Deep Shadow (9 page)

From a calf scabbard, I removed my dive knife. Normally, I would have been carrying something cheap—more than one diver has died because he dropped an expensive knife and chased it into the depths. But this was to have been a shallow-water dive, so I was carrying a treasured possession. It was one of the last survival knives made personally by the late Bo Randall of Orlando. The handle was capped with a machined brass knob. I used the handle now to tap on the tusk, then straightened myself to listen, hoping to hear a response.

Nothing.

I tapped again, a measured series, then gave it a few silent seconds before leaving the tusk and swimming down into the crater.

A vein work of fissures thatched the crater’s limestone floor. Tendrils of gray silt vented upward from the cracks, as symmetrical as smoke on a windless day.

A volcanic effect.

It told me yes, water was flowing out through the latticework of stone. It also told me that the area beneath me was porous, not solid—possibly not heavy enough to crush two men.

Using the knife, I began tapping on the limestone, traveling along the bottom in an orderly way.
Tap-tap
-
tap.
I waited.
Tap-tap-tap.
I listened.

After several attempts, I abandoned the crater and followed its outer wall downward. At the edge of the wall, the bottom angled deeper. It dropped toward a funneling darkness: the mouth of an underground river.

Again, I went through the ceremony with the knife.
Tap-tap-tap
. Wait.
Tap-tap-tap.
Listen.

Twice, I worked my way around the wall, tapping, then waiting. When I finally heard a dull
Tap-a-tappa-tap
in reply, I thought I might be imagining it. I wasn’t convinced until Tomlinson added a vaudeville rhythm:
Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits.

The sound was muffled but the source familiar. Rap an air tank with a knife—it was the same bell-like sound. It told me at least one man was alive. No . . . they were both alive, I realized. I was now hearing a duo of bell sounds: Tomlinson and Will both banging on their tanks.

Tomlinson didn’t carry a knife—it was irrational, but he never did—so he must have been using a flashlight or a D ring from his vest.

The clanging was steady, not frantic, which I found reassuring. My partners were trapped somewhere under the crater floor, beneath a plateau of rock and sand, but obviously they had room enough to move their arms. It suggested that they were in a crevice or in an underground chamber that had been covered by rubble

I unsheathed my knife and began to dig methodically, pulling away rock, digging at the bottom. It was mostly sand. Frustrating. Digging a hole underwater is an exercise in futility. If I scooped out two handfuls of sand, twice that amount sieved downward and filled the temporary hole. Thinking it might be more efficient, I grabbed a pan-sized oyster shell and used it like a shovel.

It wasn’t much better. Until I returned with the jet dredge, though, a shovel was my best option. I continued digging, burning my dwindling air supply, until the clanging signal from beneath the crater changed. It caused me to pause.

I heard an articulate
TAP. Tap-tap-tap . . . TAP . . . tappa-tap.
Over and over, with the same careful spacing. Some sounds were intentionally louder, it seemed.

I banged the oyster shell against my own tank, parroting the signal . . . then received a different signal in reply.

It was Tomlinson. Had to be. Tomlinson, the blue-water sailor, the maritime minimalist. He was attempting Morse code. The man had been studying code for nearly a year, inspired by a late, great friend who had railed against our growing dependence on technology.

I’ve been a devoted user of shortwave radios since childhood, but I’m not a student of Morse code. I know a few basic shorthand signals, but now was not the time to test my skills. We had less than twenty minutes of air left. Subtleties of communication would have to wait.

I returned to my digging, bulling chunks of limestone to the side, then using the oyster shovel to scoop a dent in the sand. I kept at it until a sound within the wall caused me to pause once again.

It was an alarm sound, the rapid
clang-clang-clang
of a fire bell. Tomlinson was telling me to stop digging.

Why?

I could think of only one possibility: My digging was somehow threatening the stability of the space that was providing them refuge.

Maddening! If I couldn’t dig, how did Tomlinson expect me to free them? After several seconds of silence, he tried Morse code again.

