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“Do you think you can swim?” Giordino asked her.
“I’ll try,” Adrian muttered weakly.
“Al, you and Adrian go first,” Pitt said. “Have her hold onto your shoulders. Summer and I will follow.” He nodded reassuringly at Giordino. “We’ll meet you in the next chamber.”
Giordino looked around. “Too bad some of our equipment isn’t still around.”
“Even if it was, we’d never find it under all this.” “Come along,” Giordino said to Adrian. “The Albert Giordino Great Western and Pacific Underwater Express waits for no one.” He led Adrian gently into the water. He had trouble walking, but swimming came easily. He guided her arms around his bull-like neck and she buried her face on his back between the shoulder blades. “Now hold tight and take a deep breath,” he ordered. Then they both disappeared, leaving only a spreading circle of ripples.
Summer gazed back at the mound of rocks surrounding the fallen statue. “There’s nothing that can be done?” she asked. “Nothing.”
Grief is a strange emotion. Summer’s sad and lovely face suddenly became a mask of haunting serenity, edged by an icy expression of determination. “I love you, Dirk, but I... I cannot go with you.”
Pitt stared at her. “That’s nonsense.”
“Please understand,” she pleaded. “This seamount has always been my home. My mother lies buried here and now my father.”
“That’s no reason to die here too.”
She laid her face against his chest. “I once promised my father I would never leave his side. I must honor that promise.”
Pitt had to fight to overcome an urge to order her to dive into the water. Instead he stroked her hair and tenderly said, “I’m a selfish man. Your father is gone and now you belong to me. I want you. I need you. Even he wouldn’t wish you to die to fulfill a young girl’s promise.” He hugged her tightly. “No more arguments. We’re leaving together and we’re leaving now.”
Summer was still softly crying when hand in hand they slid beneath the yellow-tinted water.
Giordino and Adrian were sitting on the ledge in the outer chamber when Pitt and Summer broke the surface.
“What took you two so long?” asked Giordino. “This waiting around is making me hungry.”
Pitt remained in the water, holding onto the ledge, unable to pull himself onto its dry surface. “We’re halfway home now,” he said confidently. “A quick swim to the surface and then it’s off we go for Honolulu.”
“We’ll go up in the same order,” Pitt said firmly. “And remember, exhale as you swim toward the surface. There’s no sense in any of us getting an air embolism after coming this far.” He turned to Summer. The water had turned her green robe into a transparent veil, and the clinging wetness of the material revealed every contour of her body. He had known many women of all shapes and sizes, but they all seemed colorless when compared to this woman from the seamount. His mind was so occupied with Summer that he hardly noticed Giordino and Adrian sliding into the water.
“See you topside,” Giordino said, smiling. But the concern in his eyes was obvious. There was no telling what they might find on the surface. If anything.
Pitt managed to smile back. “Good luck. Keep a sharp watch for sharks.”
“Don’t worry. If I see one, I’ll bite first” He waved his good hand, and, with Adrian securely draped around his neck, dove down and out of the underwater entrance.
A strange stillness gripped the chamber. The murky water lapped gently at the w
alls and spilled around the tiny sealife attached to the rock. Dim light from the outside danced upon the roof, throwing fleeting shadows across the broken surface.
“There’s a new life for both of us up there,” Pitt said softly.
Summer gazed into Pitt’s green eyes and caressed his face lightly with her fingers. Then she wept; her mind and being torn between love for her father and new love for a man she barely knew. She struggled within her heart to reach a decision, her long sunset hair lifting and falling with the gentle waves, tears mingling with the saltwater on her cheeks. Then she knew what she must do.
“I am ready,” she said. “You are sorely hurt so you must go first. I will follow.”
Pitt nodded silently, yielding to her logic. He brushed his lips over her hand. Then he smiled and ducked under the surface and was gone.
Summer watched his naked form glide beneath the rocks and vanish into the sea,
“Good-bye, Dirk Pitt,” she murmured to herself and the empty chamber. She climbed up on the ledge, arched her supple body, and dove cleanly into the water. For a brief instant she stared at the sunlit entrance to the outside world. Then she turned and swam back toward the yellow cavern and her father.
The water became warmer as Pitt rose upward. Fifty feet, he thought, that’s what Giordino’s depth gauge had read when they had entered the small, air-pocketed chamber. He peered through the bluish-green liquid, just making out the rhythmic sway of the sun-dazzled surface above. He exhaled bits of breath slowly, erasing the pressure on his lungs and watching with loose curiosity as his air bubbles trailed alongside his head during the ascent It was as if they were hanging motionlessly in space.
He bobbed to the surface, met by the burning tropical sun. The breath rasped in and out of his lungs like air cycles from a pneumatic stamping press. He relaxed a few moments, as much as his aching and exhausted body would allow, floating in the gentle rise and fall of the swells. His eyes blinked clear, and he searched for Adrian and Giordino, spotting their heads twenty feet away as they rose on the crest of a wave just before they dropped and disappeared momentarily in the trough.
