“Paul, don’t think about it,” Ophelia urged. “I need your help. Don’t you see this is for the best? It was a tragic accident. That’s all.”
Dorion gaped at her. Had she actually convinced herself of the lie?
Nichols rejoined them and spoke directly to Hodges as if they were old friends. “That’s probably long enough.”
“Any sign of them?”
“No. If they do pop back to the surface, that is to say if they weren’t blasted into chum or buried in sediment, both of which are pretty darn likely, it won’t be until we shut the blowers off.”
Hodges looked skeptical. “Could they still be alive down there? Ihara has a SCUBA tank.”
“I suppose anything is possible. She was probably already well into her reserve. If she had more than ten minutes left, I’d be very surprised.”
“Then keep the blowers running for ten more minutes.”
Nichols shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
You’re the boss, Dorion thought. Professor had speculated that the saboteur who had tried to kill them with the submersible might actually be a member of the crew. Now the truth was revealed; not one member of the crew, but all of them.
Hodges had no doubt come aboard in Nassau. How did he escape the authorities in Delphi? The answer to that was obvious as well. Ophelia’s brother, a member of the deadly Norfolk Group, had seen to that, springing the assassin from jail and putting him back on the hunt, but this time with a difference; this time, his orders were to keep Ophelia alive.
And Ophelia insisted on keeping me alive.
Like a complex equation suddenly resolving before his eyes, Dorion saw that he really had no choice in the matter. Jade and Professor were already dead. His continued defiance would not bring them back, and would accomplish nothing more than to cut short his own life. Ophelia was right. There was work to do, amazing work. He had glimpsed the possibilities of the future as if through a window. Now it was time to open the door and step through into an amazing new world.
“A tragic accident,” he mumbled, and then turned to Ophelia and nodded.
Jade’s world vanished in a tumult of white noise. The force of the blowers knocked her mask askew, flooding salt water into her eyes with a fury that felt like sand paper. She bit down on the SCUBA regulator mouthpiece, knowing that if she lost it, she was dead.
The struggle to simply stay alive consumed her thoughts, but some analytical part of her brain, far removed from the now-dominant reptilian survival instinct, demanded an explanation. Why had Explorer turned on the Jacuzzi jets? Why had Professor fallen overboard?
Professor!
The blowers slammed her into the seafloor. The impact drove the breath from her lungs, and despite her best efforts, she felt the regulator explode from between her teeth. She flailed frantically in the total whiteout until she managed to snag the air hose and felt along its length until she found the mouthpiece. She struggled against the weight of the water pressing down from above. Farther away from the source, it was a little less like being under a rocket taking off, more like being under a waterfall, or being caught in the spin cycle at Pipeline. She couldn’t swim, but she could crawl, and just that tiny scrap of control brought her back a step from pure panic mode.
Professor!
He was still out there, drowning, maybe already dead.
She refused to accept that. And yet, unless she did something immediately, it would be true.
She crawled forward blindly, trying to fix his last position in her mind’s eye. She had been swimming toward him when the blowers had started up, maybe twenty yards away. If the blowers had driven him to the bottom as well, then she would find him somewhere along the straight line she was now moving.
But what if she couldn’t keep a straight line? What if, in the blast from the Explorer’s props, she had gotten turned around, or Professor had been blown in another direction? What was to stop her from wandering around in circles, like the pilots of Flight 19, mere inches from Professor as he drowned?
If he was still alive, he had only seconds remaining. She knew that SEALs prided themselves on being able to hold their breath longer than anyone, but something told her Professor might not have gotten a chance to draw a good breath before going in.
Don’t think about that. Just find him.
She tried to straighten her mask, but in the relentless cascade, it was impossible to clear it of water. She gave up, visibility was nil anyway, and started crawling forward, sweeping out with her hands every few feet in hopes of snagging his inert form.
Too bad the Shew Stone didn’t show me this, she thought mordantly. And yet, in a strange way, it had. It had shown her a future where she and Professor were preparing to make their last stand against a power-mad Ophelia Doerner. Ophelia had evidently taken that step, gone over to the dark side, which meant that the future she had seen had to be real.
And that meant Professor was alive and she was going to save him.
She kept moving, kept searching, refused to acknowledge the passing seconds, every one of which took Professor closer to oblivion.
Her groping hands found something, a rock like so many others she had found…no, wait. Her fingers were raw from searching and dragging herself across the reef. She couldn’t tell what she was touching now, but there was something different about it. She found it again, grasped it, pulled herself close.
It had moved. Definitely not a rock.
She was close enough now to make out a blur of color, the bronze hue of tanned skin.
It was Professor.
Frantic but now also hopeful, she drew herself closer, climbing his torso like a horizontal ladder over a crevasse, and found his face. Unable to tell if he was conscious — she would not allow herself to think past that — she took the regulator from her mouth and pushed it between his lips.
Nothing.
She let go of the mouthpiece and instead pressed her own mouth against his, exhaling her breath into him.
He jerked, started coughing and thrashing, but she held fast, one arm wrapped around his neck, unable to do anything but ride out the spasms as his body fought to purge the water from his lungs. Then, miraculously, she felt a tapping against her back.
She thrust the regulator at his face and this time he took it of his own accord. She felt more spasms, but after a few seconds, he was pressing the mouthpiece into her hands again. She took it, drew a shallow breath then forced herself to take another, this time deeper, filling her lungs.
Your turn, she thought, handing it back to him.
With each hand-off, the coughing spasms eased until he seemed to be breathing normally. Jade had let go of his neck, but now had one arm wrapped around him, hugging him close as if he were the only stable thing in her universe.
Abruptly, the pressure holding them down eased and Jade felt her natural buoyancy return. The ominous rumble of Quest Explorer’s engines abated as well, replaced by the eerie calm of the still ocean. She looked up, half expecting to see total normalcy restored to the submerged depths, but everything remained shrouded in a dark fog of sediment.
She felt Professor tapping her again. She could just make out his face, only an inch or two from his. He brought his hand close and pointed up. What was he trying to tell her? Swim back to the surface?
No. Someone had just tried to kill them again. Not just a lone saboteur, but someone who could command the Explorer’s crew to throw Professor over and fire up the blowers. Whoever was behind it probably thought they had succeeded, that both Jade and Professor were dead. Better to let them go on thinking it.