He gave an okay sign to Ki Soo, who gave it back, and I found all of this rather interesting and very different from what I had experienced so far.
“Now listen up.” My new acquaintance spoke as if he had worked with me for years.
“Comm equipment’s tricky if you’ve never used it. It can be real dangerous.” His face was earnest.
“I’m familiar with it,” I assured him with more ease than I felt.
“Well, you gotta be more than familiar. You gotta be buddies with it, because like your dive buddy, it can save your life.” He paused. “It can also kill you.”
I had used underwater communication equipment on only one other dive, and was still nervous about having my regulator replaced by a tightly sealed mask fitted with a mouthpiece and no purge valve. I worried about the mask flooding, about having to tear it off as I frantically groped for my alternate air source, or octopus. But I was not going to mention this, not here.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him again.
“Great. I heard you were a pro,” he said. “By the way, my name’s Jerod, and I already know who you are.” Sitting Indian-style, he was tossing gravel into the water and seemed fascinated by the slowly spreading ripples. “I’ve heard a lot of nice things about you. In fact, when my wife finds out I met you, she’s going to be jealous.”
I was not certain why a diver in the Navy would have heard anything about me beyond what was in the news, which wasn’t always nice. But his words were a welcome salve to my raw mood, and I was about to let him know this when he glanced at his watch, then stared down at the platform and met Ki Soo’s eyes.
“Dr. Scarpetta,” Jerod said as he got up. “I think we’re ready to rock and roll. How about you?”
“I’m as ready as I’m going to be.” I got up, too.
“What’s going to be the best approach?”
“The best way-in fact, the only way-is to follow his hose down.”
We stepped closer to the edge of the pier and he pointed to the johnboat.
“I’ve already been down once, and if you don’t follow the hose you’ll never find him.
You ever had to wade through a sewer with no lights on?”
“That one hasn’t happened to me yet.”
“Well, you can’t see shit. And that’s the same thing here.”
“To your knowledge, no one has disturbed the body,” I said.
“No one’s been near it but me.”
He watched as I picked up my buoyancy control vest, or BC, and tucked a flashlight in a pocket.
“I wouldn’t even bother. In these conditions, all a flashlight’s going to do is get in your way.”
But I was going to bring it because I wanted any advantage I could possibly have.
Jerod and I climbed down the ladder to the dive platform so we could finish preparations, and I ignored overt stares from shipyard men as I massaged cream rinse into my hair and pulled on the neoprene hood.
I strapped a knife to my inner right calf, and then grabbed each end of a fifteen-pound weight belt and quickly hoisted it around my waist. I checked safety releases, and pulled on gloves.
“I’m ready,” I said to Ki Soo.
He carried over communication equipment and my regulator.
“I will attach your air hose to the face mask.” He spoke with no accent. “I understand you’ve used comm equipment like this before.”
“That’s correct,” I said.
He squatted beside me and lowered his voice as if we were about to conspire. “You, Jerod and I will be in constant contact with each other over the buddy phones.”
They looked like bright red gas masks with a five-strap harness in back. Jerod moved behind me and helped me into my BC and air tank while his buddy talked on’
. “As you know,” Ki Soo was saying, “you breathe normally and use the push-to-talk button on the mouthpiece when you want to communicate.” He demonstrated. “Now we need to get this nice and secure over your hood and tuck it in. There, you get the rest of your hair tucked in and let me make sure this is nice and tight in back.”