Into the Blue (Coastal Fury Book 3) by Matt Lincoln

Author:Matt Lincoln [Lincoln, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-25T22:00:00+00:00

22

It’d been a while since I rode in a submersible as small as the four-person personal craft in the back of Wraith. Even the arm attachment was tiny, but it served Header well.

“We call it the ‘Bug’ because it’s small, cute, and green,” Header told us. “The name also bugs a member of my crew.” He toggled the attachment, which made a little whir. “This little grabber has snagged some important… er… things for us,” he said with a grin as he closed the spherical canopy.

Tessa took what photos she could before darkness enveloped the sub. Header hovered near the caverns and shone the sub’s powerful spotlight onto the more impressive stalactites so she could use her low-light settings to get photos without her flash.

“I want to come back someday and shoot this place properly,” Tessa told us in a wistful tone.

She had a long way to go before she was ready, but I wasn’t about to remind her of that in front of the other two. Until she got a handle on her fears, it wouldn’t be safe for her to dive in open water period.

Header used the light to track the wall as we descended. The Hole formed tens of thousands of years earlier when the supporting limestone structure of a dry land area gave way and collapsed. Silt formed from the reef and Atlantic drops like avalanches or waterfalls, sliding down to the bottom and leaving deposits along the way. The lower we went, the more evidence there was of the silt.

“H2S layer,” Header announced.

He played the light across the cloudy level that marked the zone where almost no life could survive. I’d been cenote diving before and had seen the clouds before, but this layer went on and on, with nothing else visible even when we turned the light away from the wall.

The descent through the hydrogen sulfide layer felt like driving through heavy fog. The reading on the depth gauge gave us our only indication that we were still moving downwards. I tried to imagine Dare and Bridget Lemon diving through the layer, relying only on the gauges on their wrists. Hundreds of feet below the surface, far from help, the Lemons had only themselves to get each other out of trouble.

It occurred to me that we had no one on the surface anywhere close to the Hole. I glanced at Header. Maybe that wasn’t so. That yacht we saw was likely in the area. Once the thought hit me, I watched and noticed that every few minutes, he clicked a button on a cord that led to an earbud that I hadn’t noticed earlier. Those were subtle mic checks.

At least if we got into trouble, his crew knew where to find us. Probably not in time, but it was the thought that counted.

We broke through below the cloudy layer into a midnight-dark zone with some of the clearest visibility I’d ever seen. At the bottom, there were dead conchs with their shells.

“Look at that,” Tessa said in wonder.

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