The Danger ( PDFDrive.com )

Minor Hockey Association finals. A hard body check, a freak accident. And a
boy named Drew Christiansen was confined to a wheelchair for life. So much
had happened — Captain Vanover’s death, Star’s injury. Yet this was still the
recollection that haunted Kaz, that kept him up at night. The sport he loved, that
he was good at, had turned him into a weapon.
That was what had brought him to Poseidon in the first place. Diving in the
tropics — what could be farther from hockey in Canada? That was why he was
here, under seven atmospheres of pressure, hooked up to a floating laboratory of
equipment, breathing a chemist’s concoction of exotic gases.
Two hundred fifty feet. At last, there it was. The sea floor. It was slanted
sharply downward. This was the place where the Hidden Shoals dropped off to
deeper ocean.
At 270 feet, the divers made themselves neutrally buoyant for the search.
Kaz looked around helplessly. Topside, it had seemed like a simple task: Go
down to the correct coordinates and recover the body. But now he took in the
featureless expanse of the slope. Their headlamps carved ghostly ovals out of the
darkness of the sandy incline.
The divers synchronized watches. Kaz knew they had only twenty-five
minutes of bottom time. Even that would require nearly two hours of
decompression before they could safely return to the surface from this depth. If
they stayed down any longer, they would not have enough breathing gas to
complete the decomp. Then they would face the same choice Star had:
suffocation or the bends.
So there was a ticking clock behind the hiss of his regulator. Kaz played his
light over the vast sameness of the bottom. He kept a nervous eye on English,
who was criss-covering the gradient with methodical track lines. To get lost
down here — Kaz couldn’t even bring himself to think about it. But one thing
was for certain: It would be a death sentence.
Less thinking and more searching. You’ve only got fifteen minutes left!
He could feel the cold now, too. A wet suit was, after all, wet. The
penetrating chill of the ocean made him shiver. Due to the slope of the sea floor,
he had to adjust buoyancy to parallel it. He watched the numbers on his depth
gauge: 280 feet, 290. Would they reach three hundred? It seemed likely. This