Swimming With the Dead (10 page)

As James moved the boat slowly up to the mooring ball, Harry stood on the bow with the boat hook and grabbed the line attached to the mooring.  He tied it around a cleat and James cut the motor.

“Let’s go,” he said, dragging tanks and dive gear out of the locker and pulling on his wet suit.

I did the same but not with the casual enthusiasm of James and Harry.  I have never been able to dive without spending a couple of seconds silently questioning my motivation.  I mean, it was stupid, really.  I was about to jump into a vast, watery underworld where the act of breathing went from being the most automatic thing humans do to one in which every inhale and exhale was a noisy and unnatural event.  Forces would push on my body and I would be enveloped in equipment that limited movement and visibility.  And every dive I’d ever done had uncovered tragedy; drivers caught inside vehicles, kids caught in the weeds at the bottom of a lake, shooting victims weighed down with rocks or stuck under bridges. 

I checked the regulator, unscrewing the cover of the second stage where the mouthpiece is attached.  I could see that it had been recently serviced—no corrosion inside, the rubber exhaust valve smooth and soft.  It looked like James had completely refurbished the device.  I snapped my air tank in place on the back of my dive vest and attached the regulator to the tank.  Then I turned the knob to begin the flow of air from tank to regulator.  I checked my air-pressure gauge, making sure the tank was full.  It showed 3,200 pounds, enough for forty-five to fifty minutes at a depth of seventy feet.  We would try to limit our bottom time to forty minutes.  Otherwise, we would have to do an eight-minute safety stop at fifteen feet to eliminate the excess nitrogen in our bloodstream that can cause the bends.

I breathed through the mouthpiece to ensure it would deliver precious air to my lungs.  These activities always managed to assure me—the rote stuff took my mind off the monsters of the deep.

James briefed us on the dive.  He’d lead, with Harry bringing up the rear.  James and Harry would carry the underwater lights.  I had my camera strapped around me and carried an evidence bag. 

The plan was to go down the anchor line together.  Once on the bottom, we would swim along the deck, around the bow, down the hull, and back to the stern.  Michael’s body was found in a compartment just past one of the main refrigeration holds.  When we got there, Harry would take the lead to the exact place. 

We made our way to the back of the boat, put our regulators in our mouths, and rolled backward into the sea.  We each gave the okay signal, fingertips on head, and began releasing air from our vests in order to start the descent.

Not ten feet below the surface, we were sinking through a huge school of barracuda.  Shit!  Nothing like this ever swam around a Colorado lake.  I resisted the urge to scurry back to the surface and into the boat.  James and Harry were continuing to descend, clearly unconcerned, into the darkness below. 

Knowing I would be unfamiliar with the environment, James had given me a quick summary of the sea life we might encounter.  “Probably see a few barracuda, maybe a shark.  They’re harmless,” he’d said casually. 

A few!  There were at least a hundred of the damned things.  Now I understood his earlier Disneyland reference.  This had to be the Haunted House part.  These fish looked mean.  I was smack in the middle of a million razor-sharp teeth.  We were out of the pack before panic took over completely.  But the barracuda continued to trail us as we swam to the wreck.

On the bottom, we scared up a sting ray, covered in sand.  He suddenly darted from his hiding place and disappeared into the blue.  James pointed to the ship, barely visible up ahead.  The mast and crow’s nest tipped, dark against the water; rigging lines draped down into the sand.  Eerie.  A death ship.

As we swam closer, I could see that the wreck was teeming with life—fish of every size and color drifted in the rigging and darted through portholes.  A blanket of color covered the hull; red, purple, and yellow coral.  An octopus slithered over some orange sponges and disappeared in a hole.  Okay, it was pretty down here.  Actually it was captivating.  I had never seen anything so stunning under the water. 

I’d almost forgotten why we were down there until Harry motioned for us to stop.  He pointed to a square of black about six by eight in the midsection of the ship; the entrance to the refrigeration hold.

