“Not at the moment,” Richard reported, “but we’re about to start down this rock wall.”

Richard and Michael swam over the edge and down the face of the cliff.

“The rock is as smooth as glass,” Richard commented. Michael nodded. He’d run his hand along it briefly.

“You’re coming up on your last one hundred feet of hose,” Louis said. He quickly took the last loops down from their storage hooks, already cursing under his breath. Soon he’d be coiling it all up again. Divers rarely wandered this far from the diving bell, and it was just his luck to be assigned as the bell diver when they did.

Richard stopped his descent. He grabbed Michael to stop him as well. Richard pointed to his wrist thermometer. Michael looked at his and did a double take.

“The water temperature just changed,” Richard reported. “It just went up almost one hundred degrees. Shut off our hot water!”

“Red diver, are you shitting me?” Louis asked.

“Michael’s reads the same,” Richard said. “It’s like we’ve climbed into a hot tub.”

Richard had been shining his light down as they descended, searching for the base of the scarp. Now he shined it around. At the very periphery of illumination he could just make out a wall opposite the one they were descending.

“Hey! Apparently we are in some kind of huge crevice,” he said. “I can just barely see the other side. It must be about fifty feet wide.”

Michael tapped Richard on the shoulder and pointed off to their left. “There’s an end to it as well,” he said.

“Michael’s right,” Richard said when he’d looked. Then he swung around and pointed the light in the opposite direction. “I guess it’s like a box canyon ’cause I can’t see a fourth side, at least not from where we are.”

“Hey,” Michael said. “We’re sinking!”

Richard looked at the wall behind him. It was true they were sinking-more quickly than he would have thought possible. There was little sensation of resistance against the water.

Richard and Michael gave a few powerful kicks upward. To their astonishment there was little effect. They were still sinking. With a mixture of confusion and alarm, both responded by reflex and inflated their buoyancy vests. When that seemed to have little effect, they released their weight belts. Still significantly negatively buoyant, they jettisoned their rebars. Finally with some continued kicking their descent slowed and stopped.

Richard pointed upward and the two started swimming. Despite the heavy work of breathing they were swimming hard. The strange sinking episode had unnerved them, and to make matters worse, they were beginning to feel the heat through their suits.

The two were even with the top of the cliff when a sudden sustained vibration swept up from the depths like a shock wave. For a few seconds both men were mildly disoriented. They had trouble breathing and swimming at the same time. The shaking was similar to what they had experienced in the diving bell on the descent, only much worse. They realized this was an underwater earthquake, and both of them intuitively sensed they were at or near the epicenter.

For Louis, the quake was even more violent. At the moment of impact he’d been frantically hauling in the tethers, which had gone suddenly slack. He’d been forced to let go of the lines to keep himself from being impaled on one of the many wall-mounted protrusions.

Richard recovered enough to take a breath although doing so was painful. The pressure wave had bruised his chest. As an experienced diver, his first response was to check on his buddy, and he frantically searched by spinning around. For a heart-stopping second he could not find Michael. Then he looked down. Michael appeared to be clawing his way up through the water. Richard reached down to lend a hand. When he did, he realized that they were both sinking-and sinking fast.

With no other way to decrease his weight Richard joined Michael in an attempt to swim upward. In desperation they even discarded their lights to free their hands. But they made no progress. If anything, they seemed to be going down. Then they plummeted, caroming off the rock wall as they were inexorably sucked into the abyss.

Inside the bell Louis had recovered his balance enough to grab the tethers, which were still slack. Quickly he pulled in a loop, but before he could get it over the rack, there was a sudden tug in the opposite direction. At first he tried to hold the lines from going out, but it was impossible. Had he held on, they would have pulled him from the bell.

Louis cursed as he frantically got out of the way of the hoses, which were now being yanked out of the bell at a furious rate. It was as if Richard and Michael were lures that had been taken by a gigantic fish.

“ Bell diver, are you all right?” Larry’s voice asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right!” Louis yelled. “But something crazy is going on! The hoses are going out at a hundred miles an hour!”

“We can see that on the monitor,” Larry said urgently. “Can’t you stop it?”

“How?” Louis pleaded through tears. He glanced at the remaining hose. There wasn’t much left. He froze. He had no idea what to expect. The last loops whipped out of the bell and for a brief moment the lines went taut. Then to Louis’s utter horror they were torn from their housings and disappeared down into the trunk and out into the unforgiving sea.

“Oh, my god!” Louis cried as he struggled to turn off the gas supply manifold.

“What’s happening down there?” Larry demanded.

“I don’t know,” Louis cried. Then to add to his terror the vibration and rumbling started again. Frantically he reached out to grab whatever he could as the diving bell shook as though it were a salt shaker in the hand of a giant. He screamed, and as if in answer to a prayer, the shaking lessened to a mere trembling. At the same time he became aware of a sizzling sound and a red glow that penetrated through the view ports.

Letting go of the death grip he’d had on the high-pressure piping, Louis twisted to glance out one of the view ports. What he saw made him freeze anew. Over the nearby ridge, which the divers had so recently scaled, came a surreal cascade of glowing, red hot lava. The leading edge sputtered and popped and smoked as it turned the icy water into steam.

When Louis recovered enough to find his voice, he threw his head back to look up into the camcorder lens.

“Get me out of here!” he shrieked. “I’m in the middle of a goddamn erupting volcano!”

The van’s interior had become quiet. A sense of shock hung over the room. The only noise came from the deck-mounted motors driving the winches that were hauling up the diving bell and the life-support lines. Moments before, utter pandemonium had prevailed as it became apparent they’d lost two divers in some kind of pyroclastic catastrophe. The only consolation was that the third diver was okay, and he was on his way up.

Mark took a long, nervous drag on his Marlboro. Oblivious to the new rules, he’d reached for his cigarettes by reflex at the first rumblings of trouble, and now that the extent of the tragedy had rapidly unfolded, he was chain-smoking out of pure anxiety. Not only had he managed to lose a hundred-million-dollar submersible with two trained operators plus two experienced saturation divers; he’d also lost the president of Benthic Marine. If only he hadn’t encouraged Perry Bergman to make the dive. For that he was solely responsible.

“What the hell are we going to do?” Larry asked in stunned bewilderment. Even he was smoking although he was supposed to have given it up six months before. As the diving supervisor he, too, felt responsible for the disastrous outcome.

Mark sighed heavily. He felt weak. He’d never had a single loss of life on his watch in his entire career, and that included hairy diving operations in some dicey locations like in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm. Now he’d lost five people. It was too much to think about.