Cattaneo: “Ten seconds. I’m going to cut the engine in eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, it’s off.”
Holding the Genesis DPV in his hands, like an extra-long submarine sandwich, Virgil tucked his chin and stepped over the side and into the dark water. The boat slipped silently away, and Virgil bobbed on the surface like a cork. A moment later, the boat’s engine fired, and Rae called quietly, “Careful, babe.”
Virgil checked the gear again. Everything seemed good and tight, and he looked at his dive computer, on which he’d gone to the compass screen. They’d put him in the water at a point where he had to navigate directly west to the dive location. He steadied his arm as he rode up and down in the low rollers, picked out a brightly lit condo on the coast that was due west, turned on the Genesis.
At what he and Julie Andrews, the Sunrise Scuba instructor, had figured was about two hundred feet per minute, Virgil settled in to drive, the Genesis just below the surface, his head just above. The prop of the Genesis wanted to pull him off line, so he had to continually correct, but it wasn’t a problem, as long as he could see the condo.
Ten minutes. Eleven. Twelve. He cut the DPV’s engine, gave the wing a shot of air to lift him a bit higher, and looked around. No boats nearby.
He checked the GPS watch, did some numbers in his head. He was a bit north of where he needed to be and still a couple of hundred feet east. He powered up the Genesis, counting to himself, then cut the engine. According to the GPS watch, he was within fifteen meters of his precise drop spot. The coastal lights were brilliant to the west. He could see nothing either north or south, although he could see what he thought were freighter lights well to the east.
He kicked to the exact drop spot, aware that the GPS was probably not as precise as he was trying to be. When he got there, he took a minute to relax and recalculate. The heroin cans should be almost straight beneath him. If there were no current, he’d be dropping about a hundred feet north of the south end of the drop string. No GPS underwater, so he had to hope he was close.
When he was cool, he checked the binders on the lift bags, then began releasing air from his wing. He dropped slowly at first, and then more quickly. He put quick shots of air into the wing to slow the descent, watching his dive computer as he dropped. He could feel no current, but then, he wouldn’t feel much, because he was fundamentally part of it.
He dropped past a hundred feet and a hundred and ten, where he often began to feel the first soft effects of nitrogen narcosis. He felt fine, nothing unusual. At a hundred and thirty, he began to feel it, a hint of light-headedness. A moment later, he slowed his descent and hovered, pulled a flashlight and pointed it down, dropped a bit, dropped a bit more, and the muddy bottom showed up as a near-featureless gray plain beneath him. He dropped until he was at the bottom, then hovered again. He put the flashlight away, brought up his arm with the attached magic wand, and snapped it forward. No red light.
Thinking: Shit.
Shook it harder, the red LED blinked at him and he turned to scan his surroundings. To his left, he saw a tiny light. He went that way, the light growing brighter as he approached. Then he saw another light, and a third.
He reached the first light, swept his gloved hand over it, stirring up sediment, but revealing the black plastic can sitting on the ocean floor. The can had two plastic straps around it: one held a diver’s weight tight to the can, while the other held a square box, which powered a band of brilliant LED lights.
All right . . . Enough junk to kill a hundred junkies, but still, a thrill to find it, a feeling of accomplishment, there in the dark at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean . . .
He stripped one of the lift bags from his plate, separated the actual lifting bag from the cargo bag, and stuffed the first of the cans in the cargo bag. He gave the lift bag a shot of air, and it rose gently above him, held down by the weight of the cargo bag. He dragged the bag to the second can, retrieved it, saw two more lights beyond it. He gave the lift bag another shot of air, retrieved the third and fourth cans, and saw two more. Another shot of the air to the lift bag, lightening the load he had to move himself.
He was working his way to the south end of the drop string. When he’d retrieved the fifth can, he saw two more, but the cargo bag would only take one. The lift bag was now straining hard toward the surface, held down by the weight of the loaded cargo bag.
He began to untie the second lift bag roll, but he fumbled it, and fumbled it again—and recognized the fumbles. He checked the computer: he’d been down for sixteen minutes and was getting narced. What to do: he thought it over, the thoughts coming slowly, like the water drops on a turned-off shower head. A bit cloudy, he decided, but no more than that. He did a number puzzle: (1 + 2) × 3. Answer, nine. Or is it seven? No, nine. The brackets made the difference. Sometimes, his mental puzzles didn’t have them, sometimes they did. With brackets, the answer was definitely nine. Okay. Took eight seconds, but that wasn’t too bad.
He grabbed the seventh can, stuffed it in the second lift bag, saw no more. Looked at his compass, headed north, finning, staying in touch with the bottom, the Genesis dangling from its tethers. Shook the magic wand. No lights. Farther north. Shook it again, and saw lights to his right. The cans were right there, in a string, twenty or thirty feet apart, and he stuffed the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh cans.
(1 + 2) × 3. What? Nine? Maybe twenty seconds this time. He checked his down-time. He’d been on the bottom for almost twenty-five minutes. Time to go.
The lift bags were like hot-air balloons, with the cargo bags hanging below. As with hot-air balloons, the bottom end of the lift bag was open, to allow air to be shot inside. When filled with air, the bags would begin to rise, lifting the cargo bags, like the baskets below a hot-air balloon.
Virgil gave the lift bags a shot of air, until they began to gently ascend, lifting the cargo bags off the bottom. He held on to their tethers, and let them pull him. They rose easily, and then more quickly. There were air-release valves operated by cables on each of the bags, and he released some air to slow the ascent.
At sixty feet, he stopped, waited more or less a minute, to decompress, until his computer told him he could continue up. His brain was clearing now, (1 + 2) × 3 took only a second.
Instead of ascending directly, he started a diagonal ascent to the east, using the Genesis and towing the bags, which would allow him to move toward the pickup point, and, at the same time, hit his decompression targets—a minute at fifty feet, three minutes at forty, a bit longer each ten feet or so.
The computer knew . . .
Something bumped his leg, hard; he tensed. Dolphin? Shark? Ray?
No. The cargo bags, twisting beside him. The lift bags were a problem. The bottom openings were small, but he couldn’t pull them so hard that they flattened and dumped air. If they did that, the cargo bags would be a three-hundred-pound anchor pulling him down.
He experimented, watching them in the wide-beam flashlight, decided he could safely tow them at about fifty feet a minute. At that rate, it would take him almost an hour to get back to the pickup point. He had enough air, and he needed to stay under a little more than fifty minutes to decompress, at a variety of different levels, slowly ascending. Nothing to do but take care, watch the computer, switch every half minute or so between the decompression numbers and the compass . . . slow and easy was the path of righteousness.