Hansumbob's voice carried back from somewhere inside.
“We're in here, Jack. We've found the strongbox but can't find Quen-Li. Paulee's gonna try dropping through the next hole into the bilge.”
Just then the
Agresor
shifted.
“Goddamn it, get the hell out of there, both of you. It's going down!”
Jack felt he was coming apart at the seams. He was about to lose three good friends including the young man who had almost become a part of him. Quince motioned Matoo to untie the other launch and their own from the
Agresor
; in case it went under, it wouldn't drag the boats down. There was only silence from below.
“Sweet Jesus.” Jack jumped onto the ship and started to pull himself down the stairs, yelling, “Paul! Bob! Damn you both!” He made it down one deck below before he could see Bob trying to reach below him in rising water. “Bob!”
“Oh, Jackee, Paul's not back up the hole.” Hansum was gasping and soaking wet. Jack realized he hadn't returned his call because he had been holding his head under to reach for Paul.
“God, no, no, no.” The ship shifted again. Jack yelled for Hansum to grab his hand. Hansum tried twice and slipped, then without warning, the movement of the ship dramatically changed and Hansum was thrown on top of him, and both flew crazily back up the companionway. The ship was inverting. Suddenly Jack was choking on seawater, but he kept a firm hold on Bob, and within seconds they were washed out of the vessel and floating on the surface. The
Agresor
was gone.
Now both launches and the billyboat were drifting over a slick of flotsam from the ship. They crawled into the boats with Matoo's help. Jack, speechless, held his head in his hands. He couldn't believe itâif only he had ordered them back to get him.
If only he had never said anything. Now it wasn't just Quen-Li, he had lost Paul. “God, it's my fault.”
Hansumbob, equally shaken, sitting in the other launch a few feet away, just said, “No, Jackee, ye can't be blamin' yesself. God knows ye tried.”
By this time there was very little distance between the
Agresor
and the
Star
. The crew had managed to anchor, and the stern was swinging from two bow hooks only a couple dozen yards from where the Spaniard had sunk.
How hollow his victory was, Jack thought. He had just drowned the man he had sailed half a world to kill, but he could only think of Paul, sacrificed in a futile effort to save Quen-Li. “Damn you, Paul. Damn you for a fool,” he yelled at the surface of the water.
Quince looked sadly up to the rail of the
Star
and asked Coop, who, from his higher vantage point, could see through the surface glare better, “How far down is she? Any chance of recovering the bodies?”
“Don't know,” Coop replied solemnly. “Her stern is broke off and still standing upended on the bottom. She's shifting like she's still got some buoyancy.”
Jack stood and peered down into the green gloom, “What did you say? Buoyancy?”
“Yeah, Jack.” Coop started to repeat his description of what he could see from the rail.
“For God sakes, man. Give me a length of iron bar!”
“What?”
“Bar, Coop, and be quick about it.” Seconds later he caught the bar, lowered to him by a line from the deck of the
Star
, and leapt into the water.
“Toss me a line,” he called back to his shocked associate, “then get Yanoo and Matoo in here each with a piece of pipe quick and have them go down and bang on the hull of the Spaniard, toward the stern.”
“An air pocket!” Quince yelled to the others. “Jack's figured there must be an air pocket in the ship, or it would slide on down the reef.”
Jack gulped in air and made for the hull. Reaching it, he started banging furiously, then listened until his bursting lungs forced him to the surface. On the way up he saw the Belaurans heading down to follow his orders. As long as he held onto the rope, his head out of the water, there was no sound. Curiously, if he dipped his ears even an inch below the surface, he could clearly hear the Belaurans banging on the hull.
He took longer, deeper breaths this time and started to descend. Again he could hear the Belaurans banging as soon as immersed. Suddenly his heart began racing. It wasn't the Belaurans. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the natives' legs were kicking at the surface. The banging came from the wreck. He swam to where he thought the sound came from and began pounding like a madman. The returning sound seemed to emanate from all around him . . . he couldn't tell exactly where it was coming from but, by God, somebody was alive in there . . . it had to be Paul or Quen-Li. God, let it be them.
When Jack hit the surface and started gasping his discovery, the Brotherhood went into a frenzy of activity, talking, yelling, offering ideas.
“Let's make another bell,” yelled Red Dog.
“I'm gonna dive for 'em,” Klett said. “Let me in there, me or Jack could make it down that far; gimme an axe.”
“Yeah, get some for the Belaurans, too,” yelled Coop.
In an even voice, Quince ordered silence. “Okay, lads, I know you're excited but let's put our brains together, not our mouths.”
Jack, still gasping in the water with the line in his hand, added, “We can't just chop our way through the hull. If we hit the air pocket, we'll let the air out and kill them sure. We have to approach by diving under. It looks to be about ten fathom to get beneath her.”
“I kin make a bell again, real quick,” Coop said.
“Not quick enough,” Quince said.
“How about something already made,” offered Mentor. “What's the biggest barrel you got, Coop?”
“That brandy cask, I guess.” He pointed to a barrel that was roughly six feet in height and four and a half feet in diameter.
“That'll do!” yelled Jack, as his shipmates helped him onto the deck. “We've got to act fast. Get Yanoo to run a line down to the lip of the upside-down bulwark and secure it, then invert that cask and weight it until she slides down the rope and stops at the tie-off spot. I can make it one way to the barrel as long as there is air in it when I get there.”
“I'll find some thin line to put in the barrel, to use as a guide,” Klett chimed in.
“Right.”
