Chapter 9

Beck could easily have swum the distance back to Dolphin unaided, but he didn’t. A survivor did not take unnecessary risks. If that meant using a little assistance, you swallowed your pride and you used it. And so he took one of the life buoys, letting it prop up the upper half of his body and feeling like a little kid learning to swim with a flotation aid in the public swimming pool. It also meant that if there was any hidden rip current that could potentially sweep him away then he would have more chance of using his strength to get back to the island.

This was a risk worth taking – but Beck knew he had to do this now. By now the tide was almost halfway back in again, and the more he waited, the more water there would be on top of the wreck. It wouldn’t start going out again until after sunset. That would be the danger time also for any rip currents. He had made another sling out of the plastic netting, which was tied to the buoy and would carry whatever he retrieved from the sunken yacht.

It took just five minutes to reach the mast.

He tied the life buoy to one of the stays – the metal cables that ran from the tips of the crosstrees down to the deck – and then just let himself float, carried gently up and down by the half-metre swell of the sea. He gazed calmly at the horizon and put his mind into as relaxed a state as he could summon, letting go of all the thoughts, worries and excitements that had dominated the last couple of hours. He simply began to breathe, slowly, deeply, in and out, over and over again.

Ju-Long would have said he was preparing his ki energy. She had showed him a similar exercise when they were trekking through the jungle on their rescue mission. Beck just called it preparing his body for a deep dive. Either way, it was a kind of meditation, preparing him for what he had to do, and he had to get this right.

They had talked through the physics together.

“If there are ten metres of water on top of Dolphin,” she had said, “then the pressure is the equivalent of an extra atmosphere. So, the air in your lungs will be squeezed to half its volume on the surface.”

So, half the usual amount of air to work with, and he would be exerting himself, blind in the salt water, with his heart working overtime with adrenaline, in an extremely dangerous environment. He would need every atom of oxygen that his body could find.

Which meant, getting as much oxygen into his tissues as he could now, and flushing out as much carbon dioxide. The more his body burned up its oxygen, without replacing it with fresh breaths, the more carbon dioxide would build up, which was what triggered the desire to gulp in more air.

He held onto the life buoy and kept breathing steadily until he could feel his lungs stretching the inside of his chest.

Okay, almost ready to go, but he shouldn’t just dive blind. He needed to know where he was going. Based on where the mast was, he pictured Dolphin lying on the sea bed. Bow would be to his left, stern to his right, which meant he could find the cockpit and the hatch into the cabin. He probably wouldn’t be able to do this all in one dive, so the cockpit would be the first destination. There would be food on the island, even if he couldn’t get the supplies up from the cabin, but the flares in the cockpit lockers were irreplaceable.

His body was buzzing with the extra oxygen he had taken in. There was no point delaying. He took a final breath, held it, and tipped himself headfirst down in the water. Hand over hand, he pulled himself below the surface, down the stay towards the boat.

It was like sliding into an alien world, a heartbeat away from the world he knew of air and light. Just a couple of metres below the surface, the water grew abruptly cold with a chill that began to eat into him. He kept his eyes shut against the sting of salt. The jagged refractions of light and dark would just confuse him anyway. Water pressed against him from all directions. A sharp pain in his ears told him that his ear drums were bowing under the pressure. He paused in his hand-over-hand progress to hold his nose tight and blew through it. Air pressure built up inside his head, forcing itself down the Eustachian tubes that ran between his throat and his inner ear, and pressing against his ear drums from the other direction, to counterbalance the water’s weight. Squeaks and clicks and a distinct pop in each ear told him that the pressure had equalised. The pain vanished and he resumed his progress downwards.

Immersed in a medium where sound travels four times faster than in air, the depths were alive with strange whirs and whooshes. His body felt somehow both weightless, able to float off at a moment’s notice, and strangely heavy – his lungs like a dead weight inside him, feeling heavier and heavier by the minute. Without the steel cable between his fingers he could have easily lost any sense of direction, to drift off into the dark with no idea which way was up, until all the oxygen was gone and he passed out. And if that happened, he knew he would be unconscious for about half a second before his body decided that that was it, game over, time to shut down for good. He fought that thought and pressed on.

His hands brushed against one of the ribbons that Jian had tied to the stay as a tell-tale for the wind direction. Good. That meant that in another metre he would be down to the guardrail. Then he could pull himself along to the cockpit–

Suddenly, a soft, billowing mass came out of nowhere and enveloped his arms and head, clinging onto him with a powerful grip. It was as if he had dived head first into the heart of a giant jellyfish that covered him up and would not let him go. He stopped abruptly and fought the panicked urge to breathe out his stored air in one gasp. His senses, already confused by the underwater scene, were now all firing off conflicting impulses so that he couldn’t tell which way his body was facing or how to get free from the grasp of whatever it was. He felt more of it, gently settling onto him and holding him in a grip of cold, molten iron. Its suction and dead weight just wanted to draw him further down into the depths.

But he was still holding onto the stay. Heart pounding against his ribs, lungs feeling fit to burst, he made himself methodically reverse his course back up the metal cable, hand over hand in the other direction. The force that was gripping him didn’t want him to go. He felt a harsh, rough surface scraping against his skin as he pulled himself free.

And then he was out of it. He risked opening his eyes, and even though they burned, immediately he could see the difference between the dark depths below and the sunlight above. He kicked his way up to the surface, following the training he remembered from his scuba course as a scout – clenching a fist above his head in case he came up underneath anything, and breathing out as he went so that the air in his lungs could safely expand as the pressure fell, without rupturing.

He broke the surface a few metres away from the mast and gulped for air.

Okay, scratch that plan.

He had already worked out what the problem was, and he knew there was no point trying again. It was the mainsail. It must have unfurled itself from the boom – they hadn’t had time to tie it down properly – and it had draped itself across the rear half of the yacht. It was an impenetrable barrier, and going into that with anything less than proper scuba gear, like facemask and air tank, would be suicide.

It meant that everything on board Dolphin was off limits. The food, the flares – and hey, all those square metres of sailcloth themselves would have been mighty handy to a stranded group of survivors.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

Beck swam over to where he had left the buoy, still bobbing next to the stay. He untied it and pushed himself back off towards the island.

“Plan B,” he muttered.