Finally the Sherwood beeped an “All Clear” and Tusker and Ian surfaced. The skiff was 30 feet away. Roland was sunning himself, talking on a cell phone to someone. At Tusker’s shout, Roland quickly put the phone down and pulled the outboard to life. “Sorry, fellas, didn’t see you come up!”

They handed their weight belts and dive gear up to Roland and heaved themselves over the gunwales into the boat. Roland swung the skiff around in a dramatic arc and gunned it. The hull banged across the swells towards the lagoon. “Find anything down there?” he shouted.

Tusker didn’t feel like sharing details. “Well, it was no accident, I can tell that much.” Roland just grinned, his yellow teeth clamped around a cigarette.

Back at the Deep Blue, the other skiff was pulled up on the shore. Sebastian and the Russians were back. Tusker jumped off the bow and turned to help Ian with the dive gear.

“I’m not feeling great, mate,” Ian said weakly. He crouched next to the boat then suddenly lurched forward and fell to the sand. He vomited violently.

“Ian!” Tusker yelled. He knew the signs: the nitrogen Ian had inhaled under pressure had started to expand in his blood vessels and his joints. His crippled posture and extreme pain were what gave decompression sickness its nickname: “the bends.”

Gitche Gumee

Four miles south of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Later that night.

It was late when the aptly named Tata Nano taxi buzzed off, leaving Tusker in a cloud of oily two-stroke exhaust back at the Deep Blue. Ian was in the hyperbaric chamber at the Trincomalee naval base up the coast and would stay there for the next few days. For a while there, Tusker had worried he wasn’t going to make it. Roland had helped him get a taxi from the resort for the drive up the A15. Ian was curled in a spasmodic husk of pain in the back seat the whole way, sucking on the emergency oxygen kit Tusker had found in Sebastian’s workshop. Then it ran dry. The doctor had said he’d need at least four days in the chamber while his body was brought back down to a simulated depth and then decompressed slowly. If he was lucky, Ian might regain use of his legs one day.

Tusker was supposed to be getting on a plane back to the U.S. soon. His visiting fellowship in Sri Lanka was set to end and a new semester of teaching back at Michigan Tech would be starting in a couple months. He could imagine the mail that had piled up back at the post office in Copper Harbor. Then there was the fieldwork in Jamaica next winter to start preparing for. But that all seemed so distant now. He was only thinking one day at a time, for the first time in years.