Infernal

3

By midday they were ready to get to work.

Gia hadn't minded his being away two extra days, but she had minded the scuba part. He'd promised he'd be careful.

After that the rest of the morning had been frenzied activity, starting with hiring one of the local minivan taxis to take them to St. George's Parish. Tom had called around and found a place there that had what they needed.

The cab dropped them at a salvage company were they picked up a small pickup loaded with a diesel pump and coiled lengths of ribbed plastic hose. The rental charge went on Jack's card.

A block away they rented two scuba setups: wet suits, vests, weights, air tanks, masks, snorkels, flippers, and regulators. That charge too went on Jack's card.

Good thing he had a high limit.

The credit card company regularly offered John Tyleski a higher credit limit. And John, good consumer that he was, kept accepting.

Then came the harrowing trip in the truck from St. George's at the base of the shaft all the way around to Somerset Parish near the barb on the hook where they'd left the boat.

The accent wasn't the only thing British about Bermuda. Here too they drove on the wrong side of the road.

Tom did okay navigating the narrow, two-lane roads in the left lane, saying you adapt pretty quickly. The only time he seemed to have a problem was at the roundabouts. He started to turn right at the first. He was looking left when he should have been looking right. Jack's last-minute warning yell saved them from a head-on with a taxi.

And Gia had been worried about scuba. The reefs would be a picnic compared to the roads. It might have been off season, but they were busy. No speeding and few passing opportunities on these tight strips of asphalt, and no shortcuts—at least none known to nonnatives—on this narrow string of islands.

The ten-mile trip took almost an hour, but they'd made it.

Jack immediately started his scuba lessons off the Beresfords' dock.

Tom had told him it was easy, that they'd be down in that sand hole by midday. Piece of cake.

Sure. Piece of cake.

But he had to admit his brother was a good teacher. And Tom had been right about it not being rocket science: Breathe through the mouthpiece, inflate your vest when you want to rise, deflate it when you want to descend. Know how to clear your mask and equalize your ear pressure every three feet or so as you descend.

In less than an hour he was reasonably functional with the gear and fairly comfortable in the water.

Jack wondered why no one had ever told him about the wonders of scuba diving. Of course, not many of his acquaintances were the scuba type, and Manhattan wasn't exactly a dive mecca. Still…

No number of Jacques Cousteau specials or repeat viewings of The Deep could convey the magic of becoming part of the sea habitat, of hanging out with the fish and the mollusks and crustaceans and all the graceful, undulating plants in their own world.

But it was more than hanging out. It was becoming one with them. To sink beneath the surface and be able to stay there, to float weightless, still, silent, watching. The peace, the serenity, the solitude… like nothing he'd ever experienced.

He loved it.

Then they'd boarded the Sahbon and Tom steered them out of the sound and toward the reefs, using his GPS doodad to guide them to the spot that supposedly contained the remains of the Sombra. They'd anchored over a sand hole and suited up.

"Ready?" Tom said.

With his skinny arms and legs arrayed around a big gut stretching the neoprene of his hooded wet suit to its tensile limits, he looked ridiculous. All he needed were a couple of Ping-Pong eyeballs and he'd be ready to play one of the aliens in Killers from Space.

"What if I said no?"

Sinking beneath the surface off the dock and jumping off a boat eight miles from shore were not quite the same. Not even close. He looked back at the roofs on the islands gleaming in the midday sun.

"Jack…"

"Okay, I'm ready," he said, then added, "You sure this is the place?"

Tom nodded. "Sombra waits below."

"If you say so. What if we see a shark?"

Tom gave a dismissive wave. "If you do, it'll be a harmless variety. Now, here's how it's going to work. See the way we're pulling on the anchor line? That's the way the current is running. We're situated over the upstream end of the sand hole. That's the way we'll work: Start upstream and slowly move downstream. Got it?"

"Sure. Instead of kicking sand in our own faces, it'll all float downstream."

"Exactly. One of us handles the hose while the other stays low and watches for artifacts—preferably of the gold and silver variety."

"And that's going to uncover the wreck?"

"I know it sounds simplistic, but that's the way it's done. The intake hose brings seawater to the pump; the pump then shoots it through the outflow hose; the stream of water from the nozzle sweeps away the bottom sand a layer at a time. It's simple but ingenious."

Jack looked around. The Sahbon sat alone on the glittering water. The coast of St. George's lay seven or eight miles to the south. To the north, past the outer rim of the reef, the bottom dropped off to six hundred feet, and then a couple of miles down to the base of the Bermuda rise.

He felt exposed out here.

And uncomfortable.

