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Moore unstrapped his knife fro rocks away fro and pitted, an inch at a ti in wrist deep, he pulled the sand away in handfuls He pried the rocks loose with his blade and let thelance at the watch Ti and lifting, slowly uncovering what appeared to be a thick, glearowths; it had been buried here for a long tiing to another section

And then he froze Forgot to exhale, then exhaled, the bubbles rattling toward the surface over a hundred and fifty feet above

He had heard so ha, but the noise didn&039;t coain What was it? He looked around and then realized so very odd: he hadn&039;t seen any fish at this depth Very odd, in waters tealanced up, looking for the reassuring distant glow of the sun There were re over hiiven way He tried to quiet the inner voices Get to your boat, they whispered So here

Where were the da out coral clumps

The sand completely obscured his vision, like the roil of white clouds; it had to be extreht A mountain of sand and below hiers closing around a rock, and pulled it out from the mound When he did, sand cascaded in sheets off the sides of theexposed a few feet away froe cylinder and the iron tower He pulled at the new object It was a large barrel of some kind, also an to slide down the sand slope, and as he clung to it he saw the detonation cap of the device, and the chill of fear raised hair on the back of his neck

It was an unexploded depth charge

Moore wrenched his hands back as if they&039;d been burned His tank clanged sharply against coral debris, and he fought his way up thewater He could see hi&039;s blast, his body reduced to a mass of bloody shreds Then the predators would co left He half-sank into the sand, fought hi back over his shoulder to see the forgotten charge pitch off the ledge Then it began to fall into the depths, spinning end over end Moore reached the sue had vanished into the darkthat if it did explode it would go off hundreds of feet belohere the shock ht not kill hiht far below The shock ca out of the depths, an undersea ind that reached inside hiritted his teeth against the pain and roaring noise that almost shattered his eardrulobe of air that tore past him and rocketed up toward the surface The blast echoed all around, the water crazily shifting in all directions, trying to rip him to pieces The sand parted, cracked open in a dozen seams It slid under him; an avalanche of it covered Moore and he fell backward, toppling toward the wild Abyss, his tank sla all around hi struck him like the blow of a fist; his mask was torn frorip, frantically, his hands closed around a solid object He held on, the currents twisting at hi pain at his temples And then a realization came to hi

There was a shudder beneath hireen distortion he saw a dark, ; he was rising too quickly He let go his grip and kicked out with his fins against a hard surface that slid past hi, twisted and turned and mauled by the fierce currents, lost in the explosion of sand and sea When he could see again he was looking toward the surface into the sun

Or where the sun had been

For noas obscured by the huge shape; the thing was rising to the surface, trailing sand; its shadow covered hiing The shape broke through the surface in a roil of foa in his ears he heard the thunder of sea surging against iron It hung there, rocking slowly from side to side

Get up! Moore screamed to himself No, no Control Control He swaan to stroke very slowly for the top He had been thrown al the slope of the shelving bottoan to cli the hull of his skiff being battered by the waves When his head finally broke water, he spat out hisat what lay not more than thirty yards from him

"Dear God," he whispered

Its hull was over two hundred feet long; red sunlight had settled into splices in the iron flesh, like the bleeding wounds of a giant saurian Water foa prow Re twisted over the side, partly subashes in the superstructure and in the bulwark of a conning tower Moore could hear the sea hissing against its sides

A submarine

One of the old World War II types, with a flat deck and a hungry-for-battle look about it It seeer for prey

Moore hung frounwale, unable to think what he should do And as he watched, he saw the bow of the thing begin to turn The currents had it now, shoving against its an to move slowly and inexorably toward the island of Coquina