The Stone Monkey (43 page)

She looked for anything hidden in the closet but found only clothes.

Clank, clank...

What do we think, Rhyme?

"I think you've got, let's see, about fourteen hundred pounds of air left. I'd say if you don't find something soon, get the hell out."

I'm not going anywhere yet, she thought. Hovering, she looked slowly around the room. Where would he hide things? He left his guns, he left the money.... That means the explosion took him by surprise too. There
has
to be something here. She glanced again at the closet. The clothes? Maybe. She kicked toward it.

She began to go through them. Nothing in any of the pockets. But she kept searching and—in one of his Armani jackets—found a slit he'd made in the lining. She reached in and extracted an envelope containing a document. She trained the light on it. Don't know if it's helpful or not, Rhyme. They're in Chinese.

"That's for us to find out back home. You find it, Eddie'll translate it, I'll analyze it."

Into the bag.

Twelve hundred pounds of pressure. But don't ever, ever, ever hold your breath.

Why was that again?

Right. Your lungs'll explode.

Clank.

Okay, I'm outta here.

She made her way out of the small stateroom and into the corridor, the treasures of evidence stashed in the bag tied to her belt.

Clank clank clank ... clank ... clank ... clank.

She turned back down the endless corridor—the route by which she could escape from this terrible place. The bridge seemed miles away down the black corridor.

The longest journey, the first step...

But then she stopped, gripping the doorway. Jesus, Lord, she thought.

Clank clank clank...

Amelia Sachs realized something about the eerie banging she'd been hearing since she'd entered the ship. Three fast bangs, three slow.

It was Morse code for S-O-S. And it was coming from somewhere deep within the ship.

S
-O-S.

The universal distress call.

S-O...

Somebody was alive! The Coast Guard had missed a survivor. Should she go find the other divers? Sachs wondered.

But that would take too long; Sachs imagined from the uneven pounding that the trapped air the survivor was breathing was nearly gone. Besides, the sound seemed to be coming from nearby. It should take only minutes to find the person.

But where were they exactly?

Well, obviously it hadn't come from the direction of the bridge, through which she'd entered the ship. It wasn't coming from the cabins here either. It had to be one of the holds or the engine room—in the lower part of the ship. Now, with the
Dragon
on its side, those areas were level with her, on her left.

Yes, no?

For this she couldn't ask Lincoln Rhyme's advice.

There was no one to help her here.

Oh, Jesus, I'm really going to do this, aren't I?

Less than 1200 pounds of air left.

So you better get your butt going, girl.

Sachs glanced at the faint illumination where the bridge was, then she turned away from it toward the darkness—and the claustrophobia—and kicked hard. Following the clanking.

S-O-S.

But when she came to the end of the black corridor, from which she thought she heard the code, Sachs found no way to get into the interior of the ship. The corridor just ended. She pressed her head against the wood, though, and could distinctly hear the clanging.

O-S.

Training the light on the wall she discovered a small door. She opened it and gasped as a green eel swam leisurely past her. She let her heart calm and gazed inside, looking to her left, into the bowels of the ship. The shaft was a dumbwaiter, presumably to cart supplies up to the cabin deck and the bridge from the lower decks. It measured about two feet by two feet.

Confronting the thought of swimming into the narrow space, she now thought about going back for help. But she'd already wasted too much time finding the doorway.

Oh, man...

One thousand pounds of air.

Clank, clank
...

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

Can't do it. No way.

S-O-S.

Amelia Sachs, calm as tea when she hit 130 miles per hour in her Camaro SS, would wake up sobbing after dreams of herself imprisoned in chambers and tunnels and mine shafts.

Can't do it! she thought again.

Then sighed through her regulator and pulled herself into the narrow space, turned left as best she could and kicked her way deeper into hell.

God, I hate this.

Nine hundred pounds of pressure on her gauge.

