At least while they were in the tunnel, but now, out here, in this impossible cloying pocket of darkness…his delusion of safety had failed. Completely failed. He was shaking, sweating, his heart pounding. His throat felt so tight he could not even speak. There was a lethal, dire magnetism to this place that had nothing to do with nanoteslas. This was a different wavelength, something older and infinitely more powerful that he could feel pulsating in the nerve ganglia of his spine like high voltage. It was real and electric and he could not deny it.

Come on, goddammit! Don’t fold up now! You can’t fold up now!

And he couldn’t.

He knew he couldn’t.

Bell was counting on him. He counted on all of them, just as Orr did, but he counted on him just a little bit more because Murphy was second-in-command. That and the fact they’d been diving with the DSU together now for something like fifteen years. Bell counted on him. And he counted on Bell.

But, damn thing was, whatever nerve he’d had was gone now.

He was hanging there, at the edge of the tunnel’s mouth, and he had simply frozen up. Maybe it was this whole damn op and this fucking city in general, but maybe it was something more. Maybe it was what was waiting out there for them, because he had the strangest feeling that something was. Staring out through the face shield of his helmet, he was likening the darkness out there to the sort you’d find at the bottom of a grave or inside a coffin after the lid had been nailed shut on you.

He kept swallowing, but there was absolutely no spit in his mouth.

Bell was about five feet away, hovering like a buoyant shrimp, waiting. The lights from his suit cast twin beams that turned the water an amber color. They were filled with whirling sediment.

“Murph…you okay?”

He worked his mouth loose, found his voice. “Yeah…just taking it all in.”

He steeled himself, knowing he had to dispense with the jitters, lock those ancestral fears down somewhere deep where they could not harm him or threaten the mission at hand. He’d done it before. So even with his insides knotted tighter than Aunt Tilly’s corset, he pressed the footpads of the suit and went out there and right away, that electricity at his spine simply jolted him and his whole body seized up.

“Murph,” Bell said over the headset, “something bugging you?”

Murphy coughed the flaking dryness from his throat. “Just…just had the funniest feeling that coming out here was like sticking my pee-pee in a hole where it did not belong.”