The Deep

“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 Corsair’s stern, so Corsair protected them from view as they moved along the dock. They slipped into the cockpit and lay on the deck.

“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.

Then he withdrew from the light. He flicked on his flashlight, located Sanders, and swam to him.

Treece held the flashlight in his left hand and shined it on his right, pointing to Sanders, then to the near side of the cave, then to himself, then-in an arching motion-to the far side of the cave. Then he shined the light on Sanders’ face, to see if he understood.