CABRILLO COULDN’T BELIEVE the cold. It had crept up on him so insidiously that it was in his bones before he realized it. He had remained perfectly still, not generating any body heat—that was the culprit. In order to stretch out his air supply, he had to sit as quietly as possible, and yet that allowed in a killer just as deadly as asphyxia.

His hands shook so badly that it took three attempts to flip on his dive light. Its glow made the loneliness somehow more tolerable. Humans were, after all, a social animal. And to die alone was one of our species’ innate fears. He turned his gaze onto his air readings. The ten minutes he’d given himself were up. He was breathing gas that was so amorphous that it couldn’t be read by the tank’s monitors.

He was feeling it too. Each breath seemed thinner, less substantive. No matter how deeply he tried to fill his lungs, he just couldn’t get enough air. Again, panic gnawed at the edges of his mind, but he beat it back and tried to keep his breathing steady. Max just needed him to hold out for another couple of minutes.

The light dropped from his icy fingers, and he was so cold he’d gone beyond shivering. He kept trying to breathe air that simply wasn’t there, and no amount of mental trickery could negate that fact. He’d rolled the dice and come up short. Juan never pictured it like this. He’d always assumed he’d die in a gunfight. Statistically speaking, he should have been shot down years ago. But of all the bullet scars his body carried, not one was in a critical area. It was funny. To survive all that and die while on a dive.

He wanted to laugh at the irony, but there wasn’t enough air, so he settled for an enigmatic grin and slowly lost his grip on consciousness.

—

“COME ON, DAMNIT!” Max barked. “We should see it by now.”

He stood over the tech’s shoulder, and both men watched the video feed from Little Geek. So far, they saw nothing but the barren plain of the seafloor. They were in the right position, but the wreck seemed to be gone.

“Are you sure you’re on-station?”

“Yes, Max. I don’t get it.”

The images were grainy, ill lit, and wavering but unmistakable in that there seemed to be no sign of the old mine tender. Both men stared until their eyes watered, trying to make out details that just weren’t there.

“There, there!” Max shouted. “Turn Little Geek, twenty degrees starboard.”

The tech worked the joystick while, four hundred fifty feet below them, Little Geek turned nimbly.