Deep (9780545628129)

by Korman, Gordon

  Kaz was fouled in some wires that had become exposed when the onslaught of the sea had wrenched the data screen free of the control console. Star got him untangled and barked, “Go!” into her regulator, following his clumsy progress out of the vehicle. She hoped the others could figure out that they had to find the surface now. Surely they were just as narced as she was.

  Star watched as Dante, Adriana, and finally Kaz began to kick upward. Exhaling a bubbly sigh of relief, Star followed. Yet through her nitrogen haze, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d forgotten something important, left a key task undone.

  As she rose, a shape drifted out of Deep Scout twenty feet below her. Arms outstretched, it began to sink slowly.

  The realization burned through the fog like brilliant sun: The captain!

  She did a U-turn in the water, diving against her body’s natural buoyancy. With no weight belt, descent was difficult. She kicked hard against the sea’s resistance, her compact form tight and vector straight. Fighting the rules of physics, she closed the gap between herself and Vanover. Fifteen feet … ten … five … almost there …

  That was when she realized that no bubbles were coming from his nose or mouth. The captain was dead.

  His eyes were closed. He must have been knocked unconscious when the surging water slammed him against the sphere. His tank was gone too, probably ripped away by the same irresistible force. The laws of science and pressure — harmless and boring on a piece of paper in diving class. But here in real life — brutal, overpowering, deadly.

  She grabbed his arm. It was lifeless, a piece of floating debris. There was one more chance. She pulled out her regulator and forced it between his gray lips.

  Nothing. The man was gone.

  She screamed with grief and sorrow, and didn’t stop until her own choking extinguished her voice.

  Convulsed with coughs, she didn’t notice the explosion of bubbles soaring upward from her regulator.

  Oh, no! The demand valve!

  By the time she bit down on the mouthpiece, she knew that most of the air supply had already escaped. Only deep, wheezing pulls would draw anything from the cylinder. Below two hundred feet, gas went fast, compressed by the depth.

  I’ve got to get out of here!

  She shot for the surface, careful not to ascend faster than her slowest bubbles. She got two more gulps of air before the tank went empty, and she swallowed hard to force back her thirst for more.

  Don’t hold your breath, she reminded herself. That was a good way to rupture a lung. All gasses expand on the way up, including the ones already in your pulmonary system.

  One hundred and fifty feet. Hang in there! She knew she might get another inhalation if she could make it to one hundred — the traces of air in the tank would expand to provide one more suck. She checked her watch — 120 feet — and —

  Right there, rising out of the bowels of the ocean, her heart stopped. Beside the Fathometer reading, a single word flashed on and off, accompanied by a high-pitched beeping.

  DECOMP.

  Decompression. She had spent too much time at depth. It was no longer safe for her to return to the surface without stopping to give her body a chance to expel nitrogen.

  But I can’t stop! I’m out of air!

  It was every diver’s worst nightmare. The choice that was really no choice at all. Ascend to the surface and risk the harmful, even deadly effects of the bends.

  Or drown.

  Star made the decision in a split second. It was no contest. Drowning was a sure thing. I’ll take my chances with the bends!

  Upward she soared, her feet kicking like pistons. As she passed through eighty feet, she managed to squeeze another fraction of a breath out of her empty tank. Then she swallowed again, fighting back the craving of her lungs. It was illogical, but she could almost feel the nitrogen bubbles frothing her blood into a milk shake as she rose to warmth and light.

  No thinking, she exhorted herself. Swim!

  Star broke through the waves to a world she’d thought she might never see again. Two huge gulps of air — pure heaven — and then the important business of yelling for help. “Hey! Hey!!”

  Gasping, she tried to orient herself. The steely bulk of Scoutmaster’s stern loomed about fifty yards away.

  Strong hands grasped her from behind, and she cried out in shock.

  “It’s okay!” the rescue diver soothed her. “I’m here to help. Don’t worry — it’s over.”

  “It’s not over!” she shrieked. “I’m bent!”

  “You weren’t down long enough,” he assured her. “You came straight up.”

  “I didn’t!” she insisted. “I tried to save the captain! He didn’t make it! Look!” She held her watch under his nose.

