Ghost River Jon Coon (free reads TXT) 📖

but nothing was broken. He reached to his harness for the valve on his bailout tank only to discover there was no tank. He was wearing the borrowed harness with the borrowed helmet, and they’d forgotten the spare tank. It was still in the truck.

No com, and only the air trapped in the helmet by its non-return valve: one or two more breaths at most. And he was wearing extra weight, too much weight to get off the bottom. It was time to do something drastic.

He remembered the lift bags on the Stokes stretcher and the air tanks to inflate the bags. He crawled forward and began frantically sweeping his arms across the bottom. He took a shallow breath and tried to conserve the last precious molecules of life.

On the barge, Jim saw the truck’s hood surface. As the truck rose, he saw the severed umbilical caught in the chassis. “What—”

The crane lifted the truck and swung it up onto the barge. Billy, McFarland’s lead diver, also saw the severed umbilical and came to Jim on the run. “Has he got a bailout bottle?”

“It’s my fault,” Jim said. “We were using your harness, and I forgot to clip on the tank.”

“Help me dress. I’ll go after him. Maybe we can get him up in time.”

They both ran to the dive shed and didn’t see the lift bag pop up in the same spot the truck had surfaced. The bag began bobbing: four bobs, and rest, four bobs and rest. It was the Navy line pull signal for a distressed diver: three pulls—everything is cool, pick me up. Four pulls—nothing is cool, get me out of here!

The crane operator saw it, leaned on his horn, then shouted down to the deck, “Buoy on the surface. Unhook that truck, and let’s send him down the crane line and an air tank.”

Jim came running with a tank and regulator. They hung it on the pelican hook, and the crane operator dropped the hook down beside Gabe’s buoy.

On bottom, Gabe had found the two tanks on the stretcher used to fill the lift bags. He cut the second stage off the regulator hose of the first and then stuffed the cut-end inside the neck seal into his borrowed helmet. He turned on the regulator just long enough to fill the helmet with cold, fresh air and then unhooked a lift bag and used the second tank to give it enough air to send it to the surface. Then he grabbed the crane line and stood on the big block, which held the hook. Jim saw the lift bag bobbing at the surface and told the crane operator, “He’s ready, come up slow.”

The operator gave a thumbs-up and began lifting Gabe off the bottom. Jim checked his watch and looked at the amount of time Gabe had been down. “Billy, get the chamber ready, he’s way over his bottom time.”

When Gabe landed on deck, Jim and Billy grabbed him, opened the helmet’s cam lock, and removed the thirty-five-pound helmet. Jim pulled the buckles on the weight harness, which dropped to the deck, and they hurried Gabe into the chamber. Billy went in with him and as soon as the doors were closed and dogged down, gave Gabe an oxygen mask, and said, “Breathe, slow and deep.”

Jim had out the NOAA dive-ops manual looking at the Navy surface decompression tables for omitted decompression. He found what he needed and pressurized the chamber to twenty feet. “Get comfortable in there, this is going to take a little while,” he said into the intercom. “Gabe, get out of your dry suit so Billy can check you for signs of skin bends, and let me know if anything starts feeling weird.”

Although he was exhausted and desperately wanted to sleep, Gabe knew he had to stay awake during the treatment. He’d spent many hours doing chamber decompression on commercial offshore projects, so this was nothing new. He was over his allowable bottom time by twenty-four minutes and would have spent forty-four minutes decompressing in the water at twenty feet. But because he would be on oxygen in the chamber with less than a five-minute surface interval while getting down to treatment depth, his time was reduced to eighteen minutes. Will this river never run out of ghosts? Now there’s Wilson Corbitt, and who knows how many more? Enough!

1130

Alethea’s Home, New Orleans

Darkly overcast with clearing unlikely

“Mére, tell me about her, the woman he’s with,” Cas said. They were sitting on the porch drinking afternoon tea. Cas had been in a “mood” since Gabe went back to Florida.

“Her husband was Gabe’s best—”

“That’s not what I mean. What does she look like?”

“Oh, she’s pretty. Red hair, fair, trim, nice figure.”

“How old?”

“Late thirties I suppose. She has a seventeen-year-old son.”

“Gabe loves her?”

“Perhaps, but if he does, he’s not admitting it to himself or to her. Not yet.”

“And she loves him?”

“I think so, but she knows it’s too soon for anything with Gabe, and even if she wanted, he won’t have it. Why?”

“I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I need to go to Florida.”

“Cas, don’t. You know Gabe is damaged goods. He broke your heart once, and he’s still’s hauling around the same baggage. If you get close, it will just happen again. Do yourself a big favor, and leave that poor man alone.”

1830 The River Camp

It was somberly quiet that night at the river camp. And there was no sign of either Paul or Zack. Emily worried about her brother. Mickey worried about Zack. Carol worried about everything. The dogs picked up the mood and lay empathetically morose by the cold fireplace.

An hour after dark Zack’s truck came down the dirt drive, and Zack got out alone. “I’m sorry,” were the first words out of his mouth. “Paul told me he wanted me to take him to the DMV to get his license and that you said it was okay. He got the