“It’s not over!” she shrieked. “I’m bent!”
“You weren’t down long enough,” he assured her. “You came straight up.”
“I didn’t!” she insisted. “I tried to save the captain! He didn’t make it! Look!” She held her watch under his nose.
The man took one look at the flashing DECOMP signal and spoke into the transmitter in his hood. “Topside, this is Diver Two. I need a chopper evac to decompression — now!” He regarded Star intently. “The captain — where did you see him and how long ago?”
“He was sinking from two hundred,” she gasped, fighting hysteria. Sharp pains stung her hips and knees. Nitrogen bubbles, collecting in her joints — classic symptoms of the bends. “He wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. I tried to give him my air—” She began to shiver with cold, the onset of shock. Hold it together….
The diver grabbed her gently but firmly and began to kick for Scoutmaster.
Staring straight up into the blinding sun, Star wept bitter tears. She couldn’t tell if she was crying for the captain or for herself. It was all the same tragedy. A good man was gone forever, and she was face-to-face with the possibility that this accident was going to end her life, right here, today.
And then she was being hauled aboard, first to a dive platform, and then onto Scoutmaster’s deck.
She looked up, her vision blurred, and saw Kaz — two of him, actually.
“I’m sorry!” she sobbed.
“For what?” he asked. “Are you okay? Where’s the captain?”
“Dead!”
“That’s not funny, Star!” It was Dante, with Adriana at his side. “Hey, you don’t look so hot — ”
“I tried to help him. I stayed too long. I’m bent!”
She was having trouble breathing now, struggling under what felt like a boulder on her chest.
She was aware of a lot of frantic activity before someone slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. Faces flashed through her pain, those of her three companions and others too. The last thing she heard before slipping into unconsciousness was the distant rhythm of an approaching helicopter.
For Kaz, the nightmare was happening again. He stood on deck in his dripping shorts and T-shirt, watching the crew preparing Star’s inert body for airlift. It brought him back to a hockey rink, not so many months ago. Drew Christiansen on a stretcher. The ambulance, backing in the Zamboni entrance. And the siren.
Today, that mournful wail was replaced by the thunder of the chopper as it hovered over them, lowering its wire-mesh recovery cage for Star.
Star. How can this be happening to her? She’s the best of all of us!
He choked back tears as he watched the crew lay her down on the padded bottom of the basket. She had saved his life that day. He would not have made it out of Deep Scout without her help untangling the wires that had trapped him.
He was here; he was fine. And she —
The crew backed away, and the cage lifted off. Kaz was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer loneliness of Star’s journey — one from which she might never return. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he was running forward. He put both hands on the rim of the basket and vaulted over the side, landing neatly next to her.
Everyone aboard Scoutmaster — the interns and crew alike — was shouting at him. But the roar of the chopper drowned them out. The basket was winched up through the windstorm of the rotor blades and hauled into the cabin.
No time was wasted. The helicopter was racing to its destination even before the hatch was closed.
The paramedic glared at Kaz. “Not smart, kid. You think this is a game?”
“I couldn’t let her go alone,” mumbled Kaz, holding on to Star’s limp hand.
The craft was only in the air eleven minutes. Kaz watched in awe as they closed in on an enormous oil-drilling platform off the west coast of Saint-Luc. When they descended toward the helipad, he got a sense of the vast size of the structure. It was like an entire city, propped up on titanic stilts, hundreds of feet above the Caribbean.
A medical team was waiting for them at touchdown. Kaz joined the stampede with the stretcher. An elevator took them into the guts of the platform, where the infirmary was located.
The double doors were marked RECOMPRESSION THERAPY. A dour-faced, lab-coated technician barred their way.
“She can’t come in here. I’ve got hard-hat divers in the water. What if one of them needs — ”
Before the man could finish, Bobby Kaczinski, the most promising young defenseman in the Ontario Minor Hockey Association, did what he had been trained to do his entire life. Without slowing his pace, he lowered his shoulder and delivered a crunching body check that put the technician flat on his back.
The decompression chamber looked like a huge high-tech steel pipe about the size of a Dumpster.
Kaz got out of the way as the medical team worked on Star. She was hooked up to various monitors, and an IV drip was started. The oxygen was discontinued, and adrenaline administered.
This isn’t happening… this isn’t Star… this isn’t our summer….
The heavy door swung shut, rubber gaskets muffling the clang of metal on metal. The hyperbaric chamber pressed Star and a nurse down to seven atmospheres — the same pressure as 228 feet. According to the dive computer in Star’s watch, that was the maximum depth of her unplanned adventure. Over the next several hours, that pressure would be slowly reduced, giving her system a chance to expel the nitrogen that was overwhelming her body.
But was the damage already done? It had taken half an hour to get her into the chamber. Thirty minutes of deadly bubbles foaming her blood.
He looked to the chief doctor, but the man’s face revealed no clue as to how the treatment was proceeding.
This is what we get for trespassing on the graves of sailors who’ve been dead for three hundred years.
First the captain, and now Star. It was too much to bear.
Two hours later, when Adriana and Dante rushed into the infirmary, the doctor’s expression had not changed.
“She’s okay, right?” Dante asked eagerly. “Is she okay?”
Kaz just shook his head and directed their attention to the chamber’s window. There lay their friend, her face chalk-white, still unconscious.
The double doors swung wide to reveal Menasce Gérard, terrible in his anger and grief.
“This is true, this thing I hear?” he demanded, voice booming. “The captain?”
“He’s dead,” Adriana confirmed in a husky whisper. “Star tried to save him and she — ”
The big dive guide strode to the window in the chamber. His fury softened at the sight of Star, and he placed a hand against the glass, as if trying to project his strength across the space between them. Then he wheeled and faced down the other three.
“Alors — here is your treasure! Are you happy now? Do you feel rich?”
They could not argue, nor defend themselves.
They could only wait.
02 September 1665
The Griffin under full sail was a majestic sight. She was a barque, three-masted, carrying twenty-four guns, and built low to the water, much different from the workhorses of the Spanish treasure fleet. The galleons were massive, with towering decks. Loaded down with their precious cargoes, they wallowed in the sea, sitting ducks for the faster, more maneuverable ships of the great naval powers — England, France, Holland. And, of course, the pirates and corsairs.
That was why Captain Blade was not overly concerned about the four-day head start the Spaniards had on the privateer fleet.