Mark logs the coordinates into the GPS and we head off. It’s another perfect day, deep azure above and below as far as the eye can see.
Last night I Googled news stories about the storm. There’s no mention of any missing yachts, or missing people. Nothing but holidaymakers’ Instagram photos of storm clouds and wind-battered trees.
As the waves fly by on the way there I think of the ghost ship the night of the storm. It was anchored there the whole time, wasn’t it? Could that have been them? Did they leave during the storm? Why would they set sail in the middle of a storm? People don’t do things like that. Yachts have names, their movements are logged; I’m sure we’d have heard by now if a ship was missing. Wouldn’t we? But there is nothing online. No mention of a missing ship.
Who are we kidding? The bag didn’t come off that little holiday yacht. The circle of paper in the water, the diamonds, the vacuum-packed money, the phone, the gun? I’m pretty sure that whoever owns this bag isn’t in the habit of logging their movements. Whoever they are, I don’t think they’ll have left a convenient trail for us to find.
I have the feeling of being too near to something I don’t want to be near to. To something dangerous. I can’t quite see what it is yet but I feel it; it feels close. I feel the trapdoors in my mind creaking under the strain of what lies underneath. But then, of course, it could just be free money and everyone loves free money. Someone might have made a mistake, and if it doesn’t hurt anyone…then we could keep it. Free money for us. And it’s not like we don’t need it.
It only takes us fifty minutes to reach the spot today—something to do with tidal stream and drift, Mark says; I’m not really listening. When we arrive there’s nothing left of the paper circle. Nothing to say anything was ever here. Nothing but water for miles. If Mark hadn’t written down the coordinates on Saturday, we’d never have found this place again.
Ever since Mark suggested the idea of diving to look for a wreck, I’ve had a dreadful feeling lurking just below my thoughts. I really don’t want to find a boat. I really, really don’t. But more than that. The thought that I’m pushing down hardest is that we’ll find something else. That it won’t be sharks hanging heavy in the water this time, it’ll be something different. Something worse.
He can feel my tension. We rig up in silence, Mark throwing me reassuring glances.
He thinks it’ll be about forty meters deep here. Contextually speaking, that’s two meters higher than the statue of “Christ the Redeemer” in Rio. I can only really go to twenty and he knows it. But the visibility out here is damn near perfect, so we should be able to see right down to the bottom without moving a muscle, or at least without having to go all the way down.
Before we slip into the water, Mark warns me again about the sharks. It doesn’t seem that relevant today. I stare off into the cloudless sky, letting his words wash over me. I breathe. Trying to let his voice calm me. We’re both nervous. And it’s not about sharks.
I notice I’m shaking as we do our buddy check in the water. He grasps my hand and holds it tight against his chest for a second. My heart rate slows. The waves are big and rolling us high today. There’s a strong breeze but Mark promises it’ll be placid once we’re underwater. As we finish up he takes my arm.
“Erin, you don’t have to do this, you know. I can go down alone. You can stay on the boat and I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes. That’s all it’ll take, honey.” He pushes a wet strand of hair behind my ear.
“No, it’s okay. I’m fine.” I smile. “I can do this. And if I don’t see for myself, I’ll be imagining worse anyway,” I say, my voice distant, slightly off-key again.
He nods. He knows me too well to disagree. I’m coming.
He slides on his mask, signals descend, and slips beneath the surface. I place my mask on slowly, securely, letting it suck hard against my cheeks. I can’t afford any mishaps today. I take my last breath of sweet fresh air and follow him under.
It’s clearer down here than it was the last time. Crystal-clear blue. High-definition blue. Mark is waiting for me just below the surface, picked out in nature-program resolution, a living thing suspended in an ocean of nothing. He gestures to descend. And we let out our buoyance.
Our descent is steady. I look up at the huge waves crashing above us; it’s so eerily still down here. Seen from underneath, the cresting waves appear forged from metal as they glint in the sun. Huge sheets of burnished aluminum.
Everything is fine. Everything is fine up until we hit ten meters.
Mark jerkily stops and signals for me to hold position. I freeze.
Something’s wrong.
Blood suddenly bursts through my veins at a rate of knots, pumping faster than ever around my body. Why are we stopping?
Is there something in the water? I’m careful not to move, but my eyes search in every direction for what it could be. I can’t see it. Should we get back up to the boat? Or is it fine?
Mark signals It’s okay back to me.
Okay? Then what? Why hold?
He signals it to me again: hold. Then he signals be calm. Be calm is never a good sign.
Then he signals look down.
