Rising Fury: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 12)

by Wayne Stinnett

  “No more than half an hour ago,” I said, turning toward the shallows to the north that separated my island from its nearest neighbor.

  Three times a week, I swim out to that island and back. The shallows between the two islands is never less than two feet. El Cazador has a recessed prop tunnel, with moderate deadrise at the transom, giving her great shallow-water capability for her size. On plane, she barely draws a foot of water.

  The ride was less than ten minutes. As we neared the waypoint on the GPS, I slowed to an idle and began watching the depth finder.

  “Is that it?” Kim asked, as the red and yellow contours shown on the GPS started to fall away to deeper water in a steep slope.

  “Not yet,” I replied. “But it’s coming up.”

  Carl went up to the pulpit to ready the anchor.

  “There,” I said, as the bottom dropped sharply away.

  I reversed the engine and brought the boat to a stop. The depth finder showed a deep hole below us, with a lot of clutter. I allowed the boat to drift while watching the screen. We were drifting sideways in the current. When the edge of the sink came up on the screen again, I waited a few seconds longer, until I was sure the bow had drifted away from the deep fissure.

  “Drop it,” I told Carl.

  He released the anchor with a splash, letting the braided nylon rope slide through his hands until the anchor reached the bottom. After we’d drifted for a moment, he tugged on the rode, turning the anchor in the proper direction before pulling more line from the small anchor locker, until he reached the red tape wrapped around it at one-hundred feet. He then measured off another fifty feet by extending the line between his outstretched arms eight times, measuring out roughly six more feet each stretch, and then tied it off to one of the deck cleats on the bow.

  “The anchor should be about ten or twenty feet down-current from the edge of the hole,” I said, switching on the LED spreader lights, as Kim began pulling our dive bags out of the fish box.

  I backed down on the anchor, satisfying myself that it was holding. “We’ll follow the anchor line down,” Carl said. He was always prone to voicing the plan, though we’d dived together many times. “I’ll clip a tethered strobe to the anchor, in case anyone gets separated. From there, we only need to swim against the current a few feet to the edge of the sinkhole. Let’s group there before descending.”

  Carl removed the rigid blue-and-white international dive flag from the overhead and secured it to its six-foot mast, then inserted the mast in a vertical rod holder in the transom. I switched on the spreader lights mounted wide on the aft end of the T-top to illuminate the flag from both sides. With no wind, it swung back and forth as the small rollers rocked the boat.

  From a storage rack on the gunwale, I removed the diver-down light pole and telescoped it out to its full ten feet. When I plugged it into the anchor-light receptacle, the alternating red and white lights illuminated the whole boat and could be seen for miles.

  The three of us began to suit up. Carl and I don’t usually wear wetsuits; the water temperature in the Keys rarely gets cold enough, except in January. Even then, it’s close to seventy degrees. The GPS showed the current water temperature to be near eighty. But Kim was pulling on a light-weight, one-piece Lycra suit.

  While I’ve never read any sort of research on the subject, as a dive-boat operator, I see a lot of divers; I’ve noticed that women are more likely to wear wetsuits, sometimes even in the summer. Maybe they lose body heat faster and were more susceptible to hypothermia than men. Or maybe men are just more stubbornly macho. I get a little cold toward the end of a long dive, when the water is below seventy-five or so, but not enough to warrant the struggle to get the damned things on and off again.

  When we were all ready, Carl moved first to the stern and sat down, carefully swinging one leg at a time over the transom to stand on the swim platform. Unlike the Revenge, there wasn’t a transom door on El Cazador. It didn’t have a swim platform when I got it, but I added a small one, along with a telescoping ladder to make it easier to get back aboard from the water.

  Kim checked my gear from behind before joining Carl on the swim platform. With their backs to me, I quickly made sure their first stages were secure and the air valves were open before stepping over the transom to join them.

  We entered the water one at a time, me going first. Once I’d moved away slightly, Kim made a giant stride entry and came to join me, allowing Carl room to step off.

