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adjacent to a hatchway, perhaps where hinges had been torn free. Sturman grabbed her tank and regulator, twisting with all his strength in each direction, wrenching the woman back and sideways. The tank popped free.
    Grabbing the woman’s vest and pulling, Sturman shoved off the wall with his free arm, kicked hard, and accelerated toward the distant opening in the hull.
     
     
    Fifty psi.
    Sturman looked at his air gauge as he and the other diver reached the exterior of the ship, not slowing as they passed through the opening in the side of the hull and began to arc up toward the surface. Sturman maintained his grip on the woman’s BC vest, since she was still breathing from his air tank. This was going to be a real balancing act, he realized. They needed to surface quickly, but too fast and they would certainly get a bad case of the bends. As it was, they were certain to suffer some ill effects. There wasn’t enough air for a safety stop at fifteen feet.
    Far from the anchor line, they began to drift in the current as they ascended in open water. Sturman continued to look at his depth gauge, dumping air from his vest to control the ascent. Ninety feet. Eighty feet. Seventy feet. They were surfacing too fast. He grimaced. This wasn’t going to be good.
    He needed to slow them down, since they probably still had two or three minutes of air in his emergency tank—at least at the low pressure of shallow water, where air lasted much longer than at depth. Before they surfaced, they could share the Spare Air as they let the nitrogen that had built up in their bodies escape when they exhaled in the reduced pressure of shallower water. Hell, he thought, they might get out of this unscathed after all.
    Without warning, the woman spit out her regulator and kicked for the surface.
    Sturman suddenly realized that the air in his main tank, which the woman had been breathing, must have just hit zero psi.
    She was out of air.
    The woman clawed for the emergency tank suspended just below Sturman’s mouth, ripping it free of his bite. She tried to put in the mouthpiece, but was clearly in a state of panic now. After a moment of fumbling with the miniature tank, she let go of it and kicked upward. Sturman tried to hold on to her with one hand and caught the sinking emergency tank with the other. He couldn’t let her just pop up from sixty feet. The risk was much too great.
    Sturman heard a faint metallic clink and felt the woman begin to rise. Shit. Her weight belt. She had released her weight belt, and was attempting an emergency ascent.
    He glanced down and watched as her thick, nylon belt, laden with twenty pounds of lead weights, slipped past her long blue fins and plummeted toward the wreck below. He quickly dumped the remaining air out of his buoyancy control vest and tried to hold the woman down, but knew they were rising fast as he felt the air in his sinuses and rib cage rapidly expand. They were in for a ride.
    Sturman knew he had two choices: try to slow their ascent and put himself at greater risk, or let her go and ascend more gradually himself.
    For Will Sturman, there was really no choice.
    He squeezed the woman’s vest tighter and raised the Spare Air tank in front of the woman’s face so she could see it, but she was wriggling like a speared fish and her mask was fogged completely over because of her rapid breathing. Her flailing arms hit the small tank away again, and Sturman realized this woman was going to drown if she didn’t get her head above water immediately.
    As they accelerated upward over the last forty feet to the surface, escorted by a host of their own expanding air bubbles, Sturman exhaled continuously, calmly, and wondered why in the hell he still chose to be a divemaster.

C HAPTER 8
    W ith his arms outstretched, Sturman could have easily touched both sides of the large, horizontal cylinder.
    Even though he was tall, about six-two, with a wide arm span, any space he could reach across with his arms