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T
he small pop-up window on the marine GPS appeared with a beep, displaying a familiar message:
Arriving at destination
. Travis eased back on the throttle to slow the sleek inboard and scanned the water. The sea was fairly calm, so he shouldn’t have trouble finding the group. He didn’t want to run over any of them accidentally, so he slowed to a few knots and watched the waves ahead for lights on the water.

Ahead, he saw one light appear, maybe a hundred and fifty yards off the bow. But that was it. Maybe one guy was signaling for the whole group. Then he saw another light, farther away, way off to his right.
Too
far to his right. Something was wrong here. He waited to see other lights appear, but only a few more appeared between the first two lights, and none of them were directed at him. They seemed to be pointed in all directions.

Travis noticed another light now, much closer and directly in front of him. He eased the Whaler toward the light, steering so that he would pass just to the right of the person in the water. As he neared it, Travis stepped over to the port side for a better look. He realized the light wasn’t held above the water, as it should be. It was bobbing on the surface.

Something was definitely wrong.

The boat drifted past the floating light, just missing it, when something else bumped gently against the hull. Travis looked toward the bow and, for a moment, he saw what appeared to be a person floating in the dark water next to the boat, being pulled beneath it as it drifted past.

Someone was going under the boat.

Travis dashed back to the driver’s seat and yanked the throttle into neutral. He leapt to the stern, grabbing a life preserver, looking for the person to pop up. There. He saw the man again. He was still floating face-up in the water, drifting down the side of the boat. Bobbing like the flashlight. Travis squatted on the transom for a better look, and realized why. He stopped breathing.

This man wasn’t moving. Even in the dim light, Travis could see that the man’s dark T-shirt was torn, as was his stomach.
Fuck, this dude’s dead.
The boat’s momentum continued to carry it past the man, preventing Travis from getting a clear look at him.

Travis tried to assimilate what he was seeing, not wanting to believe he may have just seen a dead body. He needed to turn the boat around and check. But where the fuck was everyone else? There was a noise.

A cough.

The dead man had coughed as the boat moved away from him. He was alive?

Travis spoke. “Hey, amigo . . . can you hear me?”

The man remained silent as the boat drifted farther away. Travis put the boat in reverse and let it idle once again as he neared the motionless figure on the water.

Travis reached out with a long-handled fishing net and placed it over the man’s head, since it was the only part of the man he could reach. As he dragged the man closer, the net forced his head underwater. The inert man came to life, sputtering as he inhaled water, then coughed as he weakly fought at the net with his hands.

“
Tranquilo
, bro!” Travis forgot his Spanish. “I’m trying to help!”

Travis somehow managed to move the struggling man next to the swim platform on the stern. As he drew the man closer to the lights on the transom, Travis could see that he was seriously injured. He was moaning. Even in the dim red stern light, holes and tears were visible on his clothing, his torso.

Travis reached down to grab the injured man. Maybe he could slide him onto the boat. The man’s body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. As Travis tried for a better grip, his hand entered a warm, wet hole in the man’s thigh and he felt his fingers brush against something smooth and solid.

Bone
.

He recoiled, realizing that he had just touched the man’s exposed femur. He regained himself, and grabbed onto the man’s wet shirt and dragged him onto the transom with the help of a small wave.

He could now see that the man was bleeding badly, the dark fluid spreading in swirls before seawater washed over the white transom. Travis didn’t want to pull a bleeding, dying man into his dad’s boat.

Travis looked at the apparently unconscious man illuminated by the red navigation light on the stern. Blood poured from a gaping hole in his right thigh. There were a few smaller holes lower on the leg. And the foot was missing on that leg. No right foot at all, just empty space below the shin. Surprisingly little blood was draining from the stump. What the hell had happened? This couldn’t have been the other boat, could it? A shark?

He asked the question several times, but the man just lay supine with his eyes shut. His body was splayed out near the back of the boat, as far up as Travis had been able to drag him. Travis managed to form a crude tourniquet around the mangled leg using a length of rope from the boat’s bumper, but he could tell it might be too late. Blood had spread across the bottom of the boat and was slowly draining down the stern. Travis stood and looked around the dark ocean for the others. A few flashlights were visible nearby, bobbing on the waves. Travis shouted several times, but nobody answered.