She eased forward, moving along the shaft that was just wide enough to accommodate her and her tank. Ten feet. Her tank suddenly caught on something above her. She fought down the shiver of panic, clamping her teeth furiously on the mouthpiece of her regulator. Rotating slowly, she found the wire that had snagged her and she freed herself. She turned back and found another blue-white face protruding through another doorway of the dumbwaiter shaft.

Oh, my Lord...

The man's eyes, opaque as jelly, stared in her direction, glowing in the bright light. His hair rose outward from his head like the coat of a porcupine.

Sachs eased forward and kicked slowly past the man, struggling to ignore the chilling sensation of the crown of his head brushing her body as she swam past.

S...

The sound, though still feeble, was louder here.

O...

She continued down the shaft to the very bottom of the dumbwaiter and, pushing aside the panic as she neared the exit, she forced herself to move calmly through the doorway into what was the galley of the
Dragon.

S...

The black water here was filled with trash and flecks of food—and several bodies.

Clank.

Whoever was signaling couldn't even make an entire letter now.

Above, she saw the shimmering surface of a large air pocket and a man's legs in the water, dangling downward. The feet, in socks, moved slightly, almost a twitch. She swam quickly toward them and burst to the surface. A bald man with a mustache was clinging to a rack of shelves that were bolted to the wall—now the ceiling of the kitchen—turned away with a cry of shock and undoubtedly from the pain of the blinding light shooting into his eyes.

Sachs squinted. She recognized him—why? Then realized that she'd seen his picture on the evidence board in Rhyme's town house—and the one she'd seen in the cabin just a few minutes before. This was Captain Sen of the
Fuzhou Dragon.

He was muttering incoherently and shivering. He was so blue he looked cyanotic—the color of an asphyxia victim. She spit the regulator out of her mouth to breathe the air that was trapped in the pocket and save her own store of oxygen but the atmosphere was so foul and depleted that she felt faint. She grabbed the mouthpiece again and began to suck the air from her own supply.

Pulling the secondary regulator off her vest, she stuck it into Sen's mouth. He breathed deeply and began to revive somewhat. Sachs pointed downward into the water. He nodded.

A fast glance at the pressure gauge: 700 pounds. And two of them were using her supply now.

She released air from the BCD and, with her arm around the limp man, they sank to the bottom of the galley, pushing aside the bodies and cartons of food that floated in their way. At first she wasn't able to locate the doorway to the dumbwaiter shaft. She felt weak with panic for a moment, afraid that the moaning she'd heard meant the ship was settling and buckling and the doorway was now sealed off. But then she saw that the body of a young woman had floated in front of it. She gently pulled the corpse aside and opened the dumbwaiter doorway wide.

They couldn't both fit into the shaft side by side so she eased the captain in before her, feet first. Eyes squeezed shut, still shivering violently, he gripped the black hose of his regulator desperately with both hands. Sachs followed him, imagining all too clearly what might happen if he panicked and ripped the regulator from her mouth or tore her mask or the light off: trapped in this horrible narrow place, thrashing in panic as she breathed the foul water into her lungs...

No, no, stop thinking about it! Keep going. She kicked hard, moving as quickly as she could. Twice the captain, floating backward, became jammed and she had to free him.

A glance at the gauge: 400 pounds of pressure.

We leave the bottom with five hundred. No less than that. That's an iron-clad rule. No exceptions.

Finally they got to the top deck—where the cabins were located and the corridor that led to the bridge and, beyond that, precious Outside, with its orange rope that would take them to the surface and a boundless supply of sweet air. But the captain was still dazed and it took a long minute to maneuver him through the opening while making certain that he kept the regulator in his mouth.

Then they were out of the dumbwaiter and floating into the main corridor. She swam beside the captain and grabbed him by his leather belt. But as she started to kick forward she braked suddenly to a stop. The knob on her air tank was snared. She reached back and found it was caught by the jacket on the body that'd been in the Ghost's stateroom.

The gauge: 300 pounds of pressure.

