"Can't help but worry the bell's tumbled over the edge," Remi said. "I can see it in my mind's eye."

"Me too, but I'd rather risk that than have them come back while we're in the middle of raising it. Let's give it another twenty minutes. Worst case, we can probably still get to it."

"True, but at a hundred fifty feet, things start getting dicey. Getting down there wouldn't be so hard. Finding it might be." As massive as the bell was, after bouncing down a hundred-fifty-foot slope it could end up almost anywhere, like a dropped child's marble that's lost in the dining room but ends up under the refrigerator in the kitchen. "And once we find it, getting it up to the surface is a different can of worms altogether. Better dive gear, compressor, lift bags, winch . . ."

Sam was nodding. There would be no chance of hiding that level of activity from curious or prying eyes. Simply renting the equipment in Stone Town--even anonymously--would set the rumor mill in motion. By day's end there would be onlookers both on the shoreline and in boats offshore--including, perhaps, the Yulin gunboat and her mysterious passenger.

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that," he said.

THEY MOVED THE ANDREYALE to within thirty feet of the bell's location. Sam went over the side and wedged the anchor behind a rock outcropping, and then, back aboard, they uncoiled the hundred feet of solid-braided three-quarter-inch anchor rope they'd purchased earlier in Stone Town. They looped the rope over the port and starboard rear gunwale cleats, then secured the loop in the center with a screw-link D ring. The remainder of the coil they tossed over the stern. Two minutes later they were in their snorkel gear and finning along the surface, dragging the rope behind them.

To their mutual surprise, they found the bell where they'd left it, perched on the edge of the precipice, but they immediately found the situation was more precarious than they'd anticipated. The sand beneath the bell's mouth was eroding before their eyes, wisps of sand and chunks of rock being ripped away by the current.

Remi fed the end of the rope through the D ring on her dive belt, then handed it to Sam, who did the same, then clamped the rope's screw-link D ring between his teeth.

They finned to the surface, grabbed a half dozen lungfuls of air, then dove again.

Sam signaled to Remi: Pictures. If the worst came to pass and they lost the bell, pictures would at least give them a chance at identification. As Remi started shooting, Sam finned forward until he could see over the edge. The slope was not quite vertical but rather sixty or sixty-five degrees. Not that it mattered. As Remi had earlier guessed, the bell's weight surpassed that of the Speaker's by twenty or thirty pounds. If the bell decided to go over the edge, the slope's angle would slow its descent only slightly.