Danger (9780545628136)

by Korman, Gordon

  He could see them now in the late dusk, waiting on the uneven planks of the abandoned marina. Outremont harbor, on Saint-Luc’s south coast, had not been used for many years. But it was the perfect place to make the pickup, far from the prying eyes of Cutter or Gallagher or anybody at Antilles Oil.

  Since the harbor had not been maintained, English came for them in a dinghy.

  Dante stared at the Adventurer. “That’s the boat?”

  “You were expecting the Queen Mary, monsieur?” English inquired sarcastically.

  The young photographer couldn’t take his eyes off the World War II–era ship. “Will it float?”

  “Maybe you should dive with us,” suggested Kaz. “Then, if it sinks, you’ll have time to get out of the way.”

  Dante bit his lip. “I’ll take my chances with the rust bucket.”

  Once on deck, English introduced the interns to Captain Bourassa and two other oil company seamen. A crew of three was bare minimum to run the Adventurer, but English didn’t want to risk letting too large a group in on their plan. An oil rig was a gossip mill. People talked. News spread.

  English’s friend Henri Roux was also there, not to dive, but to handle diving operations from topside.

  “Is that everybody?” asked Adriana.

  “There is one more — ” English began.

  “Hi, guys.”

  From the main companionway, limping only slightly more than usual, emerged Star.

  The three stared at her.

  “You went home this morning!” exclaimed Dante.

  Star grinned. “I am home. Wherever the action is — that’s home.”

  “But you can’t dive.” Kaz turned to English. “You’re not going to let her dive.”

  “Cool your jets, rink rat,” Star soothed. “I’m not that nuts. But someone has to look after you guys from topside — make sure Henri doesn’t blow the bell full of laughing gas by mistake.”

  “But what about your dad?” asked Adriana. “Didn’t he need to get back to work?”

  She shrugged. “I talked him into letting me stay. I’m all checked out of the hospital. The doctor says I’m ninety percent. The rest will come gradually.”

  “You’re doing awesome,” Kaz observed.

  “But you’re still limping,” Dante added dubiously.

  Star looked exasperated. “Bonehead, I’m still me! The bends doesn’t cure cerebral palsy.”

  English addressed Kaz and Adriana. “It is time to press down to our work depth. This will take more than two hours, so we must begin at once.”

  The Adventurer was equipped with a decompression chamber. English, Kaz, and Adriana were locked inside, and Henri Roux manipulated the controls, gradually increasing the pressure. By the time the bell reached the wreck site at 703 feet, the three divers had to be used to the crushing weight of twenty-two atmospheres.

  There was an insistent hiss as gas flooded the chamber. Adriana’s ears hurt almost immediately. She squeezed her nose and blew out. There was a squeal as the pressure equalized. She would be doing this for the next two and a half hours.

  The things I put up with for archaeology!

  Star’s face appeared at the chamber’s window. “Ears pop yet?” she asked over the intercom.

  “It feels like somebody set off a cherry bomb in my skull,” Adriana replied in a squeaky tone. Saturation divers breathed a mixture of helium and oxygen called heliox. It made you sound like a Munchkin.

  Kaz adapted his high-pitched voice into a perfect Bart Simpson impression that had Adriana howling with laughter. Outside the chamber, Star and Dante were practically rolling on the deck.

  Even English’s baritone was shrill and distorted. “Monsieur Simpson, he is a diver?”

  Dante was nearly hysterical. “He’s a cartoon on TV!”

  “Ah, yes. Your American television.” English displayed no hint of a smile. “Amuse yourselves now. On the bottom, there is no laughing, only danger.”

  “We’ll stick to you like glue,” Kaz promised.

  “That is no help at seven hundred feet. With the backup tank, you breathe maybe three minutes. Ascent, this means only death from the bends. Alors, you have one choice — the perfection.”

  “Aw, lighten up, Mr. English,” Dante wheedled. “We’re all going to be rich. What are you going to do with your share of the money?”

  “I will do nothing,” English replied readily.

