“Hello!” Gannon called into the fantastic floating ruin. “Hello! Is anyone in there?”

Gannon closed his eyes, listening intently. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. There was nothing. The only sound was the low chugging of his diesels.

He retrieved his binoculars and pointed them to the south. Far off beyond the wreck at ten miles or more, he could just make out the dark coast of one of Little Abaco’s tiny uninhabited outer islands.

“What in the hell?” he said angrily as he scanned a three-sixty.

Why were there no boats in the water? he thought. Or choppers in the sky? Hadn’t the pilot called in a mayday? Hadn’t the airport in Little Abaco seen it disappear off the radar?

He went back up into the flying bridge and did another slower, tighter sweep with the binoculars. About another football field north of the tail section, he spotted a thick clump of objects floating in the water. It was quickly getting darker now, so it was hard to know what they were. Just five or ten black lumps bunched together, rising and falling in the calm swells.

“Please don’t be what I think you are,” he said to himself as he levered at the throttle and turned the wheel.

He’d chugged the Rambler in close enough to see that the items were only a cluster of floating pillows and seat cushions when he spotted something below in the clear water beneath them.

It was something large and pale.

4

Gannon came down the ladder and threw off his shirt and grabbed a diving mask from his equipment locker. The diving door was port side rear, and he swung it open and extended down the telescoping diving ladder with a loud clack and plunged feetfirst into the warm water.

In the darkening water below the hull of his boat there were some undersea limestone ridges at a depth of about fifty feet. In the murk, about fifty feet farther down their crusted slope, was the entire front of the jet with its huge wings and most of its forward cabin resting on a coral plateau.

He searched the plane and the coral all around it through the mask until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. Then he scrambled back up and stripped off the mask and kicked off his wet sneakers as he raced across the deck for his tanks.

It was three minutes later when Gannon plunged backward into the water. He clicked on all his lights and thumbed at the buoyancy compensator as he spun himself around and down into the dim water.

He was geared up with everything he could think of. His double 120 tanks, his flippers and wrist dive computer, his brand-new BCD vest. The light was almost gone now, so he’d also grabbed his powerful hand-strap Sola flashlight along with his GoPro camera diving mask because the camera had another light.

Descending along the crusted ridgeline toward the plane, he swung the powerful flashlight back and forth at the wreck, hoping to see air bubbles. But all he saw were bits of fiberglass and a couple of gray angelfish that came out of the coral, attracted to the light.