Pressure Drop by Peter Abrahams Page A

Nottage came closer, close enough for Matthias to distinguish his curly white Afro over the deck railing; the black face remained unseen. “Sea on fire, boss,” Nottage said in a low voice. “Sea on fire.”
    â€œEverything’s okay, Nottage. You can sleep on the deck if you like.”
    â€œDon’ wan’ no deck,” Nottage said. He weaved away up the path, and out of sight.
    It was still dark when Matthias walked down the Bluff to the beach. The dogs had gone to sleep, or maybe they couldn’t hear him because of the wind. The compressor shed stood in a grove of palm trees at the side of the dirt track leading to the dock. Matthias went inside and switched on the light. The room remained dark. He remembered Hew’s light going out. The power was off again.
    He knelt in front of the compressor and felt the intake filter. It was clean, if that mattered. This was a new compressor—the old one, Exhibit A, still hadn’t been returned—and the case was closed.
    Matthias walked out on the dock. The beams creaked under his weight. A shadow moved at the far end. A big shadow.
    â€œG’day, Matt,” said Brock.
    â€œIt’s night,” Matthias said, sitting beside him.
    Brock had a six-pack. They drank it and watched the dawn come up. First it lit the clouds, then the sea, then Brock’s long sun-tinted hair and the gold hoop in his ear.
    â€œLet’s go to the drop,” Matthias said.
    â€œWhat part of the drop?”
    â€œYou know.”
    â€œYou’re driving yourself crazy,” Brock said, but he followed Matthias to the slip where So What was kept, freed the lines and jumped in, landing lightly, very lightly for such a big man, as Matthias started the engines.
    The wind blew harder, disrupting the surface of the ocean with sharp-edged waves that made the bottom unreadable. Matthias didn’t need to read it. He turned north a few hundred yards offshore and cut the engines not far beyond the Angel Fingers. Brock tossed the anchor over the side. Line ran out. Brock tugged at it, nodded, let out some slack. Then they spat in their masks, donned fins and snorkels and slipped into the water.
    Matthias felt the swells raising and lowering his body; he might have been a microbe on the chest of a giant. He looked for the anchor, saw it had hooked itself in the orange forest of elkhorn coral at the edge of the wall, forty feet below. It was the same coral head that Who Cares had been anchored to when Moxie came out to see why it was overdue and found Hiram Standish, Jr., floating in the water and the Frenchman gone. Matthias took his deep breaths, stilled his body, then jackknifed down.
    In a moment he had left the surface turbulence behind. Matthias kicked with long slow strokes and kept his hands by his sides. The secret of deep diving was using as little oxygen as possible. That meant diving down in a straight line and getting the most power from the fins with the least effort. Matthias glided down past the coral head, out to the edge of the drop and looked into the deep blue of the Tongue of the Ocean, deep blue as far as he could see. He glanced at his depth gauge—45 feet—sensed Brock behind him and kept descending along the face of the wall. It unreeled upside down as he went by.
    Sea fans, yellow and pink, grew out of the rock, and at 70 feet there were lacy branches of black coral. Fish felt the currents his body made and ducked into their holes—tiny fish like purple-headed royal grammas and big ones like Nassau groupers with their thick lips and stupid stubborn eyes. At 85 feet a green Moray stretched its head out of the wall to watch him go by and then curled back out of sight.
    Now he could see the big shelf, overgrown with staghorn coral, that stuck out from the wall at 100 feet. He had seen it many times in the days following the accident, when he had put on tanks and dived the wall over and over, all the way to 300 feet, the