I forced myself to concentrate. The louder clanks, I decided, were
dah
s in Morse. The faster, lighter raps were
dit
s.

Was it the letter
R
? Yes, an
R
.
R
is the most common Morse abbreviation. Even I recognized it.
R
stands for “roger”—“signal understood.”

It was Tomlinson’s way of beginning a dialogue.

I attempted a
dit-dah-dit
reply, then waited.

Once again, he tried to signal, but the letters wouldn’t take shape in my head. Because I didn’t understand, I let silence communicate my confusion.

Tomlinson tried a different pattern. I heard:
Dit-dit . . . DAH . . . dit. DAH . . . dit-dit-dit.

Three times, he sent it, before I recognized another common Morse abbreviation.
F-B.
It was short for “fine business”—the equivalent of “everything’s okay.”

Everything was certainly not okay. He was telling me they weren’t hurt—not seriously, anyway. So why had he sounded an alarm?

I tapped out the letter
R
in reply—“understood”
—
then listened to a string of louder, methodical bell notes. Instead of attempting to translate, I counted . . . counted four distinctive clangs, but the fifth—if there was to have been a fifth—was interrupted by a cascading clatter of rock and then a thunderous thud.

Another section of lake bottom, or possibly the interior wall of the crater, had collapsed—loosened by our clanging sound waves, more than likely.

I was blinded by another silt explosion, but this time I held my ground. I hung tight to a wedge of rock as the murk enveloped me. For a full minute, I waited for the unstable limestone to settle before I attempted to signal Tomlinson again.

This time, when he replied, the sound was much fainter. Either more sand and rock separated us or his location had changed.

I didn’t want to risk another exchange in Morse code. Sound waves are corrosive, and the lake bottom was too unstable. I needed the jet dredge.

A dredge is the underwater equivalent of a pressure washer. The one we had brought consisted of a generator, a heavy coil of hose that floated on a tractor-sized inner tube and a brass nozzle fitted into a three-foot length of PVC pipe. The thing shot a laser stream of water that would cut through rock and sand and was commonly used for setting pilings—or for treasure hunting. That’s why we’d brought it.

I had to get the generator going, prime the pump and return with the hose. I needed Arlis Futch’s help.

On the chance that Tomlinson and Will had, in fact, found refuge in an underground chamber, I located a crevice below the crater. It took a while to find one that looked to be about the right size. Without removing my BC, I popped a latch on the backpack, freed my air bottle and pulled it over my head. After I had inhaled a couple of deep breaths, I closed the valve, then purged my regulator before removing the pressure gauge and regulator hoses.

Full air bottles sink. Empty tanks float. Mine was half full, so it was easy to maneuver. I wedged the bottle into the crevice, valve up, and braced it with a chunk of rock. When I was convinced the tank was secure, I opened the valve a quarter turn.

A silver chain of air bubbles ascended from the tank. They began to disperse along the underside of the crater. The bubbles became as animated as ants as they probed the rock face, seeking vents and passages to continue their ascent. If there was a chamber above, the bubbles would find the open space and burst free.

I am not a cave diver, although I had explored a couple of caves years ago beneath an island off Borneo. But I’ve spoken with, and read about, Florida’s cave divers—an exacting, dedicated group that has lost more than one comrade to their collective passion for mapping subterranean labyrinths.

From these people, I had acquired a sense, at least, of the complex geology that defines the underwater karst catacombs that exist beneath the flatlands of central Florida. A small rock vent can lead to an ever-narrowing dead end, but it might also open up into a cavern. Caverns have been discovered beneath Florida’s flatlands that are the size of airplane hangars, vaulted cathedrals of limestone. Some were formed during the Pleistocene and had once been home to wandering families, human and animal, before the rising sea level flooded them.

I had heard that such caves might contain air bells—pockets of air—although I doubted the truth of it. Not in Florida, anyway. An airtight vault in rock as porous as limestone? It was unlikely.

Even so, wedging a bottle beneath the collapsed ledge was worth a try. Maybe, just maybe, Will and Tomlinson had been lucky enough to find an air pocket. Maybe, just maybe, I had provided my friends with additional air.

