Dexter McCauley
Chesapeake Bay, May 8, The Present
“Hey Dex, you down there?” The headset of his Divelink crackled with Don Jordan’s voice.
“Well, I’m sure as hell not still up there with you…” said Dex McCauley as he inched his way down the safeline.
“Hey, c’mon, man, I’m just checking the radio,” said Don.
Dex smiled behind his full-face mask. He liked Don, the Captain and owner of the Sea Dog, which had been the base vessel of the dive club since they started their wreck-diving adventures several years ago. They called themselves “The Deep Six” because that’s how many of them were in the group—and nobody cared if it was a cliché or not (and it certainly was that). They’d been through a lot, and they were a tight bunch of guys. Six of ’em.
Although not an official member of the “Six,” Don was a real nice guy who wouldn’t be caught dead diving himself. He believed he should have fun on the water, never under it. He’d been running a charter boat business out of Annapolis for almost ten years, and still loved it.
“You hear me?” said Don.
“Affirmative…I just can’t help being my terribly sarcastic self.” Dex said into his mask-mic.
“What’s it like down there?”
“Not too cold. We’ll see what it’s like at 60 feet or so…” Dex was currently hanging around 30 feet as he waved his torchlight upward toward the surface, looking for his dive-mate. “Mike, you in yet?”
“Just hit the water, Chief. I’m working my way down the line,” said Mike Bielski, his voice edged by the clipped accent of a true New Jersey native.
“You see my light yet?” Dex undulated the torch slowly.
“Just barely,” said Mike. “But it’s getting brighter all the time.”
Dex floated in the dim water. Despite the inherent perils, he loved it down there, plain and simple. There was no way to explain the unique perspective diving gave you, the sensation of being in a world that existed solely for yourself.
And it was pretty damned cloudy down there. Not much ambient light once you got below more than about 10 feet. Without a light, depending on what was floating around in the water, it could be as dark as a mineshaft at midnight. Some guys couldn’t handle that kind of darkness when combined with the water pressure and the knowledge that the air and the light was so far above you. Some guys even lost the feel for what was above you. Directional sense shot all to hell. The darkness and the pressure was just a natural force of disorientation, and some people would go crazy if they had to stay down for the length of your average dive.
But it had never bothered Dex. He’d always felt at home down there—a place where you were totally alone with your thoughts. Even though, sometimes, those thoughts could gang up on you. Overwhelm you if you weren’t careful.
Like going to the bottom of the Styx, and being swallowed up by a never-ending night where dreams died with everything else. Held in the pressurized grip of the ocean, you could feel more horribly alone than anywhere else on the planet.
Hey, he thought as he shook his head. Back to the present, pal.
Pay attention to what you’re doing—this current dive would not be anywhere near as deep as some of the other wrecks they’d dove. Stay alive and useful to the rest of the team. Even though it was still early in the season, two weeks before Memorial Day, there’d been a whiplash of warm current surging up the Bay from a temporary coastal sway of the Gulfstream.
Visibility was another story, though. In a word, it was shitty. Even down in the Lower Bay, which got more of the Atlantic waters to keep it clean. Dex had known the waters of the Chesapeake had been getting ever cloudier for twenty years. If you were going to chart it out, it was on an inverse slope with the diminishing oyster population. More oysters; cleaner Bay.
So far, Dex wasn’t able to see much of anything that might be lying beneath him, but he knew he had to be patient. His dive-mate on this first dive of the day was Mike Bielski, and he could just barely see Mike’s torchlight stabbing through the murky water—even though he was barely fifteen feet from the other man. And this was one of the best seasons for visibility in the bay, when most of the floating algae had died off.
But today, Dex wasn’t all that concerned with how well he could see down here because they wouldn’t be just swimming around, looking at random for whatever might be littering the bottom. Using his Navy surplus gear, Kevin Cheever had given them some hard data in the form of LORAN coordinates, and they were going to be trying to home-in, for the first time, on the site of a new wreck.
A wreck so far unknown and unidentified—until Kevin had stumbled on the data that suggested something interesting might be down there.
“I see you,” Mike’s voice filled Dex’s earphone. “I see the safeline.”
“Okay, grab on.” Dex watched his dive-mate grasp the nylon line running from the Sea Dog straight down to the bottom in the center of the LORAN grid. Most divers didn’t bother to hook a sliding piton and tether from the safeline to their toolbelt, which would keep them on course to the target—unless the visibility was practically zero. As long as you could see the line, most divers preferred to be unfettered, and Mike was no exception.
Bielski was a tall stringbean of a guy. At an age when most guys were losing the battle of extra poundage around the middle, Mike seemed to getting leaner. He ate his share of Doritos and burgers and Budweisers along with the rest of them, but never gained the weight. And it wasn’t a life of training and exercise doing it, either. Other than the excursions with the dive club, Mike sat on his ass working math theorems at Johns Hopkins University.
“Ready,” said Mike, pointing downward with his thumb like an emperor giving his opinion on a fallen gladiator.
“Okay, let’s take a look…”
“Donnie, you still on our channel?”
“I got you. Base unit’s loud and clear,” he said. “Good luck, guys.”
