Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,122

air through his regulator, and a little after six o’clock, right hand pinning his mouthpiece and mask to his face, took the long step into the Atlantic Ocean. When he heard the boat engine start, he oriented himself toward the west, and turned the Genesis on.

* * *

On his last dive, he’d seen one more can of heroin that he didn’t think he had time to get to, but as he ascended, he used the Genesis to pull him over to the brilliant white LEDs, and then went as straight up as he could, pausing for decompression stops, and then all the way to the surface, where he checked the GPS watch and noted the reading.

On this trip, he steered directly west from the drop point, surfaced, made his way to the noted GPS coordinates. Boat lights were approaching from the north, appeared to be a bit off to the west of him, but coming fast, and he vented air from his wing and dropped straight down.

He got lucky. Visibility had improved overnight, and when he activated the light wand at a hundred and thirty feet, he immediately saw LEDs of two cans to the south, and another to the north. He had the southern cans bagged in the first minute on the bottom and could still see the glow from the can to the north. That gave him a solid compass heading for the line of cans, and he picked up the northern can a minute later and could see another beyond that.

He was moving quickly, and slightly lower, now down to a hundred and seventy feet, getting narced, six cans bagged, when his leg was snagged and he was yanked off-line. He would have lost the Genesis if it hadn’t been tethered to his backplate. He struggled against the opposing pulls on his leg and from the Genesis, managed to drag in the machine and turn it off.

He swiveled, gathered himself, let his heartbeat slow, and then used his most powerful flashlight to look at his right leg and fin. He was tangled in a coil of half-inch-wide plastic strap, the kind used to secure boxes for shipping. It rose in a snarl off the bottom, a tangle the size of a government desk. He pulled at it, and found it securely fastened to a lump of something on the bottom. There were a half dozen bright-colored fishing lures hung up in it and tangles of line. What the lump was, he couldn’t tell—maybe concrete, or something metal. Junk, covered with mud.

He’d trained for this. The first rule: stop and think. He did that, then tried to slowly unwrap the tangle from his leg; that didn’t work so well, as the Genesis had pulled the tangling plastic strips into a knot. Moving in slow motion, he took his wire cutter from its pocket on the backplate harness and started cutting.

The stuff was tough, but his wire cutter clipped through it easily enough. He made a half dozen cuts, dropping the scrap pieces to the bottom, and then kicked free. His leg stung, and he took a moment to look at it. He’d cut himself and was bleeding, a trickle of blood from his calf, black in the LED light of his flashlight. He pulled the leg of his wet suit around to one side, so an undamaged section of the suit would cover the cut in his leg; the bleeding seemed to stop.

To the north, he could see the LED lights of another can, and he got himself away from the tangle of plastic straps, turned on the Genesis, and went after it. He fitted six cans in the first cargo bag and had five in the second, when his computer told him that his time was up. His bottom time had been shorter because of nitrogen build-up from the day before, but he’d done good.

He shot squirts of air into the lift bags, and he and the bags rose slowly until the computer told him he was at the first decompression stop. He waited for a full minute, then began the diagonal run back to the pickup, struggling to keep the bags rising as slowly as possible. They wanted to circle each other, and with slightly different amounts of air in each bag, and slightly different weights, they wanted to rise at different rates. Each bag had a release valve, but releasing exactly the right amount of air from each was tricky—as they rose, the air expanded