66 Metres (14 page)

‘Ninety-six dives. Gozo, Sharm, and some Russian lakes you won't have heard of.'

‘Any rivers?'

Her instincts spiked.
The Thames
. Who was he? She tried not to show her reaction. ‘The Volga. Why?'

He didn't miss a beat. ‘There can be surging current on the Tsuba, especially inside, as it's on a mound of reef rising up from the sea floor, and the wreck itself is open on both sides. That kind of current feels more like a river dive than an open water drift dive.'

Sounded plausible. But her gut told her to watch this one closely.

‘Deepest dive ever, deepest dive this year?'

‘Fifty-two; thirty-eight.' She eased the front of the wetsuit over her shoulders. He indicated for her to turn around. He zipped her up at the back, and tucked away the tag, his fingers cool on the back of her neck. She faced him again. He passed her the Suunto dive computer, same make and model as his. She began strapping it to her right wrist.

‘Other one,' he said. ‘Everything is rescue-style on a deep wreck dive.'

She changed to the left wrist. Her turn to interrogate him. ‘What about your dive history.'

‘Nine hundred and twenty dives. Deepest seventy-six, Sipadan. Dived everywhere except the Volga and those Russian lakes.' A smile flashed across his lips and was gone.

The strap was being a bitch, tricky doing it one-handed. Not that he offered to help her. Not that she'd have let him. ‘Deepest dive this year?'

‘Sixty-eight. Three days ago.'

She dropped the computer, then stooped to pick it up. ‘No shit! Air or trimix?'

He smiled, a sad one, and this time it hung around.

‘Lots of shit, actually. Air.'

She focused on her computer, checking its functions, but she wanted to punch the sky. This guy would be the perfect buddy to help her retrieve the Rose.

Ben came out lugging two weight belts and the waistcoat-like stab jackets with twelve litre cylinders of air already attached. ‘Each stab has a strobe on the left shoulder,' he said, ‘torch in the right pocket, attached to the stab by elastic. A spare octopus regulator, naturally.'

She donned the weight belt, then Jake picked up her stab and held it so she could slip her arms through the holes and then fix the waistband and tighten the shoulder straps. It was heavy, and she had to lean forward to keep her balance.

Ben held up Jake's stab jacket and he shrugged it on, slotting the harnesses into place. Nadia faced Jake and they each went through their buddy checks – air, weight, releases. It was like being back at the Dive School in Sharm where she'd finally learned how to dive properly.

Jake stared at her legs. ‘You don't have a knife.'

She wanted to say she'd never needed one. Instead, she smiled, and played the part of the dumb tourist. ‘I slay men with my eyes.'

Ben laughed. Jake didn't. ‘Get her a knife.'

Her smile faded. He was hard work. ‘I don't need one. And anyway, you seem to have two.' She wondered why; one strapped to his right calf, another shorter one, its sheath upside down, on his upper left bicep.

He didn't say anything. Ben came out with a knife and without warning knelt down and strapped it to her right calf.

‘You should ask a girl before you fondle her, you know.'

Ben nodded, but Jake answered. ‘Sorry. A rule of mine.'

Ben stood up, pulled his baseball cap down snug onto his head. ‘Right, let's go. The water's flat so I'll be going pretty fast. Careful getting into the boat.'

She gave Ben a look.

‘Both of you,' he added.

Ben slowed the engines then began manoeuvring the RIB, homing in on the wreck. All Nadia could see in any direction was mirror-like sea and a clear blue sky, the sun directly overhead. They'd need the magic of GPS and sonar to find the Tsuba.

She pulled out her iPhone and switched on the Sat-Nav locator.

‘You get a signal out here?' Jake asked. He'd said very little on the way out.

‘It's Russian,' she said, as if that explained everything. In her experience it usually did. But Jake didn't look convinced, studying the phone a moment before looking away.

She walked up behind Ben, stared over his shoulder at the sonar. A lozenge-shaped image was right below them. Glancing from her phone to the sonar, she worked out where the Rose should be on the sea floor, then closed it down.

Ben shut off the engine completely, the world suddenly silent barring the slip-slops of wavelets against the hull. ‘The prow is directly beneath us, at twenty-five.'

