CHAPTER 7
“Val, you still there?”
Valerie Martell blinked, and pressed the cell phone against her ear. “Yeah. Sorry, Rich. I was just looking at your photo again. Are you sure you don’t have any other shots of the object in the corner? Maybe from another angle?”
On the other end of the call, Richard Ford cleared his throat in obvious irritation. “No, we don’t. I already told you that. Look, I’m really in a hurry here. So if you could just focus for a moment, and let me go over some background . . .”
“Sorry. I’m listening.” She shut the cover of her laptop. Val had worked with the short, balding Ford before. As the executive vice president for research at the National Exploration Society, based in DC, he was intense, driven. Always in a tie. And never patient.
She said, “You were giving me background . . . saying you’d gathered mapping data on the holes, collected samples and multimedia. . . .”
“Right. But we’ve now postponed the operation. Indefinitely. To figure out what happened, and out of respect for the two divers’ families.”
“They’d probably want you to continue,” she said.
“Probably. They were a lot like you and me. But you know the drill. Liability issues trump.”
“Oh, I know.”
Val sat at the small desk in her apartment, which faced the window. The afternoon had turned clear, sunny, and through the open blinds she had a distant view past the low hills to the flat, blue expanse of Monterey Bay. As Ford talked, her mind drifted again to the printout of the dark, blurry image he had sent her. The curved object in the corner, studded with white dots, possibly had a reddish tinge, or maybe that was just her imagination. Maybe she wanted it to be red. Wanted it to look more like a cephalopod arm, to give her an excuse to pack her bags and head for the Bahamas.
Ford finished his monologue: “. . . and we’ve been trying to describe a number of the blue holes in the area since.”
“Uh-huh.”
“This was their fifth foray into this particular hole. It’s nicknamed ‘The Staircase’ by the locals, because the layers of limestone in its shallows look like giant steps leading to the rim of the main shaft. People swim and bathe in the freshwater on the surface, but until we came along, nobody had ever explored its depths.”
“How did you retrieve the camera?”
“Another of our teams went in. Followed their safety lines to where one had somehow broken off in the tunnel they were mapping.”
“But no sign of the men?”
“Just a few pieces of equipment,” he said. “Let’s see . . .”
She heard paper rustling before he continued.
“A swim fin . . . the metal spool for one of their safety lines, a couple other little things. Part of a flashlight.” He paused to let it sink in. “But nothing else so far.”
“How far did you get? On the larger project, I mean?”
“We were making relatively good progress before the accident, considering the logistical complications of diving these caverns. Know anything about the Bahamas’s blue holes?”
“Not much. I know about the ones in Belize, though. The geology of the Bahamas must be similar to the Yucatán.”
“Relatively speaking,” Ford said. “The Bahama Bank is karst limestone, which over eons has eroded into impressive submarine cave systems. The more famous ones are perfectly rounded sinkholes, but there are also some fault-line holes offshore that look more like huge cracks.”
“So some of these blue holes are landlocked?”
“Most of them, actually. Inland blue holes, like the one Breck and Pelletier were in. But few are really landlocked .”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Many of them link to the ocean through a network of caves. Like their marine counterparts, they formed over the last few million years, mainly during the Ice Ages.”
“When sea level was much lower?”
“Exactly. Hundreds of feet lower. The Bahamian Plateau once towered four hundred feet over the sea. Back then, the limestone platform was exposed to the elements.”
“And acid rain did all the work. Right?”
“You got it. Carbonic acid in rainwater pooled on the rock. Wore it down. Then, in periods where the holes were submerged in the ocean, tidal action helped scour out developing caverns. So now it’s a pretty unique place, with a shitload of blue holes.”
“You said those two divers were in an inland hole?”
“Yeah. We’d discovered three main arms off this one hole alone. Side tunnels, extending more than three hundred feet beneath the surface, with two of the passages likely extending far offshore.” There was a pause before Ford continued. “They got that shot I sent you on their last dive. I thought it looked like the arm of a squid or something.”
“Well, it does. Some cephalopod, anyway. If this really is some sort of tentacle, it’s very likely an undiscovered species.”
“Just like everything else in those caves,” Ford said. “You plan to look into this? Would PLARG send you down there?”
“Probably not. But I might go, on my own dime.”
“Really? But you’re not a caver.”
“I have a few ideas.”
“Well, if you do plan something, let me send you our data first, to get you up to speed. I have a lot of older papers on the area’s geology. And since our teams had gotten to more than twenty new holes in just the past two months, we’ve got a boatload of images, maps, notes. You name it. We were hoping to map at least fifteen more holes before the money ran out, but then . . . well, you know the rest.”
Val frowned. “What happened, Rich? I mean, you said those men were experts.”
“The best,” he said, and then paused. “I don’t know, Val. Like most of the other inland holes, it appears that somewhere underground that hole reaches well out to sea. Maybe a strong tidal surge sucked them down. Maybe they got lost. We just don’t know.”
“Are you still working to find them?”
“Not anymore. But like I said, we already looked. It’s too dangerous to keep sending men back in there.”
Val heard muffled shouting as Ford barked at someone in his office.
He said, “Sorry, Val. I gotta go.”
“What did you say was the name of the last hole they were in? The Stairway?”
“The Staircase. I’ll send you an e-mail with more details. But I’ve really gotta run.”
“Thanks, Rich. I appreciate it. One more question.”
“Hurry.”
“Was Mack on this project? Involved in any way?”
“Your uncle? No. He declined. Like always. I don’t know why I ask him anymore.”
“Thanks.” It had been a long time since she’d seen Mack herself.
“Well, good luck,” he said. “And Val?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful down there.”