Ghost River, Jon Coon [ebooks online reader TXT] 📗

And after years as an oilfield diver and then underwater criminal investigator, Gabe understood insanity more than most. He focused and pulled himself down the line.

Trooper Charlie Evans, Gabe’s partner, had gone missing yesterday. He had been searching for a teenage girl reported to have jumped off or been thrown from the Chattahoochee River bridge. Her parents had begged—no, demanded—the team to find out what had happened to their daughter Mickey. Charlie should have waited. The team’s SOPs, standard operating procedures, specifically stated he should not have gone into the water without the rest of the dive team. But the grief-stricken parents didn’t want him to wait. Gabe could only assume Charlie had asked himself the same question Gave often asks, what he would do if the missing girl were one of his own kids? No question. Charlie had called Captain Brady, got permission to dive, and unpacked his dive gear.

Charlie made the dive alone, in scuba, with no safety lines or umbilical, in the hope of finding the answer: was the girl really there, or had something else happened to her? No answers. And now Charlie was lost along with the girl.

February was the absolute worst time to dive the river. Snowmelt from the Blue Ridge Mountains in northeast Georgia dropped the water temperature into the forties. Days of hard rains in Atlanta raised the water level ten feet, and the current ripped. Trash and trees roared downstream, ready to crush or snag anything they touched. Only for your best friend would you risk this kind of dive. Gabe had been Charlie’s instructor and mentor, best man at his wedding, godfather to both kids. It was like losing a younger brother. But Gabe had learned from and respected Charlie as well. Always a loner, Gabe admired Charlie for his outgoing nature and willingness to grab life by the horns. Thoroughly committed to family and faith, Charlie was always Marine-Corps positive: Go for it and kick butt.

Except this time. Too much time had passed, and there was only one possible outcome. Find Charlie’s body. Give Carol and the kids closure. Help them through the pain.

Almost on bottom, Gabe brought his arm around the buoy line and held his wrist computer up against the dive mask faceplate. The white luminescent display showed the depth of sixty-two feet. Even in his dry suit and fleece underwear, he was so cold he felt numb. His fins found bottom, and he dropped to his knees. The current pushed him downstream and slammed him into a twisted mass of steel beams, rebar, and concrete. He winced, grunted, and struggled to move, but he was pinned.

He caught his breath, and shouted into the face mask com, “Jim, the current’s got me. Pick up the slack and hold it so I can pull myself out.”

On the surface Jim Phillips, his dive tender for the past five years, replied, “Roger that. Picking up slack. Tell me when to stop.”

Gabe felt the umbilical go taut and used it to pull himself forward. He crawled upstream into the shelter of a mountain of bridge debris, grabbed on, and caught his breath. “That’s good; I’m clear. Keep it tight.”

“Roger that. All stop. You okay?” Jim asked.

Before Gabe could answer, he heard, through the full-face mask com, the drone of the air compressor stop, leaving a deathly silence.

“Compressor’s down, switch to reserve while I check it,” Jim said.

“Switching to reserve,” Gabe said. He opened the valve of the reserve tank and took a deep breath. “I’m good, but no lunch breaks, man. This tank is only good for ten minutes, and I’m freezing down here.” Gabe decided to use those precious minutes to learn as much as he could about the site. He attached the line from a small cave-diving reel to the buoy line. Then he flattened himself to the bottom, to keep a low profile in the current, and moved in an arc against the taut hose package, working to his right until he’d gone as far as he could. He began to explore and visualize his surroundings. There were beams, with webs and flanges, and cross braces held together with large rivets.

He followed a beam edge until he felt two small-diameter wires, which led to a two-inch diameter tube with a “V” pressed upward on the bottom side, resting in torch-cut notches across the widest part of the beam. Gabe recognized the package immediately. He’d set hundreds on salvage dives. He ran his fingers gently over it again, confirming what he was afraid he’d found. What is this doing here?

It was an electric blasting cap and a shaped charge made from an extrusion of copper and filled with an explosive called RDX. It could blast through inches of steel like a hot knife through butter. NASA used shaped charges to separate the stages of the huge rockets that lifted astronauts into space. The technology was adapted for underwater salvage to cut huge bridges and twenty-story oil platforms into sections small enough for cranes to lift. When intended for use underwater the explosives would be sealed in pressure-tight aluminum housings. But this one wasn’t.

It was intended for land use only, and the network of trunk lines and branches should have all fired and cut the bridge into pieces before any of it hit the water. He checked the gauge on the reserve tank. Half-full, five minutes. What was Jim doing with that compressor?

Gabe stretched forward and found a spider web of wire and several more shaped charges. Could Charlie somehow have set some of them off? But how? Setting off the electric blasting caps required electric current. In theory it would be impossible to detonate them without it. But then what happened to Charlie?

The compressor was still deathly silent. He checked his tank pressure again. Time to go.

“Jim, forget the compressor. Pull me up. I’m almost out of air, and we’ve got live explosives.”

Parked on the approach to the