Night Diver: A Novel (34 page)

“Do you have any glow sticks?” Holden asked. “They’re quite handy for being seen down below, especially since these suits lack reflective tape.”

She went to a bin that held odds and ends of spare diving equipment and emerged with a bundle of glow sticks. She gave him half and put half in her own mesh diving bag.

“Have you dived at night with only your own personal headlamp and glow sticks?” Holden asked as he suited up.

“Yes, but I never went beyond sixty feet or so.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“Excited. Some nerves, but that went away after a few minutes. In the end, I really enjoyed night diving and did it whenever I could. Everything is different at night. Magic.”

He smiled. “Excellent. Some people simply aren’t suited for night dives. They see only their own fears.”

He didn’t mention anything about the years since she had last dived, or the way her parents had died. He couldn’t know how she would take night diving until she was underwater. Neither could she.

Even as he wished she would stay aboard, he silently saluted her courage in attempting the dive.

Kate checked the gas levels in the tanks. They weren’t planning on a long dive, but divers used more gas at night than they did in daylight. Some of that was anxiety. Most of it was simply a daylight creature’s need to see more than a single small cone of light. She didn’t want to be one of the divers who fell prey to his own imagination, or in her case, memories . . .
the cough and shudder of her father as he came aboard, the slipperiness of the deck in the storm, the aching question of where her mother’s body actually lay.

But none of that was as bad as the present, the feeling that she’d been set up and betrayed by her own family, brought in as a redheaded puppet show to divert attention from Donnelly crimes.

“Our mystery square is SSE of our current position,” Holden said as he zipped up and flexed his leg, trying to ease the ache. “What do you think we should be looking for?”

“I don’t know. It could be loose, but I doubt it. If I was going to run an operation like this, I’d bundle up the salvage with lift bags,” she said, referring to a sturdy balloon that was attached to a large metal hook, waiting to be secured to a net full of salvage, “and stash them beneath a shelf of coral or lava. Even a cave. That rock pile looked like it would be good for hiding things.”

“Handy bit of kit, those lift bags,” Holden said, checking his tank and then hers. “But not for the inexperienced. Should we take extra canisters for anything we might find?”

“Might as well. We have gas to spare.”

They went out on the stern to finish suiting up. Rain was coming down in sheets. They ignored it. They would be underwater soon enough.

“I’ve rarely used the lift balloons,” he said. “In my line of work, we’d bring up devices in nets and cables. Very slowly, mind you. We didn’t want the pressure change to cause the whole works to go off.”

“Gold doesn’t have a problem,” she said. “It can go to the surface like a rocket.”

“Check me, if you would,” he said, turning around so she would look over the connections and the tank setup.

“Your backside is fine,” she said, a smile in her voice.

And nerves. She was going to dive, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

Holden checked her out. “Don’t fight the water, love. It always wins.”

She let out a sigh. “I know.”

“If you can’t see me, light up a stick.”

“Same goes for you.”

Before Holden put on his dive mask, he asked, “Are you ready to do this?”

“Ready as I ever will be. Not eager, though.”

“You would be mental if you were.”

They hugged awkwardly, feeling neoprene and plastic instead of heat and skin. Around them was darkness with only a hint of purple behind the layers and layers of clouds.

“Eyes down, gentle descent, let your vision adjust.” His voice was slightly high and chopped on the communication system and air mix. He turned on his headlamp. “And don’t look—”

“Into the work lights,” she said, turning her head aside as she activated her own light.

They shuffled off an edge of the stern that wasn’t occupied by the speedboat. As they finned out toward the dive buoy, the
Golden Bough
loomed above them like the silhouette of some great leviathan, haloed in storm and light.

Kate concentrated on counting, only allowing herself to breathe on even numbers, not thinking about anything except maintaining a regular rhythm. It was a dive trick she had used many times on land, where it had helped her through some very bad moments.

When Holden bent and went fins up to go below, she waited one breath before she followed. It took her a moment to find him within the cone of her headlamp. Energized by the storm, the water moved both of them about with the ease of infinite strength. They didn’t fight the push and pull of the swell. They just finned steadily down, pausing for compression stops. The grip of the storm on the water lessened with every downward kick.

Later, the force of the wind might reach all the way to the bottom, churning it up and making visibility nil, ripping out coral chunks and rocks and scattering the fragile remains of the
Moon Rose
.

But not yet. Though the water wasn’t as clear as it had been yesterday, it was transparent enough that Kate didn’t feel claustrophobic. She could catch glimpses of motion from Holden’s fins perhaps ten feet below her. His light was a nimbus of pale gold that dissipated a few yards ahead of him, scattered by particles suspended in the water. When she looked back up toward the surface, there was no silvery disk of light, only a gloaming kind of darkness where sky met water.

She went back to counting and keeping her breath steady, tasting the dryness of the gas as it went from pressurized containment to breathable inside her mask. The weight of the water grew with each downward stroke of her fins. When she felt her anxiety increase because her beam was almost immediately scattered by suspended particles stirred up by the storm, she put her fingertips at the edge of the beam to give herself something to focus on besides the particles streaming by. Immediately her sense of vertigo faded.

“Are you all right?” Holden asked.

“Yes. Just trying to stay centered despite the haze of stuff suspended in the water.”

Their voices were disembodied, even her own lungs sounding otherworldly to her. She kept counting and realized that her body already knew what to do—legs slightly apart, fins out and flat to slow her descent to a manageable rate.

