Night Diver: A Novel (26 page)

There was a sullen anticipation in the air, a sense that the doldrums were fighting a losing battle against the earth’s motion and the returning rivers of air that humans knew as the trade winds. But the doldrums wouldn’t give in easily. Before the rivers returned, there would be the kind of storms where sky and sea went to war. Until that happened, there would only be an oppressive kind of waiting.

“How is your leg?” Kate asked when they reached the workboat.

“Slightly more surly than the day.”

“Ouch.”

“It has been a lot worse.”
And will be again as soon as I dive.

But there was no need to share that tidbit with her. She felt bad enough about watching her family’s business circling the drain. She didn’t need to feel guilty about his diving, too.

“I just have this hunted feeling that something is going wrong,” she admitted as she stepped into the workboat.

It is,
Holden thought.

He could sense the coming storm, feel it in his thigh, taste it in the back of his throat. It could come in an hour. It could come in a day.

But come it would. The coy tropical depression that had been dubbed “Davida” had decided to quit fooling around and get down to the serious business of pushing around countless tons of air and water.

Kate brought the workboat quickly up on plane. It was good to have the air moving fast enough to make her feel less like she was wrapped in a sticky cocoon. That, and the feeling of imminence, had her pushing up the throttle, racing something she could only sense, not describe. She chased the feeling inside her head, trying to put it into words.

About a kilometer out, the wind came up, chopping the oily-looking water into sharp little waves that rode on top of the underlying swell. The workboat had to push hard across the dull surface of the sea, aluminum hull smacking as it hit the chop kicked up by the sudden exhalation of wind.

“Would you mind backing that down just a bit?” Holden shouted to her. “I’d like to be able to dive when I get there.”

She realized that she was pushing the boat at a speed better suited to calm water. It made for a rough ride, and no doubt his thigh was already aching from the dropping air pressure.

“Sorry,” she said, slowing so they could talk without shouting. “I wasn’t thinking. Well, I was, but not about speed.”

“So what were you thinking about?”

“The fact that people with vertigo aren’t afraid of heights as much as they are tempted to jump. To fly. I understand that. Being on the sea again. Us. Do you think there’s a chance for us?”

He almost smiled, because he’d spent a great deal of time before dawn, listening to her breathe, holding her, thinking.

“What is it they say in America,” he asked. “All in?”

“Yes.”

“I’m all in, Kate. The rest is your choice.”

Wind gusted, pushing hard at the hull. She responded with automatic movements on the controls, evening out the boat’s motion.

“Do we have a shot at the real thing?” she asked without looking at him.

“I didn’t know we’d been feeling a false sort of thing.”

She gave him a smile that turned upside down. “That isn’t what I meant. It’s just . . . the rest of it.”

“The complication called life.”

“Yes.”

“I’d love to promise you it will be easy, but then, easy isn’t worth much, is it?”

Her smile righted itself. “No, it isn’t.”

“You were heartbreakingly brave at seventeen.”

“I was scared to the bone.”

“That’s what bravery is, love. Doing the right thing no matter how much it frightens you.”

Before she could say anything, her pocket cheeped. She steered one-handed and pulled out her phone.

Holden saw tension draw her face before she even answered.

“It’s Grandpa. He hates phones. He never—”

Abruptly she slowed the boat so she could hear over the engine. As she listened, her tension redoubled at the strain in his voice as much as his words. Then she went pale to her lips. When Holden gently pushed her away from the controls, she barely noticed. He took her seat, checked the dials automatically, and looked toward her.

“We’re on our way,” she said to her phone. “Ten minutes. Maybe a bit more. The sea suddenly went choppy.”

Her hand shook as she pocketed the phone. Only then did she truly realize that she and Holden had switched places.

“I can drive,” she said. “It will be hard on your thigh, but—”

“I’ll drive. I can brace myself more effectively when I know precisely what’s coming. Shore or ship?”

“Ship. Larry’s sick. Grandpa called for a helicopter evacuation.”

“Dive related?”

“I don’t know.”

Holden nodded and pushed the throttle as high as the boat could safely go given the water conditions. The scarred hull came up on plane and raced toward the unseen ship, assuring Kate that he knew what he was doing with the controls and the limitations of the workboat.

Safe wasn’t the same as comfortable. Bursts of spray peppered over the windscreen and swirled to get both her and Holden damper than the humidity already had. She was forced to brace herself so that she didn’t fly out of her seat, but she didn’t complain. She felt like they were crawling, wanted to tell him to speed up, yet didn’t say a word. It wouldn’t be safe to go any faster, which meant Holden wouldn’t listen to her.

That’s why he took the pilot seat,
she realized.
How did he know?

Then she realized that her hands were quivering despite their grip on the dash. He must have seen how shaken she was before she even knew herself.

Larry,
she thought, wanting to scream like the engines.
What happened to you? Don’t you dare be really hurt.

And she was afraid down to her soul that he was.

Damn the ravenous sea!

Yet even as she silently raged, she knew it wasn’t the sea. It was choices, human choices, the freedom to be stupid that took so many lives.

A black helicopter with black pontoons churned by overhead just as they saw
Golden Bough
’s outline condense out of the thickened atmosphere on the horizon. The aircraft would reach the ship within two minutes. The workboat would take longer and be much harder on the occupants.

Holden didn’t need conversation to know what was going on behind Kate’s haunted eyes, so he concentrated on getting to the ship as fast as he could. When they finally pulled alongside, the helicopter was waiting a short way out, sitting up on fat black pontoons. It was old, almost antique, with a bubble-shaped cockpit and a body that was more empty space and framework than aluminum paneling. With its rotors turning lazily, the helicopter looked barely airworthy.