  Each of us had powerful dive lights tethered to battery packs on our waists with a curly cord, like an old telephone receiver. We also had backup flashlights, one in each pocket of our buoyancy compensators.

  Leading the way, I finned around the boat to where the rode entered the water at the bow. There weren’t any instructions needed; the three of us had dived together dozens, if not hundreds of times, and Carl had already hit the high points.

  I took hold of the anchor line and raised my BC’s purge valve, depressing the button on the end. The air quickly bled out and I began to descend, following the yellow, braided-nylon anchor line.

  Shining my light ahead and toward the bottom, I could clearly see the rode almost all the way to the anchor, the bright yellow line a sharp contrast to the inky blackness around me. The ten feet of chain on the end connecting the line to the anchor was absorbed by its surroundings. Visibility was limited to the dive light’s ability to pierce the inky black water. Still, I could just make out where the rode reached the anchor, more than a hundred feet ahead.

  I slowly finned against the slow-moving current, following the rode toward the new fissure. Looking back, I could see Kim right behind me, with Carl just descending from the surface.

  I equalized the pressure in my ears and continued. The sound of our breath intake and bubbles was accentuated, along with the night sounds of the sea; clicking noises, and the occasional trill of a fish. The ocean isn’t a quiet place. Not even at night.

  We reached the anchor and I made sure the flukes were sunk deeply in the sandy bottom before turning toward the drop-off. Carl quickly attached the strobe to the end of the five-foot chain the nylon rope was attached to and turned it on, letting it float a few feet above the bottom. At the edge of the hole, we stopped and looked down, hovering in place by slowly finning into the current.

  The contours around the edges were more rounded than they were when I found it last week. The constant movement of the current carried sand away from the edge on one side and pushed it into the abyss on the other. Several feet down, a jagged limestone outcrop jutted out into the hole a few feet and the antennae of several lobsters were visible in the crack between the ledge and where it disappeared into the wall.

  Pointing my light at the wavering feelers, I glanced over at Kim. She was grinning behind her second stage. I held up three fingers, then pointed down into the crevasse, and she nodded her understanding that we would try to catch three on the way down.

  She raised three fingers in return, then gave a jerking thumbs-up, followed with a V-sign. I grinned. She wanted to catch three on the way up, too.

  I nodded, then looked over at Carl. He pointed to his chest, then to Kim, and finally to me. Kim and I nodded our understanding, and he kicked a few times to move out over the center of the hole where he doubled his body over, and descended. Kim jackknifed her body and dove after him without hesitation. Moving out over the center of the hole, I followed them down.

  We moved slowly, so as not to disturb the lobster. Soon, they’d be leaving the hole to forage across the grassy flats all around us. It only took a couple of minutes before we had three good-sized bugs in the bag Carl was carrying.

  I was carrying a pole spear, which is nothing more than a five-foot aluminum rod with a length of thick surgical hose attached at one end and a threaded spear tip with butterfly barbs on the other. With my right arm through the loop, I adjusted it, so the rubber hose was around the inside of my bent elbow, but held loose, with no tension on the hose. If there
was a big grouper down here, I wanted it and a pole spear is easier in a confined space than a spear gun.

  Checking my gauges, I saw we were at forty feet and I still had plenty of air. So we descended further. Once we were past the limestone outcrop, the sinkhole opened to a good thirty feet wide.

  The whole Florida peninsula is built on a limestone base, with crevasses and underground rivers carving a network of tunnels and caves in the soft rock. In the northern part of the interior there are vast networks of these underwater caves and rivers that extend for miles and probably connect to others. It was this network of caves and caverns that Kim had mentioned diving with Marty.

  I’d done my share of cave and cavern diving. I remember a slime-covered pond that an old friend knew about. It was on a farm just outside of Ocala, and no more than twenty feet across. Like surface rivers, underground rivers will change course sometimes and the pond was a remnant of such a change.

