Peter Benchley - The Deep

Treece stopped fanning. At first, Sanders thought he had given up. Then he saw two fingers reach into the sand hole and withdraw, clutching what looked to Sanders like a brown leaf. There was a faint impression on the leaf, traces of writing or printing. The fanning resumed, and Sanders saw a glint in the sand. The fingers probed again, as delicately as if they were extracting a splinter from a child’s foot. An ampule was pulled from the sand.

Soon more leaf appeared-rotten wood, Sanders now assumed, from the cigar boxes that held the ampules; and then another ampule. Then two ampules together.

Then, as the hole deepened, the corner of a box, faded and flaking. Sanders backed off a few inches, for most of the box seemed to lie outside the cave.

Treece fanned until he had uncovered the box.

It lay upside down, a brown square about six inches by eight. He set the paddle down and gently lifted the box bottom, which came away in one mushy piece. Inside, protected by a honeycomb of cardboard partitions, lay forty-eight ampules, all intact.

Treece didn’t touch them. He picked up the paddle and began to fan again, moving away from the mouth of the cave. The sand that swirled around the cave was already sifting between the ampules, covering them.

Treece fanned until he found the edge of another box, then stopped. He held his left wrist up to the light and rolled back his wet-suit cuff.

Sanders saw the dial of his wrist watch: they had been down for thirty-two minutes. Treece’s thumb pointed up, and his hand reached to take the light from Sanders.

Sanders rose slowly in the black water, watching the beam of light below him. It would move a few feet, then stop, then move again. Sanders swam without using his arms, kicking smoothly, making as little commotion as possible, for he suddenly felt lonely and vulnerable in the blackness. His senses were useless, and he did not want to attract the attention of anything equipped to prey upon the weak or solitary.

His head broke the surface. He looked around and saw that he had misjudged his ascent; he had risen away from the boat, not toward it. It rested at anchor, a black sculpture in the moonlight, about fifty yards away. He did not want to swim on the surface, where he would make sounds and vibrations that an animal below might determine were being emitted by a wounded fish. So he ducked underwater and kicked in the general direction of the boat. Twice he poked his head out of water, twice discovered that he had strayed way wide of the boat.

Since he could see nothing on the bottom against which to measure his progress, he could not maintain a steady course.

He was breathing too fast, too deeply, his lungs gasping for more air than the regulator would give them. Stop it!

he told himself. Stop it, or you’ll run out of air. He stopped swimming and lay motionless in the water, forcing himself to breathe more slowly. Gradually, the ache in his lungs subsided. He raised his face from the water, saw the boat, and, with a smooth, deliberate breast stroke, swam toward it.

Sanders reached the boat and held onto the diving platform at the stern that made it possible for divers to board the boat without assistance. He unsnapped his shoulder harness and heaved his tank onto the platform.

Then he hauled himself up and sat, breathing heavily, letting his flippered feet dangle in the water.

He heard a distant whining from the direction of the bow.

Treece’s head popped up beside the platform. He spat out his mouthpiece and said, “Where’s Charlotte?”

“Forward. Sounds like she’s having a nightmare.”

“Not bloody likely.” Treece pulled himself, tank and all, onto the platform. With one motion, he shed his tank and stepped over the transom onto the deck. “She doesn’t sleep on the boat. She waits for me, so she can lick the salt off my face.” He started forward, and Sanders followed.

As they neared the bow, the whining grew louder, more frantic. Sanders saw the outline of Treece ahead of him, a wide, towering figure that moved with certainty and grace even in the dark. He saw Treece stop, then heard him cry, “Bastards!”

“What is it?” As he drew even with Treece, Sanders saw the dog.

She had thrust herself against the port gunwale, where she thrashed in a contorted ball, wildly biting at her flanks.

Something shiny protruded from her rear end, just above the tail, where the dog couldn’t reach with her teeth. She had tried to get at whatever it was, and in gnashing at her flanks had torn tufts of hair and flesh from her haunches. Exhausted, whining, she continued to snap at herself.

Treece squatted down and put out a hand to soothe the dog. The dog curled her lip and growled. “It’s all right,” Treece said softly. “It’s all right.” He grabbed the dog’s neck and forced her head to the deck. With his other hand, he reached around and yanked a piece of steel from the dog’s back.

Freed from pain, the dog moaned and licked herself.

“What happened?”

Treece strode aft, swung down into the cockpit, and snapped on an overhead light. In his hand was a two-inch-long dart shaped like a feather.

“What the Christ do they think they’re doing?”

Sanders looked at the dart and said, “Cloche.”

“What?”

“Cloche wears a feather exactly like that, only smaller. It must be his calling card. He’s already worked on Gail and me. Now he probably wants to force you to deal with him.”

“Idiot,” Treece said. “Just because he hired some toady to row out here and shoot my dog? That’s supposed to make me fall to my knees?” He spat on the deck. “All that does is piss me off.”

He looked up and saw the dog hobbling along the gunwale. “Get me the first-aid kit,” he said, pointing to a locker on the starboard side. “Got to patch up the old lady.”

He lifted the dog off the gunwale and set her on the deck. Gently, he forced her to lie on her good side.

Treece clipped the matted hairs from around the ragged wound, cleaned it with an antiseptic, and poured sulfa powder onto it. As he worked, he cooed lovingly to the dog, soothing, reassuring, treating her, it seemed to Sanders, with paternal tenderness and affection.

The dog responded: she made no sound and did not move.

When he had finished, Treece scratched the dog’s ears and said, “I suppose I better bandage you.”

He reached for a gauze pad and adhesive tape.

“Knowing you, you’ve already got a taste for yourself, and you’ll eat yourself right up to the bloody neck.” He helped the dog to her feet, and, tail wagging feebly, she tottered to a corner and lay down.

“What do you think they’ll do now?” Sanders asked.

“Cloche? No telling. T covered up those ampules, so he’ll not be dead sure we found anything. But that just buys us a day or two.”

Treece shook his head. “Lord, but there’s a Christ load of stuff down there.”

“More than we saw?”

“Aye. That box was just the tip. It looks to me like the number three hold hit the rocks and spilled a little bit. Then maybe she slid backward and busted her guts.” Treece made an upside-down V with his hands. “What we saw was up at the top here. The farther down away from the cave I looked, the wider the pattern was, with some of those explosives mixed in.”

“Can we get it all up?”

“Not with a Ping-Pong paddle. We’ll need the air lift.”

He pointed to the aluminum tube lashed to the gunwale. “And we’ll have to dive with Desco gear, not air tanks. Can’t be coming up every hour for new tanks. That means firing up the compressor, and that means noise. It’s going to be bad.”

“Why?”

“The deep stuff must be all mixed in with the artillery shells.”