The Deep

Gail watched Sanders’ light as it descended toward the light that lay on the bottom, her light. That light was picked up, and the two beams moved together across the bottom, stopped and fuzzed as the mist of sand permeated the water.

She shivered and raised her eyes to the dark cliffs.

She tried to envision what Coffin’s body looked like, crumpled in the sand. She shook her head to rid herself of the thought, walked forward, and took the shotgun from the shelf in front of the wheel. She sat on the transom, cradling the gun in her lap-hating it, afraid of it, but grateful for it.

A noise behind her: splash, bump. She jumped off the transom and spun, cocking the gun and aiming it at the water. A hand broke the surface and reached for her; it held a canvas bag full of ampules. Gail put the gun down and, trembling, reached for the bag.

Sanders lifted the bottom of his mask. “You all right?”

“Yes.” She emptied the bag onto the tarpaulin on the deck. “I almost shot you, that’s all.”

“If they come, I don’t think it’ll be in a submarine,” Sanders said. He took the empty bag from her and dropped below the surface.

Gail knelt on the deck and began to count ampules, groping for them in the dark.

With only two divers working, the collecting went slowly. Each time Sanders surfaced, Treece stopped digging in the hole, for fear of unearthing ampules that would be swept away in the tide.

Waiting for Sanders to return, he moved to the reef and probed with the air lift. He dug at random, finding ampules in one spot, artillery shells in another, nothing in another. He came to a small pocket in the reef, where the coral receded about five feet from the reef face and formed a kind of cove. He concentrated on the cove, touching the air lift to the bottom and watching the sand vanish up the tube.

Sanders returned and tapped Treece on the shoulder. Treece nodded, intending to return to the field of ampules, and routinely checked his watch.

The wet-suit sleeve covered the dial, so, to read it, Treece had to cradle the air lift under his right arm and use the fingers of his right hand to peel back the left sleeve. It was eleven o’clock. Treece let the sleeve fall back into place and moved his right arm away from his side, to drop the air lift into his hand. He missed it; his bandaged, rubber-covered hand did not respond quickly enough, and the air lift fell to the bottom. It hit the sand and bucked; Treece lunged for it with his left hand, caught it, and wrestled it under control. Then he saw a gleam.

As it bounced on the bottom, the tube had moved to the right side of the little cove and, always hungry for sand, had gouged a hole on its own. The gleam was at the bottom of the hole.

Treece gave Sanders his light and motioned for him to train both lights on the hole. Then, like a surgeon exploring an incision, Treece lowered the air lift to the gleam. His left hand hovered near the sand, to catch the object if it was wrenched free and flew toward the tube; his right held the tube a foot off the bottom, diluting its power to a point where it barely disturbed the grains of sand.

It was a pine cone, about the size of a tennis ball, perfectly shaped of gold. Each of the countless ridges on the pine cone was topped with a tiny pearl.

Delicately, Treece plucked the pine cone from the sand and held it beneath the lights. Motes of sand passing between the pine cone and the light made the gold shimmer.

A canvas bag hung off Sanders’ wrist. Treece reached into the bag, set the pine cone gently on the canvas bottom, and resumed digging.

Another gleam: a half-inch circle of gold.

Treece pinched it between his fingers and pulled; it would not come. He stripped more sand away and saw that the circle was connected to another circle, and that one to still another: a chain of gold.

When twenty links where exposed, Treece was able to pull the rest of the chain free with his hand. It was seven or eight feet long. Treece pointed to a clasp at the end of the chain. Sanders looked closely and saw the engraved letters “E.f.”

Treece dug for a few more minutes and found nothing.

He put the gold chain in the canvas bag and pointed upward.

“Careful with that,” Sanders said as he handed the bag to Gail. He passed her one of the lights. He heard Treece surface beside him and said, “How come we’re quitting? Maybe there’s more.”

“Maybe, but it’s too late to get it all now, and I don’t want to do a half-ass job and leave a bloody great ditch down there for someone else to spot.”

“It’s incredible!” Gail said, shining the light on the pine cone in her palm.

“Turn off that damn light!” Treece said. The light snapped off. “Someone on the cliffs with glasses could pick that out clear as day.”

Treece climbed aboard, turned off the compressor, told Sanders to haul in the air hoses, and started the engine. He looked back at Sanders, who was coiling the hoses neatly on the deck.

“Don’t bother with that. Just throw it on board.

Soon’s you’re done, take the wheel.”