He crossed the rocky, sandy dirt to the rear of the truck and dropped the tailgate. In the bed was another vehicle, a golf cart–like utility quad ATV 4x4 known as a Gator. It, too, had a kind of truck bed that was filled now with diving tanks and coils of lights and ropes.

Gannon dropped the ramp and backed the Gator down. He winced at the tremendous roar of its four-stroke engine as he fired it on.

Not exactly stealth mode, was it? he thought. But there was no helping it.

He went to the back of it. Down between the tanks was a bulging faded-green canvas sea bag and he zipped it open.

Sealed up watertight in thick plastic vacuum-sealed garment bags were the money and the diamonds and his GoPro camera.

He hadn’t planned on adding the GoPro to the rest of his salvaged contraband until he’d wisely decided to take a look at it back at the house and realized he’d actually filmed the whole dive into the plane.

It was some pretty creepy footage. Not to mention incriminating.

He certainly hadn’t meant to memorialize the event, but he must have accidentally hit the camera’s record button when he turned on its light while he was in the water.

He zipped the canvas bag back up again. As he stood there in the dark it occurred to him that he could still cease and desist from what he was doing here. That even now there was still time.

Then the moment passed, and he found himself hopping in behind the Gator’s wheel and flicking the lights on.

12

The narrow foot lane he was looking for was another two hundred feet down the pitch-black drive.

It was off to the left atop a thickly overgrown slope, and thistles and sharp pine brush and branches scraped like claws through the Gator’s open door as he throttled up to it.

About a football field from the tree line where he’d come in, the path began to slope steeply downward as the pine forest trees began to thin. The trees gave way to a shrubby glade, and he hit the brakes a moment later as the path suddenly ended.

Beyond in the headlights of the ATV was a large depression in the earth about the size and shape of an ice hockey rink. It was rimmed with steep, almost sheer ten-foot-high pale rock walls, and at the bottom of it was a large pond-like body of water.

The large quarry-like opening in the ground was known as a blue hole. All over the Bahamas, blue holes were cave-like water-filled sinkholes that had been formed by eons of rain eroding through the soft Bahamian limestone.

There were several that were famous diving tourist spots but not this one. The only reason Gannon knew about this one out here in the boonies was because he had dived it three years before with a geology professor from Australia who had hired him to watch his back while he did research.