  The man took one look at the flashing DECOMP signal and spoke into the transmitter in his hood. “Topside, this is Diver Two. I need a chopper evac to decompression — now!” He regarded Star intently. “The captain — where did you see him and how long ago?”

  “He was sinking from two hundred,” she gasped, fighting hysteria. Sharp pains stung her hips and knees. Nitrogen bubbles, collecting in her joints — classic symptoms of the bends. “He wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. I tried to give him my air —” She began to shiver with cold, the onset of shock. Hold it together….

  The diver grabbed her gently but firmly and began to kick for Scoutmaster.

  Staring straight up into the blinding sun, Star wept bitter tears. She couldn’t tell if she was crying for the captain or for herself. It was all the same tragedy. A good man was gone forever, and she was face-to-face with the possibility that this accident was going to end her life, right here, today.

  And then she was being hauled aboard, first to a dive platform, and then onto Scoutmaster’s deck.

  She looked up, her vision blurred, and saw Kaz — two of him, actually.

  “I’m sorry!” she sobbed.

  “For what?” he asked. “Are you okay? Where’s the captain?”

  “Dead!”

  “That’s not funny, Star!” It was Dante, with Adriana at his side. “Hey, you don’t look so hot — ”

  “I tried to help him. I stayed too long. I’m bent!”

  She was having trouble breathing now, struggling under what felt like a boulder on her chest.

  She was aware of a lot of frantic activity before someone slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. Faces flashed through her pain, those of her three companions and others too. The last thing she heard before slipping into unconsciousness was the distant rhythm of an approaching helicopter.

  * * *

  For Kaz, the nightmare was happening again. He stood on deck in his dripping shorts and T-shirt, watching the crew preparing Star’s inert body for airlift. It brought him back to a hockey rink, not so many months ago. Drew Christiansen on a stretcher. The ambulance, backing in the Zamboni entrance. And the siren.

  Today, that mournful wail was replaced by the thunder of the chopper as it hovered over them, lowering its wire-mesh recovery cage for Star.

  Star. How can this be happening to her? She’s the best of all of us!

  He choked back tears as he watched the crew lay her down on the padded bottom of the basket. She had saved his life that day. He would not have made it out of Deep Scout without her help untangling the wires that had trapped him.

  He was here; he was fine. And she —

  The crew backed away, and the cage lifted off. Kaz was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer loneliness of Star’s journey — one from which she might never return. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he was running forward. He put both hands on the rim of the basket and vaulted over the side, landing neatly next to her.

  Everyone aboard Scoutmaster — the interns and crew alike — was shouting at him. But the roar of the chopper drowned them out. The basket was winched up through the windstorm of the rotor blades and hauled into the cabin.

  No time was wasted. The helicopter was racing
to its destination even before the hatch was closed.

  The paramedic glared at Kaz. “Not smart, kid. You think this is a game?”

  “I couldn’t let her go alone,” mumbled Kaz, holding on to Star’s limp hand.

  The craft was only in the air eleven minutes. Kaz watched in awe as they closed in on an enormous oil-drilling platform off the west coast of Saint-Luc. When they descended toward the helipad, he got a sense of the vast size of the structure. It was like an entire city, propped up on titanic stilts, hundreds of feet above the Caribbean.

  A medical team was waiting for them at touchdown. Kaz joined the stampede with the stretcher. An elevator took them into the guts of the platform, where the infirmary was located.

  The double doors were marked RECOMPRESSION THERAPY. A dour-faced, lab-coated technician barred their way.

  “She can’t come in here. I’ve got hard-hat divers in the water. What if one of them needs — ”

  Before the man could finish, Bobby Kaczinski, the most promising young defenseman in the Ontario Minor Hockey Association, did what he had been trained to do his entire life. Without slowing his pace, he lowered his shoulder and delivered a crunching body check that put the technician flat on his back.

  The decompression chamber looked like a huge high-tech steel pipe about the size of a Dumpster.

  Kaz got out of the way as the medical team worked on Star. She was hooked up to various monitors, and an IV drip was started. The oxygen was discontinued, and adrenaline administered.

  This isn’t happening … this isn’t Star … this isn’t our summer….

  The heavy door swung shut, rubber gaskets muffling the clang of metal on metal. The hyperbaric chamber pressed Star and a nurse down to seven atmospheres — the same pressure as 228 feet. According to the dive computer in Star’s watch, that was the maximum depth of her unplanned adventure. Over the next several hours, that pressure would be slowly reduced, giving her system a chance to expel the nitrogen that was overwhelming her body.