  “Come on,” chided Kaz. “You could buy a nice car.”

  “I do not drive.”

  “A big house?” prompted Dante. “On the water, maybe?”

  “Everything I need, I have.”

  “What about travel?” suggested Adriana. “Wouldn’t it be great to see the world?”

  English gave them a disinterested shrug. “Where do people go for vacation? The islands. Me, I am already here. But,” he added, “the first money from any treasure will repay Antilles Oil for use their equipment. Another share should go to Braden’s family, no?”

  Star nodded. “And Iggy Ocasek. He helped us find the deeper wreck.”

  “I’m going to give some of my share to this guy back home,” said Kaz. “A hockey player. He’s got — medical bills.”

  “I haven’t thought about what I’m going to do with my share,” Adriana told them. “Donate it to charity, I guess.”

  Dante rolled his eyes. “Yeah, me, too. I’m donating mine to the Dante Foundation.”

  “For now, there is no money, only talk,” English said sharply. “Remember this — gold is valuable because it is hard to get, not easy. And harder still to keep.”

  It took two hours for the slow-moving ship to reach the coordinates of the wreck site at the edge of the Hidden Shoals. By this time, the three divers were sweltering in their watertight “dry” suits, waiting to transfer to the bell. The bell was pressurized and docked with the chamber by means of an airtight tunnel. The three crawled through into the cramped space that would be their home for the operation to come. They carried their Ratcliff diving helmets — Rat Hats.

  The bell was dark and damp, and smelled like a locker room after the big game — the odor of physical labor, bodies, perspiration. The walls were curved, with view ports barely the size of CDs. There was no floor that Adriana could see. They settled themselves uncomfortably on endless piles of coiled umbilical lines. English pulled the hatch shut with a muffled thud.

  According to the gauge, the pressure was already equivalent to a depth of 660 feet. It’s happening, Adriana thought to herself. We’re really going to do this.

  Henri’s voice came through the interphone box. “Can you read me in the pot?”

  They could hear Dante in the background. “Hey, what does this switch do?”

  A quick, sharp slap was clearly broadcast over the hookup, followed by Star’s voice: “Cut it out, Dante!”

  “Topside, we read you,” English reported with a sigh. He added, “Please do not let that annoying child touch anything.”

  The Adventurer’s powerful spotlights came on suddenly, capturing the bell like a stage performer. Inside, tubes of light leaped from the round ports. There were a few minutes of equipment checks, followed by the roar of the winch. The bell lifted shakily off the deck.

  “Stand by in the pot.” There was a jolt, and they were in the water, sinking through deepening shades of blue.

  Adriana was amazed at how quickly the sweaty heat deserted them. She hugged her bulky dry suit. “Is anybody else freezing?”

  English nodded. “This is normal. The helium — it makes you lose warmth faster than air.”

  As they descended quickly, English checked the umbilicals, which were really several different lines, taped together like bundles of spaghetti strands — breathing supply, phone cable, safety rope. There was also an extra hose so that hot water could be pumped through a system of tubing that crisscrossed the fabric of their dry suits. This would provide warmth against the icy chill of the deep sea.

  All at once, English an
nounced, “We are arrived.”

  “So fast?” blurted Adriana.

  Seven hundred feet may be an alien world, she reminded herself. But the actual distance to the surface is a little more than an eighth of a mile.

  English pushed aside cables, welding torches, and a few plastic sandwich bags of high-energy snacks to clear the bell’s work-lock beneath their feet. He opened the double hatch to reveal water the color of intergalactic space. The blackness washed upward at first, as if it were about to flood the bell. But then the pressure equalized, halting the ocean’s advance.

  English helped Kaz and Adriana seal the big fiberglass helmets to their suits before donning his own. Suddenly top-heavy, Adriana overbalanced and conked her Rat Hat into the wall of the bell. “I’m okay,” she muttered, recovering. The heliox tasted metallic in the close quarters of the headgear.

  “Topside,” English reported. “Hats on.”

