That’s when something big came out of the gloom and rammed me. Hit me high near the shoulder, knocked the mask crooked on my face. I could feel a slight suctioning draft as whatever it was sped by.
A few minutes earlier, I had felt an unexpected bump on my thigh. Thought it was Tomlinson’s fin.
Ahead, I could see the foggy corona of two flashlights.
The thing that had hit me wasn’t Tomlinson.
It came into my mind that it might be Augie and his squash-shaped friend, Oswald. They might be dumb enough to charge around forty feet beneath daylight. But did they have the courage?
I doubted it.
I straightened my mask, tilted it, and exhaled through my nose to clear the mask. When the water was gone, I shined my light to the left, then the right. The color of invisibility was a silted gold that began and ended at my faceplate.
Nothing.
But something was out there. Something big. Circling, maybe. Or turning right now, building speed to hit me again.
I told myself not to panic, stick with the plan. This was like being on a beach in a lightning storm. There was nothing I could do to prevent from being struck, so why worry?
All true, but I didn’t experience a feeling of untethered freedom, as I had during the hurricane. I was scared. Something was out there in the gloom. Something that could see me with sensory precision. Something that had probably already noted the accelerated pounding of my mammalian heart. The fresh cut on my forehead would leave an unambiguous trail of blood.
As I followed my partners up the anchor line, I expected to be hit again. I wasn’t.
On the surface, as I allowed waves to sweep me along the safety line toward the dive platform on the stern, I expected to be hit from below. I wasn’t.
As I hurried to vault myself out of the water, pulling my legs up into a fetal position, I decided that maybe it was that idiot Augie who’d crashed into me.
It wasn’t.
The forty-three-foot Viking sportfisherman had broken free of its anchor and was adrift. That was why Arlis had sounded the emergency recall. It had happened only a minute or so after Augie and Oswald, wearing scuba gear, had entered the water, Arlis told us.
“They never even submerged,” he said. “When they saw the boat drifting, they took off swimming after it. But there’s not a chance in hell they caught up with that thing.”
I had my rebreather system off by then, standing on the dive platform. The Viking was a pendulous splash of white in the distance shrinking fast.
27
Arlis was on the flybridge, already motoring toward our anchor, using the automatic wench to retrieve it, while Tomlinson, Jeth, and I stripped off our gear on the stern. I felt the Island Gypsy swing her beam to the waves and knew that we were free.
“One of you boys get on the radio and raise Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard. Tell ’em to stand by. You other two, get up here. I need you as spotters. Whoa! First, pull the safety lines in, dummies! Do I gotta tell you everything?”
Arlis wasn’t old and feeble now. He was his acerbic, irritable self—taking charge, which is exactly what he was supposed to do.
When he realized that the Viking had pulled anchor and her two divers were adrift, Arlis had done something very smart. He’d reacted as only a person with his water experience would have. I had rigged a backup dive system—tank, regulator, and BC vest—and clipped it to a safety line. The safety line was tied to a red mooring-sized rubber buoy. If one of us had gotten tangled in rubble below, an emergency air supply was ready.
Because the Viking was drifting faster than Augie and Oswald could swim, Arlis expected the two to turn toward our boat. Maybe they did—he wasn’t sure. He lost sight of them within seconds. When the two men didn’t reappear swimming toward our vessel, he realized the waves and current had taken them. They were adrift.
Immediately, Arlis inflated the spare BC and tossed the backup dive system overboard. It was still attached to forty feet of rope and a rubber buoy. When the two divers realized they were in trouble, it was likely that they would inflate their BC vests. Their drift pattern would be similar to that of the backup air system. The red buoy gave us something visible to follow.
We were following it now.
“I’ll give you the wheel, if you want.”
Jeth shook his head, and told Arlis, “You’re doing just fine.” He spoke without turning his head to look at the old man because he didn’t want to take his eyes off the water.
Arlis nodded. “You made the right decision.” Sure of himself; his ego coming back to life out here in big water.
That was fine with me. I liked his confidence. We needed it.
We’d already divvied up search quadrants: I was on Arlis’s left, scanning the area ahead, and abeam the trawler’s port side. Jeth was to Arlis’s right, responsible for the right side. All three of us kept track of the red buoy ahead as it bucked from wave to wave.
With each set of breakers, though, it seemed less and less likely that we would find the two men.
I’d checked my watch when I felt us break free of our anchor: 4:27 P.M. By 4:40, I was losing hope. It seemed improbable that we hadn’t caught up with them in ten minutes. By 4:50, I was beginning to second-guess: Was following the buoy still the smartest thing to do? Augie and his partner would’ve stopped chasing the Viking after only a few minutes. They would have then turned into the waves and tried to swim in the direction where they hoped our trawler was anchored.
Neither of them looked like long-distance swimmers. They would have soon tired. They had no other choice but to inflate their vests and resign themselves to the hope that someone would come searching for them.
Their maneuvers would have changed the course of their drift. If our course was off by only a few yards, we’d already passed them. We needed to turn back and make another try.
Below, Tomlinson was on the VHF with Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard. He’d stuck his head above the ladder long enough to tell us that a search-and-rescue helicopter was being scrambled at the St. Petersburg base, seventy miles north. I’d tried to get him to change places with me—his eyesight is perfect; I wear glasses—but he insisted that he stay below.
“Maybe I’ll see something down there that you can’t see from the flybridge.”
In a search that seemed increasingly futile and random, it made as much sense as anything else.
We had closed on the Viking. It drifted beam to the sea, only a few hundred yards away now. I entertained the mild hope that the two men had somehow caught up with their boat. Perhaps they were drifting with it, hanging onto the anchor line.
Unlikely, but we’d soon find out.
To my left was a thin charcoal smudge that I knew was Sanibel Island. Ahead, it was raining over Fort Myers Beach. I could see squall clouds dragging tendrils of rain across the water, sunlight oscillating through rain mist, the streaming light interrupted by clouds.
I checked my watch: 5:03 P.M. We’d been searching for half an hour. The wind had a silver edge to it, blowing steadily from the southwest. It glazed the waves with icy light. I looked at Jeth, who simultaneously looked at me. Arlis remained steadfast at the wheel—still wearing his Bing Crosby hat; the orange life jacket we’d forced on him, an absurd touch.
Jeth’s expression said, This is hopeless.
I nodded. Hopeless.
I knew Augie only well enough to dislike him. The other guy, Oswald, we had never exchanged a word. But to be adrift, alone, in a wind-glazed sea…night coming soon, and death soon after—I didn’t wish that hell on anyone…