The Stone Monkey (Lincoln Rhyme 4)

"Rarely see sharks in these waters."

"Hardly ever," the other officer echoed. "Not big ones anyway."

"I'll take your word for it," Sachs said, replacing the knife. Wasn't the movie Jaws set here?

The dive chief handed Sachs a large mesh bag for stowing any evidence she found. Into these she placed what she'd brought for evidence collection--plastic bags. Then he and his assistant donned their equipment and, carrying their flippers, all three walked unsteadily to the very stern of the heaving ship.

Shouting over the noise of the wind the dive chief said, "Too choppy to go off the deck. We'll get into the raft, put our flippers on and then fall backward into the water. Hold your mask and regulator to your face. Other hand on your weight-belt release."

She tapped the top of her head--the hand signal for okay.

He did the same.

They climbed into the yellow raft, which was already in the water and reared up and down like a bucking horse. They sat on the side and checked their equipment.

Twenty feet away was an orange buoy. The dive chief pointed to it and said, "There's a line from there that goes straight down to the vessel. We'll swim over to that and follow the line down. What's your plan for the search?"

She called back, "I want to get samples of the explosion residue from the hull and then search the bridge and cabins."

The other divers nodded.

"I do the inside alone."

This was a breach of the fundamental scuba rule that you be able to swim to your buddy on one breath. The dive chief frowned.

"You're sure?"

"Have to."

"Okay," he said uneasily. Then he continued, "Now, sounds don't work well underwater--hard to tell where they're coming from--but if you're in trouble bang on your tank with the knife and we'll search for you." He held up her SPG--submersible pressure gauge--which showed how much air was in her tank. "You've got three thousand pounds of air. You'll burn it fast because you're going to be pumped up on adrenaline. We leave the bottom with five hundred. No less than that. That's an iron-clad rule. No exceptions. We come up slow--no faster than the bubbles from our regulator and we pause for three minutes fifteen feet down."

Otherwise, Sachs knew, there was a risk of decompression sickness--the bends.

"Oh, and what's the most important rule in scuba?"

Sachs remembered it from her course years ago. "Don't ever hold your breath underwater."

"Good. Why?"

"Otherwise your lungs could explode."

Then they started her air and she pulled on her fins then mask, gripped the regulator fiercely in her teeth. The dive chief gave the other "okay" sign--middle finger and thumb in a circle--and she responded the same way. She pumped some air into her BCD to allow her to float on the surface. They gestured for her to roll backward.

She gripped the mask and regulator so they wouldn't be torn off by the entry and she held her weight-belt release so that if her buoyancy device failed and she dropped toward the bottom she could dump the weights and swim to the surface.

Okay, Rhyme, here's one for Guinness: the record for searching the most submerged crime scene.

One, two, three . . .

Backward into the churning water.

By the time she righted herself the others were in the water beside her and gesturing toward the buoy. In a few minutes they'd swum to it. Okay signs all around. Then a thumbs-down, which meant descend. Then they took their BCD control in their left hand and deflated the vests.

Immediately, noise became silence, motion became stillness, heavy became weightless and they drifted downward placidly along the thick rope toward the bottom.

For a moment Sachs was struck by the absolute peace of life underwater. Then the serenity was broken as she looked below her and saw the dim outline of the Fuzhou Dragon.

The image was more unsettling than she'd expected. The ship on her side, a black gash in the hull from the explosion, the rust, the peeling paint, the encrusting barnacles on the plates. Dark and jagged and foreboding--and containing the bodies of so many innocent people.