  Adriana heard Henri’s voice coming from a small speaker by her ear. “Comm. check. Everybody reads me, yes?”

  “Loud and clear,” she replied into the helmet’s built-in microphone.

  “Me, too,” said Kaz. “Man, this sure beats scuba!”

  The three divers stepped into flippers. “Locking out,” reported English.

  And they dropped into the molasses-dark.

  The Adventurer’s topside dive station was an odd place for a communications center. The roar from the compressors in the gas shack made it nearly impossible to hear. But Henri, Star, and Dante bent over the console, listening to every word from seven hundred feet.

  The divers had been out of the bell for an hour already, and they still hadn’t been able to locate the wreck site.

  “Don’t you remember?” Star said urgently into the microphone. “There was junk scattered all the way down the slope, but the main shipwreck landed on kind of a shelf.”

  “Well, we found the slope,” Adriana reported, her voice distorted by helium. “We just can’t find the shelf.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t find it?” Dante demanded. “The coordinates are right, the depth is right — ”

  “It’s a little dark down here, Dante,” Kaz squeaked, annoyed. “I can’t even see Adriana and English unless there’s a light shining right on them.”

  “But it’s there,” insisted Dante. “It has to be!”

  “Enough!” English’s voice was stern, despite the high tone. “This is not the time for the debate. We search. And if we find nothing, we go home. Alors, this is all we can do.”

  “But Cutter’s getting Tin Man tomorrow,” Dante reminded them. “That’s in seven hours!”

  Star pulled him aside. “Let them work in peace,” she said in a low voice.

  “That’s in seven hours!”

  “They know that,” she assured him. “But scaring them isn’t going to help them find anything — ”

  Dante wheeled away from her and faced Henri. “I want to go down there.”

  The dive master frowned. “English says — ”

  Dante cut him off. “I see things that other people don’t. I’ll find that wreck site.”

  “No way,” said Star. “You don’t take a guy who isn’t comfortable diving and send him to seven hundred feet.”

  “You do if he’s the only guy who can find a billion dollars!”

  “It’s too late anyway,” Star told him. “We’ve only got one bell.”

  Dante pointed to the lift basket that hung on the smaller winch next to the crane that controlled the bell. It was to be lowered to the wreck site to be filled with treasure. “It’s going down anyway. What’s the difference if I hitch a ride on it?”

  “You must descend very slow,” Henri said thoughtfully. “Two hours, maybe more.”

  “Yeah, right,” Star snorted at Dante. “You’re afraid to scuba dive, but you can sit in a cage for two hours watching the water around you turn black. You won’t make it, Dante. You’ll freak out and do something stupid. And then you’ll get yourself killed for sure.”

  “You think I want this?” Dante snapped. “You think I want to risk my life and spend four days decompressing? I’d be thrilled to stay topside while everybody else dives. But I’m the guy who can get it done. End of story.”

  Henri took Dante to get suited up while Star reported the change of plan to the divers.

  “I forbid this!” exclaimed English.

  The three interns told him about Dante’s color blindness. “He only sees in black and white,” Adriana explained, “but he can spot shadings underwater that nobody else can. If anybody can find that wreck, it’s him.”

  English was still skeptical. “And the boy, he is not frightened?”

  “He’s terrified,” Star admitted. “But I’ve never seen him so determined.” She sighed. “I wish I was going down with him.”

  “You must be more careful what you wish for, mademoiselle,” the guide told her solemnly.

  * * *

  Dante clung to the lift basket to keep himself from shaking. Just gearing up for this dive was enough to bring on panic. The bulky dry suit constricted him as if he had been mummified, and the Rat Hat reminded him of a medieval torture device. Dangling at the end of the umbilical, he felt like a worm on a hook.

  It was not a smooth and even descent. Instead, he was being ratcheted to the depths in a series of ten-foot drops. In between, the basket would stop for ninety maddening seconds. This allowed him to adjust to the pressure, until it was time for the winch to jerk him downward once more. It was frustratingly slow, but that wasn’t the worst part. Waiting for the halted basket to move again was the worst kind of mental strain.