A crewman who was probably a med tech finished fastening a gurney to one of the pontoons, then slid a plastic cover over Larry, protecting him from stray water. The rental skiff with Grandpa piloting it was tapping gently against the big pontoon, held in place by the wind and the old man’s skill on the water.

The pilot was seated, shouting across the open cockpit with Patrick Donnelly. Her tank top fitted over her lean body and her multiple neat braids were tied at her nape, out of the way of the helmet she was getting ready to put back on.

Grandpa’s voice carried across the waves. “Move! You gotta get him to shore fast!”

Holden brought the tender alongside the fiberglass rental Kate’s grandfather had used to ferry the patient over to the helicopter. Even through her worry, she noticed that Holden made the tricky maneuver look easy.

“Take the controls,” he said.

The instant she did, he moved to the gunwale rising and falling against Grandpa’s boat. Timing the swells, he crossed over into the other boat in a single flowing movement that didn’t jar either small craft.

Kate watched, impressed. Switching between two watercraft must have been part of his ABCD training. He made it look easy. It wasn’t.

“ . . . fly barely above the waves,” the pilot was saying in a clipped British accent. “Until we are certain about the cause of the patient’s condition, we have to assume the bends. If you want to take responsibility for him, we can fly up high, but standard procedure says we stay real low for evacs of scuba accidents.”

When Grandpa opened his mouth to answer, Holden cut him off. “She is correct,” he said. “Kate will take the workboat and I’ll take this skiff. You fly in with Larry. Your information about him will be more up-to-date than anyone else’s, including Kate’s.”

Grandpa turned on Holden as though happy to find an outlet for the emotions strangling him. “Who the hell are you to—”

“I’m a former navy diver,” Holden cut in, nudging the older man away from the boat’s controls. “We’re wasting time. Crewman,” he snapped.

“Yes, sir,” the man said automatically, responding to the authority in the stranger’s tone.

“When your patient is secure, help Mr. Donnelly aboard,” Holden said.

“But the
Golden Bough
—” Grandpa began.

Kate heard. “I’ve already piloted the ship solo in a storm worse than this one is making up to be.”

For a few tense moments, Grandpa chewed over his choices and she held her breath. He’d left the ship in someone else’s care only once before, when he’d been too out of his head with pain and fever to object. When he had awakened after emergency surgery, it was to the news that his son and daughter-in-law were dead. Larry had been with him then, had helped him to cope. Though neither of them ever spoke aloud about it, both remembered it. Despite their occasional arguments, Grandpa loved Larry as he loved nothing but the sea itself.

And now he had to choose.

Grandpa muttered a few ripe words while he timed the swells and chose his moment. Then he stepped from the gunwale up onto the pontoon with the speed of a man half his age.

“Hand up that valise,” he ordered Holden.

Holden looked down, grabbed the battered leather valise from an open locker, and managed to get the small suitcase up to the old man without either of them going for a swim. Grandpa squeezed Larry’s plastic-covered shoulder and climbed into the helicopter.

“Which hospital?” Holden asked the pilot.

“Saint Swithin’s in Kingstown,” she said. “They have a pressure ward. It’s old, but like this bird, it does good work.”

The pilot put her helmet on and waited while everyone strapped in.

Carefully Kate backed the workboat away, giving Holden room to do the same. As soon as they were out of range, the helicopter rotors speeded until they were nearly invisible. There was a moment of hesitation while the pontoons broke the embrace of salt water and then the aircraft shot aloft. Flying very low toward the island, the helicopter quickly became a noisy black dot heading back toward shore.

By the time Kate and Holden tied off and got aboard the
Golden Bough,
the aircraft had vanished.

“That pilot could show the helicopter crews I know a thing or two,” Holden said. “Most of them got up so fast that everyone was pancaked on the deck. To be fair, we were under fire at the time.”

She smiled wanly, took a deep breath, and turned to what was left of the crew. Luis was splotched with dirt, sand, and water from working the siphon. Raul was out of his wetsuit and half dressed. Both men were pale beneath their skin’s natural darkness.

“I quit,” Luis announced. “The dive, it really is cursed.”

“Me too,” Raul said.

“Again?” she said.

“Nobody is going ashore until we know what happened,” Holden said, standing beside Kate.

In silent agreement, she handed him the key to the workboat.

“Talk or swim,” she said.

Raul looked like he would rather swim, but a glance at Kate’s stance and Holden’s disconcerting eyes got the diver talking.

“I don’t know much,” Raul said so softly he barely could be heard. Then, louder, “Larry, he say something over the com about feeling no good. We be down there, I don’t know, maybe an hour after descent, maybe less.”

“So, no more than ninety minutes since you went in?” Holden asked, looking at his dive watch.

Raul shrugged. “Larry, he go down quick. Me? Slow and easy, man.”

“Go on,” Kate said through pale lips. “You were down there about an hour and then . . . ?”

“He work the siphon and I work near. Then it sound like the siphon suck up something too big. Don’t know. I don’t see that. But I hear or maybe feel a big
clack
and he cry out on com.”

“Was Larry all right up to then?” Holden asked.

“He don’t say nothing, so I don’t ask. He be working fast. That storm, she be coming soon.”

Kate made a sharp gesture for Raul to keep talking.

“So I hear the funny sound and then Larry, he give me the wave.”

In demonstration Raul put his arm out and bent the elbow. His hand was flat with the thumb pointing down. Then he brought the hand to his chest and tapped himself a few times.