Tomlinson decided to try his flashlight again, so he turned it on, and shined it toward his feet.
Visibility had improved. He could see his own toes, long and thin, and he could discern the vague shape of Will’s legs next to him. A slow current was siphoning the silt downward, clearing the water.
An underground river, Tomlinson guessed, flowed beneath them. It was pulling water toward the sea.
It was still too murky to use his dive slate to communicate with the boy, but it would soon be an option. He patted Will’s arm, switched off his light and considered a few other reassuring facts as he rested.
Arlis Futch’s truck was loaded with gear. Some of it was safety backup stuff—Ford again—but Arlis had also packed equipment they would need to begin salvage work, if they actually found Batista’s plane.
There were three or four extra bottles of air and at least two spare regulators. There was an inflatable lift for muling heavy objects to the surface and there was a generator rigged with a compressor pump and hose, used to jet-wash through sand and rocks. It was a sort of reverse-suction dredge. Arlis had built it in his shop—useful for setting pilings at marinas or blasting sand away to expose gold coins.
That’s what they needed, the jet dredge. The hose was banded to a length of half-inch PVC pipe. It wouldn’t be easy for one man to use alone, but Ford could manage. Arlis would have to stay onshore to monitor the generator and the pump intake.
Would Ford think of the dredge?
Of course he would.
Tomlinson’s thoughts were interrupted by a distinctive sound.
Tink . . . tink . . . tink . . . tink.
Tomlinson held his breath, listening. He heard it again: Tink . . . tink . . . tink . . . tink.
It was Ford, signaling them. He was using his knife to tap on something—a rock, possibly—Tomlinson could picture it. The sound seemed to come from beneath them.
Without prompting, Will began banging on his air tank in reply, using something metallic, and Tomlinson joined him, using his flashlight. So Ford would know they were both responding, Tomlinson added a signature rhythm—Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits.
It was the knock he sometimes used before entering the lab.
Ford responded, sounding closer.
Tomlinson was grinning. He decided to try some basic Morse code abbreviations before using code to remind Ford about the jet dredge. He also wanted to communicate that they had only about twenty minutes of air left.
Banging the flashlight against his tank, Tomlinson signaled several times, but Ford’s silence told him he didn’t understand, which was frustrating. He tried again. Same result.
Tomlinson thought, Concentrate, Ford. It was a rare night when the man didn’t sit in his reading chair, fiddling with the dial of his shortwave radio. But did he spend his time learning ham chatter? No—the guy preferred overseas programming, the traditional news source for American State Department types.
Damn spooks . . .
Morse code wasn’t working, and the sound of Will’s breathing was as steady and insistent as a ticking clock. Tomlinson tried once again to communicate that they now had only nineteen minutes of air left and clanged much harder, aluminum flashlight against aluminum tank. He rang the bell notes in a methodical way, hoping Ford would count them.
As his impatience grew, he clanged the tank harder and harder—a mistake. Sound waves have a potent physical energy. It was something that Tomlinson knew, of course, but he didn’t pause to consider.
As he banged away at the tank, the corrosive sound loosened the limestone. Tomlinson was thinking, Hurry up, Ford—hurry!, when, for the second time, he heard limestone beneath him splinter and he felt the sickening sensation of falling into darkness.
Beside him, Will Chaser yelled, “’Ummm assss!,” as the floor beneath them collapsed and the vacuum sucked them deeper.
Tomlinson wrapped his arms over his head, anticipating the crushing weight, as the world went black again.
SEVEN
AS I WADED ASHORE, THE MAN WITH THE PISTOL WAS grinning but sounded jittery as he called, “You need some help, Jock-o? We heard you yelling. Drag your ass up here, tell us all about it. Me and Perry, we’re full of ideas.”
Perry, an intense man, was leaning toward me, his cheek pressed to the rifle. I felt my abdominal muscles constrict. Any second, his finger could slip . . . or he could pull the trigger intentionally.
I recognized the weapon. It was a battered Winchester 30-30, a classic carbine favored by cowboys and at least one alligator hunter. It was Arlis Futch’s rifle. Arlis being Arlis, I knew the weapon was loaded.
Obviously, the two men had already been inside the man’s pickup truck. It was parked behind them, beneath cypress trees, the driver’s-side door still open. I wondered what they had done with our cell phones and the handheld VHF.
The edge of the lake was moss coated and slippery. I was carrying fins but kept my hands at chest level. As I walked, my eyes shifted from Arlis to the man with the rifle—Perry—then to his partner, who held the little silver automatic. “Pistol”—it became his designation, a way to differentiate between the two because they looked so much alike. They were of similar height, one a decade older than the other, but both men skinny in slacks. Perry wore a short-sleeved shirt, Pistol wore a jacket so wrinkled that it looked like he’d slept in the thing. Maybe he had. The men might have been brothers were it not for differences in facial structure.
So far, Pistol had done all the talking, and I now listened to him ask, “Why were you yelling for Gramps to call nine-one-one? One of your buddies get eaten by a shark?”
Gramps—he meant Arlis.
I said, “There’s no need for guns. I’ve got two friends in trouble. If you help us, maybe we can help you.”
Pistol replied with a mocking grin, and said, “Of course we’ll help you. But, Jock-a-mo, we need you to do us a favor first. We want the keys to that cowboy Cadillac. The old man says he doesn’t know where they are.”
The man nodded toward Arlis’s black diesel truck: twin cab, four-wheel drive, tow-rigged with mud flaps, a bumper sticker that read EAT MORE MULLET.
I didn’t respond.
As I drew closer, the man pressed, “Maybe you didn’t understand. I’m trying to be friendly. It can be dangerous out here in the sticks, you know.”
I was looking at Arlis, seeing his left eye swollen purple, his mouth busted, lips the color of grapes. Normally, Arlis is a talker. He’d been badly beaten. It explained his silence.
Pistol was getting mad, which broadened the vowels of his Midwestern accent. “You got a hearing problem, mister? I want those goddamn truck keys!”
When Arlis signaled me with a slight shake of his head—Don’t cooperate—the man with the rifle, Perry, decided to demonstrate that his partner was serious. He crow-hopped toward Futch and used the rifle butt to spear him behind the ear. The sound of wood on bone was sickening.
Arlis buckled forward and fell. Because his hands were taped behind him, he couldn’t break his fall. He landed hard, face-first, on limestone.
I tossed my fins onto shore and slogged faster toward Arlis, ignoring shouts—“Stop right there, Jock-o!”—as I used my peripheral vision to process details about the gunmen. I had to read the situation fast and accurately or we would all die, Tomlinson and Will included.
Both men had the bony, wasted look of hitchhikers. The type you see at intersections, holding signs, their displaced expressions as masked as their egos. They had feral, gaunt faces. Long Elvis hair matted from sleeping on cardboard; clothes from some Salvation Army box or maybe pilfered from a trailer-park laundry.