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

fresh, an improvement beyond the air she’d been breathing. She held onto the mask and prayed. As she fought to maintain consciousness an iridescent light began to glow beside her. She felt warmth. As she stared into the light his face became recognizable.

“Dad?”

Gabe knew raising the boom would increase the lifting capacity. He slacked the crane line and gently pulled the hydraulic lever until the boom began to rise. He stopped at forty-five degrees and returned to the cable drum levers. At a forty-five-degree boom angle, a one-hundred-ton crane should lift fifty tons. Even fully flooded this can’t be over ten or twelve tons. So why isn’t it coming up? It must be mud suction. Either that or it’s hung on something.

“Hang on. This could get interesting,” he said to Carol. Gabe pulled the lever and took a strain on the line, again rolling the barge to its side. He released and then quickly reengaged using the roll of the barge to jerk the cable. It was a valiant, violent attempt that didn’t work. However, in the river fifty-feet below, his effort broke the seal on the outer recompression chamber hatch flooding the chamber nearly to the top.

“Tell them to clear the deck,” Gabe told Carol. “Get them off the barge, I’m going to try that again.”

Carol did as asked, but then came back to join him. “They’re on the bank,” she reported.

“I meant you too.”

“Fat chance.”

“Okay, hang on, here we go.”

He took a strain on the line again, this time rolling the barge until the water was coming over the port side. Unsecured equipment rolled across the deck splashing into the river. He waited. The chamber didn’t budge. Thinking that constant pressure might release the mud suction, he left tension on the cable and locked the spool.

“Let’s see if there’s dive gear in that shed,” he said, getting up from his seat. They climbed down from the crane and up to the dive shed. Most of the gear was gone, but one wetsuit and a tank and regulator remained. He put the regulator on the tank and checked the air. “Half full. That will have to be enough. You took Emily diving? Right?”

“Ten feet in Cozumel. Warm as a bath, clear as glass.”

“But she used a regulator?”

“Yes, for maybe ten minutes.”

“Better than—”

The barge shook violently. The crane’s boom snapped back, rising to its full arc and then folded back, and crashed over the stern of the barge. The cable snapped across the deck like a bullwhip. Gabe pulled Carol down hard and covered her as the cable swung overhead, shredding the roof of the aluminum dive shack.

“Maybe that wasn’t a good idea,” he said helping her up.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Let’s go see.” He led her out onto the deck where they found the frayed end of the crane cable imbedded in a portable toilet. Gabe examined the severed cable. “There’s no way to bring the chamber up now. I’m going after her.”

CHAPTER 42

Gabe’s mind raced as Carol helped him into the gear. The wet suit was too big, the rotting fins too small, and the regulator not serviced since Jimmy Driftwood sang about the battle of New Orleans in 1959.

“Gabe, what are you doing?” Bob asked. “You’re hurt, and you can’t dive with that junk. It’s suicide. Wait for the team to get here and do this right.”

“She may not have time. I have to go now.”

“Please wait—”

“I got them into this mess. I have to get her out.”

Carol returned with an armload of rope and a heavy sweatshirt. “This’s all I could find. Will you be okay?”

“I’ll need a cheater pipe for the hatch dogs and a down line,” he told her. She delegated, and soon both appeared. An acetylene cutting rig on a handy dolly would be sacrificed as the anchor for the down line. Gabe coiled a hundred-foot extension cord over the bottles to use as a tether and search line. He would dive from a McFarland skiff tied off to the barge. Carol was first in the boat. As the boat swung away from the barge out into the current, she took his hands and prayed. Then she kissed Gabe and handed him a decades-old, hard black rubber, round scuba mask, discarded by the dive crew.

Gabe spit in the mask and rinsed it in river water, “Not that I’ll be able to see a thing down there.” It was a hollow laugh.

Sweatshirt on over the ragged wetsuit, rotten mask in place, regulator untested, rinsed and leaking, he did a back roll out of the skiff and was gone. The entry shock took his breath as cold water flooded the tattered suit. He gasped for air but forced himself to focus on the line, pulling his way down through the current. Dear Lord, it’s now or never. Please help me save our girl.

Gabe came to the torch bottles and rested for a second as he uncoiled the extension cord and let the current carry him back. He was so cold his hands were going numb and his legs were cramping. He remembered watching a training film about Navy Seals in which they survived long submersions in ice water by tensing their abdominal muscles and generating massive amounts of body heat. He flexed until it hurt but felt better.

The current quickly took him to the end of the line, and he’d not made contact with the recompression chamber. Just once, You could make it just a little easier, just once, he said looking up.

Keeping a tight grip on the extension cord he crawled to his left and began an arc toward the river channel. The cold felt like a jackhammer smashing into his forehead.

Gabe bumped into the chamber and grabbed the skid frame. He felt the two oxygen bottles, which supplied the masks inside, passed over them and followed the skid-frame to its end. It was jammed under the guardrail of the fallen bridge span. The crane could never have lifted it free.

Gabe pulled himself