Below (Ryan Lockwood) by Ryan Lockwood

Author:Ryan Lockwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2013-05-16T21:00:00+00:00

Waiting on the boat, Sturman lit a cigarette to calm his anxiety. Worry was not an emotion he had felt for a long time.

Val had been gone for more than ten minutes, but he hadn’t seen any signs from her yet. He took off his hat and tossed it into the open cabin doors behind him, wiping the sweat off his brow with a thick forearm. Bud wagged his tail and Sturman scratched his ears.

He looked at the two ropes running into the water, each tied to a different cleat, and reminded himself which was tied to Val and which was connected to the net. She would tighten the rope on his left when she had a squid in the net, signaling him to hoist it up; the rope cleated off on his right was her lifeline.

As Sturman took his second pull off the cigarette, savoring the burn of the smoke entering his lungs, the line on the right suddenly drew taut. Val’s line.

Sturman flicked his cigarette into the sea and grabbed the rope. As his hands closed around it, he swore as he felt an incredible weight at the other end and the vibrations of an obvious struggle. He considered pulling Val in, pausing as he remembered her request not to worry about her tether unless she was likely out of air. He glanced at his watch—she probably still had ten more minutes. This is crazy.

The line remained tight for a full minute. He decided not to wait any longer. Let her be pissed—he wasn’t going to let her die down there while he stood idly on the boat picking his nose. He would have to pull her up very slowly, to prevent giving her decompression sickness, so he should probably start the process.

As Sturman braced his feet to begin hoisting her to the surface, the tension instantly left the rope. He slowly drew on the braided nylon, water dripping through his fingers as he passed the now slack line over his palms. He pulled in the line until it ran straight down into the water again, semi-taut, and concentrated on feeling for movement. It was still. Shit.

To his left, Sturman caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked over to see a floating coil of the second rope begin to go under. Something was pulling it down into the water. The second line grew taut, then shuddered off a spray of water as it was jerked tight. He had to make a decision.

He couldn’t pull Val rapidly to the surface—it would kill her. He had only one choice.

Dropping her tether, he grabbed the other rope near the cleat and pulled on it with both hands. Something heavy was thrashing aggressively on the other end. He pushed his knees against the gunwale, took a deep breath and, hand over hand, began to haul in the line. The loose rope began to quickly gather into a messy coil at his feet.

A few times during his struggle to

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