The Chinese man handed over one more note. “Give me what you have of theirs. And rent us two of your best boats to go find them.”
The agent nodded and reached for the keys to the larger boats. They had pilothouses and inboard motors, designed to go for swordfish, and they were as fast as the boat the Americans had gone out in. Maybe faster.
CHAPTER 32
Hawker had surfaced in a dark void filled with the air from Danielle’s tanks. He flipped up his mask and shouted.
“Danielle!”
Grabbing the wall, he steadied himself.
“Danielle!”
There was noise and reverberation from the venting tanks, like being in a hot tub gone out of control. But no sign of Danielle.
He found his LED flashlight and switched it on. The space was no more than five feet across and roughly circular. The ceiling above him was curved like the inside of a dome. He moved along the wall and found an opening.
It was like the rim of a pool. As he sloshed around, water spilled over the side and went sliding down a ramp of some type.
The inner chamber of the temple was dry.
In the dim light he saw a figure lying at the bottom. He clambered over the wall and slid down. Danielle lay on her side, coughing out water and finding her way back to consciousness.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. She was exhausted.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” he shouted. The sound echoed around them. “Are you out of your mind?”
With great effort, she sat up. “Actually, I think I might be,” she said finally.
“What are you talking about?”
“Nitrogen narcosis,” she said. “Or more likely oxygen narcosis, since we’re using a high-oxygen blend. I had it once before, but on a longer, deeper dive.”
“You’re the diver, the former marine biology student,” he said.
“One of many degrees I started and then abandoned,” she said. “But anyway I’m sorry. I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I just felt like I could get in here. It was right in front of us.”
She put a hand over her eyes, rubbing at her temples. “The problem with that type of narcosis is you don’t feel it coming on. You just feel great. It’s like the fourth stage of tequila, without all the drinking.”
As angry as he was, Hawker had to laugh. “Bulletproof?”
“Invincible,” she replied.
She had seemed to be acting a little crazy ever since they’d spotted the sharks. He looked up the ramp. “Do you even remember what happened?”
“I remember thinking I didn’t want to get cut, and that I was afraid you’d get trapped, too,” she said. “And then, when I was pulling away from you I exhaled and I saw the bubbles pop. It reminded me of a cave dive I was on a couple of years ago. I remembered the exhaust from my regulator getting trapped against the ceiling, creating a thousand little bubbles, perfectly round spheres like silver pearls. But when these bubbles popped, I realized they had to be reaching air. That’s why I kicked you. I couldn’t go back; I had to go forward.”
She looked up the ramp.
“I grabbed this wall as I was blacking out. I guess I hauled myself over.”
He sat down next to her and brushed the wet hair back from her face. “I know what oxygen narcosis is, but why would you get it?”
“It happens.”
“On a dive this short, this shallow?”
He sensed there was something more, perhaps something she didn’t want to tell him. He waited.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said. “And they drugged me a lot in China. I don’t know what it was—truth serum, narcotics, barbiturates maybe. They kept me sedated a lot. You said I was there ten days. I remember forty-eight hours.”
“So the drugs are still in your system,” he said.
“Some of it might be,” she admitted. “I didn’t think about it. Didn’t want to, I guess. But I should have. Things like that can affect you when you dive, especially with nitrox.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said, aiming his flashlight around. “But where the hell did it get us to, anyway? Back down the rabbit hole somewhere?”
They were in the center of a temple of some kind, one that was sealed against the water. The tunnel, which angled down and then up, acted like an air lock. As long as the roof didn’t leak, the water could never overcome the pressure of the air. It could never push inside.
Above them the ceiling of the room was curved and smooth like the dome of some rotunda. Seams between the blocks of stone were precise and almost invisible. No water dripped or leaked. It was an incredible work of construction.
The beam of Hawker’s flashlight played across the smooth stone walls and stopped on what looked like a stairway covered with hieroglyphics. “McCarter would love this place.”
“If he could get over the sharks,” she said.
“I almost didn’t get over the sharks.” Hawker told her. His light followed the flight of the stairs. Lying prone on an altar at the top was a familiar shape. It looked like a sarcophagus of some kind.
“Can you stand?” Hawker asked
She reached out a hand and he pulled her up. Together they crossed the open floor and began climbing the stairs.
Up on the surface, McCarter sat in the fishing boat. Strangely, his feelings of paranoia had returned at almost the instant Danielle and Hawker had descended beneath the waves.
He found himself checking the GPS every thirty seconds to make sure the wind and the current hadn’t moved him and then scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars, fearful that there might be some miscreants coming toward their position. He hadn’t seen anything so far but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
In addition he had to watch Yuri, and he found his nerves jumping anytime the boy moved away from the very center of the boat. As a precaution he’d tightened all the straps on Yuri’s life jacket and secured a second flotation device to his back.
“Think they’d be mad if they came back up and I had you tied to something?”
Yuri ignored him and McCarter had to laugh at himself.
“I used to be the normal one,” he told Yuri. “Now look at me. I’m seeing things. Hearing things.” He glanced over to Yuri, who was ignoring him and playing with the sunglasses again. “Talking to a child who finds plastic sunglasses more interesting than my learned conversation.”
He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again and looked out over the calm gulf waters. It was midafternoon and the sun was blazing from a cobalt blue sky. To the east, some large cumulous clouds had begun to grow. They were a long distance out, but seemed to be moving his way. The last thing he wanted was to be on the water in some kind of storm.
“Come on,” he whispered to his absent comrades. “Let’s not take all day.”
A slight breeze blew up, wafting audibly past his ears.
Why aren’t you paying attention today?
He spun around, looking for the source of those words. No one there, of course.
Why aren’t you paying attention today?
They were his wife’s words. Said kindly, on the days when he was distracted by some problem and not listening to her.
He looked at Yuri. The boy was staring back at him as if he’d heard something, too.
“I’m not even going to ask,” McCarter said.
Another sound caught his ear, a distant rumble of thunder to the east. The storm clouds were still many miles out but they stretched off to the south. He followed the line with the binoculars, wondering if they would cause a problem getting back to shore. And then he caught sight of something new: Two fast-looking boats were cutting across the sea toward them. They were probably five or six miles off, but hauling ass directly at his position.
“Shit,” McCarter said, pulling the binoculars down.