Sam shrugged his shoulders and kept scanning up and down the bank. There. Twenty feet to his right he saw it again, a flash of gold. They swam to it and stopped again. Here the Good-bye Zone precipice was closer still, not eight feet behind their backs. Even at this distance they could feel the surge of the current, like a vortex trying to sweep them into the deep.

Jutting from the bank at waist height was what appeared to be six or seven inches of a barrel's hoop. Though tarnished and fuzzy with barnacles, in a few places the hoop had been sandblasted by the current, exposing shiny metal.

Sam reached out and fanned the area around the hoop. The exposed portion widened to eight inches, then ten inches, before curving back and disappearing into the bank. Sam moved his paddle upward, hoping to uncover some of the barrel's staves if the wood hadn't succumbed to rot.

Sam stopped fanning. He looked to Remi and saw her eyes were wide behind her mask. Above the hoop was not rotted wood but a curved metal facade, mottled green with patina. Sam dropped to his knees and wiggled forward until his chest was nearly touching the bank, then craned his neck and waved his paddle beneath the hoop. After thirty seconds of work a cavity appeared. Gently, slowly, Sam slipped his hand into the hollow and probed the interior with splayed fingers.

He withdrew his arm and backed away from the object until he was again beside Remi. She looked at him with expectant eyes. He nodded back. There was no doubt: Their barrel wasn't a barrel but rather a ship's bell.

"WELL, THAT WAS UNEXPECTED," Remi said a few minutes later after surfacing.

"I'll say," Sam replied after removing his mouthpiece. Until now, the biggest artifact they'd ever found was a sterling silver trencher from a torpedoed World War II Liberty Ship.

She shed her fins and tossed them over the gunwale onto the afterdeck of their rental--a commuter-style twenty-five-foot Andreyale Joubert-Nivelt express cruiser complete with lacquered teak woodwork and retro subway windows--then climbed the ladder, followed by Sam. Once they'd shed the remainder of their gear and tucked it away in the Andreyale's cabin, Remi fished a pair of water bottles from the ice chest and tossed one to Sam. They sat down on the deck chairs.

"How long do you think it's been down there?" Remi asked.

"Hard to say. Doesn't take long for patina to set in. We'd have to see the thickness of the growth on the rest of it. The interior felt fairly unblemished."

"And the clapper?" Remi asked.

"Couldn't feel it."

"Looks like we've got a decision to make."

"That we do."