They were all gone.

Travis really wanted a joint. He was torn between starting the boat and getting the hell out of there, or staying in the hopes that there might be a few other men in the water. Hector had said there were fifteen of them.

Fifteen.

But there was only one now. It didn’t matter. Sharks or something had killed them all. Travis was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to flee. He’d already been there too long. But what the hell was he going to do with the guy in the stern?

He made up his mind, knew what he was going to do. He took two quick strides toward the man’s body. He would check for a pulse, then he was going to dump the body and get the hell out of here if he was dead.

Travis paused over the bloody man splayed out in the stern.

“Wake up, goddammit. Tell me what’s going on, man, or I’ll leave your ass out here!”

The man didn’t answer. His breathing was very quiet.

As Travis leaned down to grab his shirt, the man’s eyes began to slowly open, staring empty at the moonless sky, unblinking in the bright white cabin. He was older than Travis, probably in his thirties, with a weathered face and wet, black locks clinging to his forehead. Travis realized he was watching the man slip away and started to cry.

“Come on, man, don’t die. What the hell am I supposed to do with you? What the fuck happened here?”

Travis grabbed the man’s head and shook it. Suddenly, the man lashed out and grabbed Travis’s wrist, their eyes locking. Travis yelled out. The man spoke.

“
Los diablos.”

“What? What did you say? What do you mean,
los diablos
?”

The man’s grip weakened, and he began to relax again, his eyes glazing over. He took a slow, shallow breath, met Travis’s eyes, and whispered the words a final time.

T
he diver descended the anchor chain into blackness.

Every few feet farther from the surface, he felt the water pressure building in his ears, forcing him to equalize the pressure by pinching his nose and blowing into his sinuses. Hand over hand, he gripped the heavy, algae-coated chain to keep his bearings in the cold, dimly lit water and prevent the current from sweeping him away from his destination on the bottom a hundred and twenty feet down—a sunken Canadian destroyer.

The only sounds Will Sturman could hear were the hiss of air flowing through the diaphragm of his regulator as he inhaled, followed by the loud burst of bubbles rushing past his ears as he exhaled in the deep.

He glanced at his digital depth gauge as the readout reached ninety feet. Looking off into the gloom, he began to notice the pale, hulking shape of the destroyer emerge from his otherwise uniform field of view.

Sturman felt something bump into his scuba tank.

He paused with one hand on the anchor chain, then rolled over in the water to face upward, shining his dive light up toward the surface. In the beam of light, directly behind him, was one of the divers he had brought down. A middle-aged woman. Above her, through drifting organic particles, he counted the rest of the divers by their lights. Four. Everyone was still behind him, all within thirty feet or so. They were almost to their destination, a silent mass of rusting steel that never saw daylight.

The
HMCS Redemption
lay upright on the sandy bottom, just as she had gone down. Intentionally sunk to form an artificial reef, it was regardless a stroke of luck that she had come to rest upright, just as she had plied the surface. Many a planned and purposefully sunken ship accidentally ended up on its side, despite the best efforts of those sinking it. All that was visible to Sturman in the darkness a hundred feet down was the span of the ship from bridge to prow; blackness consumed the rest of the three-hundred-and-seventy-foot leviathan.

This was the first of two dives today, so he would bring the group down deeper and let them explore inside the hull if they wanted. On the later dive, nobody would be allowed as deep or permitted to stay under as long. The demolition crew that had sunken the
Redemption
had removed her doors, cut holes in the side of the hull, and had otherwise made her diver-friendly before setting off the charges to sink her, so it was easy to navigate by wreck-diving standards. He would still need to keep a close eye on these folks, though; they were relatively experienced divers, but if they got turned around in the darkness of the hull he wouldn’t have much time to find them before they ran out of air. At this depth, many divers burned through their air supply in less than twenty minutes.

