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Doyle thumbed up and they started to rise. He identified the boat’s hull in the water and surfaced twenty feet away. The captain had turned off the prop and bobbed in the water.
Elise and Hunter sat on the boat, wrapped in towels. Heather sat, eyes closed to the sun.
Greg surfaced next to him, spat out his regulator. “Did you see what I found?” He held it out to Doyle.
“Next time, you listen to me,” Doyle said. “The last thing we need is you getting lost or stuck. The lava tubes are fun, but they can be dangerous too.”
Scott’s eyes narrowed, but Doyle didn’t care how much money he might have lost for Hope House. The guy was reckless.
Reckless divers were dead divers.
He waited until Greg climbed out of the water, then took off his fins, threw them onboard, and climbed up the ladder. “That’s a trinket from one of the souvenir shops.” He gestured to the figurine. Grabbed a towel to wipe his face.
Greg made a sound and pitched the fake treasure back into the sea.
“Wait—aw.” More litter in the ocean.
“We’re going back to pick up the others,” said Ignatius.
Doyle studied the rock formation as they motored away. Yes, a small boat, even a fishing trawler, might anchor at the mouth of the tunnel.
But the plan depended on where the tunnel led. He’d have to do some scouting.
Captain Ignatius consulted his GPS screen as he positioned them over the wreck not far away and turned off the engine.
Doyle checked his watch. The others had the same air as he did, but deeper down, the divers would expend more air.
They should be up by now.
He searched the water. Spotted Declan holding an orange deployed sausage. And with him, Ethan Pine.
But Austen, Stein, and Tia were nowhere to be seen.
Doyle pulled off his BCD, a fist in his gut as Declan swam over. He had already changed tanks by the time his boss pulled up to the ladder.
“Where are they?” Doyle said, affixing his vest back on.
“Tia got caught in a web of old fishing net coming out of a porthole. They’re cutting her out.”
Doyle put in his regulator, held on to his mask, and jumped into the water.
* * *
And this was how she would die. Caught in a fishing net sixty feet below the surface of the water, the light rays unable to pierce the darkness, slowly suffocating.
Don’t panic. She read the look in Stein’s eyes as he sawed away at the fishing net that she’d swum right into.
Because she’d panicked.
Stupid!
She’d spotted a shark snoozing on the sand beneath one of the barnacle-encrusted cannons of theTrident,fallen into a coral corridor. The shark stirred and she bolted.Sort ofbolted, because she was swimming. But itfeltlike bolting as she turned and headed for the first ray of light through a snarl of coral.
She’d scraped her tank on the coral, and maybe that’s why she hadn’t seen the fishing net caught on the spires and jagged edges of the opening.Like swimming through a spiderweb... The tiny holes clipped onto her BCD, her tank valve, then the buckles of her fins, and even snagged on her wet suit.
Her thrashing hadn’t helped.
She’d probably set herself up for disaster when she’d first thought she’d be creative and search amidst the deeper coral and lava formations for wreckage that might have floated from the main site with the current. The debris field spread over a hundred-yard area along the bottom, but some of the wreckage had fallen into the crannies of coral on the way to the ocean floor. Ethan had pointed out remains too—not just a cannon, but an anchor and timbers and even the rotted mainsail.