Read Online Flashback by Nevada Barr - Free Book Online Page B

divers, recovered bodies and searched for sunken treasure. Treasure was one of the lures that had brought her, finally, to the Dry Tortugas, a major shipping lane during the days when Spanish galleons were heavy with gold plundered from the Incas and the Aztecs.
    Today would have more to do with bodies than booty, Anna suspected. Or, worse, pieces of bodies. Whole corpses didn't bother her much, but bits here and there were a tad unsettling. And, though she would never admit it even to herself, she wasn't all that gung ho to go flippering around in what might amount to fisherman soup.
    The Reef was rafted off the Curious, and Anna and Teddy joined Linda and Danny on the research boat. Danny had backed it up to be well clear of the oil slick so the divers wouldn't foul their gear or get petroleum on the neoprene of their wet suits when they went over the side. As Anna and Linda donned dive suits and scuba gear, the sun sprang from the sea. In these latitudes there was little twilight; day and night were sudden and complete. While Anna buckled and tugged and checked equipment, Linda went through her safety spiel. Wrecks, especially recent wrecks, were notoriously unstable. It was possible parts of it could still be burning. The women took a moment to rehearse the rudimentary hand signals: help, look and go to the surface. Then they rolled off the gunwale into the water. Because the air temperature had yet to rise with the sun, the water was a few degrees warmer and the initial plunge felt good, like the first immersion in a warm bath. Suddenly weightless and warm, Anna felt her muscles relax and her mind empty of the surface's fussy thoughts.
    The sun low, water made murky by the recent disturbance, the bottom was a mottled dark area seen through a fog of particulate matter. Anna guessed the depth at around thirty or forty feet. The boat they sought had gone down in what was considered deep water in the shallow, reef-filled park. Just to the east of the boundary line the ocean floor dropped thousands of feet down a sheer wall.
    Quicker to get oriented, Linda gestured "follow me." Her fins, long and sleek, were of that strange neon color cities had taken to painting fire trucks in the late seventies, a shade between yellow and lime. Not pretty but surprisingly visible. Anna followed their flicking toward where the boat had exploded, burned and, presumably, sunk.
    Visibility got worse, but not by much. A lot of the particles had settled. The blast must have come early on, between midnight and two or three in the morning. Any earlier and someone at the fort would have heard and reported it. Swimming along in this sea of thoughts and other flotsam it occurred to Anna that someone had heard it. She'd heard it. It had almost awakened her. Tangled in dreams of the Civil War brought on by Great-Great-Aunt Raffia's letter, her unconscious mind had transmuted it into cannon fire. There was no way to prove that had been the case but, looking back, Anna was pretty sure it was. The knowledge was of little practical value. Not having fully awakened, she had no idea what time she'd heard the explosion.
    Doesn't matter, she told herself. Boat fires were stunningly fast. Even if she'd leapt from her bed and sprinted to the Reef Ranger, this boat would have burned to waterline before she could have reached it.
    And Bob?
    That thought Anna pushed away. Too little information yet for self-recrimination.
    The iridescent fins ahead of her stopped. Anna kicked to where Linda hung, suspended fifteen feet above the ocean floor. Beneath them was what remained of the boat whose blood sheened the surface. Guessing from the mess scattered over broken coral reefs, it had been a cigarette-type boat, long and lean and fast; basically huge engines and fuel tank housed in a bullet-shaped fiberglass body. This one was larger than most Anna had seen; maybe thirty feet long when it was in one piece. At present, fragments of it were strewn over an area three times