His mind raced back to one of the early lessons he'd been taught by his drill instructor, a former UDT man named Rackel who'd seemingly been born in a frog suit. The last-ditch technique for surfacing with no obtainable oxygen was a free ascent. You shed your weights and let your own positive buoyancy take you up, breathing out through your mouth to release air from the lungs, while spread-eagling your body to increase friction between yourself and the water--and slow your upward motion. Air compressed as you dove, expanded as you rose, and there was always some contained in your lungs, however starved for it they might be. Ascend any faster than sixty feet a minute without exhaling, and you risked having them literally inflate until they ruptured.

The impossible hurdle for Ricci was that he was ninety feet down, and had already been emptying his lungs for several seconds. Seconds that felt like an infinity, and were about all he could tolerate. Regardless of how fast he allowed himself to rise, he would have gone past the limit of his ability to exhale long before reaching the surface. Nor could he make his decompression stop ... and that might lead to the bends, a condition with the potential to cause severe brain and nerve damage or even death.

Never mind that for now. One small step at a time, remember? Get to the surface alive, and then you can worry about what might happen afterward.

He needed an air source. One that could sustain him for at least part of the ascent.

And maybe he had one.

The bladders of his BC were almost entirely deflated, but the physical stresses upon them were identical to those upon his lungs. They too would have retained some compressed oxygen that would expand as he got closer to the surface and the atmospheric pressure on them decreased. And just as the air in his lungs would seek its outlet via the passages leading to his nose, throat, and mouth, so would the air in his BC try to escape through its artificial equivalent--the oral-inflator hose. A thirty- or forty-second supply would bring him up to a level of sixty feet, from which he might be able to exhale the rest of the distance. A long shot, but it was either that or call out the bugler and honor guard. Or dishonor guard, considering how his police career had finished out.

Abruptly turning faceup in the water, Ricci rolled his body to the left, away from the hose, to bring it up off his shoulder, puffing what little breath he had left into its mouthpiece to clear it of water. The safest way to rise would be on his back with one hand raised, so he could see and deflect himself away from any potential obstacles--and also so the hose would be above his head, allowing the water pressure to bear down upon it, and promote the free flow of air from it.