Clear sky, clear air, clear water, gentle breeze, glittering waves… where did this vague unease come from?

"Tom, what are we really doing here?"

His brother's face was a study of innocent perplexity. "I don't know how to answer that, Jack. We're starting an impromptu archaeological excavation in search of long-lost treasure in an attempt to save my ass. What other reason could there be?"

Jack couldn't think of one. But he sensed one.

"All right. Let me ask you once again: If the Bermuda coast guard or navy or whatever they use to patrol these waters stops by and asks who we are and what we're doing, what are we going to say?"

He'd posed this to Tom a number of times since this morning but had yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

"They won't. No reason they should. We're anchored well outside the reef preserve, we're nowhere near any of the protected wrecks. We're just a couple of divers."

"But just say they do a random check. We are, in a very true sense, illegal aliens. I don't want to end up in that prison."

"Will you stop worrying? You sound like a nervous old biddy."

Attention to details, anticipating potential problems before they became real… it had kept Jack alive and on the right side of jail bars. So far.

Tom stepped over to the pump. They'd placed the heavy, steamer-trunk-sized contraption near the transom. The hoses were in the water and ready to go. The short feeder had a weighted end that hung over the port side and drifted a couple of feet below the surface; the coils of the longer one, a fifty footer, floated on the starboard side.

A touch of the starter button brought the pump's diesel engine to sputtering life. The end of the longer hose began bubbling and snaking about as it filled with water drawn through its shorter brother.

Tom fitted his mask over his face. "See you downstairs," he said in a nasal voice.

He stuck the mouthpiece between his lips, waved, then fell backward into the water. He hit with a splash, righted himself, then grabbed the end of the hose. He motioned Jack to follow him, then kicked away toward the bottom.

Jack adjusted his own mask, then took a test breath through the mouthpiece. Everything seemed to be working, but he hesitated. He was about to jump into a hole and couldn't help but remember another hole, the one in the Everglades, the one that had no bottom…

Shaking it off, he seated himself on the gunwale, tank over the water and—here goes—toppled backward.

He hit the water and let himself sink. Immediately the tank and the weight belt became weightless, the clumsy, unwieldy, uncomfortable gear became lithe and supremely functional. He held his nose and popped his ears, then kicked toward the bottom, following the hose down to where Tom hovered and waited forty feet below.

This sand hole was a forty-foot-deep oblong depression in the reef, about half as wide as it was long. They'd anchored near the upstream edge, so as Jack dropped through the crystalline water, popping his ears whenever the pressure became uncomfortable, he checked out the nearby coral wall.

Something strange here.

He drifted over for a closer look. The coral looked bleached and barren—no sea grasses, no algae, no vegetation at all. No sponges or anemones, no starfish or sea urchins. A closer look showed not a single living coral polyp.

The reef was dead.

Jack had heard of coral blights that wiped out entire reefs. Maybe that was the story here. He looked around and could not find a single fish. Even in the shallow water by the dock he'd been accompanied by a wide variety of brightly colored fish. He'd been able to identify a parrotfish and an angelfish, but the rest were strangers.

Here, on this reef, however… no movement, no color.

In a way that made sense. The coral polyps were the bedrock of the reef ecosystem. When they died, the hangers-on went off in search of greener pastures.

But you'd think you'd see at least one fish.

Jack did a full three-sixty. Nope. Not one. Nothing alive in this sand hole except Tom and him.

He shook off the creeps crawling up his back and kicked down toward where Tom was impatiently motioning him to come on!

When Jack reached him, Tom signaled him to sink closer to the bottom. When Jack was down, almost prone, Tom aimed the hose at the floor. The invisible stream of water stirred up the sand, billowing it up to then drift downstream, leaving a smooth depression in the floor.

Although Tom had explained it to him, he'd needed to see it in action to appreciate the simplicity of using a stream of seawater to move undersea sand.

Holding the hose at a low angle, Tom swept it back and forth in slow arcs, removing a thin layer, then stepping forward to repeat the process along the center of the sand hole's long axis. Sort of like power washing a patio or walk, except that it exposed no clean surface, just more sand.

Wondering how far down to the bottom of the sand, Jack hovered behind, checking the newly exposed layer for anything that might be man-made. It was slow going, and on their first pass they found nothing.

So it was back to the upstream end for another try. This time, midway along the course, Jack felt a tap on his wet suit hood. He looked up to see Tom excitedly pointing at the sand.

Just ahead lay the edge of a piece of wood, rotted and crumbling but still bearing unmistakable signs that it had been milled. This was no remnant of a sunken log. This had once been a plank.