Ryan Lockwood - Below

The Spare Air tank, a tiny canister he carried for emergencies and had used only once before, would give him several minutes of air to surface if he controlled his breathing. He placed the mouthpiece of the tiny tank in his mouth and took a cautious first breath. It still worked.

Sturman gave her a reassuring look: Everything’s all right now. She didn’t seem to see him. She was still panicked.

He looked behind her and quickly realized why she was still down here. The primary regulator at the top of her scuba tank, which connected her air hoses to the tank, was somehow jammed into a hole adjacent to a hatchway, perhaps where hinges had been torn free. Sturman grabbed her tank and regulator, twisting with all his strength in each direction, wrenching the woman back and sideways. The tank popped free.

Grabbing the woman’s vest and pulling, Sturman shoved off the wall with his free arm, kicked hard, and accelerated toward the distant opening in the hull.

Fifty psi.

Sturman looked at his air gauge as he and the other diver reached the exterior of the ship, not slowing as they passed through the opening in the side of the hull and began to arc up toward the surface. Sturman maintained his grip on the woman’s BC vest, since she was still breathing from his air tank. This was going to be a real balancing act, he realized. They needed to surface quickly, but too fast and they would certainly get a bad case of the bends. As it was, they were certain to suffer some ill effects. There wasn’t enough air for a safety stop at fifteen feet.

Far from the anchor line, they began to drift in the current as they ascended in open water. Sturman continued to look at his depth gauge, dumping air from his vest to control the ascent. Ninety feet. Eighty feet. Seventy feet. They were surfacing too fast. He grimaced. This wasn’t going to be good.

He needed to slow them down, since they probably still had two or three minutes of air in his emergency tank—at least at the low pressure of shallow water, where air lasted much longer than at depth. Before they surfaced, they could share the Spare Air as they let the nitrogen that had built up in their bodies escape when they exhaled in the reduced pressure of shallower water. Hell, he thought, they might get out of this unscathed after all.

Without warning, the woman spit out her regulator and kicked for the surface.

Sturman suddenly realized that the air in his main tank, which the woman had been breathing, must have just hit zero psi.

She was out of air.

The woman clawed for the emergency tank suspended just below Sturman’s mouth, ripping it free of his bite. She tried to put in the mouthpiece, but was clearly in a state of panic now. After a moment of fumbling with the miniature tank, she let go of it and kicked upward. Sturman tried to hold on to her with one hand and caught the sinking emergency tank with the other. He couldn’t let her just pop up from sixty feet. The risk was much too great.

Sturman heard a faint metallic clink and felt the woman begin to rise. Shit. Her weight belt. She had released her weight belt, and was attempting an emergency ascent.

He glanced down and watched as her thick, nylon belt, laden with twenty pounds of lead weights, slipped past her long blue fins and plummeted toward the wreck below. He quickly dumped the remaining air out of his buoyancy control vest and tried to hold the woman down, but knew they were rising fast as he felt the air in his sinuses and rib cage rapidly expand. They were in for a ride.

Sturman knew he had two choices: try to slow their ascent and put himself at greater risk, or let her go and ascend more gradually himself.

For Will Sturman, there was really no choice.

He squeezed the woman’s vest tighter and raised the Spare Air tank in front of the woman’s face so she could see it, but she was wriggling like a speared fish and her mask was fogged completely over because of her rapid breathing. Her flailing arms hit the small tank away again, and Sturman realized this woman was going to drown if she didn’t get her head above water immediately.

As they accelerated upward over the last forty feet to the surface, escorted by a host of their own expanding air bubbles, Sturman exhaled continuously, calmly, and wondered why in the hell he still chose to be a divemaster.

With his arms outstretched, Sturman could have easily touched both sides of the large, horizontal cylinder.

Even though he was tall, about six-two, with a wide arm span, any space he could reach across with his arms and couldn’t stand up in was much too small for comfort. Semi-claustrophobic, Sturman had first taken a scuba class right after high school to help him conquer his avoidance of confined spaces. It had worked. Well, that and his general fearlessness. He didn’t worry much about dying, never had. Seventeen years later, he could remain relaxed while breathing compressed air through a hose, a hundred feet underwater, at intense water pressure, while swimming through narrow openings in a sunken vessel. But he still didn’t enjoy being confined.

The rapid ascent from the HMCS Redemption this morning had ended with them breaching halfway out of the water with the momentum of their ascent. Sturman had looked over at the female diver to see bloody froth coming out of her mouth and bubbling out of her nose into her mask. That had frightened the hell out of him, but the woman had stayed conscious and wide-eyed as he towed her back to his boat. Sturman had realized she must have held her breath on the way up and damaged her lungs.

Besides her lung injury, they had both almost immediately started to feel the first effects of the bends. Sturman had gotten a headache moments after surfacing, and by the time they reached the boat two hundred feet away his face had begun to itch and his shoulders and elbows were tingling.

On his marine radio he had called for an ambulance to meet them at the dock. To prevent serious injury and lessen the pain of the decompression, they had been rushed to the hyperbaric chamber at the hospital in La Mesa. When they had reached the hospital an hour later, Sturman, although primarily concerned with the injured woman, had felt intense pain in his upper joints as the nitrogen gas bubbling up in his tissues wreaked havoc on his nerves. The woman, in greater pain and still bleeding some from her mouth, hadn’t even been able to talk at that point. She had been confused and delirious, and when she had been able to speak through the pain and bloody froth, all she had kept asking was where they were and what was happening.

Now she was unconscious on the floor of the chamber, underneath a light blue hospital blanket. A nurse sat beside her, monitoring her vitals.

“You are suffering from decompression sickness.”

Sturman turned to see the doctor, a middle-aged Indian man, looking at him through one of the five small, circular windows in the chamber. His voice had emanated from a small speaker inside the chamber. On his white coat was a metallic nametag: DR. PESHWAR.

Sturman walked over to the porthole and saw a button labeled TALK next to a small speaker. He pushed it.

“Thanks for the diagnosis, doc. I thought I was in here for the view,” Will replied. As a divemaster, he already knew all about the bends.

The doctor scowled at him and shook his head. “Do you think this is funny, sir? That woman nearly died.”

“I’ve got a helluva headache,” Sturman said. “Say what you’ve gotta say.”

“Your bodies absorbed a lot of nitrogen when you were underwater, and when you surfaced too quickly, the nitrogen didn’t have time to leave your body,” the doctor explained over the small speaker. The chamber walls were too thick to speak to each other directly. “What you are experiencing is the bubbling up of nitrogen in a gaseous form in your blood and tissues, particularly in your joints. Mrs. Buckner also has suffered trauma from an air embolism. Apparently she held her breath on your ascent and ruptured her lung.”