CHAPTER 21
“You owe me twenty bucks, son,” Mack said.
“You already said that,” Eric mumbled to the old curmudgeon, who stood in the setting sun by the water’s edge, stripping out of his wet suit. It was the first thing Mack had said when he surfaced.
Eric sat beneath a large Bahamian pine, looking over DORA for damage. He knew this might happen. It had happened before. But Eric had prayed it wouldn’t happen today, in front of this asshole.
DORA had gotten stuck.
After the ROV had gone back a couple hundred feet, and Eric was guiding her out on the return trip, he had somehow wrapped her umbilical around a stalagmite or some other cave feature—he wasn’t sure, since DORA had kicked up so much silt that in no time he’d been unable to see anything on the monitor. After a while, as Eric sat alone on the surface wondering what to do, helplessly watching clouds of pale silt shifting across his laptop monitor, Val and Mack, still underwater, apparently had realized the ROV was stuck—probably because the umbilical had ceased to move. Mack had followed the cable back and freed DORA in the tunnel.
Eric knew when he arrived at the trapped submersible, because of the motion on the camera. The wave of a hand in front of the lens. Plus, he’d finally used the ROV’s external keyboard at that point to type Eric a message. Two words:
YOURE WELCOME
At least DORA hadn’t been too far back, or Eric wouldn’t even have her now.
Val, her hair still wet, shivered in the cooling air as Eric watched her slide out of her tight neoprene wet suit. He realized he was staring at the faint line of cleavage between her breasts, where a gold chain dangled. He quickly looked up and met her eyes. She smiled faintly, then opened a cooler and brought out some sandwiches and a large Tupperware of fresh fruit.
“Take a break from that, Eric,” she said. “Let’s eat some dinner.”
“That’s all right. I don’t have an appetite.”
“But I do. Being right makes a man hungry,” Mack said, grabbing a sandwich. He sat down, a towel draped over his thick shoulders, and bit into the food as he reattached his prosthesis. Eric grinned when he swore and swatted at a sand fly on his neck.
Val said, “I just texted a woman I met a few days ago. She works at Oceanus. I’m going to have her over for dinner so we can get a little more background on this area.”
Mack said, “Is she a diver?”
“No. But she might know more about the holes here. Maybe she can get us in touch with more of the locals. She said she’s free on Saturday night. Valentine’s Day.”
Mack finished tightening a strap above his knee. “Talking to her won’t help Watson here pilot his toy any better.”
Eric said, “Really? Will you let up already? I’ve never actually piloted her in a cave like that. It’s like a video game. I only have so much control.”
“Well, I’d think a guy like you would be better at video games. All you fuckin’ Gen-Y-ers, all you do is play on your Ataris.”
“On our whats? What the hell are you talking about? My ROV would work fine if you’d just do your job and mind the damn cable.” Eric felt himself getting angry.
Mack glared at him. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying if you had kept the slack pulled in on her return, like I told you to, I wouldn’t have had a problem.”
“You listen to me, son—”
Val waved her hands in the air. “Enough! Mack, you can’t expect him to master this in the first try,” she said. “DORA’s never been in this environment.”
“Excuses are like assholes,” Mack said.
“What?”
“Everybody’s got one.” Mack grabbed another sandwich off the cooler.
Eric said, “It will go faster once I get a little more experience. You’ve got to be patient.”
Val said, “Eric’s right. Besides, this wasn’t a total failure. DORA operated smoothly, and made it two hundred feet into the side passage.”
“And the video and sonar captures were good,” Eric said. He had gotten good visual, even recorded a blind fish with a translucent tail flitting through the darkness, and the sonar device would be able to produce a three-dimensional map of the tunnel on his laptop.
Still, DORA had gotten stuck.
Eric connected a cable to the ROV’s output port, then to his laptop. Val sat down cross-legged in front of him, now wearing only a swimsuit, a towel draped over her shoulders. He tried not to stare. He removed his glasses and cleaned them with his shirt.
He cleared his throat and said, “Val, this morning you said something about a kid going missing. What do you think happened?”
Munching on fruit, she said, “I don’t know. Mars said a teenager disappeared in another hole on the island. Last week.”
Mack said, “Was he diving?”
“No. He and his friends were swimming, at night. I guess a reporter from Nassau has been on the island asking questions.”
“Mars sounds like a better source of local information than any newspaper,” Eric said.
“He is.”
Val said, “You’ve been down in a lot of these holes, Uncle Mack. What do you think happened?”
Mack sat down against a pine. He rubbed his right forearm with a calloused hand. “When I was fifteen, diving for lobster down here with your grandpa—the locals call them ‘crawfish’—I got ahold a this big fella.” He paused, his eyes far away as he brought back the memory. “That bug was inside a sunken boat. Didn’t wanna come out. And I was runnin’ outta breath. Wouldn’t let go, you know.”
“You?” Val smiled at her uncle. He grinned.
“See this?” He ran a finger down a long scar on his forearm. “My arm got stuck. Some piece of metal. Cut it real nice when I finally jerked it free. Lost the lobster.”
“You think that teen was diving for lobsters?” Eric asked.
“No. Lobsters don’t live in these inland holes. Maybe he was after something else, got stuck. I don’t know. There’s also the tides, they create suction. He coulda gotten pulled down. It happens sometimes. Blue holes are dangerous.”
Eric pictured a boy’s corpse floating in the darkness, wedged into some submarine passage. Limbs swaying in the current. He shuddered and looked down at his laptop. The download was nearly complete.
“But they didn’t find his body either?” he asked.
Val shook her head.
“Check this out,” Eric said. The download was complete. He turned the laptop toward them.
On the screen was a colorful three-dimensional image of what looked like a tunnel.
“Is that where we just were?” Val asked.
“Yep. The different colors depict surface hardness, or density. Things like algae and silt appear lighter than solid rock.” The image changed as he zoomed out, reorienting the view so that they were looking at the entire image from the side. The tunnel now appeared as a long, jagged yellow line, running out of a much thicker yellowish column—a vertical stack of pancakes that had to be the main shaft of the hole—all on a field of black.
Mack said, “Huh. Pretty cool, actually. But you still really believe we can rely on that thing to do this job?”
Val said, “We have to, Mack. None of this is worth anyone else dying.”