listening to the kid’s methodical digging. They rarely used the tank now—only when Will got tired or when Tomlinson felt the need to cleanse the stink from his lungs. He was getting into the challenge of holding his breath, sometimes glancing at the firefly dots of his watch and counting off the seconds as if they were a mantra.
Once into Tomlinson’s mind came the image of Will swinging the knife too hard, the stainless blade ricocheting off a rock, and he felt a welling terror. What would happen if the boy dropped the knife?
Lose the knife and they were goners. They would never escape from this hellish place with its unholy odor. They would be doomed to share the breathing hole—like two incompetent Arctic seals—until hypothermia or insanity put their reins into God’s hands.
After half an hour of digging, and sharing the airhole, Tomlinson nudged Will away long enough to shout out several calls for help. It wasn’t the first time that he and the boy had tried, and he didn’t expect results. That’s when a better idea came into Tomlinson’s mind. He thrust two fingers into his mouth and tortured his own eardrums by blowing a rhythmic series of piercing notes.
Three times Tomlinson whistled for help, but then he felt a structural tremor in the limestone beneath them and thought,
That was the end of that—for a while, anyway. It was better to dig their way to safety, Tomlinson decided, than to risk another catastrophe.
As Will continued to dig, Tomlinson made an effort to move his consciousness on to a brighter plane of thought. One of the basic exercises in Vipassana meditation was to perceive air flowing through the body as if the veins and capillaries were a river. Considering the situation, how much more positive could he get?
Tomlinson’s focus shifted to an imaginary breathing port in his belly. His eyes monitored the sweep hand on his watch, timing himself. Every ninety seconds or so, he would take a breath or two from the octopus hose and then return to his meditation while Will hacked away.
Because of the watch, Tomlinson was able to mark to the second when it happened. They had been using the tank sparingly, but this time when he placed the regulator in his mouth and attempted to inhale he got nothing. There wasn’t enough pressure inside the thing to open the demand lever in his mouthpiece.
Beside him, he felt Will’s body jolt—the boy had attempted to grab a breath from the primary hose and his regulator had gone dead at the same instant.
It was almost sunset, 5:45 p.m.
They were out of air.
EIGHTEEN
ONE HOUR AFTER SUNSET, AT 7:12 P.M., KING SAID TO me, “Well, Jock-o, the ball’s in your corner now. Come back with a big fat sack of coins and we’ll say
He hurled a net bag at me. They had cut me loose, and because the truck was running, lights on, I was able to duck before the bag hit me in the face.
I had resumed the tactic of ignoring King, and was speaking only to Perry. As I Velcroed a spare bottle to a harness, then added a clip-on weight, I said to him, “You can push all you want, but I still need someone in the water to help me with the jet dredge.”
Perry replied, “That’s something we’ll have to talk about.” Sending a private signal to me, possibly. Since King would be the one going in the water, maybe he didn’t want to discuss it in front of his partner. I took it as a good sign.
“When?” I asked.
“Later. But I want some proof this time.”
I said, “Okay—but keep him away from that dredge until I need him. Keep him away from all my gear, in fact.”
King claimed he had repaired the hose. He hadn’t, of course, so I had made the dredge marginally workable by screwing a radiator clamp tight at the end of the hose to constrict water flow. It would cut through sand, but it wouldn’t move rock.
Perry was irritable and tired of making decisions. “You don’t say much, but, when you do, it’s always trouble.”
I told him, “Blame your partner, not me.”
King snapped, “I didn’t break that hose and you know it. Stop blaming other people for your own screwups. That’s a sign of immaturity, Jock-o.”
The man was maddening. I let him see that I wasn’t listening, but he continued to talk, anyway.
“How about this? How about you do what we tell you to do and keep your mouth shut? What’s so hard about that? I think you’ve been around ol’ Perry long enough to know he’s got quite a temper on him when things don’t go our way. Dredge or no dredge, you’d better come back with more coins, Jock-o. If you don’t, Grandpa will end up with a knife in his ribs—and you’re next on the menu.”
I was sitting at the edge of the lake doing a final check of my gear. Everything had to be as solid as I could make it for this dive and I didn’t have much to work with. There were only two tanks of air left, counting the bottle I would use, and one extra regulator. An important additional piece of equipment was a fishing reel I had found in the back of Arlis’s truck. It was an old Penn grouper reel, loaded with a couple hundred yards of monofilament that would be useful if I needed to put down a lay line. Old fishing line was a poor substitute for a thousand yards of nylon cord on a Jasper reel, but it would have to do.
The two cons didn’t know it, of course, but I wasn’t going into the lake to fetch coins. I was going down into that damn drainpipe-sized cave again to search for Tomlinson and Will.
I hadn’t imagined hearing Tomlinson’s shrill whistle. Maybe the boy was still alive, too. They had somehow managed to find an air bell or a breathing space above the water table. It had to be one of the two, and now they were trapped beneath the limestone awaiting rescue.
I went over and over it in my mind, arguing the likelihood. In all my reading, I could remember only a few rare mentions of air bells. Those were in caves formed during the Pleistocene before the water table fell and then rose again—but I had never heard of an air bell in Florida. Limestone was too porous to maintain the watertight seal an air pocket requires, but it was
A disturbing fact nagged at me, though. The whistling sound hadn’t come from beneath the lake. It had seemed to originate in the swamp far beyond the shoreline. But sound plays tricks when filtered through water or when reverberating through limestone. It was also possible that Tomlinson and the kid had followed a karst vein beyond the perimeter of the lake. Even so, I would have to start where they had started—underwater, in that damn tunnel.
It wouldn’t have been an easy operation even with a chopper standing by and a fully manned rescue team. Alone, the difficulties were too many to list. Finding Will and Tomlinson wouldn’t be easy, but, if I did, that’s when the real work would begin. With only one extra tank and regulator, we would have to somehow buddy-breathe through the tunnel, then back to the surface. I couldn’t picture how that was possible in a conduit so narrow, but if I found them we would have to manage.
All I knew for certain was that they were alive and I had to hurry. A true air bell—a pocket of air trapped in a rock chamber beneath the water’s surface—would keep them alive for only a short amount of time. Because of that, it was pointless to dwell on the obstacles. I had an objective. I would move toward it. Sometimes, circumstances
