Ryan Lockwood - Below

He took a deep breath. “Who do you think you are, Sturman? A knight in shining armor?”

Val and the other researcher had not surfaced. They had to know he had arrived, so if they were alive, the shoal, or something else, was preventing them. If Val couldn’t come to him, he would go to her instead.

With no time to don a wet suit under the shark suit, Sturman immediately began to slide on the heavy chain-mail garment. The two-piece protective suit, made up of thousands of tiny stainless-steel links of the sort found in butcher’s gloves, was designed for diving with smaller sharks. It wouldn’t protect a man from the crushing pressure of a great white’s maw, but it was adequate against blues, reef sharks, even small makos. Sturman had acquired it from Steve Black years ago as a means to pay off a large debt, and he’d used it a handful of times when diving in open water with schooling sharks. A blue shark had once taken a bite at his upper arm on a winter dive with Steve, and the suit had done its job. He had gotten a nasty bruise, but nothing more.

As Sturman yanked the suit on, he watched the angled hull of the seiner on the water next to him, the tip of the bow now barely above the surface. It was going to sink before he could even get in the water. The lights on his vessel might help ward off the shoal, but unless Val appeared at the surface very soon, she and whoever was with her were about to ride the dying vessel down to Davy Jones’s locker. He needed more time. If only he could stop the boat from sinking, even slow it, he’d—

Sturman looked at the seining skiff he had towed over, drifting a few yards away, and at the heaps of drifting net in the water and its mass of cables and ropes tangled on the surface, all kept from sinking by the yellow floats through which the ropes were threaded. How strong were those cables? Would they hold? No, it didn’t matter. They were too lengthy and unworkable. He glanced at the last few visible points of the submerged seiner. Part of the boom protruded from the surface. It had to be strong enough. But how could he fasten it to his vessel?

The anchor chain . It just might hold long enough for him to find her. But would it even work? And his own boat—

He ran his hand along the worn wood of Maria ’s cabin door, knowing it would be for the last time.

Val had remained relatively calm, focused mostly on the blackness where Karl had disappeared, until she felt the first sharp teeth tearing through her wet suit. Instincts took over, and she panicked.

Kicking, reaching, squirming, willing herself toward the dark cabin doorway behind her, she continued to lose ground as the animals clung ever tighter against her body. Even in the relative weightlessness underwater, she could feel their bulk pressing into her, pulling her down. Ten feet from the doorway, she somehow reached the vertical side of the sinking boat and clawed at its surface, dimly aware that one of her nails broke off as she managed to grip a groove in the rusty metal. She turned her back toward the boat and forced her attackers against the rough metal, and felt them release her. She turned and finned along the vessel until she saw some sort of hatchway, maybe the opening to the hold. She bumped and clanged through, into the black water inside the Centaur .

For a moment, she would risk drowning inside the boat. She needed another plan.

In the cast of the lights, she studied the hundreds of silhouettes in the water above her, each the size of a blue shark, moving past as they were disturbed by the stimulus. She looked at her depth gauge. She was fifty feet below the surface. Her air wouldn’t last long here. She began to feel pain on her left leg and with her hand found a gaping tear in the neoprene on the back of her thigh. Warm blood seeped past her fingers into the cold water. It felt like a lot of blood. Her time was running out.

She would have to leave the safety of the sinking seiner. But how?

The groans of the dying vessel rose in volume and frequency, and Val saw a cloud of bubbles rise past her face in the shifting beam of her dive light. She felt the Centaur begin to push down into the top of her head. If she didn’t leave it soon, it would drag her to her death when it gasped the final pocket of air trapped in its steel lungs and began its long journey into the abyss.

But how to get out of the sinking ship? With Sturman’s boat now above her somewhere, she needed to find it and get on board as fast as possible. If she swam upward against the hull it might provide cover long enough for her to locate the bright lights beaming down from Maria. Once she was close to the lights, the lit water itself might provide some measure of protection.

It was time to decide now. Karl was gone. She could try for the surface, knowing it was probably hopeless. Or she could give up and die inside the doomed vessel.

She was gathering herself to move again out of the darkened hatchway when she felt dull vibrations run through the hull. It had come into contact with something on the surface. Then the seiner slowly began to change its position in the water. From its vertical orientation in the water, prow at the surface, it somehow started to slowly right itself in the depths. The lights on the surface grew brighter—or closer? As though pivoting around something up above, the vessel continued a slow-motion swivel for a few minutes until it was nearly upright.

Impossibly, the boat protecting her had somehow stopped sinking.

Sturman rolled off his boat and into the cold water, sinking like a stone as his armor sought the bottom. With no air in his BC and lacking the buoyancy of a wet suit, the heavy shark suit dragged his body under faster than he had ever descended. He wasn’t worried about going too deep, because around his waist was a tether that secured him to the skiff.

He plummeted down toward the seiner, which hung from its boom below him. In the bright glow cast by the lights on board Maria , he could see the boat’s raised cabin and part of the deck through the tangled threat of netting near the surface, but everything faded into black around the sides of the vessel. In the fringes of the light he could also see other things. Moving things, living things, close to his size and clearly at bay only because of the brightness.

As he pushed aside a mass of netting, he realized it offered some degree of protection. The squid moved closer now as he fell farther from the light, drifting shapes several yards away in the water, but they seemed hesitant to approach the netting. Black spots marking their watchful eyes were visible near the midpoints of their tapered bodies, which appeared darkish grey as the dim water absorbed their true reddish color.

Dense water rushed past his face for another few seconds as he avoided the net, the seawater becoming noticeably colder as he moved deeper through a thermocline. The vessel loomed closer, a few large squid darting along its surface, and then he was there.

He slammed into the surface of the seiner with a rasp as the hard chain-mail links at his knees and elbows scraped against the rough metal hull. He released air into his BC vest to achieve some measure of buoyancy as he pulled himself over the deck of the vessel. He had no idea how long Maria could keep the enormous boat from sinking, or whether the anchor chain might give.

He kicked along the tilted deck of the vessel toward the raised wheelhouse at the fore end. As he passed a hole in the deck, a blinding beam of light caught a cloud of bubbles as they whooshed past his face. The beam was redirected and he squinted at the dim outline of a diver holding the light. He shined his own dive light toward the diver’s face.