He definitely felt disoriented. He double-checked the readouts.
His oxygen levels were fine.
Down. Release with one hand, clutch with the other. Down.
When Angel spoke in his ear, he was absurdly grateful. “You’re making good time,” she told him. “It’s going to feel longer than it actually is. Can you still hear me okay?”
“Loud and clear. Everything okay topside?”
“Yeah. So. Now that we can talk in private…”
Chapel stopped climbing down the cable for a second. “Yes?” he asked. “Something on your mind?”
“I just wondered — have you got the ring yet?”
Chapel wanted to laugh. Never a great idea on a dive, of course. Laughing used up a lot of air. He forced himself to merely grin through the plastic mask. If any fish were watching with better eyes than he had, maybe they would see the scary monster from above the surface bare its teeth.
“Yeah,” he told her. “It’s waiting for me back in New York. I just have to pick it up.” He pulled himself down another meter. Down.
“Is it nice? Julia deserves something nice.”
“I agree.” Down. One hand over the other. “It’s nice. A gold band with a single diamond. Nothing showy — you know that’s not her style. Not too big.”
“I think if it were me you were proposing to,” Angel told him, with just a trace of jealousy in her voice, “I’d be perfectly happy with something showy. And big.”
“Stop trying to make me laugh.” Down. Release with the left hand, clutch with the right. Release with the right hand, hold on with the left. Down.
“You know I’m happy for you,” Angel said. “You know that.”
“I do,” he told her. When he’d first told Angel that he was going to propose, it had felt distinctly weird. He was confiding in a woman he’d never met. He didn’t even know what Angel looked like. But it didn’t feel weird for long. She’d been whispering in his ear for so long he felt like they were old, close friends.
“I mean, I’m happy for you now. I wasn’t… convinced. At first.”
“I know,” Chapel said. Down. Angel had suggested he take his time and think about what he was doing. He and Julia had been fighting a lot, and they had both said things they couldn’t take back. Angel had suggested that maybe that wasn’t the best time to make things official. But Chapel was certain he was making the right decision.
Down. One hand. The other hand. Down.
He checked his depth gauge. Thirty meters. This was the farthest he’d ever dived before, and he was only a fifth of the way to the bottom. It had felt like no time at all. Or like he’d been doing this for hours.
“How long until I can turn my lights on?” he asked.
“A little ways, yet. I just wanted to tell you something. I know you can make her happy. You’ve never failed at a mission yet, Jim. I think if you put your mind to this, you’ll be a great husband.”
Down. He wished he could kick his way down. It would be so much faster. But he had to stay with the cable. Down.
He thought about what Angel had just said. “Is there a ‘but’ somewhere in that statement?”
Angel was quiet for a while. He started to worry there was a problem with the transponder. But apparently she was just thinking about what to say next.
“Not so much a ‘but,’” she said.
Down. Hand over hand. Down.
“More,” she said, “oh, I don’t know. A hope. I wanted to say that I hope she can make you just as happy. That you’re sure you’re making the right choice for yourself.”
He stopped again. He told himself he was resting, conserving his energy. In truth, what she’d said had just distracted him so much he couldn’t concentrate on his descent. When he realized that, he forced himself to focus. He adjusted the pressurization of the drysuit and checked over his dive computer. Then he started down again.
Angel couldn’t really be jealous, could she? Admittedly she was the woman he was closest to in the world other than Julia. And Angel flirted with him all the time — and he definitely reciprocated. But that was just the way they were, wasn’t it? It was just banter. Harmless.
At least, he’d always thought it was.
Down. Suddenly concentrating on climbing down the cable was a great distraction.
“I am sure,” he told Angel. “I definitely am.”
“Good. As long as you’re sure. Then I guess you have my blessing, though I notice you didn’t ask for it.”
He smiled inside his mask. Down. One hand, then the other. Down. “Can I turn my lights on yet?”
“Give it another ten meters.”
Down. One hand, the other. Left hand, right hand. Down.
Seventy-five meters down. Halfway to the bottom. He tapped a button on his dive computer screen. A halogen lamp the size of his pinkie finger mounted on either side of his mask flicked on, spearing light out into the darkness.
There was nothing to see, of course, not even any fish at this level. But he’d never been so glad to see anything as the cable he held in his hands. He looked down and then up along its length. It stood as straight as a pillar in the middle of the ocean.
He looked at his gloves. Put a hand to the cable. Then the other.
Down.
Lying between the Florida Keys and Cuba, the Cay Sal Bank was one of the world’s largest coral atolls. From the surface it was almost invisible, merely a handful of tiny cays — rocks too small to be called islands. Just below the waves, however, more than three thousand square miles of ground rose up from the ocean floor, in most places coming within twenty feet of the surface. Unsurprisingly it was a graveyard for shipping — dozens of oceangoing vessels had run aground there, and most lay where they’d fallen, barely covered by the lapping blue water of the Caribbean.
If you could remove all that water and look at the bank in open air, it would resemble an enormous and ludicrously high plateau, with a flat top and — almost — sheer sides. If you stepped off that hypothetical plateau, you could fall two thousand feet before hitting the ground.
But that “almost” was important. Though from a distance the sides of the bank would look sheer, up close they were rough and slightly tapered, interrupted everywhere by promontories and narrow ledges that would stop your fall long before you hit the bottom. Donny’s yacht had dropped its anchor onto one of those ledges about eighty fathoms — a hundred and fifty meters, as Chapel’s dive computer reckoned — down.
That was still very deep. It was far, far deeper than Chapel had ever dived before, even though he’d been SCUBA diving since he was old enough to get his certification. It was deeper than most professional divers went. A hundred meters down, still pulling himself along hand over hand, he could feel the water above him pressing down on him, squeezing him inside his drysuit like a tube of toothpaste. He was getting cold, too, which was always a bad thing on a dive when you couldn’t afford clumsy fingers. He’d passed through the thermocline where the water dropped fifteen degrees in the space of a couple of meters of depth. Up on the surface he’d sweated inside his suit, and now he felt like he was slicked down with a layer of clammy water.
He concentrated on breathing normally, on regularly checking the gas levels on his dive computer. On sticking to a steady pace.
At a hundred and twenty meters down he saw the rocky wall of the slope as a looming shadow, a patch of darkness that cut off his lights. A little farther he started to see towers of coral rise up around him like the fingers of some enormous beast reaching up to snatch at him. The wall of the slope kept getting closer, which perversely enough made him feel claustrophobic — he’d gotten used to the sense of floating in limitless space, so any indication that there was solid ground nearby made him worry about falling and smashing into the ground below.