Invisible Armies

Chapter 41

Visibility is zero. Only the top layer of oil, exposed to air, can burn; the rest of it, opaque as ink, blocks the sun's light entirely. Only the telltale pinching sensation inside her ears tells her she is sinking. Danielle works her jaw furiously, opening the eustachian tubes to equalize air pressure before her eardrums burst or her sinus cavities rupture. With her free hand she pushes the inflation button on her buoyancy vest, her BCD, flooding its bladders with enough air to slow her descent. All this in only a few seconds, operating purely on instinct. She hasn't gone diving for years, but the shock of immersion has brought it all back, made that summer in Baja California seem like yesterday.

She feels a disturbance in the water to her left. A splash. Keiran made it off the ship. But he is helpless, doesn't know the first thing about diving, she can't even see him, and her fins aren't on, she can't maneuver. Danielle reaches her arm out, clutching desperately, and her fingers close on something. A strap. Enough to connect them in the dark water. He is not as overweighted as she, he is sinking, but much slower than she had. She grabs him and pulls him closer. She can tell by feel that he is curled up into a taut ball around the scuba tank he carries, breathing as furiously as an Olympic sprinter. But at least he isn't kicking and flailing.

Even so, their situation is desperate. Both of them are sinking, she thinks fairly slowly, and that is a good thing, but she can't even see her gauges to see how deep they are. They don't dare ascend for fear of surfacing in the midst of the flames; and if they go too deep, nitrogen narcosis will set in like a powerful drug, they will lose their ability to reason, and even if they somehow manage to ascend after that, they will certainly get the dreaded bends. They need to get out from under the burning oil right now. But without fins, in full scuba gear, Danielle can't swim much faster than an infant crawls. And they may well sink to a lethal depth before she can even strap on her fins.

She takes a deep breath and tries to focus. No sense brooding about their predicament; better start trying to do something about it. She lets go of the speargun, she can't spare a hand for it, tucks an arm through one of Keiran's straps to keep them connected, and then, working awkwardly in darkness so complete she might as well be blind, with thick gloves on, she slips off one of the fins looped around her arm, and tries to pull it onto her right boot as fast as she can. The attempt is not successful. But after its failure she realizes she can see a metallic glint in front of her. She squints and it coagulates into the rim of the spare tank Keiran carries. Vision has returned.

Of course: as they sink, they fall out of the cone of darkness beneath the oil, to where ambient sunlight can reach them at an angle from the edge of the slick. She quickly looks at her gauges. They are a hundred feet deep already. Danielle relaxes when she sees this. It's farther down than she'd like, but they can manage a good ten minutes at this depth before it gets dangerous, time enough to get themselves together.

Something drifts through the corner of her sight. The edges of her mask are clouded, they weren't able to spit and clean them out with seawater, she can only see clearly straight ahead. She turns her head, sees the discarded speargun drifting slowly downwards, and reaches out to grab it. Maybe they can afford to keep it after all.

Keiran, thankfully, is following instructions, remains a motionless lump wrapped around the spare scuba tank. His whole body is shuddering. The water around them is extremely cold, and it takes a minute or two for body heat to warm the water between wet suit and skin, but Danielle knows Keiran's spasms are not due to the temperature. He is fighting panic, and the need to do something instead of trusting his life to Danielle, with every iota of his will. So far he is winning. She finds his BCD's controls, inflates him to neutral buoyancy so he will hover near a hundred feet deep, and then, with slow precise movements, keeping an eye on him, straps the fins onto her feet.