"Caleb, I can see you now." Teddy didn't need to say it because Caleb swam directly up to his dad and grasped his arm tightly. Both men were crying but thankfully neither could tell through the full face masks.
"Diver one and two ascending to first decompression stop at ninety five feet." Teddy would have been proud to know that Caleb and he were praying the same prayer as they were reunited: Father, thank you for saving the life of my loved one today.
Teddy and Caleb had to hang out at ninety-five feet switching bottles and breathing air for ten minutes—outgassing nitrogen. Teddy struck the Buddha pose as they floated in the water with the current, monitoring their depth and waiting for time to pass. Caleb struck the same pose. He couldn't wait to tell his father about the tiger shark. He could imagine the big predator returning and swallowing them in two quick bites as they floated in the water.
As he was checking his depth gauge for the ten thousandth time, Caleb looked up and saw what appeared to be a small pyramid in the distance. They were still at ninety-five feet. The pyramid-like structure sat on top of an outcropping at the lip of a jagged ridge that rose up from the seafloor and ran above them to almost eighty feet from the surface. "Dad, take a look over there." Caleb gestured.
"What is it?"
"I don't know for sure, but it looks like a mini-pyramid."
"Bones, are you getting this?" Teddy had that far away stare.
"I hear you, but the rover is up and out. Do you want me to send it back down?"
"No. Caleb and I are almost finished with our decompression stop at this depth. We'll give it a swim over on our way up. It's due east from here about one hundred yards. Can you pick us up?"
"We will head that way. Blow your dive noodle when you surface." Bones reminded them how hard it was to see divers on the surface unless they blew air into a six foot long orange noodle.
Joshua went back to scanning his instruments thinking about everything that had happened that day. Too many close calls. Looking up from the panel, he noticed a watercraft on the horizon.
"Uncle Stu! Do you see what I'm seeing?" Joshua exclaimed.
"What?" Bones scanned the horizon. "Okay. Got it. Teddy, we have a rigid hull inflatable coming up fast on our port side. I am guessing the local cops are here to check our papers."
Bones hustled down to the trawler's starboard deck, released the dogs on their own rigid hull inflatable that had been chained to the deck for heavy weather, and pushed it with his foot so that almost half of the un-inflated craft hung out over the edge of the gunwale. He grabbed the marlinspike, fished up the dive line and clipped the boats lanyard to the dive line so Teddy could find it when he surfaced.
Bones wanted to be ready for anything, including if he and Joshua were taken into custody while Teddy and Caleb were still decompressing down below.
"Roger that. Caleb and I will be praying for you!" Teddy wasn't surprised except that it had taken so long for the locals to get nosy. He knew he had his papers in order, but he thought again about that phone number. He might be making a call for help sooner than he had anticipated.
"Joshua, let me do the talking. If they ask you a direct question, just answer them truthfully and without any sass. We want these guys off our boat as quickly as possible."
"Ola, Senor!" Bones waved at the approaching boat and smiled real big, trying out his nice guy.
"Turn your engines!" It was the porky cop screaming into a bullhorn. "We come aboard!"
"No problem. Welcome aboard." Bones smiled.
"Turn your engines!" Pauncharillo yelled through the bullhorn again.
"Joshua! I think he means 'turn off your engines'—kill the engines, Son!" Bones made a cutting gesture across his throat as he coiled a line and threw it across to one of Pauncharillo's deck hands. Bones was glad to see weapons were holstered. "Joshua, come slowly out of the cabin where they can see you."
"How can I help you, Sir?" Bones was sweet as pie.
"I see… papers!" Tubby hopped across the gap unceremoniously and slipped as he landed almost ending in a heap.
"Yes. Of course." Bones ran into the cabin and came back with a folder that included their boating license, insurance, permission from the Ministry of Antiquities to dive on the site and various and sundry other colored papers bearing multiple stamps by multiple agencies, each one an opportunity for a bribe. Bones quietly hoped the mystery girl behind the James Bond phone number had done her homework.
"I see." Pauncharillo made out as if he was carefully scrutinizing each document, although it was apparent that he didn't understand half of what he was looking at. "I want look!" He glared at Bones daring him to refuse.
"Be my guest, only be careful as we have two divers down and they are diving on mixed gasses, which can be very dangerous… peligroso." Bones put on his most serious face.
"I careful!" Pauncharillo began to look around, but he took only mincing steps in any direction as he carefully stepped over lines, comm wires, tubes and diving paraphernalia—genuine concern had crossed his face at the word: danger.
After a cursory look around the aft deck, Pauncharillo slapped the folder against Bone's chest and said: "You careful!"
As the chubby cop's boat roared away, Bones signaled to Joshua to get Olivia moving again. Then he replaced and tied down their own rigid inflatable boat on the starboard deck and called down to Teddy and Caleb on the coms: "Teddy, do you read me?"
"Roger. How'd it go with the law? Sure took awhile." Joshua and Uncle Stu had been unable to communicate with Teddy and Caleb while Pauncharillo was on board.
"Nope. It did not take long at all. He came aboard and I scared him with 'mixed gasses'—you should have seen his face. What about you guys?" Bones was pulling up the dive line in preparation to go get them.
"Not a pyramid, but definitely a manmade structure from the same time period. We should explore it on our next dive. I'll take one of the boys with me because it's located at only eighty-eight feet. A strange shaped building, kind of a square box with a sloping roof off the back heading east and a large entrance facing west. What do you think, Caleb?"
"Cool. All I can say is cool. Somebody built that thing thousands of years ago—somebody very big."