When he reached bottom, he saw that they had landed in a kind of amphitheater, a bowl on three sides of which coral and rock rose steeply toward the surface. The fourth, the seaward side, was open.
There the boat lay placidly on the surface, the anchor line angling down from way forward of Sanders to a spot in the rocks behind him. The only sounds he heard were the soft whistle of his inhalation and the bubbly rattle as he exhaled.
He looked around, trying to discern shapes in the distance where transparent blue dwindled into dim mist. As always when he had not dived for several months, he felt a tingle of excitement, a mild but thrilling blend of agoraphobia and claustrophobia: he was alone and exposed on a wide plain of sand, certain that he could be seen by creatures he could not see; yet he was encased, too, by thousands of tons of water whose gentle but insistent pressure he could feel on every inch of his body.
He rose off the bottom and swam to his right, to the end of the line of rocks. Creeping along the rocks, he looked for anything that might signal the presence of a wreck: metal or glass or wood. He swam around the whole bowl and found nothing. Moving to the center of the bowl, toward Gail, he tapped her on the shoulder. When she looked up, he spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, as if to say: Where do you think it is? She shrugged and held up a piece of glass, the bottom of a bottle. He waved a hand contemptuously: Forget it, worthless. He motioned for her to follow.
Together they swam to the left. At the edge of the bowl, the rocks and coral continued in a fairly straight line. A school of bright blue-and-yellow surgeonfish fluttered by. A streak of sunlight danced over a piece of mustard-colored coral, its surface smooth, inviting touch. Sanders pointed to it and shook his index ringer, warning her away. Then he pantomimed the sensation of being burned. Gail nodded: fire coral, whose mucous skin caused terrible pain.
They kicked their way along the reef, followed by the grouper, which evidently still harbored a primitive hope that something edible would result from their visit.
Sanders felt a tug at his ankle. He looked back at Gail. Her eyes were wide, and she was breathing much faster than normal. She pointed to the left.
Sanders followed her hand and saw, hanging motionless, staring at them with a white-rimmed black eye, an enormous barracuda. Its body was as sleek and shiny as a blade, its prognathous lower jaw ajar, showing a row of ragged, needle teeth.
Sanders took Gail’s left hand, turned her diamond ring so the stone faced her palm, and balled her hand into a fist. For emphasis, he held up his own clenched fist. Gail nodded, tapped herself on the chest, and pointed upward. Sanders shook his head: No. Gail insisted, frowning at him.
I’m going up, she was saying; you stay here if you want.
She kicked hard for the surface. Sanders blew an annoyed breath and followed.
“You want to quit?” he said as they boarded the boat.
“No. I want to rest for a minute. Barracudas give me the creeps.”
“He was just passing by. But you should have left your ring in the boat. Flashing that stone around is asking for trouble.”
“Why?”
“They’ll mistake it for prey. The first time I ever dove on a reef, I had a brass buckle on my bathing suit. The instructor told me to cut it off. I said the hell with it; I wasn’t about to ruin a fifteen-dollar bathing suit. So the guy took a knife and tied it to the end of a stick and set it in the sand, blade up. We were five or six feet away from the knife, and the instructor kept wiggling the stick, which made the blade flash in the sunlight.
He only had to wiggle it four or five times before a big barracuda came by and stared at the knife. The instructor wiggled it again, and bango! Faster’n you could see, that fish hit the knife. He hit it again and again, cut his mouth to ribbons, but every damn time the blade moved he’d hit it again. And every time he hit it I imagined he was hitting my belt buckle, or right nearby. I never wore that suit again, except in a pool.”
Gail removed her rings and tucked them in a cubbyhole in the steering console.
“One more thing,” Sanders said. “When there are just the two of us diving, one of us has to be the leader of the pack.”
“Why do we need a leader?” Gail thought he was kidding. “Are you on a power trip?”
“No, dammit,” Sanders said, more sharply than he had intended. “It’s just that underwater we have to do things together. We have to know where each other is, all the time.
Like then: If that had been a shark instead of a barracuda, and you wouldn’t listen to me and shot for the surface, we’d be in a hell of a mess.”
“A shark! Around here?”
“Sure. Chances are they won’t bother you, but they’re around. And if one does come along, you don’t want to do something stupid.”
“Like?”
“Like panicking and rushing for the surface. As long as you have air, the best thing to do is stay on the bottom and find shelter in the reef. As soon as you start for the surface especially if you’re scared and swimming in a hurry-you become prey. And on the surface, you’re lunch.”
“Suppose I run out of air.”
“You share my air and we wait for a chance to come up together. Unless he’s a real monster, we’d have a pretty good chance of making it to the boat.” Sanders saw that the talk of sharks was making Gail nervous.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just don’t do anything without checking with me.”
Gail looked at him and drew a deep breath.
“Okay.” She put her face over the side and looked through her mask into the water. “You think that barracuda’s gone?”
“Probably.”
She continued to look underwater for a moment more, scanning the bottom. She was about to take the mask out of the water when she saw something big and brown behind the boat. “Hey, what’s that?” she said, passing the mask to Sanders.
“Where?” He leaned over the side.
“Behind us. About as far as you can see.”
“It’s a timber. I’ll be damned. There it is.”
Sanders uncleated the anchor line and let the boat drift backward a few more yards. “Let’s have a look.”
“What did the bell captain say it was called? Goliath?”
“Yes. Goliath.”
They went overboard together, and as soon as their bubbles had risen away, they could see debris on the bottom. A long thick timber lay at right angles to the reef. Rotten wooden planks littered the white sand. Sanders touched Gail’s shoulder and she looked at him. He grinned and put thumb and index finger together in the “okay” sign. She responded with the same sign.
They swam along the bottom at the base of the reef. Gail found a rusted can, its seams burst and jagged. From a crevice in the rocks Sanders pulled a Coke bottle, intact. Gail lay on the bottom and dug beneath the near end of the big timber.
She found a fork and part of a plate. Sanders saw something sticking out of the sand at the far end of the timber.
He dug around it until he discovered what it was: the fluke of a huge anchor. Gail motioned that she was going up. He followed her.
Treading water on the surface, Gail spat out her mouthpiece and said, “Let’s go over the reef.”
“Why?”
“It looks like this is just the last bit of the bow.
There’s got to be more of her on the other side.”