Stillness. I breathe. I signal okay. Mark nods, satisfied. He loosens his grip.
I’m okay. But I’m not going down there. There’s no way on earth I’m going down there.
I signal up. I’m going up.
He looks at me for a while before he replies. He signals okay. Then, You, up.
He’s still going down. Alone.
I squeeze his arms and he releases me. I watch him descend as I kick up slowly. A controlled ascent, now the panic has dissipated. He disappears into the murky darkness as I rise.
Once I hit the surface I remove my tank immediately in the water and haul it onto the boat. I strip off my suit and leave it like a husked skin on the floor. I slump there shivering and wheezing, struggling to catch my breath, elbows on my knees as the tears start to well in my eyes.
Images flash across the backs of my closed eyelids. Their faces. The passengers’. Distorted, distended. The terror. I slam my fists down hard onto my legs. Pain flashes through my body. Anything to stop the images.
I get up and pace the deck. Think about something else. What does it mean, Erin? Yes, think about that, concentrate on that. What does it mean?
It means the bag was on a plane and the plane crashed. A storm in the South Pacific. Something happened and they had nowhere to land. We’re about one hour by air to Tahiti. I guess they couldn’t make it there. Or maybe they didn’t want to land in Tahiti. It’s obviously a private plane. A private jet. They had money. Other than the money in the bag, obviously. Perhaps they wanted to stay away from public airports. I think about the diamonds, the money, the gun.
Perhaps they thought they could outrun the storm. But they didn’t. I look at my watch. Mark must be in there by now. With them. Stop it, Erin.
I turn my mind to the logistics of the flight. Where were they going? I’m going to need to look some stuff up once we’re back. I rummage through the boat locker until I find what I’m looking for. A pad and pencil. Right, I know what I need to do, what I need to focus on. Not the plane down there. Mark’s got that covered.
I note down: Flight paths over French Polynesia?? God, I wish I’d noted down a tail number or something from down there. I’m sure Mark will.
I jot down: Plane type, aircraft tail number, max speed, & distance achievable nonstop??
Planes can only travel so far without refueling. We can try to work out where they might have been heading. I doubt the flight was logged, but we can search online and see if anyone is missing.
At least now our question has been answered. What we have found is flotsam. Our bag was most certainly not deliberately jettisoned. Somehow that canvas bag made its way, along with those bundles of papers, out of the plane’s breached hull and up into the Polynesian sunshine. But—and this is a big one—technically, what we have is neither flotsam nor jetsam. This is not a shipwreck. This is a plane crash. What we have is a big bag of evidence from an underwater aviation incident. I take a shuddery breath of cool tropical air.
Our honeymoon feels a million miles away and yet just within reach, if only we could—
Mark breaks through the waves on my starboard side. He fins toward the boat. His expression blank, controlled. For the first time, I truly appreciate how useful his masked emotions actually are. I think if I ever saw him truly scared, then I’d know for sure that we were done for.
He drags himself up the ladder at the stern of the boat, exhausted.
“Water, please,” he says as he jiggles his tank off onto the deck. He peels off his suit, discards it like mine, and drops heavily onto the teak seating. I fetch a water bottle from the cooler box and hand it across to him. His eyes are tight in the sunlight, brow tensed against the glare.
“You all right?” he asks. He’s watching me, concerned.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sorry. I just…” I’m not sure how to finish that sentence, so I stop.
“No, it’s fine. God. It’s good that you came up.” He takes a long pull on the water bottle and looks out over the waves, his wet hair dripping slowly onto his bare shoulders.
“Fucking hell,” he says.
I wait but he doesn’t continue.
“Are they in there?” I ask. I have to ask. I have to know.
“Yeah,” he says.
He takes another long swig of water.
“Two pilots up front, three passengers. That I could see. One of them was a woman, the rest men.” He looks out again at the waves, his jaw tight.
“Fucking hell.” I realize too late that I’ve echoed him. I don’t know what else to say.
“They weren’t good people, Erin,” he says, looking at me now.
What the fuck does that mean?
I want to know more, I want to know everything he saw, but it doesn’t seem right to ask. He’s processing. I wait for him to tell me.
But nothing comes. He drinks more.
His words still hang in the air. I try to catch them before they disappear. “What do you mean, they weren’t good people, Mark?”
“The things they had with them. Down there. They weren’t good people. Don’t feel too sad, is all I mean.” With that he stands. Grabs a towel and wipes his face, rubs his hair.
I realize that’s probably the most I’ll get from him right now, and I don’t want to linger too long on the thought of the people down there. I’m trying my hardest to stay focused as it is. I change the subject. Well, sort of.
“It’s flotsam, Mark.”
He stares at me blankly for a moment. I think he’d forgotten all about the bag until now. I continue.
“Well, sort of flotsam, lost by accident in an emergency—it can be claimed by the owners. But you’ve just met the owners and I don’t think they’ll be claiming it anytime soon. Will they?” My stab at dark humor. I’m not sure it sounded quite right.
“No, no, they won’t.” He says it flatly.
I move on quickly. “Mark, did you get the plane’s tail number? Anything we can use to identify them? Who they were? Anything helpful?”
He pulls the dive slate off his tank strap and hands it to me. The plane make, model, and tail number. Of course he got it!
“They’re Russian,” he says as I jot the slate information down in my notepad and wipe it clean again.
I look up. “How do you know that?”
“There were Russian snack packets.”
“Right.” I nod slowly.
“Listen, Erin. You said no one will claim the bag. Does that mean you’re suggesting we don’t report this? We don’t report a plane crash?” He’s scowling at me.
Shit. Yes. I thought that’s what we both were suggesting. Weren’t we? To keep the shiny pretty diamonds and the free money. To pay off our mortgage and have a family, right? Or am I crazy? Maybe I am crazy.
My mind flits to the people below us. The dead people, rotting in the water. The bad people. Should we keep the bad people’s money?
“Yes. Yes, that is what I’m suggesting,” I say to Mark.
He nods slowly, processing what that means.
I continue, carefully. “I am suggesting that we get back to the hotel, find out if they’ve been reported missing, and if anyone is missing them at all, then we forget it all. Drop it back here. But if not, if they’ve just evaporated into thin air, then yes, I say we keep the bag. We found it floating in the sea, Mark. We keep it and use it for a better purpose than I’m sure it was meant for.”
He looks at me. I can’t quite tell through the blaze of sun what his expression means.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s find out who they are.”
It turns out there’s a live online feed of every registered airborne flight in the world. I’m watching it now as different-sized purple triangles flicker across a lo-fi black and yellow map of the world. A real-life version of the video game Asteroids.