Deep Shadow

water with a bloody tint. With the light off, the walls seemed to expand around me as if the shock of illumination had caused them to spasm tight around my body. I preferred the illusion of space so progressed in darkness.

Ten yards into the vent, though, I stopped, finally admitting to myself, This is pointless.

I didn’t want to believe that, either. Intellectually, I knew it was true, but my brain had latched on to a fanciful thread. It was the irrational conviction that Will Chaser had indeed recently been here in this same dark space. It was an intangible sensation . . . a feeling, not a thought. Tomlinson had been here, too, presumably, but it was the image of the boy that was strongest in my mind.

I told myself, That’s ridiculous. Absurd—you’re imagining things, Ford.

I knew that was true, too. Tomlinson was my closest friend. I barely knew the boy—why would I feel some sensory connection with him? Plus, there is no validity to a perception that has been catalyzed by hope alone—or by fear. That variety of skewed thinking was the source of all superstition.

After another ten yards, I stopped again and tried the flashlight. Its beam created a milky tunnel through the silt. Was there an opening ahead? I couldn’t be sure. I pressed ahead a few more feet before deciding that I was wrong. It was another illusion spawned by wishful thinking.

The vent was so cramped, I couldn’t move my elbows, but I could move my right wrist. Eight times, I tapped the flashlight against my tank. Not hard—I didn’t want to risk disturbing the rocks overhead. The possibility of being crushed was too real and the thought of being trapped here unable to move, biding my time until I ran out of air, was terrifying.

Three more times I signaled, but there was no reply.

It brought me back to my senses. Intellect displaced imagination, and I began to back out of the vent. As I did, I felt a sickening, visceral dread. It was an out-of-body sense of unreality. My movements became robotic as I paused to signal one last time, then waited in a roaring silence—a silence that became hypnotic, pounding inside my head. It communicated a single, throbbing reality: They’re gone . . . both dead. You can’t help them by killing yourself.

It was an unavoidable truth. I backed out of the hole, expecting the tunnel to collapse each time my elbow collided with a rock or when I had to brace a knee and apply force to lever myself backward another few inches.

When I was finally free, my mind functioned by rote as I continued exploring the area. I saw a few more coins, bright and solitary in the shallows. The sight catalyzed an irrational anger in me. Yes, Arlis had found Batista’s gold plane—so what? I had no idea if there was a ton of gold beneath me or if the treasure included only the handful of coins I had seen fluttering into the depths. It no longer mattered. The plane wreck had cost two more lives. Nothing was worth that.

I kicked toward the shallows, my eyes moving from the bottom to the surface still hoping for a miracle. Once again, I searched the surface, hoping to see two pairs of legs dangling, but there was nothing.

Now even King was gone. I could see the underside of the inner tube still tied to my marker buoy, the hose floating in a loose coil, but the jet dredge was unattended.

I nursed a momentary hope that the son of a bitch had drowned, but only because I was still in shock. As I began to recover, though, my focus switched from the death of my friends to how I would now deal with the skinny drifter, with his slicked-back hair and his smirking contempt.

King had intentionally sabotaged my rescue attempt, slowing me as we’d positioned the jet dredge. He had caused me to lose a precious ninety seconds when I’d dropped the spare tanks. It was King who was responsible for the final cataclysmic collapse that had taken Tomlinson and Will, probably crushing them both.

King. He had taunted and manipulated me, confident that I, like most people, would not stray beyond the boundaries of normal behavior. But the man had no idea who he was dealing with. King and Perry were both about to find out.

I realized that I was hyperventilating. The realization produced a reaction that I found perversely comforting. A cold flooding calm moved through me that was familiar. It leached color from the glowing orange numerals of my dive watch. It dulled the undulate sky above. The reaction gave me focus.

King was up there. Maybe the sound of the ledge collapsing had spooked him. Maybe he had simply attempted further sabotage by abandoning me.

It didn’t matter. The man was somewhere onshore, and I would find him. There was no rush now. King and Perry wouldn’t murder Arlis. Arlis was key to controlling me. They wouldn’t kill me, either—not right away, at least—because they needed me to recover the gold.

Gold. They had Arlis as leverage. But I had leverage, now, too. I had two additional coins in my vest and there were more coins on the bottom of the lake. Play it right and their collective greed would give me the opening I needed.

I’ll kill them both.

That’s what I was thinking.

My gauges told me that I had burned another quarter bottle of air while worming my way in and out of the vent. It was additional evidence that Will and Tomlinson had perished if they had jammed themselves into a tunnel.

Comparing open-space diving to cave diving is like comparing a game of paintball to actual combat. The same is true of wreck penetration. It’s not recreational sport, it’s an unforgiving craft.

An overhead environment sparks involuntary physiological responses. Pulse and respiration increase proportionally as visibility and space decrease. The fight-or-flight sensors become the brain’s primary supplier of data, and both the hypothalamus and the medulla begin a chemical dialogue with the spinal cord, releasing epinephrine to fuel a blooming panic.

If you’re human, you react, and there is no ignoring it. The responses can be mitigated only by a hell of a lot of training, preparation and experience.

If Will and Tomlinson had attempted to escape through a vent, their air consumption would have doubled, even at twenty feet. In all probability, they’d run out of air long before I had returned to the water.

Even so, I was reluctant to surface. I couldn’t give up without at least checking the rubble below. I dreaded the thought of finding the bodies of my friends, but the idea of leaving Tomlinson and Will Chaser here, alone, on the bottom of this remote sinkhole, was even more repugnant.

I checked my dive computer to confirm that I hadn’t accumulated a decompression obligation. I still had almost half my air remaining, and I needed time to think about how I would handle King and Perry when I surfaced.

No rush, I reminded myself as I kicked downward, descending headfirst into the blue. It had taken me less than two minutes to bounce-dive to the bottom and recover the spare tanks. Because of the depth, I couldn’t risk lingering. But neither did I have to hurry.

At a hundred feet, visibility began to deteriorate, but I could still decipher the shape of limestone blocks and shell rubble that comprised a new underwater hillock—the term mogote came into my mind. Silt spiraled downward into the hillside, the flow line defined by a sumping whirlpool vortex.

It would have been interesting to introduce the chemical fluorescein into the lake, then trace that brilliant green dye to its emergence points. No telling where this underground river flowed, and there were probably many exit points—adjoining sinkholes, flowing surface rivers, the Gulf of Mexico sixty miles west or even Florida Bay a hundred and fifty miles to the south. It was not only possible, it was a probability that had been well documented by Florida hydrogeologists.

At the top of the hillock, I paused and used my flashlight. The beam penetrated the murk below, a solitary white laser in which silt became animated, boiling like smoke from a subterranean fire.

After checking my gauges—105 ft—I followed the beam down the hillside, kicking slowly. I told myself that I was looking for more coins. They would be useful for convincing King I had discovered a great treasure. But I was, in fact, on a reluctant search for two bodies.

As I descended, a peripheral awareness confirmed that the landslide had covered much of the plane wreckage. Only the nose of the plane was visible now. The vague geometrics of the cockpit windows were as bleak and unresponsive as the eye sockets of a skull. Atop the fuselage, I saw what may have been several more coins. Ironic, if they had come to rest here.