The question was, were they seeing what they wanted to see, the victims of self-suggestion, or was there really something there? One look at Remi’s face told him she was wondering the same thing.
“One way to find out,” he said.
The break in the reef was narrow, less than eight feet wide, and with high tide and churn, the top of the coral was submerged just enough to be invisible at a distance but close enough to the surface to rip the dinghy’s rubber skin to shreds should Sam stray.
Remi sat in the bow, arms braced on the side walls as she leaned forward and peered into the water.
“Left . . . left . . . left,” she called. “Okay, straighten out. Steady on . . .”
On either side of the dinghy, through the froth Sam could see dagger-edged coral just beneath the turquoise surface. He jinked the throttle and rudder, searching for that delicate balance between steerageway and power; not enough of the former and he couldn’t avoid being pushed onto the coral; too much of the latter and he couldn’t respond to Remi’s signals.
“Good . . . hard right!”
Sam pushed the rudder over and the dinghy veered just as a wave broke on the reef and knocked the stern around. “Hold on!” He powered up and compensated.
“Left . . . a little more . . . more . . .”
“How far to go?”
“Ten more feet and we’re through.”
Sam looked over his shoulder. A swell was rising twenty feet behind them, building up on the reef ’s outer edge.
“Gonna get hit,” Sam called. “Brace yourself!”
“Almost there . . . veer right, straight now . . . good. Give it all you’ve got!”
Sam cranked the throttle to its stops just as the wave broke under the dinghy’s stern. Sam felt his belly lurch into his throat. For a brief second the prop lifted free of the water with a sputtering whine, then the dinghy was slapped back onto a calm lagoon.
Remi rolled onto her back, leaned against the bow, and let out a sigh. “I’ll say it again, Sam Fargo, you sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“I do what I can. Welcome to Goat’s Head Lagoon.”
Sam lifted his head out. He dipped his fingertip into the water and brought it to his lips. It tasted only about a third as salty as true seawater.
“Underground river?” Remi asked.
“Has to be,” Sam replied, shaking the water from his hair.
Though it was an uncommon phenomenon, sea caves in this area did on occasion link up with both solutional and fracture-guided caves, which in turn joined underground inland streams.
“I’ll have to look at a map. I think we’re only a couple miles from Lake George. I wouldn’t be surprised if this system dumps out there. Or even down to Salt Lake.”
“Neither would I, but if you don’t mind I’d prefer we put that adventure on our ‘someday’ list.”
“Deal.” Sam checked his watch. High tide was thirty minutes away. If they were going to explore the cave, they’d have to do it within the next hour lest they find themselves fighting the full force of the outflow. Ideally, they would enter at the end of the inflow, use the forty-five- to sixty-minute window of relatively calm current to explore the cave, then ride the outflow back out. The problem was, this was not a typical closed sea cave. The source of the underground river inside would create volatile currents that could either trap them inside or suck them into fracture tunnels that led into the bowels of the island. Neither option appealed to Sam.
He put the question to Remi, who replied, “I’d rather we wait, but I know that look in your eye: You want to go in.”
“Better we find out now if we’re on the right track. We’ve got seventy-five feet of rope. We tie one end to a banyan root out here, the other end to my weight belt. If I get into trouble, I can haul myself out.”
“And if you bonk your head and are out cold?”
“Every sixty seconds I’ll give the line three tugs. I miss one of those and you haul me out using the dinghy.”
“Time limit?”
“Ten minutes, not a second more.”
Remi considered this for a few moments, narrowed her eyes at him, then sighed. “Okay, Jacques Cousteau. Remember what I said, though: If you die, I’ll never forgive you.”
Sam smiled and gave her a wink. “Deal.”
Ten minutes later he was suited up and sitting in the bow. Remi glided the dinghy to a stop against the cliff. Sam, moving carefully, stood up and tied a bowline knot around a protruding root, then sat down and secured the other end to the D-ring on his weight belt. Remi reversed the dinghy and stopped ten feet from the face, using minute throttle adjustments to keep them stationary.
Sam spit in his mask, rubbed the saliva around the inside, then dipped the mask into the water and slipped it on his head, the lower edge resting just above his eyebrows. Next he slipped on his fins, punched the regulator to test the airflow, then nodded to Remi.
“Luck,” she said.
