WAEWAETOROA PASSAGE

The shock of landing felt like a car crash; then dark water enveloped him.

His nose filled with salty water. It seemed to take an age to kick back to the surface, but then he shot up above the waves like a cork, the wet suit giving him buoyancy. He gasped in a huge lungful of air and coughed and spluttered the water out of his sinuses.

Then there was a loud splash nearby. Someone had followed him over the side of the ship!

He jackknifed in the water and began to swim down. It was hard. Harder than he had realized. The wet suit kept trying to drag him back up to the surface.

He opened his eyes despite the sting of the salt and saw the bright lights of the Möbius, barely a few meters away, the submarine itself just a dark smudge in the water behind the glare of the lights. A couple more strokes and he was nearly at the sub. The top hatch was open, he saw, and Rebecca was already inside, silhouetted against the hatch lights.

She was waving frantically at him, and he suddenly realized that she had been down there, holding her breath, waiting for him to come so she could close the hatch.

Suddenly a strong hand closed around his ankle pulling him backward in the water. He kicked frantically but the grip was viselike. Desperately, he kicked out with his free foot and felt it connect solidly with something soft, like a person’s face. The steel ring on his ankle loosened, and he kicked away down toward safety.

The hatch neared, and then Rebecca’s hand reached up and pulled him closer.

He dived down into the hatch. Rebecca was already spinning the wheel to close it, but she seemed tired, listless. He swiveled around inside the narrow compartment and grabbed the wheel off her, twirling it around. The hatch snicked shut and locked, and in the same instant, Tane’s hand found the flush lever.

Compressed air roared and the water level dropped, an inch, two inches, then enough for him to get his mouth and nose above water. He sucked in the tinny air and thought it tasted wonderful. Rebecca, where was Rebecca? She was just floating in the chamber and had not raised her head.

The water level continued to drop, and Tane grabbed Rebecca by the hair, wrenching her head above the water. She didn’t breathe in.

“Oh crap!” Tane muttered. There was nowhere to lie her down in the narrow chamber, so he pressed her body against the rounded wall with his, the black neoprene suits clinging to each other. He pressed into her stomach with his fists and a torrent of seawater poured out of her mouth. She still wasn’t breathing.

They had done this stuff over and over in first-aid classes at school, but that all seemed like a million years ago. Finger in the mouth, check for obstructions. He remembered that much at least. There were none. Seal the nostrils. Her mask, still hanging around her neck, was getting in the way, so he tore that off over her head. He gripped her nose tightly between two fingers. The rest of the training was a blank, so he just sealed his mouth on hers and blew. He counted to three—was that in the training?—and blew again. The water was around his waist by then. He breathed into her lungs again, and by the time the chamber was empty, she was breathing on her own.

The only thought in Tane’s mind was, It works. That stuff they taught us. It really does work.

He spun the wheel for the side hatch and dragged Rebecca’s semiconscious body out onto the floor of the main cabin. He could hear the engines of the Möbius running at full speed.

Fatboy looked back through the open door from the control room. “What’s wrong?” he shouted.

“She’s okay,” Tane yelled back.

Rebecca coughed and spluttered and her eyes began to open. He was wedged against the side of the sub. Her head was in his lap.

“Tane,” she said weakly.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She just nodded and closed her eyes again. A moment later, she said, with her eyes still shut, “I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.”

“You did great; you did great,” Tane reassured her. She had been holding her breath for him.

She tried to get up, and Tane put an arm underneath her shoulders to assist. He helped her lie down on one of the bunks and fastened the Velcro safety strap around her waist. He unstrapped the torch from her wrist and loosened the wet-suit jacket to help her breathe.

“I need some help up here!” Fatboy yelled from the cockpit, and Tane scurried forward.

Water rushed past the steering dome as he strapped himself into the codriver’s seat.

Fatboy said, “Grab Rebecca’s chart, the one she marked the rocks on. We’re going back through the Waewaetoroa Passage.”

“At night?” Tane asked incredulously. “At this speed?”

“Got no choice,” Fatboy said, and as if to prove him right, there was suddenly a loud pinging sound against the metal of the hull.

“What the hell was that?”

“Sonar,” Fatboy said. “I knew that was coming. They’re chasing us. Now they know exactly where we are. They’re much faster than we are, but they’re big and heavy and it’ll take them a while to get moving.”

“We can’t go through the passage at night.” Tane was horrified.

“They can’t go through it at all. They draw too much water. They’ll have to go all the way around Okahu Island, by Whale Rock. And they won’t be able to ping us through the passage—too much rock for the sound to bounce off. I’m thinking that we run the passage and try to make it to the Hole in the Rock before they round the island. We can hide from the sonar behind Motukokako Island, and they won’t know which way we’ve gone.”

The pinging sounded again and again, vibrating against the little hull.

“Get that chart ready,” Fatboy said. “Here we go.”