  At least he wasn’t bored. Thanks to the Rat Hat’s comm. system, he could listen in on the other divers as they searched. Henri gave him constant updates on his breathing mix, which changed the deeper Dante got. And Star kept him busy by asking, “How’s it going down there?” with every grinding of the winch.

  “Oh, great,” Dante muttered, his voice Mickey Moused by heliox. “An electric eel just wrapped around my helmet, and now I’m picking up Radio Australia.”

  Many fathoms below, Kaz chuckled. “Good one.”

  “Can it, rink rat,” Star grumbled. “I’m just trying to make sure the guy’s okay.”

  “Of course I’m not okay,” Dante told her. “I’m diving, aren’t I?”

  The blackness began around three hundred feet and, by five hundred, Dante felt as if he were suspended in ink. His hand torch provided some visibility. But the cone of light it squeezed into the void seemed to shrink the deeper he got.

  It’s like being blind. Did he really have a prayer of finding the wreck site in this nothingness?

  He spotted the floodlights on the bell long before the other divers were able to see him. By this time, he had been in the lift basket so long that he wasn’t sure his stiff body could even move. But it did and, at 680 feet, he allowed Kaz and English to haul him out of the tight mesh.

  English carefully detached Dante from the topside hoses and tethered him to an umbilical from the bell. This would enable him to return to the surface in the pot with the other divers when the mission was over.

  Okay, time to get rich, Dante thought.

  The ship they believed to be the Griffin had rained debris all the way down the slant, before coming to rest on a tilted ledge at seven hundred feet.

  Find the ledge and you’ve found the treasure.

  He joined the search, tracking back and forth over the featureless slope. He could not have imagined such terrible visibility.

  You could swim past a five-star hotel if it wasn’t right in your light.

  “What do you think?” asked Kaz. “Are you seeing any more than the rest of us?”

  “Black is black,” Dante replied gloomily. “In color or black and white.”

  In fact, he was probably seeing less than anybody. His glasses were slowly but steadily fogging inside the Rat Hat. He squinted in concentration, focusing on the dim oval his torch project
ed onto the muddy grade. Another hour passed. It seemed like a week.

  As he panned the endless parade of sand and muck, a round object raced through his field of vision. The others might easily have missed it. But in the gray-on-gray world of Dante’s color blindness, shape and texture were everything. He backtracked and picked up the circular form.

  It was a metal plate, pewter probably. Definitely very old.

  Heart pounding, he shined his light to the left. There was nothing but the underwater moonscape of the seafloor.

  Huh? But where’s the —

  Beginning to despair, he turned to the right.

  The wreck of a seventeenth-century ship winked into ghostly existence in the murky beam.

  He tried to call “Guys!” but he began to cough, choking on his own excitement.

  “Dante!” cried Kaz. “You okay?”

  “I found it!” Dante rasped through hacking and helium. “The shelf! The wreck!”

  “Don’t move,” ordered English. “We come to you.”

  “Okay.” Dante couldn’t take his eyes off the remains of the old vessel. It was almost as if he expected the site to disappear the instant he looked away. Dishware, bottles, muskets, and helmets littered the angled plateau, along with larger items like anchors and cannon barrels. Ballast stones were everywhere. Half-buried timbers poked out from the bottom silt, all that was left of the spine of the wooden craft.

  Now the hard part, he thought to himself. Finding treasure in this mess.

  He dropped to his knees, digging an arm experimentally into the soft muck of the shelf. He cleared it away, and aimed his light into the hole. An unmistakable yellow glow shone back at him.

  Dante Lewis was staring into a vast pile of gold bars.

  It was well after midnight, but the quiet of Côte Saint-Luc harbor was shattered by the rattle and roar of the winch of the R/V Ponce de Léon. The thousand-pound piece of equipment being lowered to the research deck was a sight straight out of Star Wars. It looked like an eight-foot-tall metal-plated robot, with side-mounted thrusters and mechanical claw hands.