Oh God.
Oh Goddy, God, God. Why look down? Why? I don’t want to look down. I don’t want to look down, Mark. I shake my head.
No. No, not doing it.
He reaches out and takes my arm. He signals It’s okay again.
His eyes. It’s fine, Erin.
I nod, I’m calm. All right. I can do this. I can do this.
I breathe in deep, a cool crisp chemical breath, and look down.
It’s beautiful. Papers caught in a slow-motion dance hang in the water all around us. Half sunk, half floating, beautiful.
Then through the gaps between papers…I see it below us.
About thirty meters below us on the seabed. A plane. Not a commercial plane. A small plane. A private jet perhaps. I see it clearly below. One wing disconnected, broken off in the sand beneath. A great gaping breach in its main hull. And darkness within. I breathe out, hanging motionless in the water.
I breathe in slow, calm. I look to the door, the airplane’s door. It’s sealed. The door is sealed. Oh. Oh shit. I feel the panic rise. I feel it fizz through my muscles, through my arms, through my heart, the clenching, the seizing. Fuck. Oh my fucking God. There are people in there.
The trapdoor in my mind bursts wide open and the panic spills out all over me. Images flash through my mind. I can see rows of silent people safely strapped in, in the dark, deep below us. Their faces. Jaws broken mid-scream. Stop! I command myself.
This is not real. Stop.
But it is, though, isn’t it? It is real. They’ll be in there; I know they will. They can’t have got out. They didn’t even try. Why didn’t they even try?
I realize I’ve stopped breathing.
I gasp in a breath. The gasps come fast in quick succession, panicked pulls on life. Grasping. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. I look up. The sun dancing silver above. Ten meters up. I have to get out of the water. Now.
I flail out of Mark’s grasp, kicking as hard as I can, up. Up and away from the plane. From the death.
A hand grabs my ankle and I jolt to a stop as it pulls hard, yanks me down. I can’t get away. It’s Mark. Mark holding me down in the water. Protecting me from rising too fast, from hurting myself. I know it’s for my own good but I don’t want it. I need to get out of the fucking water, right now.
The surface is still about eight meters above us. I suck in breaths as I struggle to get free. Free from him. He clambers up me to eye level and seizes me by my shoulders, strong and steady. Trying to muffle the panic. Stanch it. He catches my gaze. Stop, Erin. Stop, his eyes say.
Breathe.
He’s got me. It’s okay. He’s got me. I’m okay. I breathe. I relax into his hold. Calm. Calm.
I’m okay.
The panic sucks back into its hole and the trapdoor slams shut behind it.
Stillness. I breathe. I signal okay. Mark nods, satisfied. He loosens his grip.
I’m okay. But I’m not going down there. There’s no way on earth I’m going down there.
I signal up. I’m going up.
He looks at me for a while before he replies. He signals okay. Then, You, up.
He’s still going down. Alone.
I squeeze his arms and he releases me. I watch him descend as I kick up slowly. A controlled ascent, now the panic has dissipated. He disappears into the murky darkness as I rise.
Once I hit the surface I remove my tank immediately in the water and haul it onto the boat. I strip off my suit and leave it like a husked skin on the floor. I slump there shivering and wheezing, struggling to catch my breath, elbows on my knees as the tears start to well in my eyes.
Images flash across the backs of my closed eyelids. Their faces. The passengers’. Distorted, distended. The terror. I slam my fists down hard onto my legs. Pain flashes through my body. Anything to stop the images.
I get up and pace the deck. Think about something else. What does it mean, Erin? Yes, think about that, concentrate on that. What does it mean?
It means the bag was on a plane and the plane crashed. A storm in the South Pacific. Something happened and they had nowhere to land. We’re about one hour by air to Tahiti. I guess they couldn’t make it there. Or maybe they didn’t want to land in Tahiti. It’s obviously a private plane. A private jet. They had money. Other than the money in the bag, obviously. Perhaps they wanted to stay away from public airports. I think about the diamonds, the money, the gun.
Perhaps they thought they could outrun the storm. But they didn’t. I look at my watch. Mark must be in there by now. With them. Stop it, Erin.
I turn my mind to the logistics of the flight. Where were they going? I’m going to need to look some stuff up once we’re back. I rummage through the boat locker until I find what I’m looking for. A pad and pencil. Right, I know what I need to do, what I need to focus on. Not the plane down there. Mark’s got that covered.
I note down: Flight paths over French Polynesia?? God, I wish I’d noted down a tail number or something from down there. I’m sure Mark will.
