CHAPTER 37
Val toweled off her hair in the bow of the boat. She felt relaxed, relieved, her wet suit stripped to her waist and the sun warming her back while the craft bobbed gently on small waves. She now understood why nobody entered the hole below them. There had been a few long moments where she’d been worried they wouldn’t make it back.
She’d left Mack when she spied something shiny beneath her—what looked like something artificial. She decided to hurry down to it, only to find it was an old beer can carelessly dropped from the surface by some tourist. As she’d begun her ascent, and was almost to her uncle, a billowing cloud of cold, sediment-laden water had overtaken them, washed up from below as it was expelled from the caverns woven under Andros Island.
With the visibility suddenly at zero, and a swirling, turbid current forcing them up too fast, she and Mack had held on to one another and tried to control their ascent without slamming their heads into the rock wall that curved in over the shaft’s opening. After several hair-raising minutes, they’d cleared the mouth of the hole and calmed down as they hovered in the warmer, clear waters beneath the boat. Needing to clear the excess nitrogen from their bodies, they remained for some time there, watching the sediment cloud haze the waters around them.
“I guess all that rain last week musta gotten under the island,” Mack said. He hadn’t bothered drying off, and was leaning back in the captain’s chair.
Val thought again of the dark cloud of cold water rising toward her and shuddered. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She sat down on a padded bench seat to put on dry clothes. Eric was in the stern, in the filtered shade under the black mesh strung over the top rails, setting his laptop up to play back the ROV’s video footage. Mack stood, a wooden toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, and moved over to Eric. Val buttoned shorts over her swim bottoms and got up to join them.
“You were right, Val,” Eric said, the hint of a smile on his face. “These holes not only suck. Now we’re seeing them blow.”
“Like you,” Mack said.
Val shook her head. Was he hard on Eric just because he’d never served in the military? Her Uncle Mack had always been confrontational, but now he’d become a bully. She wished this fieldwork could be more light-hearted. Suddenly she had a flashback:
Almost two years ago. Will Sturman. With his friend, Mike Phan, arguing and telling lewd jokes. Off Southern California, on Maria, named after the wife he’d lost. Him looking at her, the way he used to.
Will had been a drunk then, before he’d gone clean with her. He was trying to get clean again now, and maybe he would. But he’d never move on from Maria. She looked at Eric.
“Got anything yet?”
He looked down at the computer. “Almost . . . Okay, there. The raw download’s ready. Might be hard to see, out here in the sun. Someone hold up a towel.”
As they’d boarded the boat, he’d informed them that the hole indeed dropped to more than 350 feet below the seabed, but how far he wasn’t sure. DORA had never reached a discernible bottom, so they would need to view the 3-D scan to determine actual depth. And he’d excitedly described some interesting features DORA had encountered. Some sort of what he considered man-made debris piles outside a few side tunnels, and larger, club-like objects just inside one passage. All now captured on video.
She and Mack crowded in on either side of him on the seat, squinting to see even under the towel they held over them.
“There isn’t much worth watching in the beginning,” Eric said. “I’m going to fast forward until DORA is farther down . . . here . . . no, hang on, I passed it.” He messed with the display. “I’m bringing us to where the hole first narrowed to a series of ledges.”
He played with the feed some more, and then on the screen was a lighter-colored shape, surrounded by a darker background. “Here. This is where I recorded that first weird pile of rocks or something, by the mouth of a side tunnel.”
Val leaned toward the monitor. “Can you turn up the brightness?”
“This is the best we’re gonna get. Mack, move that towel over the screen.”
He did, and suddenly the playback was a little more discernible. In the paused video, DORA’s lights were fixed on a pile of rubble. It was located on a relatively flat surface, with the black opening of another branching fissure behind it.
“Where is that?” Mack asked.
“About three-hundred-twenty feet down. This is where the shaft clearly narrowed, starting with a wide ledge on one side. It looked like a bulldozer had excavated the tunnel here, so I took DORA just past this pile, into it.”
He played the video feed again, and bits of marine snow moved upward on the camera, and Val realized she was seeing the first hint that the upward flow of cold water was about to begin.
“There.” Eric again paused the image and pointed. “There’s one of the clubs.”
“Looks like a big tooth or something,” Mack said.
“I doubt it,” Val said. On the screen was an elongated object with a heavier mass on one end, more pointed on the other. Something about it was familiar. “It’s hard to tell with it half-buried in the sediment like that. But I’d guess it’s probably some sort of bone. Maybe from a whale.”
“How the hell would a whale bone get back into that narrow cavern?”
“Good question. I don’t know.” Val thought for a moment. “Maybe the same currents that pushed the rubble out brought the bone back in. Let’s send some stills of this footage to Karen.”
“Back at PLARG?” Mack asked.
She nodded. “She studies marine mammals. Maybe she’ll be able to ID this.”
“I found a bone too,” Mack said. “Smaller than that one. I dropped the damn thing when that sediment kicked up. You saw it, Val.”
“I couldn’t tell what was sinking toward me. But I’m not surprised we’re finding bones. With the lower oxygen levels in these holes, bones and other matter might preserve longer than they would elsewhere in the ocean.”
Eric fast-forwarded. “There.” He paused the video. “Here’s the other pile. The bigger one. Maybe forty feet deeper.”
It was indeed another mound of debris, perhaps five or ten feet high, also located just below an opening in the rock wall. She scanned the image. There appeared to be the skeletal remains of sizeable arthropods, and maybe a few large bones jutting from the pile.
“What do you think these are, Val?” Eric asked.
“Well, they could be debris cones, from the collapse of the rock above.”
“Like the pile of snow that forms when you shovel off a deck?”
She nodded.
“DORA found something like this in Mexico’s cenotes,” he said. “But here they’re at the mouths of tunnels.”
She said, “What do you think, Mack?”
He shrugged. “Debris cones seem plausible. Or maybe like you said, the currents piled that stuff there over time.”
“Maybe.” She frowned.
“What?” Mack said.
“Well, with the bones, the shells . . . they sort of remind me of something else.” She watched as the dense cloud of sediment finally overtook the ROV and obscured the camera, effectively ending the video. Eric stopped it.
He looked at her. “What? What do those remind you of?”
“Well, it really isn’t possible. They’re far too large. But they look like middens.”
“Middens?”
“Yes. Middens.”
“What the hell are those?” Mack asked.
“Basically they’re trash heaps, usually composed of bits of rock or coral, and shells . . . or bones.”
“Made by what?”
Val got up and moved to the edge of the boat. She leaned over the side, gazed down into the water. The dark hole beneath the surface remained obscured by the cloudy water.
“Nothing that gets big enough to do that,” she said.