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divers had returned ahead of schedule and rested on the deck beside him near the base of the anchor chain. In another minute, he would need to go looking for the other two, but he could wait a little longer. He preferred to keep the whole group together as a dive wound down and air ran low. Just then he noticed a faint light in the distance, moving toward them down the hull.
     
     
    As the light approached, Sturman realized something wasn’t right. There was only one beam pointed toward him, closing on him fast. Every diver had brought down a dive light, and they had been instructed to stay in pairs.
    Sturman made eye contact with the pair next to him and signaled for them to ascend to the safety stop near the surface. The divers gave him an “okay” signal with thumb and forefinger, the universal scuba message indicating they were all right and understood. The two divers began to kick upward as Sturman finned toward the lone diver approaching along the foredeck.
    Looking into the diver’s mask, Sturman could see by the man’s expression that he was terrified. Jack, Sturman remembered. His name is Jack. Jack was trying to pantomime something to him, but since he was unable to speak underwater, it wasn’t clear what he was trying to get across. And their air was running out.
    Sturman held up his hand in the other diver’s face, palm outward: Stop. He then looked the panicked man in the eyes and gave a large, exaggerated shrug: Where is she? Where is your dive buddy?
    The diver looked back at Sturman for a moment, exhaling a burst of bubbles through his regulator, then shook his head and shrugged back. Either this guy didn’t understand the question or didn’t have the answer. Sturman squeezed the man’s shoulder and pointed to the mooring line, then gave a thumbs-up: Ascend the chain now. The man shook his head no—understandable, since it was his wife he had left behind. Will squeezed the man’s shoulder again, harder this time, and locked eyes with the man, repeating the command to ascend.
     
     
    One thousand psi. Sturman was beginning to worry. He had made sure the reluctant diver had begun his ascent up the mooring line and then, with a series of powerful kicks, had set off alone down the length of the sunken destroyer. Past huge double guns, each large enough to shove a soccer ball into the barrel, past a metal bridge rising several stories off the deck. He had covered almost the full length of the wreck, but hadn’t seen any sign of the missing woman.
    His mind went through scenarios as he weighed the possibilities and his options. He had about six minutes before he would have to ascend. The woman probably had simply been separated from her husband, and would head up soon on her own. She had logged a lot of previous dives, and Sturman had taken this group out before without incident. But there was another possibility. She could be trapped somewhere, or lost within the ship. Not likely, though. No. She had simply become separated from her dive buddy, so he hadn’t been able to help her.
     
     
    Eight hundred psi. Sturman had reached a large opening amidships and headed down into the darkness of the hull. Now he was moving along the upper interior deck, passing through hatches that mercifully had had their doors removed. If it had been dim in the water outside the ship, in here it was truly black. The little bit of sunlight that filtered down through over a hundred feet of particle-laden water was unable to penetrate the intermittent openings in the ship to offer any illumination in its belly. The waters of Southern California were not the clear waters of the Caribbean.
    Sturman’s whole world had become the single cone of light emitted by his powerful dive light, which reached through a dozen or so feet of black water swirling with detritus before being absorbed by the darkness.
     
     
    Six hundred psi. Sturman swam through an opening in the deck, down into the next lowest level. Looking up into the