As Sturman reached the bottom of the anchor chain, really a permanent mooring line fixed to a buoy at the surface, the current began to weaken. He noticed a lingcod as big as his leg below him, resting on the deck where the chain was bolted to the wreck. That lingcod was always here. The fish looked as though she might be dead and never even twitched in his presence, but he knew she was just conserving energy. The mooring chain next to her was affixed on the foredeck of the destroyer. Divers usually started here and followed the length of the ship and explored as time permitted in the lighter currents near the vessel.

Sturman let go of the chain and passed the lingcod, and began to move over the deck with smooth strokes of his swim fins. He took deep, slow breaths to minimize his air consumption, and looked over the ship in reverence. He had seen this vessel in its final resting place hundreds of times, but he never grew tired of looking at it. He liked being down here. In the darkness.

 

 

Sturman glanced at his air gauge. Twelve hundred psi of air remained in the tank—maybe eight minutes of bottom time, if he wanted to be really conservative. Sturman was rarely conservative with his own air, but he never put his clients at risk. The divers he had in tow would almost certainly run out of air sooner. He had let the foursome leave in pairs ten minutes ago, and had been studying a patch of giant white-plumed anemones sprouting from the deck like oversized cauliflower. The Metridiums fluttering in the current were each over a foot tall and practically as wide.

Sturman looked at his watch. It was time to round everyone up and return to the surface. Two of the divers had returned ahead of schedule and rested on the deck beside him near the base of the anchor chain. In another minute, he would need to go looking for the other two, but he could wait a little longer. He preferred to keep the whole group together as a dive wound down and air ran low. Just then he noticed a faint light in the distance, moving toward them down the hull.

 

 

As the light approached, Sturman realized something wasn’t right. There was only one beam pointed toward him, closing on him fast. Every diver had brought down a dive light, and they had been instructed to stay in pairs.

Sturman made eye contact with the pair next to him and signaled for them to ascend to the safety stop near the surface. The divers gave him an “okay” signal with thumb and forefinger, the universal scuba message indicating they were all right and understood. The two divers began to kick upward as Sturman finned toward the lone diver approaching along the foredeck.

Looking into the diver’s mask, Sturman could see by the man’s expression that he was terrified.
Jack,
Sturman remembered.
His name is Jack.
Jack was trying to pantomime something to him, but since he was unable to speak underwater, it wasn’t clear what he was trying to get across. And their air was running out.

Sturman held up his hand in the other diver’s face, palm outward:
Stop.
He then looked the panicked man in the eyes and gave a large, exaggerated shrug:
Where is she? Where is your dive buddy?

The diver looked back at Sturman for a moment, exhaling a burst of bubbles through his regulator, then shook his head and shrugged back. Either this guy didn’t understand the question or didn’t have the answer. Sturman squeezed the man’s shoulder and pointed to the mooring line, then gave a thumbs-up:
Ascend the chain now.
The man shook his head no—understandable, since it was his wife he had left behind. Will squeezed the man’s shoulder again, harder this time, and locked eyes with the man, repeating the command to ascend.

 

 

One thousand psi.
Sturman was beginning to worry. He had made sure the reluctant diver had begun his ascent up the mooring line and then, with a series of powerful kicks, had set off alone down the length of the sunken destroyer. Past huge double guns, each large enough to shove a soccer ball into the barrel, past a metal bridge rising several stories off the deck. He had covered almost the full length of the wreck, but hadn’t seen any sign of the missing woman.

His mind went through scenarios as he weighed the possibilities and his options. He had about six minutes before he would have to ascend. The woman probably had simply been separated from her husband, and would head up soon on her own. She had logged a lot of previous dives, and Sturman had taken this group out before without incident. But there was another possibility. She could be trapped somewhere, or lost within the ship. Not likely, though. No. She had simply become separated from her dive buddy, so he hadn’t been able to help her.

 

 

Eight hundred psi.
Sturman had reached a large opening amidships and headed down into the darkness of the hull. Now he was moving along the upper interior deck, passing through hatches that mercifully had had their doors removed. If it had been dim in the water outside the ship, in here it was truly black. The little bit of sunlight that filtered down through over a hundred feet of particle-laden water was unable to penetrate the intermittent openings in the ship to offer any illumination in its belly. The waters of Southern California were not the clear waters of the Caribbean.

