The descent took a full four minutes. They went down hand over hand, first pulling on the anchor line to break their initial buoyancy and then letting go, dropping as if pulled down by the invisible wreck below. Tusker took mental note of a light north-south current drawing him away from the taut yellow line. Decompression in a current could be difficult. He and Sam made occasional eye contact as they dropped, watching for telltale signs of mental or physical impairment and keeping an eye on tank valves and regulators for bubbles. Even a tiny leak at depth was cause for concern. They’d need every cubic foot of gas for their long decompression, or else they’d get bent or drown.

Tusker watched the numbers on his depth gauge tick off. The streams of sunlight, so friendly in the first 100 feet, gradually diminished to a flat grey at 150 feet, then to a sort of twilight below 200. As they approached 300, they switched on their handheld torches against the blackness. Tusker aimed his below. The dark water absorbed most of the 5,000 lumens. No matter how many times Tusker had done these deep dives, he never got used to the apprehension of dropping into a black void. Besides the increasing pressure on his eardrums, which he occasionally relieved by wiggling his jaw from side to side, there was no sense of going up or down since there was no reference point in the dark water.

He felt the wreck before he saw it. It was an imperceptible change in the water column — the presence of something huge nearby. Then, his beam fell on a section of hull. The unmistakable shape of a ship, so out of place in this lonely spot. The Vampire. He reached up to his inflation hose and added a burst of gas into his buoyancy wing.

At this depth, and with four heavy tanks, the wing was almost fully inflated before it arrested his descent. He came to a stop just a foot above the coral-encrusted steel. Tusker made sure to stay as shallow as possible, near the top of the wreck. Even a few feet made a big difference in the minutes of deco time they’d have to spend on the way back up.

Sam drifted down next to him. Tusker searched her face to make sure she was doing OK. She wrinkled her eyes in a smile behind her mask and winked at him. He could see her taking in the wreck. The ship was huge, stretching well beyond their torch beams, which revealed only a few yards on either side of them.