All Dante registered was that he was having a fine time, and here was Star, ruining it. The lionfish had gotten away, leaving Dante sweating from his efforts.
Who needs a rubber suit to dive in boiling water?
Before Star’s horrified eyes, Dante unzipped his lightweight tropical skin suit and began to peel off the thin material. In his narced state, he had forgotten that the wet suit was not for warmth; it was for protection from the sting of coral and other venomous sea life.
She grabbed him and held on. He fought back, the upper half of the wet suit flapping from his waist.
That was when she saw the shark.
CHAPTER TWO
It was a bull shark, seven or eight feet long, although it looked even bigger through the lens of the water. It was not Clarence — the teen divers had already had a run-in with the eighteen-foot tiger shark of local legend. But Star was an expert diver, and she knew bulls could be aggressive. Especially if this one mistook their struggling for the thrashing of a wounded fish.
“Calm down!” she barked into her regulator, tasting salt water.
Dante was too impaired to heed the warning. His eyes were barely open, mere slits behind his mask.
The predator was only a few feet away, close enough for Star to see the peculiar remora fish clamped to its underside, attaching itself to feed on scraps of prey.
Star was torn. Should she swim away? But what about her partner? She was there for him, and he for her.
Onto the scene burst a blur of black rubber, a six-foot-five body formed by rigid discipline into the shape of a torpedo. It was Menasce Gérard, a hulking native dive guide with the unlikely nickname English. Propelled by the powerful kicks of his flippers, he swam into the shark’s path. In a single motion, he pulled the dangling camera off Dante’s arm, wheeled around, and brought it down with all his might on the bull’s flat snout.
The shark reared up, shocked. Clearly, a bonk on the nose was the last thing it had expected. It turned abruptly and swam off, roiling the water. Out of the storm appeared a smaller fish — a foot long, with a round suction cup on its back. It was the remora, dislodged from its host during the commotion. It darted back and forth, searching in vain for the bull’s pale underbelly. Finding nothing, it panicked and clamped onto Dante’s bare chest.
That got Dante’s attention. He cried out in shock, blowing a cloud of bubbles into English’s face. He tried to pluck the remora from his skin, but the hold was too strong. Even the guide couldn’t seem to yank the fish free.
English gave the signal to surface, but Dante was focused on his new tenant. “Get off me! Get off me!” He swallowed water, putting himself in a choking frenzy.
The guide took hold of Dante from behind, crossing his arms in an iron grip. Unable to reach his own B.C., he shot air into Dante’s until they both began to rise. Star joined the shaky ascent.
They surfaced about twenty yards from the R/V Hernando Cortés, their dive boat. Symptoms of narcosis disappear as a diver rises, so Dante was no longer dazed. Now he was hysterical. “Pull it off! Pull it off!”
Doubting the boy could even swim in his frantic state, English towed him Red Cross–style to the Cortés. The other two teenage interns, Bobby Kaczinski and Adriana Ballantyne, hauled him onto the dive platform.
Adriana gawked at the fish fastened onto Dante. “What’s that?”
English scrambled up beside them. “Remora!” he exclaimed, trying to work his hands under the creature’s suction cup.
“You’re hurting me!” cried Dante.
Star was last out of the water. She kicked off her flippers and approached Dante. She walked with a limp — the result of a mild case of cerebral palsy — although underwater the condition disappeared. Hefting her dripping air tank, she began smacking the remora with the flat bottom. Dante staggered backward, flopping down on the deck. “What are you trying to do, kill me?” he gasped.
“Silence, you silly child!” ordered English in his French Caribbean accent. This was not his first run-in with the four teens, and he was not in the mood to be understanding. “We do nothing, you complain! We do something, you complain louder!”
“But what if it’s stuck on forever?”
“What’s all the commotion?” Captain Braden Vanover peered down from the flying bridge. Spying the fish attached to Dante’s chest, he exclaimed, “Oh, jeez!” and disappeared below.
He returned a moment later, carrying a bottle of Jamaican rum and a hypodermic syringe. He dipped the needle in the liquor, drew up some dark brown liquid, and injected it into the remora, just behind the gill slits.
The gray fish dropped to the deck, flipping wildly on the olive-painted planks. English expertly kicked it back into the sea.
Then he wheeled his furious attention on Dante. “You were maybe trying out for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, monsieur? Why do you take off the wet suit at eighty feet?”
“He was narced,” supplied Star.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Dante defended himself. “How was I supposed to know that crazy fish was going to stick on? It could happen to anybody.”
“If it was not you, then it would not happen!” the guide seethed. “All of you — you attract the troubles like the giant magnet!” He turned to face Vanover. “I am finished with these American teenagers. I am not MTV, me! The next time they dive with you, you will find another guide!” He peeled off his dripping wet suit and stormed below.
“I’m Canadian,” Kaz called after him. If English had heard, the big man gave no sign.
The four interns exchanged agonized looks. Their internship was a sham — a smokescreen for Tad Cutter’s treasure hunting. Scuba trips with Captain Vanover and English were all that kept this summer from being a total bust. Now they were gone too.
“Well,” the captain said slowly. “You’ve heard the bad news. Anybody ready for the good news?”
“We could sure use some,” said Adriana.
“The office just radioed in. The PUSH team wrapped up their research a few days early. The next project doesn’t start down there for another week. The station is yours if you want it.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Poseidon Underwater Self-contained Habitat, or PUSH, was a subsea lab built right onto the Hidden Shoals proper, sixty-five feet beneath the waves. There, scientists called aquanauts could live and work for days at a time, spending almost every waking minute diving.
For Star, it was a dream come true. “The only problem with scuba is it’s over too fast. But on PUSH, when your air runs low, you just swim to the station, switch tanks, and swim back out again. And there’s no decompressing because you don’t have to return to surface pressure. Home is right there on the reef.”
“Home is an underwater sardine can,” Dante said sourly.
“Even when you’re not diving, it’s still awesome,” Star went on. “Because you’re under sixty-five feet of water. Look out the window, and you’re right in the thick of things.”
“We’ll be in the thick of things, all right,” grumbled Dante. “Every time you crook your finger, you’ll be picking somebody else’s nose.”
The four were in the cabin the two girls shared, watching Adriana pack for their undersea sojourn. The girl gazed bleakly from the stacks of color-coordinated designer outfits to the tiny watertight bag about the size of a kindergartner’s knapsack. Anything that wouldn’t fit had to be left on dry land.