  Russ Livingston, Deuce’s dad, had brought me there without telling me what we’d find. Just that I’d get a kick out of it. We’d waded into the algae- and hyacinth-covered pond, carrying our tanks and BCs. The water was deceptively deep, and we’d had to use lights immediately after submerging. Russ had led me to a small crack in the bottom, where I realized why we had to drag our gear. He’d gone first, pushing his rig ahead of him through the opening. I remember shining my light into the narrow opening and seeing him don his gear ten feet below.

  Once I’d joined Russ on the other side of the opening, I saw just how large the cavern was. From the opening, it flared out kind of like an inverted funnel, and at thirty feet it was at least fifty feet across.

  We’d dived to nearly a hundred feet that day, reaching the sandy bottom where a narrow tunnel stretched away to one side, but was much too narrow to get through. I knew it to be one of the many subterranean rivers that had changed course, finding a shorter way through the limestone. Over time, sediment had filled and restricted water movement in the upstream side, and the river had become dormant.

  Russ had sifted through the sand at the bottom, found something, and began to dig around it, shaking it loose from the sediment. Slowly, a grayish rock began to appear. Not knowing what it was, I started to help him. After a minute, we got the thing loose, and the sand fell under it, exposing the giant skull and tusks of what could only have been a mastodon.

  Later, sitting on the tailgate of Russ’s old pickup, he explained that most of the other bones from the ancient fossil had been removed by treasure hunters, but the skull was too big to fit through the rock opening. He told me that in ancient times, when sea levels were lower, some of the underground rivers had been on the surface. He’d told me about some of the caves he’d explored and all the animal bones he’d found in them and hypothesized that an animal, or even an early human, could be caught up in a fast-moving stream and swept into the subterranean portion.

  Glancing at my gauges, I continued to descend, Kim and Carl right with me. At sixty feet, I happened to glance to my left and saw two very large hogfish resting in a hollowed-out spot in the side of the sink. I froze in place and could sense that the others had also stopped, reading my body language. Moving very slowly, I reached up with my left hand and took hold of the pole spear near the tip. I pulled it back, stretching the rubber hose behind my elbow, until I could grip it near the tip with my right hand. The pole spear was cocked and ready, and the two hogfish hadn’t yet paid much attention to the intruders of their watery domain.

  Using only my fins, I slowly turned my body, moving slightly to my right for a better shot. Unbelievably, the nearer hogfish moved slightly forward, directly beside his partner, as if shielding the other fish. I slowly raised my arm, extending the point of the spear, aiming for the sweet spot just behind the long sloping head of the first fish.

  When I released my grip on the pole spear, it shot forward, skewering both fish, one in the kill spot and the other just behind the gills. The first fish twitched once and was still. The second one kicked its tail a few times, before it died too.

  Carl dropped down next to me, carefully opening his catch bag so the lobster didn’t escape. I removed the threaded tip of the spear and slid both fish off and into the bag. We’d been in the water less than twenty minutes, and we’d caught enough food for five people. More importantly, we’d caught exactly what we wanted instead of whatever took our bait. Fishing is fun, but diving for food is just all around better for the fishery, since there’s no unwanted by-catch.

  Slipping past me, Kim continued down, examining the jagged walls of the sinkhole as I threaded the tip back onto the spear. The hole had probably opened up more than a week before, and with the twice-daily change in direction of the current, any loose sand or rocks were likely already dislodged. Over the coming months and years, it would gradually be filled in with the detritus of the sea.

  Dropping down alongside her, I checked my pressure and depth, then followed her gaze. We were at sixty-five feet, more than thirty feet below the seafloor, and directly ahead I could easily make out the remnants of a long-dead coral reef. But there was something a little off about the symmetry. One branch of the ancient coral grew perfectly straight, disappearing at nearly a forty-five-degree angle into the limestone just above the now-exposed reef.

  Digging into her pocket, Kim produced the GoPro camera she always carried and using her tethered dive light to illuminate the old coral formation, she took several pictures before looking at me excitedly. She was breathing faster than normal.

