He relaxed his body, hoping desperately-through a film of waning consciousness-that he could convince his attacker that he was dead. But when the man felt muscle resistance ease, he tightened his grip.
Then, as suddenly as the weight had fallen on him, it left him. He was free. He drew a painful, rattling breath.
He heard Treece’s voice whisper, with bitterness and feral ferocity unlike anything he had ever heard, the single word “Kevin!”
Sanders raised himself on one elbow and looked.
Kevin lay on his back, Treece kneeling on his chest and pulling his hair so his head tilted at a cockeyed angle. With his other hand, Treece held the carving knife at Kevin’s throat. Kevin’s legs kicked, then fell to the dirt.
“You told him!” Treece whispered. “Why?”
Kevin said nothing.
“Why? For money?” Treece’s voice was no longer angry; it was choked with the sorrow of betrayal. “For money?”
Still Kevin was silent.
In the reflections of moonlight off the water, Sanders could see their eyes: Kevin’s flat and expressionless, looking through Treece with a kind of blank resignation; Treece’s shiny, enraged, unbelieving.
“Oh, you sorry, sorry bugger,” Treece said, and when the last whispered word had faded, he punched the point
of the knife into Kevin’s throat and drew the blade quickly across the neck. There was a black line of blood, a foam of bubbles, and a wet, wheezing sigh. Treece hung his head and closed his eyes.
A beam of light swept across the cove toward them, and Sanders heard Cloche’s voice call, “Kevin?”
Sanders whispered, “Treece?”
Treece did not answer.
“Treece!”
The light moved closer, and Sanders knew that in a few seconds it would illuminate half of Treece’s back. He rose to his knees and lunged at Treece, hitting him with his shoulder and knocking him to the ground. The light swept over them, stopped, and moved back to the water.
“Kevin?” Cloche called again. “Idiot!”
Lying on the ground, with Sanders next to him, Treece gradually shook off his stupor. “All right,” he said. “All right. At least now we know.”
He crawled on his stomach to the end of the path, looked at Cloche’s boat, and returned to Sanders. “Looks like there’s two or three divers, plus a couple fellas they’ll leave on the boat. We’ll wait till the divers are overboard, then try to get to
“The tanks have bad air.”
“Not all. I only filled two that night. The others were already full. There should be four good ones aboard.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll see how many men there are and how they’re working. If they’re working two at a time in the cave, with hand lights, we’ve a chance to pick ’em off.
Odds are, the divers won’t be armed. They’ll have their hands full with the glass.”
“Pick them off?” Sanders said. “Why?”
“To stop ’em before they get the ampules. We can’t get the glass up with those yahoos around, and I’m damned if I’m about to let Cloche have what’s down there.”
“What do we do? Stab them?”
“Only if you have to. Try to grab the regulator hose and cut it and get the hell out of his way. A man with a sudden-cut air hose is a bloody menace; he’ll grab a baby’s mouthpiece.”
“But if we cut their air hoses, they’ll just come up; they’ll be waiting for us on the surface.”
“It’s my bet these chaps are still a bit wary of the water. Put ’em in a panic, they’re like as not to hold their breath on the way up, or lose their way and drown in the cave. But even suppose they don’t. If we cut all their air hoses, they’ll be spooky as hell about going back down there. And Cloche doesn’t have extra equipment.”
“So they wait for us to come up and then shoot us.”
“We won’t come up. It’s dark. They’d have a hell of a time following a bubble trail. We’ll stay on the bottom, go out of the cove and around the corner. There’s a place about fifty yards down where we can land.”
“He won’t give up-especially when he finds that guy floating off the reef.”
“No, he’ll be back. But all we need is the rest of tonight to get that glass out of there and destroy it.”
Sanders paused briefly, then said, “Okay.”
They heard splashes and fragments of conversation.
Someone said, “Where’s Kevin at?” and Cloche replied, “Drunk, I suppose. He is of no consequence now; he gave us full value.”
A few more splashes, then silence.
Treece waited for ten or fifteen seconds, then crept out into the open. Cloche’s boat floated twenty yards out in the cove, off
“Fins, mask, and tank,” Treece whispered.
“Don’t fool with weights. They’ll make too much noise.”
The necks of the steel air tanks gleamed in the moonlight, and Sanders saw that it would be impossible to pull the tanks out of the rack without being seen.
“Old Indian trick,” Treece said, removing a two-pound lead weight from a nylon belt. He reached to the transom and uncleated the stern line, letting the stern swing a few feet away from the dock, then recleated the line. “When you hear the splash, grab a tank and go over the side between the boat and the dock. I’ll be right along.” He threw the weight as hard as he could—a straight-arm arc that used the muscles of the shoulder, not the arm—and the weight cleared the bridge of the other boat by several feet and splashed into the water beyond.
Sanders rose, removed a tank from the rack, held it overboard, and slid into the water after it, aware of the sounds of footsteps and voices and the cocking of a rifle. Treece joined him. They checked each other’s tanks, making sure the air valves were turned on, and the air was good. “Hold my hand till we get to the bottom,” Treece said. “We’ll stay there for a minute and have a look-see. Their light’ll tell us where they are.”
Hand in hand, they sank below the surface and kicked to the bottom.
Kneeling in the bushes at the top of the hill, Gail heard the splash and the voices. She got to her feet in a stooped stance, ducked as a beam of light swept toward her, then rose again and looked down, half-expecting, dreading, to hear a gunshot.
But there was nothing, only the incessant taxi horns. Holding the cleaver—scared of it but glad of it, as she had been of the shotgun—she started down the path.
Near the bottom of the path, with her hands in front of her like a blind person in a strange room, she stepped on one of Kevin’s legs. Shocked, she lurched backward and fell into the bushes, cracking branches as she fell.
She heard a voice: “Kevin?”
She held her breath.
“Go over there and look around.”
A splash; sounds of a man swimming.
She exhaled and inhaled, and her nostrils filled with the stench of feces. Terrified, she extricated herself from the bushes and scrambled up the hill.
On the bottom of the cove, Sanders and Treece knelt together, still holding hands. Forty or fifty feet away, the cave was as visible as a proscenium stage in a dark theater, illuminated not by hand-held lights but by huge floodlights. As they watched, a diver swam out of the cave and turned on a flashlight. He carried a mesh bag full of ampules. Two other divers passed him, heading for the cave, switching off their flashlights as they entered the pool of light.
Treece tugged at Sanders” hand, and they kicked toward the cave. When they were within ten feet of the entrance, just outside the range of the floodlights, Treece let go of Sanders’ hand and gently pushed him against the face of the cliff, signaling for him to wait.
Treece dropped to his stomach and pulled himself along the sand until he could look inside the cave.
