Passionate Choice

Chapter 6.5

   A fresh air-tank on her back, mask over her eyes and mouthpiece of her air-tube in her mouth, Selena walked off the ladder into the water and sank immediately, pulled down by he weights at her waist. Soon, she was at the entrance to the crevasse. A long shadowy figure appeared. Keith was there as he had promised, and together they swam along the formidable wall of coral that was the dangerous reef. When they reached the end of it, they turned into a wide bay and floated down further to an overhanging growth of coral near which a barracuda hung motionless, big-jawed and glassy-eyed, challenging them to move another inch.

   Keith indicated to her that she should hang, too, in the water like the fish and stare back at it. The tactic worked. After a while, the barracuda backed off rather disdainfully much to Selena's relief. She knew that barracudas don't attack divers but she never could be sure that the fish knew it. As soon as it had gone, Keith beckoned to her to follow him under the overhanging growth of coral. Soon, she was staring not at a barracuda but in amazement at the after part of the hull of a wooden ship. Holes gaped between the worm-eaten, coral-encrusted timbers and many fish—she recognized parrot fish, angel fish and yellow snappers—swam in and out of the hull. At the stern where the rudder was still attached, numerous clumps of colourful orange-cup corals thrived in the relative darkness.

   Following Keith, she floated upwards and over the edge of the hull which was lying at a forty-degree angle on firm sand. Inside was a shambles of broken timbers. Obeying Keith's come-on signal, she followed him to a section of the hull that had been cleared by some previous visitors. There in a cavity was what appeared to be an iron chest. She swam closer to it. It wasn't iron at all. It was a simple, cheap, tin chest, the sort that students often use to pack all their goods and chattels in when they are on the move, quite modern in design, and it was padlocked.

   She looked at Keith enquiringly. He indicated something that must be 'the treasure' and pointed to his air-meter showing that their time below was running out and they should go back to the dive-ship. On her way out of the wreck, she searched, out of habit, for artefacts and picked up from the sand some darkened discs which could have been silver coins, Part if a pottery jar made from rough clay, and surprisingly, one of the cast-iron oval grenades she had so recently discovered near the site of the wreck. In fact, there was a box full of them, laid neatly in a row, close to the hull, from which the sand had obviously been cleared quite recently.

   Putting her funds carefully into the waterproof bag she had tied round her waist, Selena swam quickly after Keith to the cove where they had left the dive-ship anchored. To her surprise, there was no sign of the ship's keel and she wondered if it had been moved to another part of the cove for some reason, but when she surfaced and looked about her, all she could see was the smooth shimmering surface of sunlit water. The ship had gone.

   Keith surfaced beside her and looked about him too, then pushing up His mask and removing his mouthpiece, he said, "Let's go ashore."

   "But where's the ship?" she asked, having pushed her mashed up too and got rid of her mouthpiece.

   "Gone back to the resort, I guess," he replied casually and turning over, began to swim towards the rim of sand backed by the usual small lake and sea grapes that curved about the cove. She swam after him.

   "But the ship shouldn't have left without waiting for us to surface. It should have stood by. Surely Gary and Max know that," she complained when, after she had reached the shore, Keith cane forward to lift the harness holding her tank from her shoulders.

   "Sure they know that, but probably Heather was so mad when she found out I was diving with you that she insisted on being taken back to the resort to tell the professor that we'd eloped together," he drawled with a touch of mockery. His hands lingered caressingly on her shoulders. "I wish we had eloped," he whispered and she felt his lips brush the nape of neck.

   A delicious shiver tingled down her spine and she turned to him quickly but he had turned from her and was laying down her diving gear on the sand next to his.