“Long enough so you don’t crack your head coming up.”
Not a comforting answer.
“I’d guess twenty seconds,” Minnow said.
“There’s an air pocket halfway through,” Woody added, “if you freak out or the surge pushes you out.”
Minnow did a slow three-sixty to check the surroundings. Big slabs of smooth rock and boulders lined the bottom, with small colonies of yellow lobe coral popping up here and there. Visibility was good and she could see eighty feet out. Woody kicked toward the wall of lava they would be diving under, and she and Nalu followed. They all took turns dipping down and looking for the light.
“Just follow the light, and stay down on the bottom. You good to go?” Woody asked.
“Yes,” Minnow said.
Nalu did not answer.
“Brah, you okay?” Woody asked.
Nalu nodded, but Minnow knew something was off. “You don’t have to do this if you’re uncomfortable, you know. It’s a long breath hold.”
He remained stone-faced. “Nah, I got it.”
“You sure?”
Woody looked at Nalu. “Stay right on my heels, I’ll keep an eye on you. We go first. Then you, next big surge,” he said to Minnow.
A moment later, the two men were gone, disappearing into the dark tunnel. She hovered, watching the sunlit bubbles coming off the rocks. She counted to twenty slowly. It seemed like nothing when you were relaxed and floating but entirely different when you were holding your breath under cold, hard rock. Suddenly a big dark torpedo came at her from the cave opening, so fast there was nothing to do. It went right past her, only inches away. But it wasn’t a shark, it was a seal. She could see the whiskers as it passed. The men must have spooked it.
Back at the entrance, Minnow watched for an incoming swell, small as they were, took a deep breath and dove under. The light appeared distant and small, but she kept her eye on it, swam just over the sand and came up on the count of twenty-one into a shallow, sandy-bottomed cavern with a small rocky shelf on one end, covered in smooth pink seaweed.
“Hooey. Always a rush, isn’t it?” Woody said, voice echoing off the walls. “Did you see our friend?”
“Hard to miss, and the last thing I was expecting was a seal.”
“Bet you was happy it wasn’t something else, though. Buggah was big.”
“Very.”
Minnow glanced around, taking in the bubble of lava they were inside of, realizing that the hole in the top was from a chunk of lava collapsing down into the cave. The whole roof was about six inches thick. Unsettling, to say the least.
“Any sign of our missing swimmer?” she asked.
Nalu was at the far end, near the pink shelf. “Hey, guys, look at this,” he called.
Minnow and Woody swam over and he held up half a swim fin.“Do we know if our man Hank was wearing fins when he went missing?” he asked.
“Good question. Joe never mentioned it and I just assumed he wasn’t. Since he was training.”
They brought the fin back to where the sunlight poured in. The bottom of it was missing and the cut was jagged.
“Hard to tell for sure, but I would say this is a bite,” Minnow said.
Woody inspected it closely. “Damn straight that’s a bite. What else would it be?”
He had a good point. There were no barnacles or hardening or signs of disintegration, so the fin had not been in the ocean for too long. And a fin might slip off a person in the shore break or maybe slip off a boat or something, but there would be no real reason for a fin to get hacked.
“I don’t know, but it’s a body surfing fin,” Nalu said.
“Are there any more people unaccounted for recently?” Minnow asked.