  I tapped my gauge cluster and pointed at hers. She lifted it and looked at the reading, then held up eight fingers. It was time to surface. She’d gulped down air faster than normal and was down to just eight hundred pounds of pressure. That could be burned up quickly at our current depth. In this hole, we were under more than three atmospheres of pressure, so each breath from our regulators consumed three times as much air.

  I jerked my thumb upward and she nodded. Slowly, we finned toward the surface. Carl was still hanging out where we’d bagged the hogfish, considering a deep slit in the side of the sink, and shining his light into it.

  Tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention, I gave him the surface signal and he nodded. Together, the three of us continued upward, rising slower than our air bubbles. We had to go single file past the limestone outcrop, and once clear, I waited for Kim, to check her pressure once more. Down to six hundred pounds. She was still breathing way too fast.

  Once we reached the seafloor, we finned toward the flashing strobe and Carl turned it off, untied it, and pocketed the marker. From there, we followed the anchor line upward toward the boat. At fifteen feet, I stopped and checked Kim’s gauges again. Her breathing was back to normal and her pressure was at six hundred pounds. Enough for a ten-minute safety stop and still leave her enough air to get back aboard with a hundred pounds.

  Finally, we started for the surface, letting the current carry us under the boat to the swim platform. At the stern, I inflated my BC and shrugged out of it, to make it easier to get aboard.

  Kim started chattering excitedly as soon as she pulled the second stage out of her mouth. “Did you see that? It was a coral reef! More than thirty feet under the sea floor.”

  “That was worth the price of admission alone,” I admitted, lifting my gear over the transom and reminding myself once more that a door would make a nice addition to El Cazador.

  “During the last ice age,” Carl began, as he helped Kim out of her BC and handed her rig up to me, “sea levels were much lower than today. What you saw was the old sea floor, buried by centuries of sediment.”

  “How old do you think it was?” Kim asked, climbing up the ladder to stand with me on the swim platform.

  I shrugged. “No idea, but it was a heck of a find.”

  “The most recent ice age was over ten thousand years ago,” Carl said. I gave him a questioning look and he shrugged his shoulders as he hung onto the ladder. “So I’m an internet junky.”

&nb
sp; “Ten thousand years?” Kim said in awe. “Do you know when the first Indians were in this area?”

  Climbing the ladder, Carl had a questioning look on his face. “The first Indians?”

  “Yeah,” she said, stepping over the transom and opening a drawer where clean towels were stored. She began wringing seawater from her hair. “There was a spear, or something stuck in the coral.”

  I grinned at my daughter. “I doubt that was a spear. I don’t think there were any people around here that long ago.”

  At the helm, I flipped on the radar out of habit. Night diving is dangerous, but most of the danger isn’t from the dive itself. Night collisions with anchored boats happen all the time. It’s always a good idea to see what’s around you. Head on a swivel, or in this case, a radar beam. After a moment, the screen came on and the unit showed the radar echo of a boat that was approaching our position from the northwest. But it was four miles off and moving slowly; nothing to worry about.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Carl said. “The first inhabitants came over a land bridge from Asia during that same ice age. I read somewhere that artifacts have been found in north Florida dating back twelve thousand years. What’d it look like, this spear?”

  Kim went to her dry bag in the starboard fish box and returned holding a small tablet computer. She plugged the cord dangling from it into the GoPro. One of the pictures she’d taken instantly appeared on the device’s screen.

  She scrolled through several, then stopped. “There,” she said, pointing at the screen. “That shaft is perfectly straight.”

  “Could be a spear,” Carl said, studying the picture. He grinned. “I know one sure way to find out.”

  “Okay, let’s rest a bit,” I said. “Eat something and go back down.”

  Kim had a worried expression. “I’d hate to destroy the coral formation to dig it out.”

  “By this time next month, sand will have half-filled that hole,” I said. “And by spring, there won’t be any evidence that it ever existed.”