He finally came flat and level with the plane two long minutes later. The first object he made out inside the torn tube of its opening was the back of a large beige luxury leather seat. To the right of it across the narrow aisle was an empty leather couch of the same creamy beige color. A few feet in front of the couch beneath a porthole window was a low wood desk with a large black TV monitor on it that blocked his view farther in.

There was a brief moan in the plane’s metal as Gannon floated there, considering his options. He checked his depth gauge with his flashlight. It said he and the plane were at one hundred fifteen feet.

He looked back at the plane through his mask. The ripped opening of the front half of the plane was strung with even more tatters of wire and shredded metal than the floating half above. But there was ample room for him to swim in as long as he stayed low.

He trimmed some more air out of his buoyancy compensator to get his horizontal balance even better, then went in slowly, careful of his hoses. He arrived at the beige chair and grabbed on to its armrest to pull himself forward.

He immediately face-planted down into the carpet as the chair unexpectedly swiveled on him. He lost his balance, and his light and his mask went askew. He had just cleared the mask and was turning, pushing up off his knees, when he bumped into something with his chest, and he swung the light around.

And came nose to nose with the revolting open-eyed corpse sitting in the chair’s seat.

Bubbles spewed, and he almost lost a flipper as he reared back in full-blown blind panic and terror. His mask went askew again and completely fogged into a gray mess as he clonked his head off the plane’s low ceiling.

He turned and twisted and lunged away out of the plane as fast as his kicking flippers and fear-crazed windmilling arms could take him. He didn’t stop swimming until his hand finally found his neon dive rope he’d dropped twenty feet to the wreck’s south.

He cleared his mask again and floated there beside the faintly glowing rope. The hiss and gurgle of the regulator loud in his ears, his heart hammering.

Of course the people are dead, you idiot, Gannon thought angrily as he glanced back at the wrecked plane. What the hell else would they be?

He needed to stop this silliness, he thought as he looked past the plane into the immensity of the rapidly darkening ocean in front of him.

Diving alone in the open Atlantic was suicidal by itself without going into some coffin-sized wreck filled with who knew what. He was almost certain to get himself killed in another minute if he kept this nonsense up.

The rasp of his breath calmed a little as he fussed with his mask strap. He looked at the time on his dive computer. Then he glanced back at the wrecked plane again.