Jake nodded, squirted a little liquid soap into his diving mask, smeared it round with his finger, then leant over the rubber tube and rinsed the mask in seawater. Nadia did the same, looking into the green-blue water below, knowing the Rose was down there, waiting for her. Maybe she could retrieve it today. Why the hell not? Ben opened both their tank valves fully, then she and Jake sat on opposite tubes facing each other, masks on, regulators in their hands.

‘We stop at the prow,' Jake said. ‘To check we're both okay. Do you want to go inside the wreck?'

She didn't. She wanted to plunge straight down to sixty-six, grab the Rose and come back up again. But he'd already said fifty was the limit, and she wasn't dived up yet, and would get narcosis. Maybe if he went inside then she could go down alone…

‘Sure,' she said.

‘Then stay close,' he said.

Ben counted down. ‘One, Two… Three!'

She rolled backwards off the boat. The water hit the back of her neck and flushed into her wetsuit, warming up almost instantly. She sucked in a lungful of air and righted herself, and brought her head above the surface. Jake was already next to her. He gave her the OK signal then the thumb-down signal to descend. She returned them both in sequence, then held up her inflate hose and dumped air from her jacket. She sank beneath the water, the last airside view a rippled one of Ben leaning over the side of the boat, watching them disappear.

Jake dove down ahead of her, streamlined, occasionally twisting around effortlessly to check she was following. The water was featureless, and she felt like a parachutist dropping through green-blue sky. Keeping her breathing even, she cleared her ears every five metres or so, and studied his technique: Jake had his arms folded in front of him, the computer on his left wrist so he could read it, his right hand holding the inflate hose, jetting air into his stab jacket every seven
or eight metres. Poetry in motion. She adopted the same position.

They fell through sheets of green-blue water fading to grey, the visibility about ten metres, the strong sunlight above gradually leached out by the depth. She couldn't see anything ahead except Jake. Then a shape emerged, dark, pointed, big. Her heart rate kicked up a notch. Not everyone loved wreck diving. Some preferred ‘scenic' dives with lots of fish. She didn't get it. Wrecks were scenic
and
full of fish.

The prow of the Tsuba loomed out of the grey. A single spotted dogfish patrolled it while a small school of black bream hugged the sloping foredeck. Ben was good, he'd dropped them right on target. Jake slowed. She jetted air into her stab a little late. While he stopped centimetres from the rust-laden prow, hovering as if in space, she rammed it, and had to brace herself against it with outstretched arms. To recover, she let her momentum spin her body and legs around vertically, like a gymnast doing an underwater handspring, so she ended upright, one hand on the prow's edge, the rest of her body parallel to the deck. As if she'd intended it that way all along.

Jake gave her an appraising look, followed by the OK signal, which she returned. He then pointed to his air gauge. She looked at hers – one eighty bar – then showed it to him. He returned the favour. His was still at a pressure of two hundred atmospheres. Rule was, you surfaced when it got down to fifty bar, though she'd often left it much later than that. Jake aimed a flat vertical hand down the deck, and she started to descend the ship, tracing its steep seventy degree angle.

Good visibility wasn't always best for a wreck dive. It was awesome to see an entire wreck underwater, but sometimes poor viz meant discovering a sunken ship bit by bit. The foremast emerged out of the grey. She glided in slow motion over two cargo holds, shining her torch down into them, illuminating a fog of tiny fish in one, rusted spare engine parts in another. The bridge beckoned, four steps and two metal railings inviting her inside. She turned to Jake and he nodded, so she went straight through the open hatch, careful not to bump the ragged metal sides, the rusty edges brilliant shades of orange in her torchlight.

The upper floor had almost completely eroded, so they finned up a few metres, and she found the helm, a classic antique ship's wheel, most of the wood gone but enough of the brass fittings left to discern its original shape. Like any wreck diver she couldn't resist grabbing it and staring out towards the mast, just visible. She realised she was grinning, and wondered if it was narcosis setting in. No, she was sure she was simply enjoying the dive.

Jake headed aft and she followed, descending deeper into the bowels of the ship.

