Absolute Pressure by Sigmund Brouwer

chapter one
    One hundred and thirty feet doesn’t sound like much. If you’re walking.
    You’d think twice if you were climbing that far. It’s about twelve stories high. Nothing fun about clinging to the side of a building one hundred and thirty feet off the ground.
    But what about the other direction? Underground or in shark-infested water.
    In your mind, turn that twelve-story building upside down. Picture how farunderwater the tip of the building would reach. Then think of going the entire distance straight down, where every cubic foot of water above you weighs over sixty pounds.
    That’s where I was headed at ten o’clock on a hot Thursday morning in August. Diving to a shipwreck, buried twelve stories underwater. It felt like the weight of the water was squeezing the light out of the sky. It was getting darker and darker by the second.
    I was six miles offshore in the warm ocean water south of Key West in Florida. I had already swum twenty feet down. There was a thin nylon line on my weight belt. It was snapped to a thicker cable that dropped from the boat above. The thick line ended in a heavy anchor. Being hooked to this line made it easy to go straight down in the Gulf Stream.
    Normally, I wouldn’t use a guideline. I’d drift down from farther back and let the stream just take me. But this was a work dive, not a fun dive.
    At thirty feet deep, I tilted my head to look up at the surface. The shadow of the
GypSea
—my uncle’s dive boat—was a long black shape, like a fat cigar floating above me.
    Far below me was another boat. This one, though, was much larger than the
GypSea
. It was also in much worse shape, since shipwrecks don’t float or move very fast.
    The shipwreck was an old US Air Force missile-tracking ship. It was almost the length of two football fields. There was no cool story about it sinking in a storm or anything like that. The ship had been cleaned up and then sunk on purpose. It was done to make a reef, a nice hiding place for fish and other undersea animals. It was also done so that tourists could scuba dive and explore it.
    Tourists were part of my job. In fact, I was diving down to the wreck so I could hide a toy treasure chest for them. It was my idea. Business had not been good for awhile. More people would hire my uncle’s boat for dives, I thought, if we set up a treasure hunt for them.
    The toy treasure chest I carried was not much bigger than a football. Inside it was a hundred-dollar bill wrapped in plastic to make it waterproof. The first diver to find it would keep the money.
    I kicked my fins and swam down another ten feet. Slowly.
    I don’t like to hurry when I scuba dive. I also check and double-check everything. All the time. There is a saying in this sport:
There are old divers and there are bold divers, but there are no old bold divers.
In other words, not only can mistakes kill you, chances are they
will
kill you.
    I dropped another ten feet. I was down to fifty feet. I had reached the top of the sunken ship. Fingers of steel reached up for me like a skeleton.
    I stopped and hit a button to pump some air from my tank into special pockets built into my vest. I did this because as you go deeper, the weight of the water makesit harder to swim. By adding air to my vest, I was able to make myself lighter.
    As I swam, I turned my head and watched for sharks. Especially hammer-heads. Around Key West, they can be as long as a car. But much more dangerous. Cars just need gasoline for fuel. Sharks need meat and blood. Even though attacks are rare, I didn’t want to be a quick fill-up for a shark.
    I saw no sharks. There were plenty of smaller fish. Although I knew they were very colorful, they all looked bluish gray. Even clear water soaks up colors. After fifty feet, reds and oranges and yellows are gone. The blues disappear after sixty feet.
    I only know the colors go away because that’s what other people tell me. In my own