He gave the thumbs-up sign to Sam and they began their ascent. He was already shivering from the cold. God knows where we’ll come to the surface, he thought. All he knew was that with this north-south current, they’d come up well past Batticaloa and miles offshore. But before that, they had hours of desperate hanging in the water column, being pulled south like a wisp of seaweed.

Despite the impulse to hurry, Sam and Tusker slowly, deliberately ascended, no faster than 30 feet per minute, until they reached their first stop, prescribed by Tusker’s Sherwood computer. The deco plan he’d scrawled on his wrist slate before the dive was obsolete given their added bottom time swimming the length of the wreck and searching for the anchor line. Now their safety was left to the dive computer’s algorithms, which would adjust on the fly as they ascended. And that would only get them to the surface.

They hung at 120 feet for eight minutes. At least there was some light filtering down from the surface now. Tusker looked across at Sam. He could see the worry crease her face, even behind the mask and hood. She wasn’t even supposed to be here. He wanted to reassure her that it would be OK, he’d somehow get them out of this, even though he knew it was a lie. He reached out and gripped both of her shoulders and gave them a squeeze. Her expression didn’t change.

He thought of Sebastian, back at the Deep Blue. It was 3:30. He’d be back from diving the Hermes with the Russians and wonder where they were. Tusker wished he’d told someone else where they were going. At least then a search party could be mounted when they didn’t return. It was basic safety on any expedition to tell a few people where you were going, but Tusker had been impulsive, reckless.

And what of Roland? Would he have dared to go back to the Deep Blue, or was he gone for good? Tusker was convinced now that he was somehow connected to all of this—the Depth Charge, the Vampire. Who knows, maybe he was even the one who’d blown up the Taprobane. Tusker vowed to find him. What he’d do when he did he wasn’t sure. But first, they had to somehow get ashore. And at the moment, that possibility seemed remote.