A jarring clang brought her head up. Tattinger had rapped on the Kamloops‘ hull with the butt of a diving knife. He was hovering near a porthole crooking an admonitory finger. Though she couldn’t see his face behind the rubber and plastic, she imagined his scowl.

Once again, she trained the light in his path and he swam on. The beam raked along the hull just ahead of him, across the portholes: blind eyes weeping rust. Between them, near where Tattinger had rapped the hull, something gleamed. Anna kicked once, floated nearer the hull. The rust around one of the portholes had been scraped away. Bright silver scratches as if someone had been hacking at the port with a sharp object. She felt around the edges of the porthole cover. There was just enough purchase to work a fingertip under it.

Jim, losing the light, had returned and hung at her elbow. Pushing Anna’s hands aside, he opened the blade of the red-handled knife he still held, and levered it under the metal. The porthole swung in easily. Whoever had pried it open before had broken the latch.

Monstrous and fish-eyed behind their masks, Jim and Anna exchanged a look. The hole was little more than eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. Too small for anybody in tanks to get through. Anna peered inside: the captain’s quarters. An out-of-reach heaven for thieves and vandals, but someone had made the effort.

Jim tapped his watch. Seven minutes. Anna tapped his camera, then the porthole. He hesitated, hating to use the film, she knew. Jim was as miserly with government property as he was with his own. He stockpiled everything from toilet paper to engine oil, kept lists of how many of each. Numbers with which to feed his insatiable database programs.

Anna tapped the porthole again and he handed her his diving knife. She held it and the light while he clicked two careful shots.

Four minutes. With efficient haste, they started to swim back. At depth, exertion was a thing to be avoided lest one treble the effects of nitrogen narcosis.

The stern, with its tangle of pipe, rolled by beneath. Anna swept the light in an arc through the water. The snaking yellow of the line did not reflect back and panic pricked again at the back of her throat. Then, at the far right, she saw the faint yellow gleam. Jim saw it in the same instant and they swam.

One minute. Now that the time to ascend was near, Anna felt a crushing impatience. The knowledge that another sixty-four minutes must be spent incarcerated in gear, enveloped in the cold embrace of the lake, seemed almost insupportable. The U.S. Navy Standards would have insisted only on fifty minutes’ ascent time but Ralph had chosen to play it safe.

Anxious thoughts began circling in Anna’s mind like vultures smelling a corpse. If Ralph and Lucas had kicked up a silt storm and gotten lost, she doubted she would have the courage to go and look for them. Cold ached in the bones of her head.

As she counted her curses she became aware of a nonstop trickle of air through her regulator. It had frozen open. It had happened once before early in the season when she and Ralph dove the docks clearing out rubbish. Once open, it wouldn’t take long before the escaping air would fill her mouth with icy slush, numbing her lips with cold until she could no longer feel them to keep them on the mouthpiece.

“Come on, goddammit!” she demanded of Lucas.

Poking her light through the viscous twilight, she strained her eyes in the direction of the engine room. Twenty seconds bottom time left. The darker block that marked the doorway wavered, changed shape, then broke into two separate shadows. Ralph and Lucas swam toward the line. With them was Denny Castle. Eight days dead, he looked the most natural of the three. Jaunty in the uniform, relaxed, he drifted through the water between them, his eyes open and unblinking. The cap was still on his head, the shine still on the black leather boots.

Lucas took Denny. With watch and depth gauge, Ralph swam slowly to thirty feet below the surface. He stopped there, hung in the water. Ten fingers flashed. They waited.

The currents caused by their flippers made Denny’s dead hands move as if he, too, grew restless with the waiting. Anna couldn’t take her eyes off him. A childish fear that if she looked away he would reach out and touch her kept scuttling through her mind, trailing a nightmare quality.

Martini’s Law must have been coined before the advent of Timothy Leary, she thought. For her the experience was proving reminiscent of an acid trip threatening to go sour rather than a good honest drunk.

She glanced at her watch. Another thirty seconds to wait. She looked back at Castle’s body.

The dead eyes had not changed expression but the jaw was dropping. Denny was opening his mouth as if to speak. A froth of reddish-colored bubbles spewed forth and rose toward the lake’s surface.

Anna’s mind spun. She reached out instinctively for the person next to her as she’d done in countless dark movie theaters when blobs, mummies, and killer lepuses made their moves. Then she remembered: Ralph had warned her. In deep-water body recoveries they removed the mask before the corpse reached the surface to let the water wash away fluids brought forth by the changing pressure.

The phenomenon lasted only a few seconds. Ralph kicked once and floated up the line. Glad to be moving, Anna followed, leaving Jim, Lucas, and the mute but expressive Denny Castle to follow as they might.

Twenty minutes at twenty feet. As the silver of the promised sky grew closer so did Anna’s impatience to see it, to breathe deep of air filled with rain, gusts and eddies, boat exhaust. To breathe again of the varying moods of life that cannot be canned.

The last wait, thirty-four minutes only ten feet below the surface, was provoking enough to amuse and Anna forgot the cold pooling inside her suit, stabbing at the fillings in her teeth, the vacant stare of Denny’s corpse.

Finally they reached the surface. Even Scotty’s cowboy countenance was a welcome sight. Jo Castle, wan and frightened, reaffirmed if only by way of pain that life went on. Thirty fathoms down, it had seemed a distant and fragile concept.

Jim Tattinger flippered over to the Lorelei’s water-level deck and was hauled over the stern like a landed fish by Jo and Officer Stanton. Anna was next, lifted clear of the water’s grasp. Ralph pulled himself up as far as the low deck and planted his butt on the two-by-four slats. Gently he took Denny’s body from Lucas and held it cradled in his arms while the Chief Ranger floundered on board.

Anna, sitting on deck, a flippered foot held clumsily between two gloved hands, was watching Jo as her wiry brown arms gathered her husband into a one-way embrace. The expression on Jo Castle’s face was familiar. Once Anna had seen it on Christina. She was watching her daughter sleep when Ally had been racked by a fever. A look that was equal parts tenderness and grief.

Either Jo was a complete psychotic, or she had not killed Denny. Remembering the strength in Jo’s arms as she had pulled her from the lake, Anna fervently hoped it was the latter.

Awkwardly, Jo bent and kissed her husband. Faint bruises ringed Denny’s mouth in blue. The captain’s cap, absurd now in the drizzling light of day, fell from his hair. Brass buttons winked as the collar of the uniform fell open. There was no shirt beneath the double-breasted jacket and the flesh of Denny’s shoulder was exposed. A livid bruise cut down between neck and shoulder. The discolored flesh was jarring on skin so white, and Anna turned away as if she would protect Denny’s modesty.