand.
In minutes she’d be dead.
Then she realized that the answer was right in front of her: Simon. His tanks were intact and still had plenty of air in them. If she could hold her breath a little longer, she might be able to get to them.
Trying to avoid looking at the bulging eyes and the rubbery, puffed-out lips, she reached for the regulator. You’re saving my life, Simon, she thought as she took a breath. For a moment she wondered if it had been a regulator failure that had killed him, but the mechanism worked fine. She took a few even breaths before she slid off her own BC vest and tanks, and watched them float to the top of the cave. With Simon’s mouthpiece locked between her teeth, she reached around him and undid the buckle and the Velcro of his BC. As she pulled it open, she tried to slide it down, but his arms wouldn’t cooperate.
Take your time, she told herself. You have to be patient. Don’t expend too much energy.
As gently as she could, she pushed his right arm out of the vest. It wasn’t easy. The arm felt stiff, too long for the armhole. She had to wedge Simon’s body against the wall and use all her strength to force it through.
With one arm out, the other became much simpler.
Once she had the tanks free, she turned away from her friend’s body and ended up facing the wall mural. Something in the shapes drew her attention, as if there were a secret there that she would understand if she just stared at it long enough. Was that shape a head? No, not a head. More like something from a microbiology class—as if the mural were some grotesque enlargement of a slide.