He took a deep breath of ocean-and-pine-scented air, wanting to remember the moment in detail, to impress its every sight and sound upon his brain so that he could call them up at whim even when he was old and feebleminded and unable to recall his own name. For several minutes before the skiff had appeared, Cobbs had heard the loud revving of its engine from out on the water, but had tried to curb his expectation until he’d actually spotted it through his lenses. And when he did, when he’d seen Dex was alone, well, Cobbs had felt almost like he was going to lift off into the stratosphere himself. Only at that moment, when the suspense had finally ended, had he realized the true fervor with which he’d hated Ricci. Only then too had he learned the whole of his capacity for murder without remorse or fear of punishment, without anything in his heart but gleeful satisfaction.
Now the skiff veered to starboard and came on dead ahead toward shore, its bow riding up high over the chop, the roar of its engine reaching a crescendo that appropriately matched the joy swelling up inside Cobbs as he imagined how Tom Ricci must have suffered in his last, struggling moments of life.
Within seconds after Ricci got his first hint that something might be wrong with his air supply, it became apparent that he had a serious problem. Before a full minute had passed, that problem escalated to a full-blown crisis.
The breath that triggered the warning seemed slightly harder to draw from his regulator than normal, and while it could have been attributable to minor overexertion — he’d been working steadily against strong currents for over an hour — a skeptical voice in his head dispelled that idea outright. He was an experienced diver, and pacing himself underwater was second nature.
He took another inhalation, another. Each came with greater effort than the last, and gave that inner voice an edge of added urgency.
Ricci snapped a glance down at his psi gauge. Its dial told him the cylinder had over 1,000 psi left in it — a full twenty-five percent of its capacity — but his mind and body were telling him something else. Although he had stopped all movement, put himself at rest in the water, his tank was barely complying with his demand for oxygen.
The dial was wrong.
The dial was lying to him.
Ricci cast aside his questions about how that could be, and bore in on his essential predicament. He was running out of air. Running out, and would very possibly exhaust what the tank had left in it within moments.
His heart pounded. He felt panic hatching inside him, and chased it off. He had to hang on and stay calm, take things one small step at a time. If he couldn’t think straight, it was time to get somebody to blow taps, because he was good as dead.
He pulled the regulator away from his mouth and reached into the satchel that contained his reserve canister, making sure to exhale into the water as he did so. At his present depth he’d be under almost four atmospheres of pressure, and with the scant volume of air in his lungs, would put far too much squeeze on them by holding his breath.
Quickly placing the flange of its snorkel mouthpiece between his lips and gums, he twisted open the valve and breathed.
Nothing flowed from it.
Somehow he was not at all surprised.
The thing he needed to do now was to get outside the hollow. No, wait, check that. First he had to get rid of whatever encumbrances he didn’t absolutely need to be carrying.
Ricci released his bulging tote and, given the extremity of his circumstances, was surprised by the keen pang of regret he felt over having to part with his unprecedented take. He almost tossed the spare oxygen tank as well, but caught himself at the last instant, pulled off its J-shaped snorkel attachment, and put it back into his satchel before letting go of the useless canister. Then he put both hands on the rocky floor of the hollow — an area he had just moments ago picked clean of urchins — and thrust backward and out through its entrance.
He tried to wring more air from his primary tank as he emerged into the eelgrass, but could scarcely get enough to fill his chest. It was like trying to inhale through a gag, or a smothering hand clapped over his mouth. Two labored inhalations later, the unit was depleted.
Ricci again felt desperation skittering around the edges of his thoughts. And again he blocked it out, like someone slamming the shutters against a cold December wind.
If he’d learned anything from his underwater survival training with the SEALs, it was that diving was all about balancing pressure. Internal and external, mental and physical. When you ran into trouble in the water, your immediate impulse was to focus solely on getting air into your lungs. It was what made a drowning person climb on the back of a would-be rescuer and inadvertently push him under. And it was usually a fatal error. Unless you were born with gills, you had to learn to modify your instincts. Concentrate on the balance, and the skills you’d acquired for maintaining it through controlled breathing, to maximize any available oxygen resource.
Assuming you had one.
His mind raced back to one of the early lessons he’d been taught by his drill instructor, a former UDT man named Rackel who’d seemingly been born in a frog suit. The last-ditch technique for surfacing with no obtainable oxygen was a free ascent. You shed your weights and let your own positive buoyancy take you up, breathing out through your mouth to release air from the lungs, while spread-eagling your body to increase friction between yourself and the water — and slow your upward motion. Air compressed as you dove, expanded as you rose, and there was always some contained in your lungs, however starved for it they might be. Ascend any faster than sixty feet a minute
The impossible hurdle for Ricci was that he was ninety feet down, and had
He needed an air source. One that could sustain him for at least part of the ascent.
And maybe he had one.
The bladders of his BC were almost entirely deflated, but the physical stresses upon them were identical to those upon his lungs. They too would have retained some compressed oxygen that would expand as he got closer to the surface and the atmospheric pressure on them decreased. And just as the air in his lungs would seek its outlet via the passages leading to his nose, throat, and mouth, so would the air in his BC try to escape through its artificial equivalent — the oral-inflator hose. A thirty- or forty-second supply would bring him up to a level of sixty feet, from which he
Abruptly turning faceup in the water, Ricci rolled his body to the left, away from the hose, to bring it up off his shoulder, puffing what little breath he had left into its mouthpiece to clear it of water. The safest way to rise would be on his back with one hand raised, so he could see and deflect himself away from any potential obstacles — and also so the hose would be above his head, allowing the water pressure to bear down upon it, and promote the free flow of air
But there was no time to lose. His brain reeling, the veins in his neck and temples throbbing, close to suffocating, Ricci placed the mouthpiece over his lips, pushed the button to open its valve, and inhaled greedily as he held it down.
A thin stream of air entered his lungs. Hardly enough to sate his aching need, but nonetheless precious beyond description.
He exhaled into the mouthpiece, then breathed from it again, more slowly and evenly this time. The oxygen cleared his head a little.
Time to lift off.
