Deep Shadow

rubber mouthpiece. King’s instincts were still good, however. More coils of hose descended above me. Without pausing, I sprinted downward, kicking hard with my fins, towing the hose behind.

I knew that the thinnest section of the overhang was shoreward, midway. There, the composite of limestone and sand was only twenty feet thick. As I swam, I traced the contour beneath the wide ledge. Gradually, bands of sunlight that pierced the surface disappeared behind me. Ancillary light, mixed with water and shadows, created a turquoise gloom that soon enveloped me, but there was still enough visibility to make out details.

The underside of the overhang consisted of hardened marl and limestone. The facing was pocked like the surface of the moon. The formation suggested the slow-motion cataclysm that had formed our planet, the geological grinding of water, rock and wind over aeons.

When the plane had crashed, it must have been nosediving, because it had sheared off a pie-shaped wedge of the horizontal strata. Where the plane had made contact, the rock facing veered sharply upward, where the overhang had nearly been severed—a fault line.

I positioned myself beneath the fault line and jetted a few bursts of air into my BC—enough to create positive buoyancy. The vest lifted and anchored me against the rocks above. The hose was stretched so tight, however, that I couldn’t get a good working angle on the fault.

Once again, I tugged on the hose, demanding slack. Once again, I was prepared when King yanked hard in response. Instead of just a single, testing jolt, though, King continued pulling the hose, but now he was also kicking hard with his fins—he had to be, because I couldn’t stop his momentum. He began hauling me toward the edge of the overhang as if hauling in a fish.

I gripped the PVC pipe in both hands as he continued to drag me along the underside of the bridge. It went that way for several seconds, my aluminum bottle clanking as it banged against rocks. Finally, I managed to turn so that my fins were in front of me and I began kicking, fighting to reposition myself.

Above me, King was in an untethered inner tube. He had no leverage, only the swim fins I had loaned him, yet it wasn’t until I had freed one hand and jammed my arm deep into a rock vent that I finally stopped myself. As I battled, the strain on the hose was so great that I feared it would snap.

A rock vent . . .

In that instant, an image flashed into my mind: Will Chaser sticking his big teenage hand into a similar rock vent, then applying pressure as he tried to steady himself.

The image was detailed and luminous in my brain as I heard a sapwood-cracking sound, then a rumbling billiard-ball percussion.

I was still holding tight, one arm in the vent, one hand on the hose, when the ledge above me broke free. Then the entire overhang fell with the weight of a marble ceiling . . .

ELEVEN

WHEN WILL HAD RECOVERED FROM THE SHOCK OF being buried under a ton of rubble, his first thought was Not this again . . .

But it wasn’t the same. Not at all like a few weeks ago, his first moments sealed in a wooden crate, listening to the men who had kidnapped him shovel dirt onto the crate. He had never experienced such a sickening panic, which perhaps had numbed his threshold for fear. Because now, lying curled beneath the crushing weight of rock, Will felt in control. He was spooked and shaken, but he wasn’t crazy scared.

Or was he . . . ?

Will let his brain take stock, testing his appendages for pain or wounds, as he assessed his immediate state of mind. Nope, he was a little stunned, true, but he was not feeling the magnitude of fear that could be accurately defined as “scared shitless.”

Will would have been startled by his self-control had he spent more than a few seconds thinking about it, but he didn’t because he was too mad to waste time analyzing his emotions. Not just mad, he was furious—furious at the random, shitty bad luck and at his own uncertainty. He didn’t know what had caused the ledge to collapse on him or how deeply he was buried. All Will Chaser knew was that he had survived worse and he was going to survive this, by God!

At least he could move a little, and he did. Slowly, foot by foot, Will wormed and muscled his way into what might have been a rock crevice, where there was enough space around him to move his hands and find the little flashlight clipped to his BC. The flashlight was rubber coated, waterproof to thirty-three feet—or so the box had claimed—and he’d brought it on this trip even though he didn’t expect to get a chance to use it. Not underwater, anyway.

Will preferred using his own gear. It’s just the way he was, which is why he’d refused when Doc, the biologist, had offered to loan him two additional flashlights that looked expensive, with their flared lenses and dense metal tubes. Doc had tried to force him to carry the things, which at the time seemed stupid. Why the hell carry extra flashlights on a sunny winter afternoon? The lake didn’t look that deep, and they would be out of the water, packing to leave, long before sunset.

Well . . . turned out the biologist wasn’t so stupid, although there was now no doubt in Will’s mind that a weird, wild streak of bad luck stalked Doc Ford. Twice, Will had been with the guy, and both times the shit had really hit the fan.

Bey-HO-ayh. Back in Oklahoma, on the reservation, that was the word that the elder Skins used when referring to some pain-in-the-ass white guy who radiated bad luck. The word sure fit the man . . . And just when Will was starting to like the guy. Sort of.

When I get out of this mess, I’ll call Ford that—Bey-HO-ayh, and let him figure it out. Tell the man right to his face and watch how he reacts. Asshole!

Ford wasn’t an asshole, and Will didn’t really believe it. In fact, there was something solid and comforting about being around the guy. They’d had a pretty good talk the night before. The man had tried bullshitting him, telling the typical adult lies, but didn’t seem to mind at all when Will had called him on it.

Now, though, Will was mad and frustrated. Picturing himself confronting the big biologist gave him an immediate objective, one more reason to get himself free of this mess. He would dig his way from under the rocks, swim to the surface, and call to the man, “Hey, you—Bey-HO-AYH ! Take a guess at what that means, dipshit!”

It could happen. No, it would happen. Will felt certain of it when he found the hippie, Tomlinson, unhurt and alive curled next to him. Only a minute or two later, they heard Ford somewhere above them, signaling. If Ford wasn’t beside them or below them, he had to be free, out there, swimming around. Ford would help dig them out. If he didn’t, Will would manage by himself.

I’ve been in worse fixes than this.

No one could argue that.

Ten minutes later, though, Will had lost some of his confidence. The lake’s rock floor wasn’t solid as rock should be. It was as fragile as rotten ice. The floor kept breaking beneath them, first dropping him and the hippie into a small crevice, then a slightly bigger crevice, sort of like falling through the floors of an old house into progressively larger closets. As the water cleared, Will could see details when he or the hippie shined their lights, but the water was never clear for long.

The third implosion had dropped them in a limestone chamber, where the floor was littered with what looked like giant fossilized oyster shells. There were shells and rock packed tight all around them, with barely room to move, and the rocks overhead were too unstable to touch.

Will had tried digging upward, as had the old hippie. Remove a single chunk of limestone, though, and a barrel of sand and rock fell with it, pouring into the crater like water down a funnel. It destroyed visibility and gave Will a choking feeling, even though his regulator continued jetting air into his lungs when he inhaled through his rubber mouthpiece.

How much air did he have left? That was the question. And how long would the batteries of his flashlights last? That was another important one.

Will didn’t doubt that he could endure just about any damn thing bad luck threw at him, but his scuba tank lacked his heart. The thing was made of aluminum and had limits—the amount of air it could hold, for instance. Will knew it had to be getting low.

Using his flashlight, Will kept an eye on the pressure gauge that was attached to his vest. First time he