Within minutes Jack had regained some composure by lying on his back and taking deep, easy lungfuls of air while his shipmates frantically went about their preparations. He tried to relax and heard the cheer when Yanoo reached the surface and said the line was now secure to the ship. The crew got the weighted barrel in place, then there was sudden silence after they let it go. It wouldn't quite sink, and Jack heard Quince prevail in his opinion that they should just get the Belaurans and Klett to force it down for the first several feet if they could. When the air in the barrel began to compress from the weight of the seawater, it would start falling on its own. Quince was right; a cheer soon followed.
“Okay, Jack, we're ready. Think ya can do it, lad?” Quince's worry was reflected in the faces of the others around him.
“Got to,” was all Jack could think to say. “Hell, through no choice of our own, we're probably the most knowledgeable people at diving in the whole damn Caribbean. We may as well use it to save our brothers.”
He couldn't believe he was diving again. Things had happened so quickly in the last two days that they seemed unreal. Years of waiting and now, suddenly, he felt he had been given no time to
prepare. Time meant nothing; he had no idea when he had slept last. He felt that his soul, following the calm of his long trip home, was now riding out the swells of a great storm, first dipping into the depths of loss and despair, then soaring with triumph and revenge, then back again. Now Paul, the person he felt closest to in the world, and Quen-Li, a part of his strange new family, might still be alive in the wooden tomb below.
Jack accepted the ballast rock Klett handed him to aid his descent. He took several deep breaths and dived beneath the surface, knowing from his experience in the Pacific not to rush. With one hand on the line, he slid down, letting the weight of the ballast stone do the work. He pushed any desire to breathe to the back of his mind, acting as if there was no limit to how long he could exist on a single lungful of air. It all came back to him at onceâthat squeezing sensation in the air pockets in his head, especially his ears.
He must keep clearing his ears before they hurt too badly. He grabbed his nose and blew. Successâa popping noise followed by relief. Then again, and now easier, again. In what seemed less than half a minute he was at the inverted wine cask.
Amazingly, he felt hardly out of breath. In one smooth move he grabbed the rim of the cask and pulled himself inside. As expected, it was less than half full of water, and he greedily sucked at the pocket of life-giving ether from the world above. Klett had tied the end of the coil of thin guide line to an eyebolt, and all Jack needed to do was grab the coil and head out on his search.
The upended ship was not as dark as Jack supposed it would be. Light poured in from rents in the hull, but he suffered from distorted vision. It was the question of the same damn blurriness they had never been able to solve in the South Seas. Still, he felt strong, and as he had noted before, breaths taken from this depth seemed to last longer. Now out of the barrel, he played the line behind him and swam up toward where the air pocket must be. At one point he banged into an inert form and recoiled when he realized it was the dead body of one of the Spanish sailors.
After ascending what felt like the right distance, Jack found himself in what seemed a hopeless tangle of wreckage. He felt an urge to release some of the precious air in his lungsâit had been dribbling out of his mouth and nose on the way upâand he wondered if that was because he had headed to shallower water after gulping “thick air,” as Paul called it, from the barrel. He secured the line to a timber and retraced his way to the makeshift bell. There would be no luxury this time for making mistakes or experimenting; he had to find the survivors fast.
Refilling his lungs, Jack reviewed what he had seen at the highest point in the hull. The dark area to the right was probably the best bet for an air pocket. If there was a cavity that held air, it would have no holes letting in light. He would try that.
As he made ready to depart again, Yanoo and Matoo arrived at the barrel. At considerable risk to themselves, they had already rigged two small containers for air and struggled down with them to freshen the pocket in Jack's bell. Jack was overcome with a depth of gratitude that surprised him. Jack O'Reilly might be living a dangerous and obsessed life, but he wasn't doing it without friends. He felt strengthened, encouraged. It mattered that there were men up there who would stand by him.
By following the line, then grabbing the remaining coils and pushing for the darkness above him, he found his way quickly back to the point he had reached on the first dive. Suddenly his head burst into air, striking a hard obstacle. He gasped, cursed, and took some deep breaths.
As if in a dream, a familiar voice came out of the dark. “Bonjour, mon ami. Kindly breathe a bit more softly, it is becoming close in here.”
“Quen-Li! Damn you for a Chinese madman, it's you!” Jack was ecstatic.
“Yes, my excitable young friend. It's meâyou expected Confucius?”
“Christ, I can't get to you. Timbers are blocking my way. Are you all right?”
“He's a bit the worse for wear, Jack, as am I,” Paul answered.
“Paul!” Jack couldn't believe his ears. Even in the pressurized air, Paul's voice was easily recognizable. “You son of a bitch, I thought you drowned.” The resentment in his own voice surprised Jack. Along with a flood of relief came the realization of how angry he had been at his friend.
“Glad to see you, too,” croaked Paul, sounding a bit like a man who had already drowned.
Quen-Li spoke again, his voice sounding strained even if his composure was unchanged, “We have a complicated situation here, Jack.”
“Complicated! Blazing balls of the pope. We're under a goddamn ship and . . . you'd be a memory if I didn't hear you tapping, andâ”
“Jack, calm down and listen.”
“Okay, my friend, speak. You're right, time's not on our side.”
“My right arm is chained at the wrist and the chain extends back under the water level to where it is secured to an iron ring.”
Jack exhaled loudly but said nothing.
“My left arm is brokenâaâuhâa measure taken by the count to ensure I could be brought back to Spain without further attrition to the count's men. . . . A story for another time.”
“Broke yourâdamn it all! If I could get my claws into that slimy bastard's throatâ”
“Jack!”
“All right, go ahead.”
“Another complication . . . with one arm broken and the other chained below me, it should have occurred to you that it would have been hard for me to return your taps to the hull.”