Chapter One
A/N – Re-edited for grammar and continuity.
A well known rule of thumb in the diving industry is that where there are fish, there's something to see. Tropical divers take that as is, but hardened New Jersey Wreck Divers know the real truth. Such people know that where there are fish, there is usually something more; something that attracts them to the site and that is what they want to see.
About half of the time, a 'fish' site will turn out to be absolutely nothing, maybe a pile of rocks that provide good hiding places. Half of the rest of the time, it's a rubbish dumping ground and the remainder of the time it's a crappy little rock or small dinghy or some other, totally irrelevant setting. And about once in a blue moon, it's a shipwreck, or something really cool. It's that small number of times that I live for. Two such people are a brother and sister pair, who live in Brielle, NJ and run a small dive operation that caters for the extreme divers who like to dive deep into the ocean to explore known wrecks and caves. But the pair of them, however, were also part of a small elite diving team who explore uncharted waters, investigate the unknown and push the boundaries of the deep.
This story is about the sister. Her name, by the way, is Stephanie Michelle Geary. She has lived in Brielle, NJ for about five years. It's a beautiful town by the sea, a hub for some of the more specialized water-related fields. Her public safety diving team is based there and is about the only team within about a five hundred mile radius. Possibly why they're the best in the area.
So, what's a Public Safety Diver when they're at home anyway? Well basically they're highly trained (SCUBA) divers who perform various tasks in the water. So, for example, the police force might use them to locate bodies in the river; or to pull clues and evidence off crime scenes that have been submerged. I met a team from Mexico who worked in the sewers; cleaning and clearing them of any debris. Thankfully Steph's team hadn't been called in for that; yet. PS divers are often called in to help with the clean up after hurricanes and tsunamis, or any sort of flooding. They often fulfill the role of search and rescue when it involves being underwater.
In summary; if it's underwater… Public Safety divers probably do it.
Today was one of those perfect days when a long shot works out. Stephanie and her brother, Jamie, had sweet-talked the GPS numbers from a local fisherman to a site; where they were aware that the nets had gotten caught on something just a week ago and this morning the siblings and another pair of divers had ventured out to the site to check it out.
Stephanie splashed first; she was the most experienced deep diver on their team at the moment; Jamie had recently found a passion for cave diving and had therefore backed away from the deep ocean diving, and both Lisa and Trey had vaguely normal jobs which meant they weren't able to dive as frequently. The first diver's job was to 'tie in' the boat to whatever was at the bottom, or, if there was nothing, to send a message back to the boat while she decompressed so that nobody else wasted time gearing up.
She hit the water heavily; two large tanks on her back and four slung across her shoulders making her quite negatively buoyant. With a quick salute to the team, she slowly let out all the air in her lungs and dropped below the surface.
The first few minutes are always the best; where you can revisit the calm and serenity of the ocean after the hustle and panic of gearing up and entering the water.
Meter by meter she dropped deeper in to the dark, murky waters. Even with a mixed gas with less nitrogen, she began to hear the drums of narcosis pound in the back of her head, but she methodically pressed on, checking gauges, mentally running through her safety tools, her eyes constantly scanning for the prize.
50m – Nothing in sight and the sunlight had long since disappeared from behind her.
she hadn't hit the bottom, their depth sounder had said there was something in the range of 60-65m, and she'd given herself a depth limit of 70m in order to ensure she had plenty of air to complete the dive safely and that she didn't suffer from oxygen toxicity or nitrogen narcosis. She kept going.
55m – still nothing; unless you counted the flash of a shark she thought she'd spotted in the distance. Probably it was nothing to worry about.
60m – a dark shape was apparent, but at that depth she knew that the mind had a tendency to play tricks on you, making shapes appear so you think you've seen the bottom, when all you've actually seen is water.
At 65m she could make out the shape of a yacht; a nice yacht. Definitely luxury. She dropped onto the deck to have a look. It had clearly been underwater for a couple of years; between seven and ten she was guessing by the erosion. She swam around it, looking for some identifying feature. Nothing. She glanced at her watch and shrugged she still had a few minutes, so she opened the door to the wheelhouse and finned her way inside. She was careful to kick gently so as not to disturb any silt or anything else. She looked around and marveled at how surreal it was to look out at the ocean from inside a shipwreck, at the bottom.
My dive computer beeped at me to alert me it was almost time to return to the surface, so she turned around to leave. A flash of light caught her attention from one corner as she did so, however, and she turned back around, shining the high beam of her torch in the direction. Nothing appeared until she moved the light back and forth a bit, and then she saw it. A silver glimmer.
Honestly, after at least half a decade underwater, she was surprised that anything would still be shining. Normally rust would have solved that problem. My natural curiosity forced me to investigate. She reached out, her gloved hands strong, grasping it and pulling it towards me. It came straight to me, light and obedient. She held it under her torch for a quick moment; it was a necklace of some description. My dive computer beeping furiously, she shoved it into her pocket and set off. She would wash it off when she was back on the surface and then we'd know what it was. she turned and fled the wheelhouse, finning slowly up the anchor line to about 35m; where she stopped for about two minutes, just relaxing and breathing slowly. There was a lot going on when diving and the two minutes at the deep-stop allowed her to not only add an element of safety to her dive, but also to just reorganize and reorient herself before she began the decompression.
After twenty minutes at 70m, she needed to do about forty minutes of decompression, which she did with plastic laminated reading materials and – for her last stop, at 5m – a waterproofed iPod. As each of the three other divers from their boat passed her, she waved to them and handed them her slate showing them the type of wreck and its depth and some other pertinent details. A luxury yacht wasn't particularly interesting to us; but it was better than some of the rubbish dumps that we'd dived on in the past and we'd probably put this site down to explore at a later date. Maybe they'd find something worth salvaging, as the first divers we legally had the initial salvage rights; occasionally this was very profitable.
An hour or so after she had stepped off the boat and into the water, she passed the last of her tanks up and hauled herself out of the water. With practiced motions she doffed her gear strapped her tanks out of the way and so they wouldn't be blown around in the wind, and gave her equipment a quick check before folding it down and packing it away. As she put away her catch bag – we occasionally caught crayfish, and she'd been hoping for dinner – a silver glint caught her eye once again and she remembered the necklace and grasped it and put it in a bucket of fresh water, giving it a bit of a soak.
After she had dried her hair, changed out of her drysuit and into some clean, warm clothes, she went back to the bucket to have a look at her find. Some grime and silt had fallen off it since she'd dropped it in there and what was apparently a single pendant, had become two. She gently rubbed it with her fingers and immediately the rest of the grime peeled away in a single motion.
The 'pendant' was actually a pair of dog tags; military issue by the look of them. They were stainless steel, so they hadn't rusted much despite having been underwater for apparent five or more years. She was easily able to read the name on the tags.
Ricardo C. Manoso