Underneath, half buried in the sand, was a man, clad only in torn remnants of a pair of shorts.
Water ran from his mouth, and from his ears when his head rolled to the side. The navy man bent down and touched him, and the man emitted a rasping, gurgling sound. Fie moaned, and his eyelids fluttered. The man’s name was Adam Coffin.
II
In sea water more than a few feet deep, blood is green. Water filters the light from above, seeming to consume the colors of the spectrum shade by shade. Red is the first to succumb, to disappear.
Green lasts longer. But then, below 100 feet, green, too, fades away, leaving blue. In the twilight depths—180, 200 feet, and beyond—blood looks black.
David Sanders sat on the sandy bottom and watched green fluid ooze from the back of a wounded fish. It was a big porgy, with long fanglike teeth; it was at least two feet long, and mottled blue and gray. A crescent of flesh had been gouged from its back-by another fish, perhaps-and blood pulsed from the wound in stringy billows that quickly dissipated in the water. The fish swam erratically, apparently confused by pain or by the scent of its own blood.
Sanders pushed off the bottom and swam toward the porgy, expecting it to retreat. But the fish continued to dart back and forth.
He swam to within three feet of the struggling fish; when the fish did not retreat, Sanders decided to try to catch it. With his bare hand, he grabbed for it, just forward of the tail.
His touch triggered panic in the fish. It began to thrash in a flurry of convulsive writhing. Sanders held on.
The fish was a shuddering gray blur. Sanders closed his eyes and tightened his grip. And then suddenly he felt a stab of pain. Shocked, he opened his eyes and tried to release his grip, but now the fish had him: its front teeth sank into the palm of Sanders’ hand.
He yelled into his face mask and yanked his hand downward. The teeth came free, and the fish darted away. Green fluid billowed from two blue puncture marks in his palm.
He looked up, fighting the urge to shoot for the surface. On the surface, twenty-five or thirty feet away, the Boston Whaler bobbed at anchor. He took a deep breath, cursing himself.
Trying to remain calm, he thought: Don’t panic; don’t rush for the surface; don’t hold your breath; let it out nice and easy. He kicked upward, trailing blood, forcing himself to rise no faster than the bubbles vented from his air tank.
Gail Sanders, sitting in the Whaler, heard her husband before she saw him: his bubbles popped and burbled on the surface. When his head broke water, she grabbed the neck of his scuba tank and, after he had unfastened the belt and one shoulder strap, hauled the tank aboard the boat. “See anything?” she asked.
Sanders pushed his face mask up onto his forehead.
“Nothing. Sand and coral. There’s no wreck down there.” He was holding the Whaler with his right hand, and Gail saw blood trickling down the gunwale.
“What happened?”
Sanders was embarrassed, and he said, “It’s nothing.” Kicking with his flippers, he heaved himself into the boat and looked toward shore, two or three hundred yards away. Atop the cliff beyond the beach, the pastel orange buildings of the Orange Grove Club shone brightly in the afternoon sun. He raised his arm and pointed straight ahead, then aimed with the other arm at a lighthouse in the distance. “The lifeguard said ten o’clock, right? Put the club at twelve o’clock and Gibb’s Hill light at ten o’clock, and we should be right on top of it.”
“Maybe it’s gone. After all, thirty years underwater…”
“Yeah, but he was pretty positive you can still see the keelson and some of her frames.”
Gail hesitated, then said, “The bell captain did say we could hire a guide.”
“The hell with that. I can find it if it’s here.”
“But…” Gail gestured at Sanders’ bleeding hand. “It might be smarter to have a guide.”
“I don’t need a guide,” Sanders said, ignoring the gesture. “Water’s water. As long as you don’t panic, you’re all right.”
Gail looked off the stern. Forty yards away, a line of breakers indicated another reef.
Behind that reef was another, and behind that one, still another.
“If a ship was going to go on the rocks, wouldn’t it hit the first rocks it came to and sink right there?”
“Maybe not. If there was a hell of a wind behind it, it could be driven over one or two reefs, bounce from one to another.”
“So it could be on any of those reefs.”
“It could. But the lifeguard said it was behind the first line. Maybe we’re not far enough behind it.” Sanders uncleated the anchor line and let the boat drift backward toward the second line of reef. When the boat was within ten yards of it, he secured the line again and adjusted the straps on his scuba harness.
Gail said, “Are you sure you should dive again?”
“Why not? I told you, that hand’s nothing. I’ll wrap it so it doesn’t bleed in the water and attract any enemies.”
Gail began to assemble her equipment. She screwed her regulator to the valve on the top of her air tank, then turned the knob that opened the tank. With a sharp pfff air rushed into the regulator. She pressed the purge button, to flush any residual water from the mouthpiece, and air hissed loudly from the rubber tube. She adjusted her weight belt, a nylon strap with three two-pound lead weights threaded on it; then dipped her flippers in the water and slipped them on her feet, rinsed her mask, spat on the inside of the faceplate, and rubbed the saliva around the glass to prevent fogging. She stood her tank upright and checked the lengths of the harness straps.
“Ready to give me a hand?” she asked. She looked at Sanders and saw that he had not started to put on his tank. He had been watching her. “What’s the matter?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing. I think I’m losing my mind, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been sitting here, getting turned on just watching you spit in your mask.”
Gail laughed. “You want to dive naked? We could conduct an experiment.”
“My research indicates,” Sanders said gravely, “that an ejaculation occurring more than thirty-three feet below sea level could cause a backup in the system, resulting in the blowing out of the brains.”
He stood, picked up her tank, and held it until she had put her arms through the straps.
She said, “There are no reserves on these tanks.”
“You won’t need a reserve. There’s only twenty or twenty-five feet of water here, and you should be able to get an hour out of a tank. More, maybe, if you’re careful.”
Gail sat on the gunwale, her back to the water, and took a breath from her mouthpiece. “Good air.”
“It better be. If they’re giving us bad air, this’ll be one short honeymoon.”
“How long will you be?”
“A minute. Go ahead over, but don’t go down till you’ve had a good look around. You don’t want to be surprised by anything waiting down there.”
Gail rolled backward off the gunwale and disappeared in a cloud of bubbles.
Sanders found a piece of rag and wrapped it around his hand. Then he gathered together his gear, put it on, and went over the side.
It took several seconds for his bubbles to dissipate and his vision to clear.
Shafts of sunlight streaked through the blue, dappling the sand and coral. The water was pellucid; Sanders guessed he could see for more than a hundred feet.
Treading water a few feet below the surface, he turned slowly around, searching the crepuscular limits of his vision for any potential danger. A pair of jacks darted in and out of the rocks. He looked down and saw Gail on the bottom, digging in the sand with her fingers. A small grouper hovered beside her, waiting for any morsels-worms or tiny crustaceans-that might float toward him in the cloud of sand stirred up by her digging. Sanders kicked slowly downward, swallowing to clear his ears as the pressure increased.