We started in.  Harry took the lead.  Inside was pitch-black.  He switched on his light, illuminating the interior, a cavernous space filled with hundreds of fish.  We swam to the other side, where Harry’s light found another opening about four feet square.  Again Harry led.  He entered the narrow entrance and I followed, James behind me.  Our path was littered with debris.  Wires hung from the ceiling, and pieces of metal jutted from surfaces.  We moved slowly, avoiding contact with anything that might snare our equipment or slice through a hose.  Every once in a while one of our tanks would brush against the steel structure, echoing through the dead ship.  We were making our way deeper and deeper into the wreck.  It was claustrophobic.  Should equipment fail here, getting out of the ship and back to the surface would be just about impossible. 

Harry directed the light into the black.  I could see several openings that led off this passage into others.  It would be very easy to get disoriented, lost in the maze.  The hall seemed to go on forever, the end somewhere in the darkness out of reach of his beam.

We were about ten feet down the passage when Harry stopped ahead.  An old generator, encrusted in barnacles, blocked the way.  Less than two feet existed between it and the ceiling.  I could see what we’d have to do to get past.  Scuff marks marred the ceiling where other divers—Michael, Acuff, and Carr—had squeezed through. 

Harry unsnapped his vest with the tank still attached, slid it off, and held it out in front of him, keeping his regulator in his mouth.  Then he swam up and over.  I was next.  I unbuckled my vest and pulled it and the tank over my head.  I’d done this before, but this was nuts.  My only connection to my tank was the mouthpiece attached to the hose, stretched out ahead of me.  If I lost my mouthpiece or the hose were cut or broke loose from the tank, I would be out of air, down seventy feet, inside a steel death trap.  I’d never make it out without help.  The same was true for James and Harry.  We were placing our trust, and possibly our lives, in one another’s hands.  And what the hell did I really know about these guys anyway?

My heart raced, anxiety level peaking.  I could feel the pressure building in my chest.  I’d be hyperventilating in a minute.  I knew the signs.  I forced myself back from the brink, took control, and squeezed over the damned generator, working my fins hard, and came out the other side.  James followed.  We clipped back into our vests and kept moving.  Suddenly Harry stopped, pointing his light to the left, the rays disappearing into a void.  He’d come to the entrance of the next compartment.  It was smaller than the first compartment, maybe eight by eight, but after the confinement in the passage, it felt like a ballroom.

Once inside, Harry pointed to a tangle of lines hanging from the ceiling and then to the compressor that lay below in the corner.  It had been the force that had held Michael Duvall in this tomb. 

Before touching anything, I wanted pictures.  I unstrapped my camera and took several wide-angle shots of the entire scene, then moved in and took close-ups from every possible angle.  Again and again, a photograph had revealed something that had not been apparent when I’d examined an underwater crime scene, and photographs were solid evidence in a courtroom.  Though in this case, because the scene had been contaminated by divers, I doubted any photo would be admissible in court.  Besides, it had been weeks since the body had been recovered.  Any number of recreational divers might have been down in the wreck since then.  Had this been a professional underwater investigation, the scene would have been kept off-limits until all evidence had been collected, a process that would have been completed quickly and thoroughly.

Next I searched the compartment for anything that seemed out of place in the wreck.  Pieces of heavy equipment were scattered about, an old freezer, another big compressor.  Junk littered the bottom, all of it parts from the ship, long covered in a thick layer of sediment and sand.  An entryway led into the dark—maybe to crew’s quarters or galley. I swam over to the compressor and pushed, then put my weight on it, fins anchored on the bottom.  It wouldn’t budge.  I could see why Michael had been unable to free himself.  The thing must have weighed five or six hundred pounds.

How could Michael have ended up underneath it?  Unless it had been unstable to begin with, it would have taken leverage to bring it down.  Why would he have done that?  Was he looking for something up there?  I swam to the ledge where the unit had sat.  Fish scurried from their hiding place when I pulled the loose wires back.  Nothing up there but water.

I could see what looked like fresh marks on the unit, just developing a new layer of sea life.  Some of the marks would have been made by the divers when they had freed Michael’s body.  But there was a separate set on the other side.  Michael had probably made them.  But with what?  I hadn’t seen any notes in the file about a wedge or crowbar being found. 

