The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(74)

At first, I was like, okay, a big rock. That’s nice. Then they explained that it was actually ice, and under that ice was an ocean twice as large as the one on Earth.

We watched as computer-generated alien squids and other life-forms swam around while scientists speculated about what could be down there. Jackie whispered to me that she wanted to be a “space aquanaut.” I decided that sounded like a pretty cool idea too.

When you dive at night in water this deep, you feel a lot like an astronaut drifting through the cosmos—only it’s a cosmos without stars. When you’re on the seafloor, it’s like landing on an alien planet, but above, in deep water, you have little sense of up or down. Divers get killed swimming the wrong direction when they lose their way.

Dad and I keep our hands on the rope as we descend. Even though we’re excellent divers, it’s possible to get caught up in a current and pushed away before your dive partner realizes you’re gone.

Your only choice then is to surface and hope that you can find each other.

Dad is ten feet below me. I keep my light aimed away from his head so that when he looks up to check on me, he doesn’t get blinded. Our lights are so powerful you can’t use them out of the water for long because they’ll overheat.

At the bottom we’re going to need them. While it’s considerably calmer down here than on the surface, the ocean is still moving and churning up sediment, decreasing visibility.

We’d hoped it wouldn’t be this bad, but no such luck. This will seriously limit the area we can search.

Dad’s light bounces off the seafloor and the corral of rocks the anchor drifted into. I let go of the line and hover off to the side as Dad makes sure the boat isn’t going anywhere.

“You good?” he asks over the radio.

I give him the okay sign.

Down here, we don’t have to worry about the Vader picking up our transmissions. If they could do that, they’d have better things to do with their time than search for a puny half-billion dollars. The navy would pay ten times that for the ability to pick up transmissions that way. The current state of the art is ELF—extremely low-frequency radio—that requires antennae miles long.

I tie another glow stick to the anchor line so we can find it at the bottom. I also affix a strobe light so we can find it from even farther out if we get lost. Diving is all about redundancies.

Dad makes the signal for us to check our air supplies. We’re both good for at least forty minutes with our large tanks. That’s not going to be nearly enough to search the area. We’ll have to surface and use the other tanks after letting our bodies recover from the depth. We won’t be following the official dive-safety tables, but we won’t be cutting any dangerous corners either.

Dad grabs some sediment, drops it, and gauges the direction of the current. He points upstream. We’ll travel against the current in our outward search, then use it to swim back when we’re tired.

I take the lead and swim over a low rise of rocks and soft yellow coral that stick out of the ground like clusters of antlers. Small fish dart in and out of the rocks, going about their business, and I catch a school of silver minnows in my light as they swim away.

I keep my eyes ahead while Dad watches around us for potential threats. Tiger, bull, hammerhead, and other large sharks frequent these seas. Divers generally aren’t much concern to them, unless you happen to be spearfishing and you’re carrying a bag of recently killed fish at your side.

In some areas, sharks have learned to recognize the sound of a speargun and will actually speed toward it in hopes of reaching the kill before the diver.

Fatal human-shark interactions are extremely rare, even in those situations, but it’s always wise to be cautious. In a zone like this, with few nocturnal human visitors, you’re sure to catch the attention of nearby sharks, who have the curiosity of a five-year-old. They want to know about everything around them that makes unusual noises.

Besides sharks, there are also barracuda, sea snakes, and a hundred smaller things that can be fatal if you accidentally touch them. It’s generally not a good idea to touch anything you don’t have to while underwater.

“On your left,” Dad calls out over the radio.

The rusted pilot house of a tugboat is sticking out of the ground with part of its hull visible. Coral has formed around it, slowly claiming the boat as its own.

“Beverly M?” I ask.

“That’s closer to shore. Probably insurance fraud.”

Florida waters are littered with unmarked wrecks that went down in completely different places from where their owners claimed they sank. Sometimes this is because of bad records; other times it’s intentional because they scuttled the ship for insurance money and wanted to make sure investigators couldn’t recover evidence of fraud.

I sweep my light back and forth for anything else unusual but only find more rocks and scattered coral formations.

Eventually we come to a steep rise that ends abruptly and drops off. If the Kraken got caught on anything before going over the edge and off the shelf, it would have been here. The problem is, this area stretches for several miles in either direction.

“Left or right?” I ask.

“Right,” he replies.

We go right another ten minutes along the rise, spotting more rocks, rusted debris, and corals trying hard to extend the Florida Barrier Reef northward.