I started up with a few kicks of my old Rocket Fins. When I broke through the surface, I was already yelling for Arlis Futch.

This time, Arlis was waiting. He was standing at the edge of the lake, next to his truck, but his posture was oddly stiff. He was standing as if he were at attention. There were two men with him.

Where the hell had
they
come from? We hadn’t told anyone about the lake—Arlis had demanded secrecy—and the nearest road was miles away.

I had to clear my prescription mask and square it on my face again before I could be sure of details. Only then did I understand why Arlis was standing oddly. One of the men was holding a pistol to the back of his head.

The second man was also armed. He had a rifle pointed at me.

With his trigger hand, the man was waving me out of the water, calling, “Come up out of there, Jock-a-mo, and meet your new playmates. We got lots to talk about.”

TOMLINSON’S FIRST LUCID THOUGHT, WHEN HE REALIZED
he was pinned under a pile of rock and sand, was an automatic attempt at humor, a comforting cliché:
Looks like I picked a bad week to quit smoking.

Not cigarettes, marijuana.

He had promised Ford that he would quit because Will Chaser was on Sanibel for a week, and the biologist was worried the kid would sniff out Tomlinson’s love for the bud.

Apparently, Will had an interest in the subject that went beyond that of a hobbyist. He didn’t need any more bad influences in his life.

Ford didn’t particularly like the teenager, that was obvious. But the man still felt some responsibility because Will was traveling with Ford’s on-again, off-again squeeze, the high-powered Iron Maiden, Barbara Hayes.

Barbara was not always iron, as Tomlinson had discovered only three nights before, and she was certainly no unschooled maiden.

More than a tad ripped on rum, Tomlinson had said exactly that to Barbara an hour after she’d left Doc Ford’s lab, where they’d eaten dinner. Really excellent snapper, with peanut gravy, but the lady was pissed off about something, no telling what. Tomlinson had said the words just before unsnapping the Iron Maiden’s bra free, the first ceremonial, no-going-back gesture in the betrayal of his best friend.

Later that evening, the betrayal had caused Tomlinson much angst. He was a sensitive man with morals—although Tomlinson seldom allowed morality to interfere with his personal life. But the betrayal had at least one positive result. It had steeled his determination to honor his promise to Ford that he wouldn’t smoke the entire week, for the sake of the kid.

Tobacco was never mentioned in the agreement, however, so at midnight on Sunday Tomlinson had ridden his bike to the 7-Eleven, where he’d bought a pack of Spirits, organic cigarettes in a yellow pack. He hoped the smokes would mitigate the withdrawal symptoms he had suffered during the previous few days. He had been having weird dreams, he couldn’t eat and a restless gray depression had descended upon him with a weight that—although more subtle—was no less distressing than the weight of the mound of limestone and sand that now covered him.

That night, pedaling home to Dinkin’s Bay, Tomlinson had lit the first cigarette he had smoked in . . . how long?

Ninth grade? No . . . the last cigarette he had smoked was in tenth. He’d had a brief fling with tobacco during that period, smoking Camels, in an effort to add to his James Dean mystique. Another reason he’d chosen Camels was that unfiltered cigarettes made his hands look bigger, and Tomlinson’s primary obsession had from earliest memory been women, and women were perceptive and impressed by such things.

Tomlinson had been weaned by a wet nurse—his family was wealthy. She was a Scandinavian dream with translucent melon breasts, so alluringly traced with veins that even as a child Tomlinson had loved maps, with their blue rivers that tracked true to the sea.

The Spirit cigarette, though, tasted like crap and had left his breath smelling worse than bong water. Adding to his displeasure was the awareness that smoking an organic cigarette was the way trendy tobacco slaves rationalized their addiction while also feeding it.

Tomlinson had an aversion to endorsing trendy behavior via his own behavior. He felt he was above such silliness. It struck him as common.

As he lay beneath the rocks, he thought,
One last joint. If I’d smoked a number last night, this bullshit would be easier to deal with now.