I motioned to James, who had brought a crowbar for just such a chore.  He moved the unit onto its side.  Underneath lay a metal pipe.  I was about to retrieve it when damned if Harry didn’t pick the thing up.  He’d just added several sets of prints to any that might have been on the pipe, possibly obliterating any that had been there.  Though the chances of lifting prints from an item recovered in salt water were remote, especially after a month, it was not out of the question.  I took it from him, grasping it by the end, and put it in the PVC container I carried in my evidence bag for that purpose.  I made sure the container was filled with water and capped it on both ends.  Otherwise the pipe would begin to oxidize the minute it was exposed to the air.

 I spent a few minutes measuring the depth and water temperature and took a water sample.  We’d been down about thirty minutes, and I’d seen enough.  I checked my pressure gauge.  I was surprised to see that I still had plenty of air—1,300 psi, far from the 500 red zone.  I was sure that my heart rate and breathing during this dive would have doubled my air intake. 

I signaled James.  Time to head to the surface.  He took the lead, swimming out of the compartment and back down the passageway.  He looked back to make sure we were following, then disappeared over the generator.  Harry was right behind me with the light when it suddenly went out.  I was enveloped in black.  It was like being pushed into a coffin.

Chapter 9

At first I thought that Harry had mistakenly switched the light off.  I expected it to come back on at any moment.  It didn’t.  Damn Harry.  Where was he?  We had been making our way out of the compartment and back down the narrow passage.  I managed to somersault around in the confined space and swim back into the black interior, looking for Harry, straining to see any sign of light from his flashlight.  Nothing.  Could the battery have died?  Was he lost or hurt somewhere?  Tangled in lines?

I’d done plenty of diving blind.  Instinct and training took over.  I kept one hand out in front while I felt along the side of the passageway with the other until the surface became a void under my fingers.  I was back to the compartment in the interior.  I banged on my tank with the end of my dive knife.  The sound reverberated through the water.  No return signal.  I banged again.  Waited.  Nothing.

I quickly devised a haphazard search pattern, and swept the inside of the compartment.  No Harry lying inside unconscious.  I was sure that the space was empty.  Where the hell had he gone?  It was time to get out.  Though I couldn’t see my gauge, I knew by now that my air would be moving toward the red zone.  I’d have just enough to find my way out of the ship and to the surface.

I felt around the side of the interior compartment until I located the passage and made my way back down the black tunnel.  At the generator, I again slipped out of my vest and tank and squeezed over.  It would be another ten feet to the big refrigeration hold, and then out to open water.  I kept moving slowly down the passage, feeling my way in the dark, brushing against the tangle of lines and jagged metal that we’d encountered on our way in.  Finally, the walls of the passage gave way to the next compartment. 

That’s when my regulator sputtered, gave me a few final bursts of air and quit.  Shit.  I had to get the hell out of there.  But I couldn’t see the opening out of the compartment.  I should have been able to see a dim gray square of light in the black.  I scanned the area, turning 360 degrees—nothing.  Precious seconds were passing, the store of oxygen in my system diminishing.  I wasn’t even sure which way was up.  All of the indicators were gone, no gravity, no visual clues.  Now even the bubbles, exiting my regulator and rising to the surface, were gone. 

I twisted and turned in the water, searching for that damned gray square.  My head struck what I thought was the ceiling of the compartment.  Again I did a 360.  There it was, up above my fins, for chrissake.  I had somehow ended up upside down, at the very bottom of what I realized was a deep, cavernous space.  What I’d thought was the ceiling was actually the floor. I swam hard, knowing that once I made it out of the ship I still had to make it to the surface.

Just as I cleared the wreck, someone grabbed me, ripped the useless regulator from my mouth, and shoved in another.  It was James.  He held the mouthpiece to my face and I breathed.  He watched as I regained composure then pointed to the surface.  We managed to do almost the full eight-minute safety stop on James’s limited tank of air, then surfaced to glorious sun and blue sky.

“What the hell!” James yelled as we climbed into the boat.  Harry was already there, lounging on the bow, drinking a beer.