The rocky mouth of the passage loomed, and then they were between the two rock walls. It was much faster this time, and not just because Fatboy was driving the boat hard. The current must flow in this direction, Tane realized. The last time they had been fighting against it. This time it was dragging them along.

“What happened up there?” Fatboy asked, not taking his eyes off the rushing rock walls ahead of them. “I was watching the ship on the periscope when it came back into the bay, and I saw them take you on board.”

“I don’t know,” Tane replied. “Ridge coming up on your right. Better come up a bit and steer a bit left.”

The ridge, a gnash of jagged, hull-piercing teeth, growled away rapidly to their right, a school of dark fish scattering in all directions as they burst through the middle of them.

Had they known that they were coming? If not, why were the soldiers there? Had something bad happened on the island? There was no time to talk or even think about that now.

The pinging reverberated off the walls of the underwater canyon, bouncing around and around in echoes of echoes of echoes, creating its own wall of sound and shielding them from the ship. In here they were invisible to the sonar, just as Fatboy had said.

“Big rock, center of the passage,” Tane said calmly, and Fatboy pulled the steering back, swerving up over the seaweed-covered behemoth as it loomed in their lights. Both of them scanned the water ahead intently. Their lights did not reach far enough ahead to give them enough warning of obstacles, and if not for Rebecca’s map, they would have smashed into the rock of the seabed many times already.

“Ridge to your right, no, your left, your left!” Tane called as Fatboy almost steered them into a pancaked rock formation.

“Get it right, Tane.” Fatboy gritted his teeth.

A large shark, apparently dozing near the exit of the passageway, twirled its tail and spun out of their way as they shot out the end of the canyon, and the seabed began to drop away beneath them.

“Now the race is on,” Fatboy murmured. “If we can’t make Motukokako in time, they’ll pick us up on the sonar and haul us in like a fish on a line.”

The pinger behind them fell silent. They were shielded from the Te Mana by the islands of Waewaetoroa and Okahu.

They said nothing, lost in their own thoughts. Tane checked on Rebecca once, but she was resting and just smiled up at him.

Only when they had passed Motutara Rock did Fatboy relax a little. “I think we’ve got a good enough head start,” he said.

Almost immediately, the pinging started again, but this was long off and distant: just a faint echo against the hull.

Tane looked at his brother in concern, but Fatboy shook his head. “I think we’re okay. The sound has to reach us and then travel all the way back to the ship like an echo. That pinging is too weak. I reckon we’re out of sonar range for them at the moment.”

The pinging, faint as it was, grew steadily louder as they continued on toward Motukokako and its famous Hole in the Rock.

“They’re chasing us,” Tane said worriedly.

“No. They don’t know where we are. They’re just guessing. If we can make Motukokako, we can lose them.” He patted the control console. “Come on, little submarine, you can do it.”

Tane didn’t smile. He felt sick.

Motukokako rose suddenly out of the seabed before them. A huge rock wall in the lights of the Möbius. The pinging was getting louder now.

“Here we go,” he said, slowing the submarine down and crawling along the face of an underwater cliff. The currents were strong and volatile, throwing the small craft from side to side, but Fatboy kept the Möbius as steady as he could.

Another cliff rose on the starboard side, and Tane realized that they were in the “hole,” the short passageway that cut right through the rock of the island.

When the rock walls disappeared, Fatboy steered to the port side and held the craft steady in one spot, using the motor to adjust for the currents that threatened to drive them back into the cliff. The pinging grew in intensity, but Fatboy shook his head at Tane’s querying look.

“We are behind the island. They can’t ‘see’ us here. But better get that periscope up and let me know when they come around the point.”

Tane raised the buoy and tried to look around. It was difficult in the swelling waves, even with the gimbals that kept the camera steady.

The moonlight illuminated the edge of the island and sea beyond, but the water kept spinning the buoy around, and he had to constantly maneuver it.

The pinging surrounded them by the time Tane caught the first glimpse of the bow of the frigate, a dark silhouette against the moonlight.

“There she is!”

Fatboy was already turning the submarine, and rock surrounded them again for a moment as they ducked back through the hole in the rock.

Tane aimed his camera at the edge of the island just in time to see the stern of the frigate disappear behind it.

“What now?” he asked.

“Wait,” Fatboy replied.

Less than thirty minutes later, the ship returned, but they were through the hole to the other side of the island long before it would have been able to ping them.

“It’s like playing hide-and-seek,” Fatboy laughed.

It sort of was, but Tane still felt sick.

They stayed in the shadow of Motukokako for another hour as the pinging receded into the distance. Only then did they start the journey back to Auckland.

Tane spent most of the trip sitting on the floor by Rebecca’s bed, watching her. She woke up at one point, looked at him, and said, “Nothing makes any sense.” But most of the way she slept. She vomited once or twice and he cleaned that up and reassured her gently that she was okay.

She had held her breath for him.