Because I was operating blindly, my fingers became adept at identifying chunks of limestone or fossilized shell. I removed the debris mechanically, tossing it aside. Five times, though, my fingers also found the slick, dense weight of coins. They were unexpected, but finding them provided me no pleasure. I slipped them one by one into the pocket of my BC. Before I surfaced, I would hide them with the others that were still in the mesh pocket inside my wet suit.
I kept an eye on the time—not an easy thing to do, but I could see the orange numerals if I held my watch against the faceplate of my mask. I had clicked the trigger of the Chronofighter just before submerging, so I knew exactly how many minutes had passed.
It took me five minutes of digging to confirm that I had indeed found the karst opening. Ten minutes later, the opening was only slightly wider than my shoulders, but that was good enough. I tugged on the hose again, a series of two sharp pulls, which was Perry’s signal to close the valve.
He didn’t respond immediately, and I thought, Now what?
After several more attempts, though, I felt a couple of tentative tugs in reply. Moments later, the hose went limp. I pushed the coils aside. Because visibility was so bad, I kept my left arm anchored to the tunnel’s entrance and waited for the siphoning current to clear the water.
It was strange to kneel there, underwater, anchored to a rock, my visual world reduced to a random swirl of sand granules that banged against my faceplate. Above me, below me and on every side, there was a void of sensory data that caused a dizzying interchange between my eyes and brain as they struggled to extract form from the murk.
I had switched off the monocular soon after starting the jet dredge—there was nothing to see, so why waste the battery? Now, though, I clicked the switch downward, which powered the monocular but not the built-in infrared light. The darkness that encircled me was transformed into a boiling green cauldron of silt.
My arm still anchored in the tunnel, I did a slow three-sixty. Soon, I could see my watch if I held it a foot from my face, which told me visibility was improving. A minute later, I could see the vague outline of my own fins.
I looked toward the surface and told myself to relax until the water had cleared. As it did, I expected to see the familiar silhouette of the inner tube and Perry’s dangling fins. Instead, I saw something that startled me. It was an animated darkness, the size of a small plane, off to my right. The thing was fast moving—and its shape and its behavior impossible to assess.
I pulled my body close to the tunnel opening and watched as the thing drew nearer. It was an animal, I realized, an elongated crocodilian shadow snaking toward me and gaining speed. I decided it was an alligator—maybe the gator that King had seen entering the water earlier. It could be nothing else.
I was fumbling for the oversized spotlight to use as a shield when suddenly the animal slowed and turned. I couldn’t make out details. I could see only its massive silhouette. The shape was visible for a few seconds, but then it melted into the gloom.
I was so surprised that I had stopped breathing. I drew three fast breaths as my brain replayed what had just happened. The animal had been descending, moving from my right to my left like a shark banking downward for an attack. Then it had disappeared. Why—and where?
I stood, with my fins on the bottom, and gave it a few seconds, then I leaned over the tunnel’s opening, straining to see.
Nothing.
I did another careful three-sixty, silt swirling before my eyes, and I soon began to wonder if I had imagined the damn thing. I’ve seen monster alligators in my life, but none the size of the thing that had just buzzed me. And the shape didn’t seem quite right, either.
So . . . perhaps I had been wrong. Maybe a plane had swooped in low, throwing a shadow, as it checked on the lakeside fire. Or possibly I’d seen a school of baitfish, moving past me in a dense cloud. In zero visibility, the human brain will scan randomly like a frozen computer, attempting to impose form on chaos.
I comforted myself with similar reassuring explanations, but I didn’t believe any of them. I had seen something. It was an animal. A reptile of some type or possibly an oversized alligator gar—a freshwater fish that grows to three hundred pounds. The thing had been descending toward me, swimming fast, but then it had veered away.
Why?
Once again, I recalled the fear in King’s voice when he’d said that he’d just seen something huge slide into the water. That suggested that it was a gator, not a fish. A big gator was a threat I had to take seriously.
It’s a popular fallacy that infrared light can pierce fog, smoke and silt, but it’s not true. Even so, I touched my fingers to the monocular and switched on the infrared. Maybe the invisible beam of light would extend my range of visibility.
Seconds later, as I continued scanning, I felt a shock wave of pressure behind me. It was as if a torpedo had shot past me. The wave caused me to duck and pull my body hard against the rock ledge. I don’t know why my first instinct was to switch off the infrared light but that’s what I did. It was an atavistic response; a limbic impulse to extinguish the campfire, to draw the limbs into a fetal position and then retreat into a dark place to hide.
My heart was pounding but my hand unaccountably sure as I unsnapped the spotlight and found the switch. The beam was blinding. Stupidly, I hadn’t first switched off my night vision system, so the intensifier tube automatically flared before shutting down to protect the precision optics as well as my own eye.
I extended the big flashlight and moved it around. Underwater, a thousand-lumen LED projects a beam that is as dense as a shaft of glowing marble. Maybe the light saved me . . . Or maybe there was, in fact, nothing from which to be saved. I was partially blinded, as I probed the darkness, so I couldn’t be certain of what I was seeing. For the briefest instant, though, I thought I saw a massive reptilian head in profile and a single glowing orange eye. The animal materialized on the far black rim of visibility and then hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to turn and face me.
It did not turn. Instead, it seemed to shrink as it descended into deeper water toward the bottom. And then it vanished.
I didn’t know what I’d just seen, but I was sure it wasn’t an alligator. So what was it?
Slowly, like a drunk approaching a mountain ledge, I moved away from the cave opening. I took a couple of strokes with my fins and then poked my head over the drop-off. The flashlight drilled a brilliant white conduit downward into the depths. I painted the beam over the bottom but was still alert to movement behind me.
It took a while for my eyes to adapt. Through a haze of silt, I identified an elongated darkness, which I knew was the fuselage of the plane. Then . . . I saw something that was too animated and well defined to be imaginary. I saw the fanning pendulum of what appeared to be a reptilian tail as the creature nosed itself into a limestone hole. The tail was miniaturized by distance, but I knew it had to be big—longer than a man.
Pushing the light ahead of me, I started downward to get a closer look. But then stopped myself.
Don’t press your luck, Ford. Leave it alone.
As I watched, I tried to convince myself that I was watching an oversized gator, but I knew it wasn’t true. More than anything else, it looked like the tail of a Nile monitor lizard—but that couldn’t be. Monitors didn’t grow to be thirteen feet long, and the animal I was watching had to be at least that big.
I extended the light downward as if using the beam to pin the creature to the bottom. As I did, a chilling memory flashed into my mind, and I pictured myself on the island of Gili Motang, in the Suva Sea, where my friend and I had been tracked by a reptile of a similar size.