Free Abduction by Robin Cook

that he was in constant communication with each diver and with diving control up in the diving van. To keep his hands free, a headset kept a tiny speaker in his ear and a microphone

positioned over his mouth.
Out in the water the two divers swam to the top of the ridge and paused. At that distance from the diving bell the amount of illumination fell off sharply. Richard motioned to his flashlight and both turned them on. Behind them, the diving bell glowed eerily like an orbiter nesting in a rocky, alien landscape. A stream of bubbles issued from the bell and dribbled toward the far-off surface. Ahead, the divers faced darkness fading to indelible blackness with only a faint hint of a glow when they looked up toward the surface almost a thousand feet above. In the back of their minds they knew the huge shark was somewhere just beyond their vision. Shining their lights forward provided meager cones of light that penetrated the icy darkness only forty to fifty feet ahead. "There's a drop-off beyond the ridge," Richard reported. "This must be the scarp." Louis relayed the information up to the dive station. Although the dive control could listen to the divers and talk to them, Larry preferred to use the bell diver as an intermediary. The combination of the helium voice distortion and the noise of the divers' breathing gas flow made comprehension by those up in the diving van extremely difficult even with the helium unscrambler on-line. It was much more efficient to use the bell diver since he was more accustomed to the speech distortions. "Red diver," Louis called out. "Control wants to know if you see any sign of the Oceanus. " "That's negative," Richard said.
"How about a crevice or a hole?" Louis relayed. "Not at the moment," Richard reported, "but we're about to start down this rock wall." Richard and Michael swam over the edge and down the face of the cliff. "The rock is as smooth as glass," Richard commented. Michael nodded. He'd run his hand along it briefly.
"You're coming up on your last one hundred feet of hose," Louis said. He quickly took the last loops down from their storage hooks, already cursing under his breath. Soon he'd be coiling it all up again. Divers rarely wandered this far from the diving bell, and it was just his luck to be assigned as the bell diver when they did.
Richard stopped his descent. He grabbed Michael to stop him as well. Richard pointed to his wrist thermometer. Michael looked at his and did a double take. "The water temperature just changed," Richard reported. "It just went up almost one hundred degrees. Shut off our hot water!"
"Red diver, are you shitting me?" Louis asked. "Michael's reads the same," Richard said. "It's like we've climbed into a hot tub." Richard had been shining his light down as they descended, searching for the base of the scarp. Now he shined it around. At the very periphery of illumination he could just make out a wall opposite the one they were descending.

"Hey! Apparently we are in some kind of huge crevice," he said. "I can just barely see the other side. It
must be about fifty feet wide."
Michael tapped Richard on the shoulder and pointed off to their left. "There's an end to it as well," he said.
"Michael's right," Richard said when he'd looked. Then he swung around and pointed the light in the opposite direction. "I guess it's like a box canyon 'cause I can't see a fourth side, at least not from where we are."
"Hey," Michael said. "We're sinking!"
Richard looked at the wall behind him. It was true they were sinking--more quickly than he would have thought possible. There was little sensation of resistance against the water. Richard and Michael gave a few powerful kicks upward. To their astonishment there was little effect. They were still sinking. With a mixture of confusion and alarm, both responded by reflex and inflated their buoyancy vests. When that seemed to have little effect, they released their weight belts. Still significantly negatively buoyant,