Chapter Two
“Hey Dex, you down there?” The headset of his Divelink crackled with Don Jordan’s voice.
“Well, I’m sure as hell not still up there with you…” said Dex McCauley as he inched his way down the safeline.
“Hey, c’mon, man, I’m just checking the radio,” said Don.
Dex smiled behind his full-face mask. He liked Don, the Captain and owner of the Sea Dog, which had been the base vessel of the dive club since they started their wreck-diving adventures several years ago. They called themselves “The Deep Six” because that’s how many of them were in the group — and nobody cared if it was a cliché or not (and it certainly was that). They’d been through a lot, and they were a tight bunch of guys. Six of ’em.
Although not an official member of the “Six,” Don was a real nice guy who wouldn’t be caught dead diving himself. He believed he should have fun on the water, never under it. He’d been running a charter boat business out of Annapolis for almost ten years, and still loved it.
“You hear me?” said Don.
“Affirmative… I just can’t help being my terribly sarcastic self.” Dex said into his mask-mic.
“What’s it like down there?”
“Not too cold. We’ll see what it’s like at 60 feet or so…” Dex was currently hanging around 30 feet as he waved his torchlight upward toward the surface, looking for his dive-mate. “Mike, you in yet?”
“Just hit the water, Chief. I’m working my way down the line,” said Mike Bielski, his voice edged by the clipped accent of a true New Jersey native.
“You see my light yet?” Dex undulated the torch slowly.
“Just barely,” said Mike. “But it’s getting brighter all the time.”
Dex floated in the dim water. Despite the inherent perils, he loved it down there, plain and simple. There was no way to explain the unique perspective diving gave you, the sensation of being in a world that existed solely for yourself.
And it was pretty damned cloudy down there. Not much ambient light once you got below more than about 10 feet. Without a light, depending on what was floating around in the water, it could be as dark as a mineshaft at midnight. Some guys couldn’t handle that kind of darkness when combined with the water pressure and the knowledge that the air and the light was so far above you. Some guys even lost the feel for what was above you. Directional sense shot all to hell. The darkness and the pressure was just a natural force of disorientation, and some people would go crazy if they had to stay down for the length of your average dive.
But it had never bothered Dex. He’d always felt at home down there — a place where you were totally alone with your thoughts. Even though, sometimes, those thoughts could gang up on you. Overwhelm you if you weren’t careful.
Like going to the bottom of the Styx, and being swallowed up by a never-ending night where dreams died with everything else. Held in the pressurized grip of the ocean, you could feel more horribly alone than anywhere else on the planet.
Hey, he thought as he shook his head. Back to the present, pal.
Pay attention to what you’re doing—this current dive would not be anywhere near as deep as some of the other wrecks they’d dove. Stay alive and useful to the rest of the team. Even though it was still early in the season, two weeks before Memorial Day, there’d been a whiplash of warm current surging up the Bay from a temporary coastal sway of the Gulfstream.
Visibility was another story, though. In a word, it was shitty. Even down in the Lower Bay, which got more of the Atlantic waters to keep it clean. Dex had known the waters of the Chesapeake had been getting ever cloudier for twenty years. If you were going to chart it out, it was on an inverse slope with the diminishing oyster population. More oysters; cleaner Bay.
So far, Dex wasn’t able to see much of anything that might be lying beneath him, but he knew he had to be patient. His dive-mate on this first dive of the day was Mike Bielski, and he could just barely see Mike’s torchlight stabbing through the murky water — even though he was barely fifteen feet from the other man. And this was one of the best seasons for visibility in the bay, when most of the floating algae had died off.
But today, Dex wasn’t all that concerned with how well he could see down here because they wouldn’t be just swimming around, looking at random for whatever might be littering the bottom. Using his Navy surplus gear, Kevin Cheever had given them some hard data in the form of LORAN coordinates, and they were going to be trying to home-in, for the first time, on the site of a new wreck.
A wreck so far unknown and unidentified — until Kevin had stumbled on the data that suggested something interesting might be down there.
“I see you,” Mike’s voice filled Dex’s earphone. “I see the safeline.”
“Okay, grab on.” Dex watched his dive-mate grasp the nylon line running from the Sea Dog straight down to the bottom in the center of the LORAN grid. Most divers didn’t bother to hook a sliding piton and tether from the safeline to their toolbelt, which would keep them on course to the target — unless the visibility was practically zero. As long as you could see the line, most divers preferred to be unfettered, and Mike was no exception.
Bielski was a tall stringbean of a guy. At an age when most guys were losing the battle of extra poundage around the middle, Mike seemed to getting leaner. He ate his share of Doritos and burgers and Budweisers along with the rest of them, but never gained the weight. And it wasn’t a life of training and exercise doing it, either. Other than the excursions with the dive club, Mike sat on his ass working math theorems at Johns Hopkins University.
“Ready,” said Mike, pointing downward with his thumb like an emperor giving his opinion on a fallen gladiator.
“Okay, let’s take a look…”
“Donnie, you still on our channel?”
“I got you. Base unit’s loud and clear,” he said. “Good luck, guys.”
“Kevin says we’re not going to need it. Like fish in a barrel,” said Dex.
“Okay, then just be careful,” said Donnie. “I’ll be monitoring everything.”
“Gotcha. Here we go…”
Dex angled his body toward the bottom and flipper-kicked. Keeping the white nylon in his torchlight, it was easy for Dex to head down to the bottom. Every once in a while he would check his Ikelite depth gauge, more out of habit than anything else, although they were getting close to a critical threshold where nitrogen narcosis became a concern. They were in a section of the Chesapeake just south of the Bay Bridge where it was never more than 70 to 90 feet deep.
He had no idea what he was looking for — other than it was some kind of wreck, fairly big at around 400 feet long and pretty much intact. He and his pals had been wreck-diving for years, but they’d never found their “own”—a new ship, one never previously discovered, charted and picked clean of anything worth salvaging.
And that was nothing unusual, Dex knew, because it was nearly impossible to just be swimming around in the murky depths of the Chesapeake and just stumble on a big boat sticking up out of the seabed. It just didn’t happen. Odds were against it — you being so small and the sea bottom being so big.
But new technology trickling down to the consumer markets would be changing all that within the next decade. Dex had seen big changes in dive gear just within the last five years with GPS, underwater communications and wearable decompression computers; and it was going to keep getting more interesting.