It took her another minute to clear her head enough to check the level of air in her tanks. Amazingly she still had fifteen minutes. While it felt like hours, just eleven minutes had elapsed since she’d first spotted the Chinese divers. While the forty-five-minute deadline she’d given Mercer was upon her, she knew he’d be waiting for her for at least another twenty or twenty-five minutes despite his assurance he’d heed her order.
All she needed to do was swim up to the surface next to the ship she could sense looming above her, wait there until the lock doors swung open, and then swim back to Juan Aranjo’s little Wellcraft.
Simple.
She checked her depth. Thirty-eight feet. She had been working at a greater depth but took a guess that she’d purged the excess nitrogen from her blood by fighting the Chinese and slaloming through the culverts.
She began climbing upward, using her one remaining fin to maintain an easy pace, her mouth somewhat slack to allow the expanding air in her lungs to escape. There was a ten-foot gap between the side of the lock and the scaly hull of the ship going up the waterway. She held close to the cement, fearful of the spiky barnacles coating the ship like a jagged veneer of thorns. The vessel had probably languished in the Bahia de Panama for weeks or even months, accumulating such a thick skin of marine life, while its owner pulled together the money to pay for the transit. A not uncommon occurrence.
She had just passed the ship’s keel when she drew a breath that didn’t fill her lungs. She inhaled again and was left with a deep hollowness in her chest. Lauren knew what was wrong. Her tanks didn’t have fifteen minutes. They were empty; the gauge had stuck. She pushed harder for the surface, remaining calm, remembering her training.
As the sun set across the isthmus, the wind picked up in a sudden gust that slapped against the tired freighter in the lock. The ship’s pilot, on just his second solo run through the canal, hadn’t anticipated the dusk wind shears and the vessel got away from him, drifting closer and closer to the lock wall.
Lauren saw the gap of murky light closing as she swam for the surface. From ten feet it had shrunk to five in seconds and continued to dwindle. She was caught between the drifting freighter and a solid wall of concrete. She would reach the surface only to be pulped by the inevitable collision. She had one chance.
The air in her buoyancy compensator continued to haul her upward even as she stopped pistoning for the surface. Despite having empty lungs and tank, she had to sink below the ship if she was going to survive for a few moments more. The gap between ship and wall was down to four feet when she spilled the air from her vest. The change in buoyancy was immediate and she began to plummet, pulled downward by her weight belt and heavy dive gear.
Her hand scraped against the side of the ship, opening ragged cuts in four fingers before she could draw them back. Her lungs screamed for air. She could barely detect the difference in the darkness below her where she would clear the underside of the freighter’s keel. It seemed a thousand feet below her. Her tank bumped the wall, pushing her forward, and her hands brushed the hull again. More blood clouded the water.
The instant her feet sank under the bottom of the ship, she angled her body like a gymnast to get out of the way. The vessel slapped the lock two feet over her head. The metallic impact echoed in her skull like a great bronze bell, a sound that shook her bones and assaulted her hearing. Disoriented by the concussion, she continued to fall. She needed air, but she was too tired and too starved for oxygen to remember that she had to swim under the ship to reach the surface on its far side. Her backside hit the concrete floor and she fell back, her spine arched over her tank. Her vision became a kaleidoscope of swirling color as her brain slowly suffocated.
One point of light remained sharp amid the torrent of colors and she reached out for it, knowing in the back of her mind that she was grasping at nothing but a phantom. The brilliance faded, her brain unable to produce anything but monochrome. Her lungs pumped, but there was nothing there. Her chest and the air cylinder strapped to her back had equalized at empty.
“You were right about the submersible, Mercer,” she tried to say around her mouthpiece, letting in the first taste of the water that would kill her.
In her last seconds, the darkness that had filled her brain exploded into a dazzling incandescence before she could no longer stop her mouth from going slack and her lungs inflating.
It was a struggle to maintain the persona of a photographer. Mercer found himself increasingly looking at the watch and not pretending to shoot pictures of the locks at sunset. Ships continued to parade by. Juan Aranjo had settled himself on the stern bench seat, pulling his stained baseball cap low over his eyes. Though he didn’t have Mercer’s emotional investment, he kept shifting his position as if the nervous energy radiating off his passenger was a physical distraction.
Mercer drank through two liters of water in the first forty minutes out of sheer nervousness. Floodlights all along the lock chambers came on, bathing the area in a glow that flattened perspective. The water beyond the pools of illumination had grown inky.
As they waited, a group of men gathered at the end of the seawall dividing the two locks. The distance and the noise from the nearby ships made it impossible to hear what they shouted to the pleasure boat, but when Mercer turned the camera on them, their gestures made it clear. They wanted Mercer and Juan to clear out.
Ignoring their growing agitation, Mercer threw a wave and continued to pretend to take pictures of the ships. Lauren’s deadline passed. Mercer’s palms had gone slick and his throat dry. Another man joined the group. Unlike the workers in their overalls and hard hats, he was dressed in a shirt and tie. He carried a megaphone and his amplified voice boomed in Spanish.
Mercer touched his ear and shouted back. “No hablo.”
“You are no longer permitted in this area,” the man said in English. “Leave immediately.”
Mercer waited a minute before moving to the driver’s seat. He twisted the boat’s key in the ignition but didn’t turn on the fuel pump. The motor caught, ran for a few seconds, then sputtered to silence. He tried it three more times with the same result and threw up his hands in frustration. He turned to face the men on the seawall and shrugged his shoulders.
A rust-streaked grain carrier suddenly slammed against the cement seawall when the pilot misjudged a wind gust. The sound was like a cannon blast.
“We will send a pilot boat to tow you to Gamboa,” the canal worker shouted. He pulled the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.
“Shit.” Mercer searched the calm water for any sign of the divers. Nothing.
It would take ten minutes for a launch to reach them and already Lauren and Vic were overdue. As a soldier, Lauren lived by the clock and had given a maximum time. He checked her watch. They’d been down for fifty-seven minutes. She’d made it clear that their absolute limit would pass in three more. Mercer’s heart began to race.
Nothing looked amiss at the locks, nothing to indicate that they’d been captured. The mules had tugged the errant freighter back to the center of the lock chamber. Lauren and Vic must be swimming back. If they ran out of air, all they had to do was surface. He studied the water in the fading light. There were no telltale trails of bubbles, no disturbances on the silky surface.
Up the canal, one of the pilot boats came to life. A moment later it pulled from its mooring and vanished behind an ore carrier that had just passed out of the locks. The divers had been down for more than an hour. Surely there was a couple minutes’ reserve. The launch appeared around the stern of the ore carrier, heading toward Mercer. “Come on, Lauren,” he breathed. “Just pop up, we’ll get you before they reach us.”