Her thoughts became sluggish, as if she'd had a few vodkas. She watched his fins undulate in front of her as they entered a narrow black corridor. She could fin faster, show him how Russians dived. Without warning she kicked hard and thrust ahead of him like a torpedo. She misjudged it and her tank grazed the ceiling. She rebounded and ricocheted towards the floor. She let go of her torch to brace herself, and her hands disappeared into a thick layer of sludge coated with powdery sediment that plumed up in front of her mask. She could see nothing, and was still descending. Dammit, the walls were narrowing.

She tried to turn around, banged her head against solid iron.
Shit!
She couldn't think straight. Panic rose in her chest, her breathing loud in her ears. Her torch hit the side of her head, its light
lost in the black sediment, as if she was in a coal mine.
Stop, dammit! Just stop moving. He'll find you
. But where was he? She tried to think. Had she turned left or right? Her breathing rasped ever louder in her ears.

Without warning she was tugged backwards sharply. Jake must have grabbed her fins. His hands pulled her around in the semi-darkness, her torch beam flailing wildly like a beacon in fog, still attached to her stab jacket by its thin cord.

Jake brought her close, right in front of his face, almost mask to mask. She breathed heavily. He put two straight fingers in front of her eyes, waggled them as if they were walking, shook his head once, then put them tight together, unmoving. She got it.
Don't fin
.

He put an arm around her waist, just underneath her stab jacket, and kept eye contact with her. She had to fight her normal instinct to struggle free and be independent, which would only get them both into trouble. She stayed still. Jake edged them back out of the soup, pulling them along with one arm, and suddenly the water cleared, and they were back on the bridge. Her panic vanished. Narcosis was so depth-dependent: one second exhilaration, the next all-out panic, but a few seconds later and ten metres higher and her mind was clear as a bell. Jake studied her, and she nodded as if to say she was okay, gave him a clear OK signal to verify it, and he let her go. She followed him back outside the ship, and checked her air. Ninety bar. She showed it to him. He looked at it but didn't show her his.

She'd blown it. Not nearly enough air left to go down to the sea floor and start searching, and in any case the narcosis would return straightaway.
Fucking hell!
The Rose was down there, waiting. She wanted to punch the wreck. But you can't punch anything seriously underwater. At least she was alive. Next time she might not get narked at all.

Jake moved away from the Tsuba, and she followed him, close to an eel that slithered off in the direction of the underwater pinnacle propping up the wreck. She and Jake slowly ascended amongst lush green ferns, flora she normally spurned. Fish skittered over mossy boulders, and she tried to take her mind off a catastrophic dive. As they rose above the promontory, the prow of the Tsuba loomed into view again. A cuttlefish, changing colour mid-water, calmed her down a little. Her computer said she'd touched forty-eight metres, and required a decompression stop for five minutes, probably more by the time they arrived at six metres.

Jake took an orange package out of his stab jacket's side-pocket, then unrolled the metre-long deflated marker buoy attached to a small reel. She gazed down the disappearing length of the ship. The Rose – her and Katya's key to freedom – was down there, and she'd been less than twenty metres above it. It might as well have been a kilometre.

At ten metres Jake inflated the orange sausage and let it fly to breach the surface, to let Ben know where they were. Ten minutes of deco. Felt like thirty. She avoided looking in Jake's direction too much, trying to find something interesting to look at, though there was nothing else around. She'd screwed up. Jake wouldn't bring her back here after this, and nor would Pete. As she gazed into the depths, knowing the solution to all her problems was below, her thoughts went into freefall. Kadinsky was going to kill her. After he'd buried Katya alive. When Jake finally gave her the thumbs-up signal to ascend, she took a long time to breach the surface.

Back on the boat, she stayed quiet. Ben was smart enough to realise something had happened and sensitive enough not to ask. On the way back to St Mary's, Jake finally spoke to her.

‘You did okay. That was a difficult dive.'

‘I fucked up and we both know it,' she said.

‘You got narked. We've all been there, Nadia.'

It was the first time he'd said her name. ‘You?'

‘Of course, I nearly got myself killed out in Truk Lagoon. I got narked on the San Francisco Maru's deck at fifty-four metres staring at a one-man Japanese tank, then flipped over the side and started heading down to the steam roller on the sea floor at seventy-two. The local instructor hauled my ass all the way back to a decompression stop bar under the boat.'