“Kevin says we’re not going to need it. Like fish in a barrel,” said Dex.
“Okay, then just be careful,” said Donnie. “I’ll be monitoring everything.”
“Gotcha. Here we go…”
Dex angled his body toward the bottom and flipper-kicked. Keeping the white nylon in his torchlight, it was easy for Dex to head down to the bottom. Every once in a while he would check his Ikelite depth gauge, more out of habit than anything else, although they were getting close to a critical threshold where nitrogen narcosis became a concern. They were in a section of the Chesapeake just south of the Bay Bridge where it was never more than 70 to 90 feet deep.
He had no idea what he was looking for—other than it was some kind of wreck, fairly big at around 400 feet long and pretty much intact. He and his pals had been wreck-diving for years, but they’d never found their “own”—a new ship, one never previously discovered, charted and picked clean of anything worth salvaging.
And that was nothing unusual, Dex knew, because it was nearly impossible to just be swimming around in the murky depths of the Chesapeake and just stumble on a big boat sticking up out of the seabed. It just didn’t happen. Odds were against it—you being so small and the sea bottom being so big.
But new technology trickling down to the consumer markets would be changing all that within the next decade. Dex had seen big changes in dive gear just within the last five years with GPS, underwater communications and wearable decompression computers; and it was going to keep getting more interesting.
“Forty feet,” Bielski’s voice piped through Dex’s headset. “I don’t see a thing yet.”
“Be careful,” said Dex. “If there’s any superstructure, it could be showing up any time now.”
From the images Kevin had given them, there was no way to tell if the sunken ship was lying on its side or had settled to the bottom in a “sitting-up” position with its stacks, bridge, masts (or whatever it had) all pointing up at the surface. An unsuspecting diver could swim right down into a tangle of netting, cables, or other jutting debris that could be deadly.
Of course, it would help to know what kind of wreck they were homing in on. The Chesapeake Bay was littered with the broken hulls of ships from the past two hundred years. Lots of wooden ships went down during the Civil War and years afterward from the capricious storms that whip up the coast from the Carolinas. But the wood eventually rots away and all that’s left are the canons and the metal fittings.
So, from the signature of the sonar scans Dex had seen, they were most likely headed toward a steel ship. Its lines were too well-defined for it to be all that much broken up.
“Hey…” said Mike Bielski. “I think I see something…off to the right. Easy…”
Peering through the dark water, Dex panned his torch back and forth, stirring up all the floating particulate in the water. Even with the algae at its lowest point, it was still hard to see very far. “What’s it look like?”
Mike eased to a stop next to Dex, reached out and held onto the safeline. Even though only ten feet separated them, Dex could only see his black and orange drysuit dimly. Like swimming in pea soup.
“Just saw it for a second,” said Mike. “A mast or an antenna. Seems like it oughta be right below us. Careful we don’t get poked in the ass.”
“Okay, let’s just inch it…”
Hand over hand, Dex began to pull himself toward the bottom. Mike was only slightly above and off his right shoulder. He and Mike played their torchlights slowly through the murk below them. Had to be real careful now in case there was anything that could snag or tangle them. Dex had survived a few incidents like that; every time he’d thought he might die, and every time it was enough to make him wonder—did he really wanted to keep diving?
But that was before Jana walked out on him. For a while after that disaster, he knew he didn’t give a good Goddamn.
Funny, when he was down here like this, the “air world” (as an old Navy diver had referred to it years ago) seemed so far away, so alien, and almost unremembered. It was as if none of what went on up there had ever actually happened. As if the ex-wife had never even been a part of his life.
“Whoa!” said Mike, his voice knifing through the silence. “Watch it!”
Dex blinked, and was stunned to see a large shaft jutting up in front of his mask. Tubular, metallic, encrusted with the bodies and exoskeletons of marine life, it represented the topmost part of whatever ship they’d found.
“Hey, guys…everything okay down there?” Don Jordan’s voice crackled in Dex’s earphones. He hadn’t been keeping the guys back in the boat in the loop, and he couldn’t blame them for getting itchy. “Yeah, we just reached some superstructure—the boat’s obviously sitting upright. Depth: fifty-two feet at the topmast. Tell Kev he couldn’t have been any more on the money unless we were in his bathtub.”
There was a pause from Don, then: “He says there’s no way you’re ever gonna be there!”
“Okay,” said Dex. “We’re going to take it real slow now. Let’s see what we’re looking at. Looks like we’re going to be just below three atmospheres…”
He signaled to Mike and they began working their way past the mast-like extension. Whatever it was attached to, below them, was still mostly invisible beyond the limited wash of their torches in the soupy water. But they hadn’t eased down much farther before they encountered a second heavily encrusted extension, and then several others. There was a grouping of steel tubes and shafts, and one of them looked familiar.
“You see that?” he said to Mike, pointing at the long thick extension.
“I see it—is it what I think it is?”
Holding up his index finger to pause, then touching his Divelink phone, Dex spoke softly. “Kev, you still got us?”
“Oh yeah…what gives?”
“We’re a little farther down, looks like we have a sub…”