The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

The tow hook on the winch attached to the SUV’s bumper slipped over the metal plate, and when Hanley took up the slack the chunk of steel slid smoothly across the rocks and revealed the yawning opening into the earth that had intrigued people for generations.

“I can’t believe I’m about to dive the Treasure Pit,” Juan said. “When I was a kid, I followed Dewayne Sullivan’s expedition in the papers, dreaming of being on his team.”

“Must be a West Coast thing,” Max replied. “I’d never heard of this place until Murph and Stoney’s briefing.”

“Besides, you have no whimsy,” Cabrillo teased, copying Eric Stone’s earlier observation.

The dive gear they had ordered from Seattle was top-of-the-line. Juan would have a full-face dive helmet with a fiber-optic voice-and-data link to Max on the surface. A tiny camera mounted on the side of the helmet would allow Hanley to see everything the Chairman did. Diving alone, especially underground, was never a good idea, but if something happened to Juan when he was in the pit, Max would know about it and be able to haul him back up.

“You ready,” Max asked when Juan finished cinching a utility belt over his dry suit.

Cabrillo gave him the OK sign. Divers never give the thumbs-up unless they are about to surface. “Keep watch on the computer for those motion sensors. If one goes off, get me up to the surface as fast as you can.”

Max had his pistol secreted in the small of his back and Juan’s on the seat next to him. “I doubt they’re coming, but we’re ready.”

Juan clipped the winch hook to his belt and slowly eased himself off the steel plate and into the Treasure Pit. There was no sense of how high he was over the bottom because the shaft was inky black. He had yet to put on his helmet. The air was layered with the thick stench of rotting kelp and the iodine tang of the sea.

His halogen light pushed only a few feet into the darkness before being swallowed up.

“Ready?” Max asked.

“Lower away,” Juan replied, and slipped his helmet over his head and locked it to the collar ring. The air from the tanks on his back was fresh and cool.

The winch paid out cable at a steady sixty feet a minute. Juan observed the rock walls below the thick wooden supports placed here some time in the past by person or persons unknown. Where the Ronish brothers had used oakum to block water seeps, the 1978 expedition had used fast-drying hydraulic grout to fill any crack or crevice, and from the look of them it was still doing the job. The walls were bone dry.

“How are you doing?” Max’s question came down the fiber-optics.

Darkness sucked at Cabrillo’s dangling feet. “Oh, just hanging on. How far down am I?”

“About a hundred feet. See anything yet?”

“Murk. Lots and lots of murk.”

At one hundred and forty feet, Juan saw the reflection of his dive light off the surface of the water below him. The water was perfectly still. As he got lower, he finally saw evidence that the pit was still connected to the sea. The rock was damp from high tide, and mussels clumped like black grapes clung to the stone, awaiting the tide’s return. He could also tell that the ocean’s access to the pit had to be limited. The tidal mark was only a few feet tall.

“Hold on a sec,” Juan ordered.

“Looks like you’ve reached the water,” Max said, watching the scene on the laptop.

“Okay, lower slowly.” Juan didn’t know what lay under the surface and didn’t want to be impaled. “Hold again.”

When his foot made contact with the water, he kicked around, feeling for any submerged obstruction. It was clear.

“Okay, down another foot.”

They repeated this until the Chairman was completely submerged and he could see for himself that the pit was clear. He dumped a little air from his buoyancy compensator so that he sank to the full stretch of the cable.

“Visibility is about twenty feet,” he reported. Even through the dry suit, he could feel the cold Pacific’s embrace. Without the dive light, he was in a stygian world. There wasn’t enough sun from the surface to penetrate this deep into the pit. “Give me some slack.”

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Cabrillo finned deeper into the pit. When he approached bottom at eighty feet, he realized that Dewayne Sullivan had pulled a fast one. He had used the excuse of the two accidents to call a halt to his exploration when in fact it looked like they had hit bottom only to discover the pit was empty. They had removed all the debris and found nothing. He swept his hand over the thin layer of silt covering the rock floor. The coating was only knuckle-deep. Below it, the rock was smooth against his fingertips, as though it had been ground flat. The only interesting feature was a man-sized niche just above the pit’s terminus.

“I think this is a bust,” he told Max. “There’s nothing down here.”

“I can see that.” Hanley adjusted the control on the laptop to sharpen the picture because of the cloud of silt Juan had kicked up. A squirrel paused as it scampered by, gave him an angry tail twitch, and ran off.

A noise suddenly caught Max’s attention. It wasn’t the motion alarm but something far worse. A low-flying helicopter was approaching. It had been coming on at wave-top height, so the island masked the beat of its rotors until it was almost atop him.