I jot down: Plane type, aircraft tail number, max speed, & distance achievable nonstop??
Planes can only travel so far without refueling. We can try to work out where they might have been heading. I doubt the flight was logged, but we can search online and see if anyone is missing.
At least now our question has been answered. What we have found is flotsam. Our bag was most certainly not deliberately jettisoned. Somehow that canvas bag made its way, along with those bundles of papers, out of the plane’s breached hull and up into the Polynesian sunshine. But—and this is a big one—technically, what we have is neither flotsam nor jetsam. This is not a shipwreck. This is a plane crash. What we have is a big bag of evidence from an underwater aviation incident. I take a shuddery breath of cool tropical air.
Our honeymoon feels a million miles away and yet just within reach, if only we could—
Mark breaks through the waves on my starboard side. He fins toward the boat. His expression blank, controlled. For the first time, I truly appreciate how useful his masked emotions actually are. I think if I ever saw him truly scared, then I’d know for sure that we were done for.
He drags himself up the ladder at the stern of the boat, exhausted.
“Water, please,” he says as he jiggles his tank off onto the deck. He peels off his suit, discards it like mine, and drops heavily onto the teak seating. I fetch a water bottle from the cooler box and hand it across to him. His eyes are tight in the sunlight, brow tensed against the glare.
“You all right?” he asks. He’s watching me, concerned.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sorry. I just…” I’m not sure how to finish that sentence, so I stop.
“No, it’s fine. God. It’s good that you came up.” He takes a long pull on the water bottle and looks out over the waves, his wet hair dripping slowly onto his bare shoulders.
“Fucking hell,” he says.
I wait but he doesn’t continue.
“Are they in there?” I ask. I have to ask. I have to know.
“Yeah,” he says.
He takes another long swig of water.
“Two pilots up front, three passengers. That I could see. One of them was a woman, the rest men.” He looks out again at the waves, his jaw tight.
“Fucking hell.” I realize too late that I’ve echoed him. I don’t know what else to say.
“They weren’t good people, Erin,” he says, looking at me now.
What the fuck does that mean?
I want to know more, I want to know everything he saw, but it doesn’t seem right to ask. He’s processing. I wait for him to tell me.
But nothing comes. He drinks more.
His words still hang in the air. I try to catch them before they disappear. “What do you mean, they weren’t good people, Mark?”
“The things they had with them. Down there. They weren’t good people. Don’t feel too sad, is all I mean.” With that he stands. Grabs a towel and wipes his face, rubs his hair.
I realize that’s probably the most I’ll get from him right now, and I don’t want to linger too long on the thought of the people down there. I’m trying my hardest to stay focused as it is. I change the subject. Well, sort of.
“It’s flotsam, Mark.”
He stares at me blankly for a moment. I think he’d forgotten all about the bag until now. I continue.
“Well, sort of flotsam, lost by accident in an emergency—it can be claimed by the owners. But you’ve just met the owners and I don’t think they’ll be claiming it anytime soon. Will they?” My stab at dark humor. I’m not sure it sounded quite right.
“No, no, they won’t.” He says it flatly.
I move on quickly. “Mark, did you get the plane’s tail number? Anything we can use to identify them? Who they were? Anything helpful?”
He pulls the dive slate off his tank strap and hands it to me. The plane make, model, and tail number. Of course he got it!
“They’re Russian,” he says as I jot the slate information down in my notepad and wipe it clean again.
I look up. “How do you know that?”
“There were Russian snack packets.”
“Right.” I nod slowly.
“Listen, Erin. You said no one will claim the bag. Does that mean you’re suggesting we don’t report this? We don’t report a plane crash?” He’s scowling at me.
Shit. Yes. I thought that’s what we both were suggesting. Weren’t we? To keep the shiny pretty diamonds and the free money. To pay off our mortgage and have a family, right? Or am I crazy? Maybe I am crazy.
My mind flits to the people below us. The dead people, rotting in the water. The bad people. Should we keep the bad people’s money?
“Yes. Yes, that is what I’m suggesting,” I say to Mark.
He nods slowly, processing what that means.
I continue, carefully. “I am suggesting that we get back to the hotel, find out if they’ve been reported missing, and if anyone is missing them at all, then we forget it all. Drop it back here. But if not, if they’ve just evaporated into thin air, then yes, I say we keep the bag. We found it floating in the sea, Mark. We keep it and use it for a better purpose than I’m sure it was meant for.”
He looks at me. I can’t quite tell through the blaze of sun what his expression means.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s find out who they are.”