Sturman’s whole world had become the single cone of light emitted by his powerful dive light, which reached through a dozen or so feet of black water swirling with detritus before being absorbed by the darkness.

 

 

Six hundred psi.
Sturman swam through an opening in the deck, down into the next lowest level. Looking up into the light streaming down from a hatch through particles in the water above him, he thought, not for the first time, that being inside this ship was almost like being in an underwater cathedral.

He wondered how quickly he would be able to get out of here when it was time to scramble for the surface. He needed five hundred psi for an adequate safety stop. Damn lady must be crazy. What the hell was she up to?
Stay calm, Will.
He took a slow, deep breath. If she was here, he would find her.

Four hundred and fifty psi.
The ship was a labyrinth. It all looked the same. In his light, Sturman saw only empty spaces and small, square rooms no matter where he was in the innards of the wreck. Walls and hatches crusted over with barnacles. An occasional fish darting through the beam of light. It was past time to head for the surface.

Fairly certain he had thoroughly searched the upper level, Sturman reached another hole in the floor, a stairwell leading into the next level down. Two levels under the main deck, he reminded himself. He figured he was somewhere near the stern of the boat now, but everything looked the same. He had been inside this boat many times, but never in a hurry. He had always planned on where he would go, followed a predetermined route. He forced himself to think about the locations of emergency escapes on each level.

 

 

Three hundred psi.
A few minutes of air left. Sturman could only hope the diver had gotten to the surface on her own. Maybe she had ascended while he was in here searching, but he had no way of knowing. He glanced again at his gauges. Now three levels down into the ship, he was somewhere near the outer hull and a hundred and twenty feet down. He was going through his air so fast now that he could have watched it drop on the gauge as he took each breath.
One more hatch
, he thought,
then I need to surface.

The seriousness of it hit him.
Jesus, don’t let her be trapped down here.

No more time. He had to ascend—now. He reached the next room, and finning through it, he saw a faint light maybe thirty feet ahead and to the left. One of the holes cut into the hull before the boat had been sunk. Essentially an emergency exit. He headed toward it as he sensed his air supply dwindling, moving impossibly slow in the water, as if the ship wasn’t going to let him leave. He entered the next chamber and something glinted in the beam of his dive light.

He’d found her.

 

 

Like an animal caught in a trap, the woman was thrashing in the beam of light, kicking up sediment and clouding the dark water. No bubbles rose from her mouthpiece. She may have just now run out of the last breath of air and was in a state of desperate panic to free herself. Sturman kicked toward her, pulling his regulator out of his mouth. He spun her around forcefully as he reached her, holding the mouthpiece in front of her foggy mask. She spit out her own mouthpiece, snatching his and forcing it between her lips.

She drew a huge breath, exhaling an explosion of bubbles around his face. Sturman reached back and grabbed the Spare Air canister attached to his buoyancy control vest. There was no way this lady was going to relinquish his mouthpiece and share it so they could buddy breathe together, and there wasn’t enough air in his main tank for both of them anyway, so using his octopus was out of the question.

The Spare Air tank, a tiny canister he carried for emergencies and had used only once before, would give him several minutes of air to surface if he controlled his breathing. He placed the mouthpiece of the tiny tank in his mouth and took a cautious first breath. It still worked.

Sturman gave her a reassuring look:
Everything’s all right now.
She didn’t seem to see him. She was still panicked.

He looked behind her and quickly realized why she was still down here. The primary regulator at the top of her scuba tank, which connected her air hoses to the tank, was somehow jammed into a hole adjacent to a hatchway, perhaps where hinges had been torn free. Sturman grabbed her tank and regulator, twisting with all his strength in each direction, wrenching the woman back and sideways. The tank popped free.

Grabbing the woman’s vest and pulling, Sturman shoved off the wall with his free arm, kicked hard, and accelerated toward the distant opening in the hull.