  But was the damage already done? It had taken half an hour to get her into the chamber. Thirty minutes of deadly bubbles foaming her blood.

  He looked to the chief doctor, but the man’s face revealed no clue as to how the treatment was proceeding.

  This is what we get for trespassing on the graves of sailors who’ve been dead for three hundred years.

  First the captain, and now Star. It was too much to bear.

  Two hours later, when Adriana and Dante rushed into the infirmary, the doctor’s expression had not changed.

  “She’s okay, right?” Dante asked eagerly. “Is she okay?”

  Kaz just shook his head and directed their attention to the chamber’s window. There lay their friend, her face chalk-white, still unconscious.

  The double doors swung wide to reveal Menasce Gérard, terrible in his anger and grief.

  “This is true, this thing I hear?” he demanded, voice booming. “The captain?”

  “He’s dead,” Adriana confirmed in a husky whisper. “Star tried to save him and she — ”

  The big dive guide strode to the window in the chamber. His fury softened at the sight of Star, and he placed a hand against the glass, as if trying to project his strength across the space between them. Then he wheeled and faced down the other three.

  “Alors — here is your treasure! Are you happy now? Do you feel rich?”

  They could not argue, nor defend themselves.

  They could only wait.

  02 September 1665

  The Griffin under full sail was a majestic sight. She was a barque, three-masted, carrying twenty-four guns, and built low to the water, much different from the workhorses of the Spanish treasure fleet. The galleons were massive, with towering decks. Loaded down with their precious cargoes, they wallowed in the sea, sitting ducks for the faster, more maneuverable ships of the great naval powers — England, France, Holland. And, of course, the pirates and corsairs.

  That was why Captain Blade was not overly concerned about the four-day head start the Spaniards had on the privateer fleet.

  “We’ll overtake them, we will!” Samuel heard him boast to his officers. Under torture, the mayor of Portobelo had revealed the route the fleet would be following back to Spain. There would be no usual stop in Havana. Instead, the galleons would veer to the south, picking their way through the notorious Hidden Shoals.

  As the privateer fleet navigated this course, Captain Blade ringed his vessel with lookouts and placed dozens of men in the highest rigging to scan the horizon for sails. Even when the skies darkened four days later and the rains came, he would not allow them to abandon their posts.

  The next morning, with eighteen-foot waves crashing over the bowsprit, gunner’s mate Blankenship was hurled from the mizzenmast as the barque heeled in the violent seas.

  Even York felt the need to plead with the captain for the safety of the crew. “Sir, the ratlines are not fit for man nor beast with the sea in this condition! We’ve lost one already!”

  “And we’ll lose many more,” Blade predicted. “That’s what the scum are for. Better to lose a few hands than the Spanish fleet!”

  Samuel, who was cleaning up the captain’s breakfast dishes and stumbling on the unsteady deck, exclaimed, “But sir — ”

  York silenced him with a sharp slap across the mouth.

  It stung, but Samuel realized the barber had just done him a favor. For if the man had given Blade a chance to deliver the blow himself, it surely would have come from the bone-handled snake whip.

  “Captain,” York persisted, “what might a lookout spy in such weather? Do you not know the size and nature of this storm?”

  “That I do,” agreed Blade. “’Tis a monster gale stretching a hundred miles in all directions around a pinhole of clear blue sky. Aye, that’s the beauty part.”

  Samuel could not contain himself. “Beauty? Such storms destroy ships, with all hands lost!”

  “Perchance they do,” Blade acknowledged. “But if we’re in it, so are the Spaniards.” He emitted a diabolical cackle. “Die we might, boy. But if we live, by God, we’ll all be filthy rich!”

  GORDON KORMAN is the author of more than forty books for children and young adults, including the Island series and the Everest series, as well as The Chicken Doesn’t Skate, the Slapshots series, and Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire. He lives on Long Island with his wife and children.

  Copyright © 2003 by Gordon Korman.

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.

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  First printing, July 2003

  Photography: Kelly La Duke

  Cover design: Ursula S. Albano

  eISBN 978-0-545-62812-9

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