Light gleamed off Holden’s faceplate as he turned his head to look back at her. She put her thumb up to reassure him. The gesture glowing brightly in the dive light’s beam. He did the same in return.

The next time Kate looked down, she saw another light below. Its location was fixed, but the amount of light ebbed and flowed in a slow, reliable rhythm.

Marker beacon,
she thought.
Divers swim to it, then up to the mother ship. Very useful if someone doesn’t want to be given away by a dive buoy.

Her family didn’t generally use such beacons, but nothing about this dive was ordinary.

“Is that one of yours?” Holden asked, indicating the light.

“I guess so. Normally we use tethers or follow the dredge or siphon line.”

“We departed from normal when we met,” he said.

She smiled behind her mask. “Look away from the beacon. Don’t burn out your night vision.”

Holden already had glanced elsewhere, but he didn’t say anything. He would rather have redundant advice than forget something critical.

At the second compression stop, the seafloor appeared to be rising to meet them. Though it was mostly dark above, some bit of light was still making it through, as well as illumination from the beacon. Traces of motion flickered around them, schools of tiny fish attracted by the light, which then reflected back from silver or colored scales.

It’s like being in a swirl of gems,
Kate thought in wonder.

To her, the beauty was both unearthly and relaxing, slowing the racing of her mind until it was more in sync with the easy, deliberate motions that were required underwater.

After the compression stop, the seafloor grew up toward them, appearing as a flat, limited horizon that stretched off in uneven shapes as far as their lights would reach. The bones of
Moon Rose
were black and misshapen.

Her breath rushed in as she looked at the wreck, stabbed by a feeling she hadn’t experienced in years. It was the moment when she had gone from looking at pictures of things that her parents and grandfather had been exploring to actually being there. That feeling never went away, even if she’d made herself try to forget it in her years on dry land.

But it came back now, and she was shocked by the strength of it.

Here was history in three dimensions. There had been men and women on the
Moon Rose
. Each of them had a life and memories of other pasts, and then it had all ended in storm and wreckage. All that was left of it now was scattered timbers that could only be reassembled with imagination and wonder.

The spars and ribs jutted out of the sandy and rocky bottom like a fantastic garden of coral. Fish swam around the wreck lazily, some glowing in the near darkness. It was like being in a dream, with a disconnect between thought and action, constant pressure, and the weight of past and present.

I can choose what to emphasize, what to accept, what to forget,
Kate told herself
. I can choose what I want to be mine.

Holden.

The future.

I can have both after the dive. All I have to do is to get from this moment to the moment we are both aboard the
Golden Bough
again.

At the corner of her vision she saw Holden. She checked her dive watch, which now glowed with a green-yellow light. He was heading off to the southeast.

“It shouldn’t be too far to the edge of the grid where everything drops down,” he said.

“As the crow flies,” she said. “Too bad we’re swimming in slow motion.”

“Impatience is the enemy.”

She smiled behind her mask.

They were close enough to get an idea of the scale of the ship now. It felt like swimming through a whale’s skeleton. The whole wreck swarmed with life. Coral growth covered what had once been exposed wood, blooming like flowers on a battlefield commemorating the dead.

“No one is working the wreck,” she said.

“There’s light in the distance at ten o’clock,” he said.

“I see. Look’s like the hip light Larry prefers.”

“He’s right about where we thought. Almost off the grid at the rock pile, very close to the drop-off to the deep.”

Even considering the distortion of the communications system, something in his voice made her pause.

“How is your leg?”

“Still taking orders, which is all that matters.”

He didn’t mention the pain radiating through his thigh with each heartbeat. He had known that diving would hurt, and it did. Talking about it made it harder to focus on what had to be done.

Following his dive compass and the blurry cone of his headlamp, he headed for a rock rise that was almost buried by fan corals and random hunks of lava sporting smaller coral decorations. The light that had once been distant grew more distinct. When Kate started for it, he caught her arm.

“Wait,” he said. “Do you see any other light?”

Both of them checked above, below, and at all sides.

“No,” she said. “You?”

“Nothing. Go back up to the top and mind your decompression times. I’ll be up shortly.”

“You go. I’ll deal with Larry.”

Holden barely held back what he thought of that idea. “We’ll stay together.”

He finned toward a figure that held position in the mouth of a small grotto. The opening was barely tall enough for someone to work upright in. From what Holden could see with the other man’s work light, the grotto would be a right bastard to move around in without banging tanks, limbs, and dive bag against coral and stone.

“Be extremely careful,” Holden said to Kate. “Things that look solid underwater often aren’t, and if they are, mashing a valve or a hose or a hand against them could be very bad.”

Is that what happened to my mother?

Kate put the thought out of her mind. It was the present that mattered, the living, this moment when Holden was approaching the grotto at a shallow side angle with deliberate stokes of his fins.

He stopped well short of the dangerous grotto and touched his right calf to make certain his dive knife was secure. If it came down to a physical argument, he wanted to have a sharp blade at hand.

Inside the grotto, Larry’s hip light flapped in slow motion as he worked a netted bag onto a hook that he was holding with one hand. When the hook grabbed solidly, he swam away from the cave, dragging net and hook well into the clear. He checked the hook again, hanging in the water several meters from the outcropping, surrounded by large flat fans of coral.