A coffin, she thought, with a clenched heart. It's a huge, metal coffin.
Sharp pain in her ears; she pinched her nose through the soft plastic portion of the mask and blew to equalize the pressure. They continued downward. As they got closer to the ship she began to hear the noises--grating and moaning as the ship's thick metal plates scraped on the rocks.
Hate that noise. Hate it, hate it. It sounded like a huge creature dying.
Her escorts were diligent. They'd stop the descent occasionally and check on her. Okay signs were exchanged and they continued downward.
At the bottom she looked up and found that the surface didn't seem as far away as she'd expected, though she recalled that water has the effect of acting like a lens and magnifying everything. A glance at her depth gauge. Ninety feet. A nine-story building. Then a glance at her pressure gauge. Jesus, she'd already used 150 pounds of air on the effortless descent.
Amelia Sachs pumped air into the BCD to neutralize her buoyancy--so that she floated level. She first pointed toward the gash in the hull and together the threesome swam toward it. Despite the pitching surface above them the currents here were gentle and they could move easily.
At the site of the explosion Sachs used her blunt knife to scrape residue from the outwardly curled metal. She placed some of the black ashy material into a plastic bag, sealed it and put that in the mesh collection bag.
She looked at the dark windows of the bridge forty feet away. Okay, Rhyme, here we go. They swam toward it.
And the pressure gauge gave her its emotionless message: 2350 pounds.
At 500 they left the bottom. No exceptions.
Because the ship was on its side the bridge door now opened upward, toward the surface. It was metal and very heavy. The two Coast Guard officers struggled to lift it and Sachs swam through the opening and down into the bridge. They lowered the door into the closed position. It clanked shut with a chilling boom and Sachs realized that she was now trapped inside the ship. Without her companions she probably couldn't open the door herself.
Forget it, she told herself, reached up to the light mounted on her wetsuit hood and clicked it on. The beam offered her faint comfort. She turned and swam away from the bridge down a dark corridor that led to the cabins.
Faint motion too from the dimness. Coming from what? Fish, eels, squid?
I don't like this, Rhyme.
But then she thought about the Ghost searching for the Changs, about the baby, Po-Yee, the Treasured Child.
Think about that, not about the darkness or confinement. Do this for her, for Po-Yee.
Amelia Sachs swam forward.
*
She was in hell.
No other word described it.
The black hallway was filled with sooty debris and refuse, scraps of cloth, paper, food, fish with piercing yellow eyes. And overhead, a shimmering, like ice: the thin layer of air trapped above her. The sounds were harrowing: the scraping and groaning, moans. Squeals like human voices in agony, pings and snaps. The clank of metal on metal.
A fish, gray and sleek, darted past. She gasped involuntarily at the motion and turned her head to follow it.
She found herself looking at two dull human eyes in a white lifeless face.
Sachs screamed through her regulator and jerked back. The body of a man, barefoot, his arms above his head, like a perp surrendering, floated nearby. His legs were frozen in the position of a runner's and, as the fish sped past, the small wake turned him slowly away from her.
Clank, clank.
No, she thought. I can't do this.
Already the walls were closing in on her. Plagued all her life by claustrophobia, Sachs couldn't stop thinking of what would happen if she got caught in one of these tiny passages. She'd go mad.
Two deep breaths of dry air through the regulator.
She thought of the Chang family. She thought of the toddler.
And she swam on.