Goddamn, she thought, pulling fiercely at the snag, kicking. But the body was jammed in a doorway and the tail of his jacket had wound tightly around the tank knob. The harder she pulled the more snugly she was held.

The needle of the pressure gauge was now below the redline: 200 pounds remained.

She couldn't reach the snag behind her.

Okay, nothing to do...

She ripped open the Velcro of the BCD vest and slipped out of it. But as she turned to focus on the tangle the captain went into seizure. He kicked out hard, struck her in the face with his foot. The spotlight went out and the regulator popped from her mouth. The blow pushed her backward.

Darkness, no air...

No, no...

Rhyme...

She made a grab for the regulator but it floated somewhere behind her, out of reach.

Don't hold your breath.

Well, I fucking have to...

Blackness all around her, spinning in circles, groping desperately for her regulator.

Where were the Coast Guard baby-sitters?

Outside. Because I told them I wanted to search alone. How could she let them know she was in trouble?

Fast, girl, fast...

She patted the evidence bag and reached in desperately. Pulled out the Beretta 9mm. She pulled the slide to chamber a round and pressed the muzzle close to the wooden wall, where she knew she wouldn't hit Sen, and pulled the trigger. A flash and loud explosion. The blowback and recoil nearly broke her wrist and she dropped the weapon through the cloud of debris and gunpowder residue.

Please, she thought... Please...

No air...

No...

Then lights burst on silently as the dive chief and his assistant kicked fast into the corridor. Another regulator mouthpiece was thrust between her lips and Sachs began to breathe again. The dive chief got his secondary regulator into the captain's mouth. The stream of bubbles was faint but at least he was breathing.

Okay signs were exchanged.

Then the foursome made its way out of the bridge and to the orange rope. Thumbs-up. Calmer now that the risk of confinement was gone, Sachs concentrated on ascending leisurely, no faster than her bubbles, and breathing, deep in, deep out, as they left behind the ship of corpses.

Sachs lay in the cutter's sickbay, breathing deeply; she'd opted for nature's air, turning down the green oxygen mask the corpsman offered her—it would, she was afraid, only increase her sense of confinement, having something else pressed close against her body.

As soon as she'd climbed onto the bobbing deck she'd stripped off the wetsuit—the tight outfit itself had become another carrier of the pernicious claustrophobia—and wrapped the thick government-issue blanket around her. Two sailors escorted her to the sickbay to check out her wrist, which turned out not to be badly injured at all.

Finally, she felt well enough to venture up top. She popped two Dramamine and climbed the stairs to the bridge, observing that the helicopter was back, hovering over the cutter.

This ride wasn't for Sachs, however, but to evacuate unconscious Captain Sen to a Long Island medical center.

Ransom explained how they'd probably missed the captain during their search for victims. "Our divers did a long search, banging on the hull, and didn't get any response. We did a sound scan later and that came back negative too. Sen must've wedged himself in the air pocket, passed out, then come to later."

"Where's he going?" she asked.

"Marine station in Huntington, part of the hospital. They have a hyperbaric chamber there."

"Is he going to make it?"

Ransom said, "Doesn't look good. But if he survived twenty-four hours under these conditions then I guess anything's possible."

Slowly the chill subsided. She dried off and dressed once more in her jeans, T-shirt and sweatshirt and then hurried to the bridge to call Rhyme. Neglecting to share some of her underwater adventures, she told him that she'd found some evidence. "And maybe a wit."

"A
witness?"

"Found somebody still alive in the ship. The captain. Looks like he got some of the people trapped in the hold into the galley after the ship went down. But he was the only one who survived. If we're lucky he'll be able to give us some leads to the Ghost's operation in New York."

"Did he say anything?"

"He's unconscious. They're not even sure he's going to make it—hypothermia and decompression sickness. The hospital'll call as soon as they know something. Better have Lon send baby-sitters for him too. The Ghost'll come after him if he finds out he's still alive."