barge. Absent a fixed target, the drill ship had to bob and weave to keep from colliding with the free-floating barge. Several times they nudged sides, the barge slapping against the bigger drill ship with a clang.
'You—incapacitate the rubber boat,' Tong barked to one of the men holding an axe. 'Everybody else, back on the ship.'
A small Zodiac had been secured to the bow of the barge, in case the NUMA team needed to go ashore. The ax bearer walked over and with a few quick swings cut loose the securing lines. He then pulled a knife from his belt and wedged it into the inflated pontoon in several spots, producing a loud rush of escaping air. For good measure, he stood the boat on end, then flipped it over the side rail. The deflated rubber boat bobbed on the surface for several minutes until a wave swamped its sides and sent it to the bottom.
Summer witnessed little of the sabotage as the thug at her side shoved her roughly to the rail. A thousand thoughts were surging through her mind. Should she risk trying to fight back with a knife to her throat?
How could she help Dirk and Jack? Would anything good come from stepping aboard the drill ship?
Every query led down a short path to something bad. There might be one chance, she decided, and that was if she could get into the water. Even with her hands tied, outswimming these roughnecks would likely be no problem, she figured. If she could jump into the water, she could easily swim under the barge to the other side. Maybe it would be enough of an annoyance to let her go. And maybe she could then help get Dirk and Jack aboard and mount a stronger defense. That is, if they were all right.
Summer feigned a lack of resistance and followed the other men as they climbed on top of the rail and pulled themselves onto the deck of the drill ship. The knife wielder gave her a boost, holding her elbows as she stepped onto the rail. One of the men on the ship knelt down and reached over to help pull her up.
Summer reached up but pretended to slip before she could reach the man's hands. She then flung her right foot backward, striking the knife holder flush in the nose with her heel. By the sound of the muffled crunch, she knew she had broken his nose but didn't turn to see the blood rushing out of his nostrils.
Instead, she ducked her head forward and dove for the thin patch of water between the two vessels.
She floated weightless for a fraction of a second, awaiting the splash of the cool water. But it never came.
Seeming to materialize out of thin air, a pair of hands sprung over the rail and clasped the back of her shirt and the cuff of her shorts. Instead of falling vertically, she felt herself flung sideways, bouncing harshly over the side rail before falling hard to the deck of the barge. She had hardly hit the ground when the same pair of hands jerked her to her feet. The hands belonged to Tong, who showed remarkable strength for a man who stood nearly a foot shorter than Summer.
'You will be going aboard,' he spat.
The blow came from her left side and Summer was a hair late warding it off. Tong's fist struck her on the side of the jaw and she immediately buckled to her knees. A flurry of stars danced before her eyes but she didn't pass out. In a dazed stupor, she was yanked aboard the drill ship and dragged up to the bridge, where she was locked in a small storage room at the back of the wheelhouse.
Resting on a large coil of rope, it seemed to Summer that the whole world was spinning around her head. A wave of nausea swept over her until she threw up into a rusty bucket in the corner. She immediately felt better and pulled herself up to a small porthole. Sucking in fresh air, her vision gradually cleared until she could see that the drill ship was positioned in the cove over the same spot where the barge had been moored.
The barge. She craned her neck, finally spotting the brown barge drifting out to sea, already more than a mile away. Squinting to try to improve her blurry vision, she fought to make out signs of Dirk and Jack aboard. But they were nowhere to be seen.
The empty barge was drifting out to sea without them.
-44-
Dirk's arms had begun to feel like spaghetti. The airlift had to be constantly wrestled into place against the invisible push of the surrounding waters. Though Dahlgren had relieved him a few times, he had been toting the pressurized tube for over an hour. The work had been made more strenuous by the building currents of an outgoing tide, which pushed the surface water seaward at nearly two knots.
The current was much lighter on the bottom, but manhandling the wavering airlift over the dredge site was like balancing a flagpole on the head of a pin.
Dirk glanced at his dive watch as he wrestled the airlift over a few inches. Only fifteen minutes to go till the end of the shift, then a break from the monotonous work. Progress was slower than he had hoped, but he had still uncovered a rough square about six feet across. The encrusted wood was thick but flat, consistent with the shape of a ship's rudder. Only the size was a little perplexing. Dahlgren's probe marks had encompassed an object nearly twenty feet long, an enormous dimension for a sailing ship rudder.
Following the ascent of his air bubbles as they rose to the surface, he gazed again at the undersides of the large black ship moored next to the barge. He and Dahlgren had heard the rumble of the ship's engines underwater as it drew near and they watched with curiosity as the dark shape brazenly drew alongside the barge. They had watched the positioning thrusters engaged and felt a slight assurance that the fool wasn't going to drop anchor on them. Another well-financed video documentary group, Dirk surmised. There would no doubt be an array of underwater photographers descending on them shortly.
Hooray, he thought sarcastically.
He shook off the annoyance and refocused on driving the airlift into the fine sand. Pushing the lip toward a small mound, he noticed that no sand was being sucked up, then realized that the vibration and whooshing noise of the compressed air had ceased. Summer must have shut off the airlift, which meant she was signaling them back to the barge for some reason or the compressor just ran out of gas. He sat for a moment, deciding to wait a minute or two before surfacing to see if Summer restarted the motor.
A few yards away, Dahlgren was driving his probe into the sand. Out of the corner of his eye, Dirk noticed him suddenly rise off the bottom. Something about the movement didn't seem right and Dirk looked over to see that his instincts were right. Dahlgren had let go of the probe and had his hands wrapped around his faceplate and air line, while his legs hung loose beneath him. He was being yanked off the bottom, Dirk realized, like a puppet on a string.
He had no time to react, for an instant later the airlift was ripped from his own hands, sailing off through the water in the direction of Dahlgren. Dirk looked up just in time to see his own air line pull taut in the water and then jerk him up off the seafloor.
'What the ...' he started to mouth, but the words fell away as he tried to draw a breath of air. He inhaled a slight puff and then there was nothing. The compressor supplying the air lines had been cut off, too. Like Dahlgren, he found himself grabbing hold of the air line to control his movements and not rip the connection from his dive helmet. Beside him, the airlift swung wildly in the water like a pendulum out of control. The big plastic pipe came barreling at him, slamming into his leg before bouncing off in another direction. Out of air, yanked like a rag doll, and pummeled by the airlift, Dirk faced enough sensory obstacles to drive most people to panic. From there, it would be just a short step to drowning.
But Dirk didn't panic. He had spent the better part of his life scuba diving. Technical failures underwater were nothing new to him. He had sucked a tank of air dry on shallow-water dives many times. The key to surviving an emergency, underwater or elsewhere, he told himself, was to remain calm and think logically.
Air was the first necessity. His natural inclination was to kick to the surface, but that wasn't necessary.
While working on surface-supplied air, the divers all carried a small emergency bottle of air. Slightly larger than a thermos, the thirteen-cubic-foot bailout bottle, called a 'pony tank,' provided about ten minutes of air. Dirk let go of the air line with one hand and reached under his left arm, where the bottle was attached to his buoyancy compensator. Twisting the valve on the top of the tank, he immediately drew in a breath of air through the regulator. After a couple of deep draws, he could feel his heart begin to slow its racing beat.
His thoughts ran to Dahlgren, who was on the shared line of surface air. Thirty feet ahead, he saw a purge of exhaust bubbles rise from Dahlgren's helmet and knew that he was breathing off his emergency air as well. The dangling airlift had ventured over toward Dahlgren and was gyrating in the water close behind him. The airlift pipe
