Douglas Preston - Riptide

"I'm doing that, but. . . Wait, now the hubs getting... Oh, shit."

"What?" came Neidelman's sharp voice.

At the same time Hatch heard the sound of the pumps on the island faltering.

"System crash," said Wopner.

There was a sudden, sharp, garbled noise from Bonterre. Hatch glanced toward the video screen and saw it had gone dead. No, he corrected himself: not dead, but black. And then snow began to creep into the blackness until the signal was lost in a howling storm of electronic distortion.

"What the hell?" Streeter said, frantically punching the comm button. "Bonterre, can you hear me? We've lost your feed. Bonterre!"

Scopatti broke the surface ten feet from the boat and tore the regulator from his mouth. "Bonterre's been sucked into the tunnel!" he gasped.

"What was that?" Neidelman cried over the radio.

"He said, Bonterre's been sucked—" Streeter began.

"Goddammit, go back after her!" Neidelman barked, his electronic voice rasping across the water.

"It's murder down there!" Scopatti yelled. "There's a massive backcurrent, and—"

"Streeter, give him a lifeline!" Neidelman called. "And Magnusen, bypass that computer control, get the pumps started manually. Losing them must have created some kind of backflow."

"Yes, sir," said Magnusen. "The team will have to reprime them by hand. I'll need at least five minutes, minimum."

"Run," came Neidelman's voice, hard but suddenly calm. "And do it in three."

"Yes, sir."

"And Wopner, get the system on-line."

"Captain," Wopner began, "the diagnostics are telling me that everything's—"

"Stop talking," snapped Neidelman. "Start fixing."

Scopatti clipped a lifeline around his belt and disappeared again over the side.

"I'm clearing this area," Hatch said to Streeter as he began to spread towels over the deck to receive his potential patient.

Streeter played the lifeline out, helped by Rankin. There was a sudden tug, then steady tension.

"Streeter?" came Neidelman's voice.

"Scopatti's in the backflow," said Streeter. "I can feel him on the line."

Hatch stared at the snow on the screen with a macabre sense of deja vu. It was as if she had disappeared, vanished, just as suddenly as...

He took a deep breath and looked away. There was nothing he could do until they got her to the surface. Nothing.

Suddenly there was a noise from the island as the pumps roared into life.

"Good work," came Neidelman's voice from the comm set.

"Line's gone slack," said Streeter.

There was a tense silence. Hatch could see the last bits of dye boiling off as the flow came back out the tunnel. And suddenly the video screen went black again, and then he heard gasping over the audio line. The black on the screen grew lighter until, with a flood of relief, he saw a green square of light growing across the screen: the exit to the flood tunnel.

"Merde," came Bonterre's voice as she was ejected from the opening, the view from the camera tumbling wildly.

Moments later, there was a swirl at the surface. Hatch and Rankin rushed to the side of the boat and lifted Bonterre aboard. Scopatti followed, stripping off her tanks and hood as Hatch laid her down on the towels.

Opening her mouth, Hatch checked the airway: all clear. He unzipped her wetsuit at the chest and placed a stethoscope. She was breathing well, no sound of water in the lungs, and her heartbeat was fast and strong. He noticed a gash in the suit along her stomach, skin and a ribbon of blood swelling along its edge.

"Incroyable," Bonterre coughed, trying to sit up, waving a chip of something gray.

"Keep still," Hatch said sharply.

"Cement!" she cried, clutching the chip. "Three-hundred-year-old cement! There was a row of stones set into the reef—"

Hatch felt quickly around the base of her skull, looking for evidence of a concussion or spinal injury. There were no swellings, cuts, dislocations.

"Ca suffit!" she said, turning her head. "What are you, a phrenologiste?"

"Streeter, report!" Neidelman barked over the radio.

"They're aboard, sir," Streeter said. "Bonterre seems to be fine."

"I am fine, except for this meddlesome doctor!" she cried, struggling.

"Just a moment while I look at your stomach," Hatch said, gently restraining her.

"Those stones, they looked like the foundation to something," she continued, lying back. "Sergio, did you see that? What could it be?"

With a single movement, Hatch unzipped the wetsuit down to her navel.

"Hey!" cried Bonterre.

Ignoring the outcry, Hatch quickly explored the cut. There was a nasty scrape below her ribs, but it seemed superficial along its entire length.

"It is just a scratch," protested Bonterre, craning her neck to see what Hatch was doing.

He snatched his hand from her belly as a distinctly unprofessional stirring coursed through his loins. "Perhaps you're right," he said a little more sarcastically than he intended, fishing in his bag for a topical antibiotic ointment. "Next time let me play in the water, and you can be the doctor. Meanwhile, I'm going to apply some of this anyway, in case of infection. You had a close call." He rubbed ointment into the scrape.

"That tickles," said Bonterre.

Scopatti had stripped off his suit to the waist, and stood with his arms crossed, his tanned physique gleaming in the sun, grinning fondly. Rankin stood next to him, hirsute and massive, watching Bonterre with a distinct gleam in his eyes. Everyone, thought Malin, is in love with this woman.

"I ended up in a big underwater cavern," she was saying. "For a moment I couldn't find the walls, and I thought that was the end. Fin."

"A cavern?" Neidelman asked doubtfully over the open channel.

"Mais oui. A big cavern. But my radio was dead. Why would that be?"

"The tunnel must have blocked the transmission," Neidelman said.

"But why the backcurrent?" Bonterre said. "The tide was going out."

There was a brief silence. "I don't have an answer to that," Neidelman's voice came at last. "Perhaps once we've drained the Pit and its tunnels, we'll learn why. I'll be waiting for a full report. Meanwhile, why don't you rest? Grampus out."

Streeter turned. "Markers set. Returning to base."

The boat rumbled to life and planed across the water, riding the gentle swells. Hatch stowed his gear, listening to the chatter on the radio bands. Neidelman, on the Grampus, was talking to Island One.

"I'm telling you, we've got a cybergeist," came the voice of Wopner. "I just did a ROM dump on Charybdis, and ran it against Scylla. Everything's messed up nine ways to Sunday. But that's burned-in code, Captain. The goddamn system's cursed. Not even a hacker could rewrite ROM—"

"Don't start talking about curses," said Neidelman sharply.

As they approached the dock, Bonterre peeled off her wetsuit, packed it into a deck locker, wrung out her hair, and turned toward Hatch. "Well, Doctor, my nightmare came true. I did need your services, after all."

"It was nothing," said Hatch, blushing and furiously aware of it.

"Oh, but it was very nice."

Chapter 16

The stone ruins of Fort Blacklock stood in a meadow looking down on the entrance to Stormhaven harbor. The circular fort was surrounded by a large meadow dotted with white pines, which fell away to farmers' fields and a "sugarbush," a thick stand of sugar maples. Across the meadow from the old fort a large yellow-and-white pavilion had been erected, decorated with ribbons and pennants that fluttered merrily in the breeze. A banner over the pavilion proclaimed in hand-painted letters: 71ST ANNUAL STORMHAVEN LOBSTER BAKE!!!