Frozen Solid A Novel

54




IF SHE COULDN’T ADD AIR, SHE WOULD HAVE TO SUBTRACT WEIGHT.

She ripped her belt’s quick-release buckle open and dumped twenty-five pounds of lead. Almost immediately her descent slowed. She looked for the white anchor line, but her light beam showed nothing. Her uncontrolled descent had not been dead vertical, then. She would have to make a free ascent and hope that she spotted the line or the shaft mouth on the way up.

Her computer’s luminous green readout showed a depth of thirty-two feet. She had been sucking hard on her mouthpiece but had been too focused on the uncontrolled descent. Only now did she realize that the regulator was not delivering air. It seemed quite possible that water this cold could freeze up even the best technical regulators. She pushed the purge button. Nothing happened. Finning hard to slow her descent, she removed the regulator and knocked it against the heel of one hand. It still didn’t work. She picked up her backup regulator, hanging on a bungee-cord necklace. She pushed it into her mouth, bit down, inhaled.

Nothing.

Forty-eight feet.

She understood. It wasn’t only the dry suit’s inflator mechanism. After she’d tested both regulators on the surface, they had simply turned off her air and argon supplies while she’d been shuffling toward the shaft. It would have been easy for Guillotte to do that, without her feeling a thing, as he walked behind her.

It was one of the oldest and most common causes of fatalities, overeager divers killed by their rush to get in the water. They hurried through all the predive donning and forgot the most important thing of all: opening valves to send air to regulators and the buoyancy-control system. How many dead divers had she read about who were found with their air turned off? Too many to count. Since divers used the same gas they breathed to inflate their buoyancy compensators and dry suits, they hit the water and, unable to arrest their descents, plunged too deep to reach the surface on the one lungful of air they had taken with them into the water. It was possible to reach back and turn on the air oneself, but an uncontrolled descent’s suffocating panic and bursting eardrums destroyed many a diver’s presence of mind. She tried that now, but with so many layers and the thick dry suit, she couldn’t even come close to the valve knobs.

Finning furiously, she arrested her descent and began slowly rising, looking desperately for the line or shaft, seeing nothing. At thirty feet her chest was on fire. Her hands and face tingled, and her peripheral vision started to close down. She was near the point where spasms would start convulsing her diaphragm, a result of the autonomic system’s involuntary attempt to breathe. She might resist that for a few seconds, but then the carbon dioxide buildup would trip a switch in her brain. Her mouth would open wide, and a silent, final gasp would fill her lungs with water.

Her peripheral vision narrowed. As though looking through the wrong end of a telescope, she saw what seemed to be blobs of liquid, molten silver trapped against the ice ceiling. It was exhaled air from Emily’s and her own dives. She knew that it had only about 5 percent less oxygen than fresh air.

She aimed for the largest silver bubble she could see, one about the size of a watermelon, in a cavity in the ice ceiling. She spat her regulator out and pressed her lips into the silvery mass. The hole in the ceiling was almost a foot deep, allowing her to push her face into the air pocket. She opened her mouth and breathed.

She held the air deep in her lungs for several seconds to let her system extract the maximum amount of oxygen. She put her face back in the water, exhaled bubbles away from the pocket to keep the air in it fresh, then took in more air. She did this until she felt her body’s air hunger fade, and then she kept doing it longer to stabilize her blood oxygen level.

She filled her lungs and pushed down, away from the ceiling, rotating 360 degrees, trying to light up the white guideline with her headlamp beam. She saw nothing but cloudy water. She exhaled, breathed again from the air pocket, and this time added the illumination from handheld lights to her headlamp beam. The extra lumens did it. She spotted the line twenty feet to her left.

She exhaled deeply to exhaust as much residual air as possible, then filled her lungs as fully as she could. She swam into the shaft mouth and started ascending. She had not been down long enough to worry about decompression sickness, and the water’s pressure, which had worked against her descending, now helped, especially without the weight belt. Pockets of gas in her dry suit expanded, speeding her rise, as did the air in her lungs, forcing more oxygen into her system.

She looked up at the bright circle of the shaft’s mouth and hoped that it would be enough.