Free Flashback by Nevada Barr Page A

letting Linda know she'd gotten the message. The rift between the dimension of Dean Koontz and Jacques Cousteau was healed as quickly as it had formed. The fear was gone.
    Rough night, Anna excused it to her self. Overtired.
    She kicked once and moved to the segmented hull. At a show of her palm, the universal signal for halt, Linda stayed back. Because of Linda's superior skill in the water, Anna had been glad to abdicate leadership during the diving. When it came to risk taking, she couldn't. Storms, currents and reefs were Linda's nemeses. At present, this tippy, murdered vessel with its one flailing human arm, was Anna's responsibility.
    Reaching the top left corner of the cabin, Anna steadied herself on the wreck and looked toward the bow. Keeled over, tilting cabin and deck at a sixty- or seventy-degree angle up from the sandy bottom, the bow was wedged between two upthrusts of coral. From the damage both to the animals and the boat's underside, Anna guessed she had been driven between the coral boulders with a degree of force, enough to shove the bow into the sandy bottom.
    Anna shook the boat experimentally. It didn't budge. She pushed it from several more angles without dislodging anything. Partially reassured it wasn't a death trap just waiting to slam shut on her claustrophobic little self, she swam back to the cabin door, to the fingers protruding from the torn fabric. Linda still hung in the water fifteen feet away. A first mate-and captain when Cliff was sick or on vacation-she was good both at the giving and the taking of orders.
    Anna removed the camera from its pocket and clicked pictures: north, east, south and west of the bow section and one close-up of the finger-fringed fabric floating in front of her nose. Record made, she returned the camera to its niche and kicked a bit closer to examine the beckoning flesh. "Finger-fringed" was unpleasantly apt. What they'd seen was not a thumb and forefinger but a ring finger and the avulsed half of the middle finger. The yellow was not a sleeve but possibly the torso of a tee shirt peeled from the body by the blast and blown out along the arm. There was a wrist, Anna was relieved to note, and part of a forearm leading back to an anchor of some sort. A body, it was to be hoped. Gently, Anna turned the new-made relic. From the look of it, the arm had belonged to a man. Much of the flesh was burned or excised by the explosion, but the ribbons remaining were coarse-skinned and the few hairs not scorched off were coarse and black.
    Bracing herself against the cabin, she reached toward the underwater light at her waist. Head bent toward the hook connecting the flashlight to her buoyancy compensator, she sensed rather than saw darkness descending, an eclipse of the pale watery sun. With a grinding noise that was felt as well as heard the tortured fiberglass fell away beneath her hand. The hulk, steady moments before, rolled with the impetuosity of submerged matter. Under the grinding filling her ears and grating on her bones came Linda's close-mouth scream, a weak mermaid's siren.
    Pushing at the environment with hands and flippered feet, Anna scuttled backward in the tradition of octopi but without the grace. The heel of her right foot banged into coral, and the cabin rolled down. Through the silt and particles, through the luminous and shifting green of the sky, a ton of fiberglass, wood and metal moved. White and bottle green, a wall toppling, a twisted and melting cliff-face.
    Again Anna kicked. Her right leg didn't move but jerked, a spasm as before sleep. The hull rolled onto her swim fin, trapping it and her toes in a vicelike grip. Bubbles, sand, a fog of minute coral deaths, destroyed her vision. Light and dark remained. Dark was fast falling, the cabin roof closing on the boulder where Anna wiggled, bait on a hook. Panic tickled inside her brain, urging her to rip off the blinding mask, tear away the regulator with its claustrophobic life support. Training shaped