“I’ll be back.”
He settled the mask over his eyes and rolled backward into the water.
He let himself hang motionless for a moment, enjoying the sudden immersion and the striking clarity of the water that filled his vision. He waited for the bubbles and froth to fully clear, then tipped himself upright and did a pike dive for the bottom, already feeling the tug of the current. He let it take him, rolling onto his side so he could watch the sun-dappled surface for a few fleeting seconds before the lip of the cliff appeared and he slipped into darkness. He clicked on his dive light and cast it around.
The cave’s entrance was a rough half circle, an arch ten to twelve feet wide and twenty feet tall. At low tide, its peak probably rose only a few inches above the lagoon’s surface—that, combined with the foliage blanketing the rock face, rendered it all but invisible. If not for the Goat’s Head clue, they would have never found it.
He finned downward, angling for the bottom, and let his fingers trail in the sand. After twenty or so feet, the bottom suddenly dropped away into darkness. He rolled back onto his side, shined his light upward, and saw the entrance arch had disappeared, replaced by surface reflection. He checked his watch and gave the line at his waist three solid tugs: All okay, Remi.
He was suddenly enveloped by cool water and he felt a new current take hold of him, this one pushing him to the right. He realized he was spinning ever so slightly, as though being pirouetted by an unseen hand. Whirlpool, he thought with a trickle of panic. The currents of the lagoon and the underground river were colliding, the cooler water slipping beneath the warmer water, creating a hydraulic tornado. Right now he was on the outer edge of the vortex, so the current was strong, but just manageable with fins—almost two knots, he estimated—but he knew it would grow stronger toward the center. He pointed himself toward what he hoped was a wall and scissored his fins once, twice, then broke the surface.
His outstretched hand touched rock and he grasped at it, his palm bumping over the surface before his fingers found purchase on an outcropping. He jerked to a stop, his legs trailing in the circular current. He gave the line three hard tugs, then checked his watch: two minutes down, eight to go. Aside from the soft gurgle of water rushing along the walls and some dripping sounds coming from deeper within the cave, it was eerily quiet.
Using his teeth, he pulled the glove from his free hand and held his fingertips up, instantly feeling the rush of cool air on his moist skin. This was a good sign. Though he judged the possibility remote, the cave’s connection to an underground river brought with it the chance of pollutants, and while they would have seen signs of toxicity in the outflow—a lack of fish, discolored rocks, dead sponges—there was also the chance of gas buildup. The brisk airflow made this unlikely. He pulled the regulator from his mouth and took a sniff, then a breath. All okay. He gave the line another all-okay signal, then put his glove back on and shined the light around.
Six feet above his head he got the first indication they were on the right track: A cross-plank catwalk suspended from the ceiling by rusted steel cables spanned the width of the cavern and ended at the opposite wall above a makeshift wooden pier supported by wooden pilings sunk into the sea floor. A second catwalk joined the first at its midpoint and extended to the rear wall at a perpendicular angle. The setup wasn’t sophisticated by any means, but clearly someone had put some effort into the structure, and judging by the rust on the cables and the coating of slime on the wooden planking, it had been quite a while ago.
The cavern was oval in shape, perhaps fifty feet wide with a vaulted, stalactite-covered ceiling that rose twenty feet above Sam’s head. Panning the light along what should have been the back wall, he saw only darkness. He’d imagined the juncture with the underground river would feature a gushing cleft in the wall, but he now realized this cavern was simply an antechamber. Aside from a narrowing of the rear walls to a diameter of thirty feet, there was no discernible separation between this cavern and the adjoining fracture-guided system. Where and how far it went there was no telling.
After stuffing all their loose gear into their two SealLine dry bags and securing them to the cleats, he tied the dinghy’s eight-foot painter line around his belt, slipped into the water, and started breast-stroking across the lagoon. He was halfway across when suddenly from the direction of the beach he heard the pounding of rotors. Even as he looked over his shoulder, the Bell appeared over the tops of the palms and stopped in a hover above him. The door was open, and a figure in dark coveralls was leaning out and looking down at him. It wasn’t Frobisher’s kidnapper, Arkhipov, Sam realized immediately, but the other one, whose photo Rube had e-mailed to him—Kholkov. Nor was there any mistaking the stubby cylindrical object in Kholkov’s hands:
.