Mercer recognized that this wasn’t a time to joke. Book took his job seriously, and right now he was dive master and that meant his partner understood the stakes. “Roger that.”
Once finished with the final checks, they jumped off the dive platform and splashed into the aquamarine world off a volcanic Pacific island. As soon as their bubbles dispersed, Mercer could see their visibility was almost endless. The bottom looked as sunlit as a country meadow, marred only by the wavering shadow of their dive boat. The gin-clear water was bathtub warm and held them in its intimate embrace.
Below, the seafloor was mostly sand, broken up by banks of coral outcroppings and chunks of black and gray rock that had been ejected from the earth during the island’s fiery birth. Booker finned down, pausing to adjust his buoyancy and looking back to make sure Mercer equalized the pressure in his ears. He checked his depth when he reached the sandy plain and entered the number into his wrist dive computer. It spat back their bottom time, and he gave Mercer the diver’s okay sign of a circle made by thumb and forefinger.
Mercer returned the gesture.
Sykes had the compass, so he set the direction and pace. Mercer, much less comfortable breathing through a rubber tube, forced himself to inhale and exhale only when he saw Book do it. This way he didn’t make the novice mistake of gulping too much air too quickly.
Soon they began attracting the interest of some local denizens. Mercer couldn’t guess the names of the fish, but he marveled at the fantastic variety of colors and shapes and wondered at the evolutionary niche each one filled. Between the outcroppings, the seafloor showed signs of life as well, tracks and trails left in the sediment from crustaceans and starfish, but it was around the living reefs that life teemed in its multitudes. Sea fans waved gently in the currents. Corals of a million shades and hues burst from the sandy background while schools and shoals and swarms of fish darted and raced, some prey, others predator. Large eyes and blurred shapes peered from some of the deeper crevices, and in one Mercer saw the permanent grin of an eel flushing water though its gills, its jaw open, its mouth a profusion of serrated teeth.
Book roamed back and forth for the better part of a half hour, trying to see anything that would give away the presence of a nearly forty-foot-long aluminum airplane. Though the bottom here was a fascinating and beautiful realm, nothing looked like a target. He shoved off, taking them eastward for a hundred yards so their return to the boat would pass over uncharted territory.
Coming up over a coral head, they saw the bottom on the other side slope away into a narrow valley. The far side of the cleft was only a hundred or so feet away, but the bottom went down a good forty feet deeper than their current depth. It seemed darker down there, more forbidding.
The two men looked at each other. They both felt it.
The trench walls were gray stone, volcanic rock that had been tortured first in the earth’s crust and again when it spewed from the depths. Sand had accumulated along the chasm’s bottom, but it was an irregular surface of buried boulders and hidden outcroppings. A shadow passed over them, something big enough to interrupt the sun’s beam. They startled and looked up, but there was nothing there. They went back to their search.
As a geologist Mercer saw the anomaly. Part of the canyon wall had given way, sheared clean from its base. An avalanche like this wasn’t so unusual. What struck him was how the rock above the collapsed section of stone was riddled with cracks. He swam up to inspect it. He lightly brushed the stone, and his finger gouged out a small divot. The rock was fissured, so that it crumbled easily. He looked up. The distance seemed impossible, but the evidence was right in front of him. For eighty years lightning had been striking the ocean’s surface above this spot, and the shock of 50,000-degree Fahrenheit electricity — transmuting water into steam with each pulse — had eventually fractured the rock. It was a similar scene to what he’d found in Afghanistan, only here the uncompressible water had allowed the lightning to cause even more damage.
Book drew a question mark in the water.
Mercer nodded and pointed down.
The army vet checked Mercer’s air supply, and his own, and then consulted his computer before flashing five fingers twice to tell Mercer they had ten minutes. Mercer gave him the okay sign and let Sykes lead him down into the canyon.
The water temperature dropped as soon as they started their descent. Both men tested the wall as they finned downward to make certain that it wouldn’t collapse on them when they reached the bottom. Their hands kicked up some flakes and chips, but nothing larger dislodged. Mercer kept one eye on Sykes’s air bubbles to keep his breathing in sync with the dive master’s.
The bottom of the canyon was a jumbled mess of rocks, most of them no larger than a man’s fist, but a few were boulder size. They began moving some of the rubble aside, being careful not to mix too much sediment into the water around them. There was little current down at this depth, so whatever became suspended would stay like that for a time.
Sykes was the first to discover it. He made a sharp pointing motion to catch Mercer’s attention. He’d uncovered something smooth and curved that was covered in a film of scum. He brushed it away to reveal dull metal.
Mercer felt his heart trip. They’d done it on their first dive! They’d found the plane. He helped Booker move more loose rocks, and his elation suddenly turned to dismay — then disappointment. They hadn’t found the wing or fuselage of a Lockheed Electra. Instead it was a steel-hulled open boat, like a lifeboat, and judging by its age it had been down here for decades. It took five more minutes to realize it had once been loaded with bags of cement. The paper sacks had long since rotted away, leaving loaves of hardened concrete piled five deep on the boat’s flattened keel.
Book tapped Mercer’s shoulder and pointed up. They’d reached their limit and would have to ascend. They made two decompression stops on the way to the surface and breached a quarter mile from Rory Reyes and the Suva Surprise. He spotted them even before they started waving. He’d already unshipped the Zodiac and jumped aboard it. A cloud of blue exhaust erupted from the motor, and in seconds he was planing across the sea.
Sykes spat out his regulator. “You should never leave a boat unattended like that.”
“He must figure it’s only for a second and we’re close enough to shore that we could swim it.”
“Pull that stunt in the military and you’re scrubbing toilets on a garbage scow for the rest of your hitch.”
Reyes chopped the throttle when he neared them and began to coast. The inflatable lost all headway just as he came abreast of the divers. He helped Mercer over the gunwale with a strong pull to his tank harness, and together they heaved Book into the boat. It was a little crowded with the three of them and their gear, but they made it work.
“How’d it go?”
“We found something promising,” Mercer said. “But it turned out to be an old inter-island trader that sank with a load of cement bags, I’d guess sometime in the 1940s or ’50s.”
“You gonna dive again?”
Mercer looked to Book.
Sykes said to Reyes, “We’ll give it a few hours first, but we can hit it again before sunset if you want.” Book then turned to Mercer. “Or are we breaking out the side-scan sonar and playing sea sleuth?”