Gordon Korman: The Deep

The sword was the smallest that could be found aboard the Griffin , yet thirteen-year-old Samuel Higgins could barely lift it with both hands.

“But what am I to do with this, sir?” the cabin boy asked in alarm.

York, the ship’s barber and surgeon, regarded him sternly. “We’re going into battle, Lucky. You won’t be picking your teeth with it.”

Samuel was aghast. “Me? I’m to join the fight?”

The word had spread like wildfire through the English privateer fleet that the invasion of Portobelo was at hand. This was what they had crossed the perilous Atlantic for, losing fully a third of their number to scurvy, fever, and the malevolent sea. At the end of this day lay riches beyond their wildest dreams.

In a secluded inlet, forty miles north of the treasure city, the nine remaining privateer ships lay at anchor. Each vessel was manned by a skeleton crew. The majority of the English seamen were loaded onto a flotilla of twenty-four canoes. These had been carried all the way from Liverpool for exactly this purpose — a sneak attack on Portobelo.

Hugging the coast, the canoes were paddled south, rushed along by the fast-moving current. Each narrow craft was about forty feet long and equipped with a small sail. The assault force totaled about five hundred in number. They were led by the captain of the Griffin , the dreaded corsair James Blade.

“Row, you scurvy scum!” the captain roared. “We reach Portobelo before dawn, or your bodies will lie at the bottom of the bay!”

Struggling with a heavy oar, Samuel knew this was not an empty threat. Over the course of their terrible journey, he had seen Blade strike, flog, and even hang his crew. And the cruel captain had murdered Evans, the sail maker, Samuel’s only friend aboard the barque. The memory of that good man’s terrible end still caused the boy to well up with suppressed anger.

By the time they had covered the forty-mile distance, Samuel’s hands were raw and bleeding. He wasn’t sure he would be able to clutch his sword, much less defend himself with it.

Blade indicated a pattern of flickering lights in the moonless blackness ahead. “The torches of Santiago Castle! Muffle the oars! We’ll take those fancy dons by surprise!”

No sooner had the words passed his lips than giant signal fires flared, illuminating the stone fortress before them. There was a flash, followed by a huge explosion. A split second later, a cannonball sizzled over their heads, close enough for Samuel to feel its hot wind. It struck the water behind them, sending up a steaming geyser.

“To the beach!” howled Blade, standing in the bow, a cutlass in one hand and his bone-handled snake whip in the other. “If you want to line your pockets with Spanish gold, first stain your swords with Spanish blood!”

The battle had begun.

Perhaps one diver in a thousand would have noticed the faint glimmer on the ocean floor. Dante Lewis spotted it immediately.

Silver!

Heart racing, he deflated his buoyancy compensator (or B.C.) vest and began to descend toward it, passing towering coral formations and clouds of sea life.

The Hidden Shoals off the Caribbean island of Saint-Luc boasted some of the most spectacular colors on the face of the earth — the brilliant turquoise of a parrot fish, the electric magenta of red algae, the neon yellow of a snapper’s tail, the shimmering violet of a school of Creole wrasses.

Dante perceived none of it.

That wasn’t exactly true. He could see everything — and far sharper than the average person. But only in black and white and shades of gray.

The promising thirteen-year-old photographer was color-blind . That was why he had accepted the diving internship at Poseidon Oceanographic Institute. Not to learn color — his brain wasn’t wired for that. But maybe he could learn to detect it, figure it out from the clues he could see — light, dark, and shading.

He checked the Fathometer on his dive watch to see how deep he’d gone. Forty feet.

So far, the plan was a dismal failure. Descending in full scuba gear, Dante swung around his Nikonos underwater camera to snap a picture of a flamingo tongue — a rare spotted snail, supposedly orange on peach. To Dante, it appeared gray on gray.

Everything is gray on gray, he reminded himself glumly. And it always will be.

Sixty feet. He looked down. The glint of silver was still far below.

Dante felt he was stuck on a backward island in the middle of nowhere for the whole summer. There was nothing to do but dive, an activity that he wasn’t much good at, and liked even less. He had almost gotten himself killed at least once already.

And for what? Gray fish, gray plants, gray coral.

But there was money in these waters. From centuries of sunken ships. Dante and his companions had already found an antique Spanish piece of eight. His brow clouded. The three-hundred-year-old coin had been stolen from them by their supervisor, Tad Cutter. The interns would not make the mistake of trusting the slick Californian again.

Eighty feet. It was deeper than he had ever been, but he barely gave it a second thought. He was completely focused on reaching the source of the glimmer.

And then his flippers made contact with the soft sandy bottom. He peered down at the object that had drawn him to the depths.

A 7UP can.

His disappointment surged like the clouds of bubbles that rose from his breathing apparatus.

Stupid, he berated himself. It was crazy to believe that every glint in the ocean was some kind of lost treasure. But it would have been sweet to snag a pile of silver and rub it in Cutter’s face! The institute man had done a lot more than swipe one little coin. He and his team had taken over the wreck site it had come from.

They’re probably over there right now, digging up our discovery!

It was a huge rip-off, no question about it. Yet the whole business didn’t seem to bother Dante right then. Instead he felt pretty good. A dull, pleasant fatigue, like a runner’s high.

Funny — he was normally pretty nervous on a dive. Underwater seemed like a place that people simply weren’t meant to be. But now he was starting to feel confident. Fearless, even.

A curious lionfish ventured close — a mass of spines and fins and stripes.

It’s an underwater porcupine in designer clothes!

In some remote corner of his mind, it occurred to Dante that he should take a picture. But he made no move for the Nikonos tethered to his arm. Instead, he reached out to touch an elaborately striped fin.

The attack came from above, knocking him backward. His dive partner, fourteen-year-old Star Ling, grabbed him linebacker-style around the waist, driving him away from his quarry. She shook a scolding finger in his face, then whipped out a dive slate and scribbled: POISON!

Dante squinted at the message, his vision darkening at the edges. He could see all the letters, but for the life of him, he couldn’t put them together to read the word. What the young photographer didn’t realize was that he was experiencing nitrogen narcosis — the rapture of the deep. Under deep-water pressure, the nitrogen in air dissolves in the bloodstream, producing an effect similar to drunkenness. In diving lingo, he was “narced.”