Oh, whatever. One more try, he thought, already swimming back toward it.

5

The dead man belted into the swivel chair back in the plane was a tall and lean distinguished-looking white-haired Caucasian male somewhere in his midsixties.

He looked polished, Gannon thought. Expensively groomed. With his white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his gray suit slacks, he could have been a doctor from a daytime TV commercial.

When Gannon looked more closely in the flashlight beam, he could see there was actually something wrong with the man’s photogenic face. There was a horribly pale bluish cast to his skin especially around his open eyes, and from his nose to his chin, there was a thin stripe of what looked like dried blood.

Behind his diving mask, Gannon squinted, perplexed.

How could his blood already be dry? he thought.

Gannon swam in a little to the right of the corpse. In two more leather swivel chairs on the left-hand side of the aircraft’s tight cabin sat two more dead men.

Like the first man, they were both white, both wearing business clothes. The one closest to him was about thirty-five or so. He had a closely cropped haircut and was stocky and rugged-faced. The other one seated farther toward the front of the plane was younger. He was bony, in his early twenties. He had longish hair and the wisp of a blond beard and was wearing white earmuff-style headphones.

Gannon passed the light from one to the other. Like the first body, they, too, had the same strangely pale bluish tone to their faces.

When Gannon finally turned to the right-hand side of the cabin beside them with the light, it took the entirety of his restraint to not rear back in another panicked bubble-spewing jolt.

In the forward galley before the cockpit was yet another dead man. He was floating upright as if standing. Unlike the others, this dead man was black and was dressed in jeans and a gray hoodie. Gannon watched as the corpse rotated around in a slow, horrid lifelike turn. There was the same blue sickly look to his features as well, and his nosebleed had been so bad, it had stained the top of his sweater black.

When Gannon pointed the light into the cockpit behind the body, he could see that there were two pilots in white-shirted airline-like uniforms still seated at the controls.

He tried to look to see their faces more closely, but the upright floating hoodie-wearing dead man in the galley was blocking the view.

And the chances of him moving the floating dead man out of the way or going any farther into the claustrophobic undersea mausoleum even another inch, Gannon thought, were exactly none at all.

Six dead. No survivors, Gannon thought with a nod. There was nothing to be done.

Time to go, he thought, flippering around in a hectic rush to finally get the hell out of there.

6

After what seemed some very long, slow minutes of following the coral ridge back up through the ten-story depth of the dark water, Gannon finally hauled himself back aboard his boat.