Deep Shadow

haunted specters to reside, if such things were real.

Not here at the bottom of a lake, though. Not in a place so far from the sea—and not linked to a random series of events that had been catalyzed by two equally random losers, King and Perry.

I began kicking toward the surface, left hand extended as a bumper, the silt so thick that my mind had nothing to process but internal data as I calculated my friend’s chances.

Tomlinson is never easy to assess or predict, and it was no different now, particularly after this chain of disasters. Tomlinson’s idea of a tough workout was swimming a case of beer out to his boat. To him, hangovers were the only variety of endurance sport worthy of his participation. And, up until the last week, he’d been a habitual ganja smoker.

Could he still be alive?

Possibly, I told myself, because it was also true that the man was a meditation guru, a master of breathing techniques. Living aboard a sailboat kept him fit, all leather and sinew, despite his devotion to excess and debauchery. Because of this, he might have another five or ten minutes of air left.

Tomlinson dead? No, it couldn’t happen. Bad enough was the probability that Will Chaser was gone, a tough teenage kid who, for no rational reason, seemed targeted by bad luck and fated to die young.

At twenty-eight feet, the water began to clear, although debris was still raining down—kept in suspension by the aftershock possibly or the result of miniature landslides from the last remaining truncated section of the overhang.

Beneath me, I could see a jumbled darkness that was a small mountain of rock. I decided that I would do another bounce dive if I didn’t find Will and Tomlinson somewhere above me, but it would be the last place I looked because if they were on the bottom they were dead. There was no way they could have survived a collapse so massive. It was possible that even the plane wreckage was now buried. Not that it mattered. The plane, the prospect of finding more gold, were meaningless to me now.

I continued swimming toward the surface.

Above me, striations of light showed that the northern section of limestone bridge was gone. All that remained was a cavernous space from which silt boiled—the same dark silt that earlier had reminded me of volcanic ash.

Fluttering down through the ash, I noticed, were several glittering objects. They were bright as fireflies. The particles formed a sparkling, descending pointillism that spun through the silt, raining down on me. Still swimming, I held out a hand and caught one.

It was a gold coin.

I looked at it for a moment, then caught another. There were dozens of the things. They appeared to gain speed as they fell.

I pocketed two of the coins but ignored the others. I didn’t need the flashlight to identify them. I knew what they were. They were more hundred-peso coins, stolen from the Cuban treasury.

Arlis had been right. He had found Batista’s gold plane.

Looking up, rays of late sunlight pierced the murk, I could make out the silhouette of the tractor-sized inner tube and King’s idle swim fins. The man was still up there, waiting to see if I was alive or dead and if I had found more gold.

But his were the only fins visible, which told me that Will and Tomlinson hadn’t made it to the surface. It gave me a sickening feeling seeing only King, and I slowed my ascent as I reassessed. If Tomlinson and the boy weren’t above me, then they were somewhere below me. Either that or they had disappeared into the porous limestone wall of the lake.

Thinking that gave me hope—but not much.

A jagged indentation marked where the overhang had broken free. It was a vertical crater the size of a closet. It looked as if a giant molar had been extracted from a limestone jaw. I knew I was in the right area because, surprisingly, the coiled ivory mammoth tusk appeared through the swirl of silt. It rested only a few yards from the crater, undisturbed, on a platform of rock that now constituted the edge of the lake’s shallow rim. The extra tank was gone, though, freed by the tremor, and had to be somewhere on the bottom.

There was no need to go looking for it now.

Probing ahead with my flashlight, I swam through black detritus, my hand extended. Visibility was so bad I had to find the inside wall of the crater by touch. If I pressed my face mask within a foot of the wall, I could make out coral patterns on gray limestone and dinosaur-sized oyster shells.

High on an inside corner, I discovered an opening. It was a karst vent less than two feet wide. I poked my head inside, feeling the limestone hard against the back of my neck. It took me several seconds to figure out that the vent angled downward, an incline as steep as a child’s slide.

I considered pulling myself into the hole to see where it led, but an act so risky demanded some thought. Entering an overhead environment underwater is almost always a bad idea and often fatal. I knew from reading, and from friends, that more than a hundred divers had been killed in Florida’s caves in recent years and an unsettling percentage of the victims had been cave trained and well equipped. I was neither, so the decision wasn’t an easy one.

Unless the bodies of Will and Tomlinson lay under a ton of rubble on the bottom, there was still a chance that they had been trapped in and protected by a similar vent. Even though visibility was poor, I could see that the area was a catacomb of holes and crevices.

With so many conduits available, it was possible that they had clawed and dug their way into adjoining chambers and were now far from the site of the first landslide. If so, those chambers might be linked to the vent I had just discovered. In fact, considering the location, it could have been the very place where they had been trapped to begin with.

I made a low pass over the sandy plateau. There were now no bubbles to be seen. That should have been enough to convince me, but I couldn’t let go of the hope that Tomlinson and the boy had followed one of the limestone corridors to safety.

The opening to the vent I had found, though, was so damn small. Would they have risked it? I tried to squeeze my shoulders into the hole, but the pillar valve on my tank stopped me, clanking against the rocks. Even if I had removed my tank, the space would have been too tight. But Tomlinson and the boy were both smaller than me. If they were desperate— and they were desperate—they could have forced their way into the thing and followed it.

I backed out of the hole and tapped my flashlight on my tank, hoping for a response. Several times I signaled, but there was no reply.

It was as telling as the absence of exhaust bubbles, but I refused to accept that silence as proof, either.

If they had followed the tunnel, I reasoned, they might be too far away to hear me. It was possible. If the vent actually did connect to a series of other tunnels and adjoining chambers, they could be a hundred yards or more from where they’d originally been trapped. In this part of Florida, there were underground labyrinths that traveled for miles before they dead-ended.

Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely. But I wanted to believe it, so I became even more determined to search the tunnel.

If I’d had my knife, it would have been easier to widen the opening, but Perry had grabbed it soon after I’d taken the thing off. Instead, I clipped the flashlight to my BC, light on, and used my hands to rip away chunks of limestone. It wasn’t easy work, and I knew too well that I was inviting another landslide.

After a couple of minutes, I tried signaling again, then used the silence as additional proof that I was making the right decision. My partners weren’t dead, they had traveled too far to hear me. I had to get closer before signaling again.

The human mind is at its inventive best when misinterpreting data to support a specific hope.

I flipped the air bottle over my head, pushed it into the hole and followed, feeling the jagged limestone tear at my skin and wet suit. The vent widened, briefly, then narrowed as I traveled downward, walking on my fingers and not using my fins, which was the best way to avoid disturbing the silt.

The vent wasn’t much wider than a drainpipe. With the flashlight on, the rock walls were orange, encrusted with oxidized sediment. Exhaust bubbles, percolating around my faceplate, loosened the sediment, staining the