He shot up past the corpse and out of the opening. Sam was shouting incomprehensibly through her regulator, pointing at her dive computer. When she saw his face, she stopped. Unable to explain, he simply gestured back down the hull towards the bow and the anchor line. Tusker’s dive computer read three hours, 28 minutes of decompression. The pressure gauge said his twin tanks were half empty. He didn’t have time to calculate his air consumption rate, but knew it’d be close as to whether he’d have enough gas to last the full decompression time. He hoped Sam breathed less than him. Women typically did. Now it was a race against time, and one limited by every single inhalation.

The swim back felt easier, taking just half the time as the journey out. Tusker registered that the current must have strengthened. It acted like a tailwind, pushing them back to the bow. This helped for the swim but would make the ascent tricky. They’d have to hold fast to the anchor line so as not to be blown off the wreck and far away from the skiff above. If that happened, it would be up to Roland to recognize it and follow their bubbles on the surface in the boat.

Tusker saw the familiar stanchions of the forward-end railing and counted them off in his torch beam. The yellow anchor line would appear right about now. Yet he saw nothing.

Sam aimed her beam around, frantically searching for it. Had it come unhooked? Perhaps Roland had to reposition the skiff and re-hook the anchor on the wreck. Then, the light from Tusker’s torch caught a flash of yellow in the water column. It was the anchor line, and he sighed with relief. But when he reached for it, he realized it had no tension. It was drifting in the current. He pulled and pulled and the line coiled in his hands until finally, the loose end of it appeared splayed out in a fray of fibers. The anchor line had been cut.

Free Ascent

Somewhere off the east coast of Sri Lanka.

The same day.

A free ascent in open ocean is risky even without facing four hours of decompression time. Tusker knew this, but he also knew that they had no choice. Without an anchor line to orient themselves at the specific depths for a safe deco stop, they could drift, not only far off the wreck site, but also dangerously up or down in the water column, compromising their bodies’ precious off-gassing. They would have to watch their depth gauges carefully, and each other.