Dead Tomorrow

fridges, garden tools, coiled chicken wire, supermarket trolleys and stolen cars was a poor substitute for the tropical fish and marine fauna of the Maldives.
    She looked around for the pink buoy, which had momentarily disappeared behind a wave, swam a few clumsy strokes over to it, then gripped the heavily weighted shot line with her rubber gloves and sank a short distance below the surface.
    It was instantly calm again here. This was always a moment she loved, descending from the waves and thewind into a completely different world. She continued steadily down, swallowing to equalize the pressure in her ears, keeping an arm looped around the rope, the visibility rapidly fading, until she was in total darkness.
    When she reached the bottom, her feet sinking into the sand, she could see nothing at all. On fine days there was reasonable visibility underwater in the Channel. But today the currents had churned up the sand and silt on the bottom into cloud that was as dark as a coal cellar. There was no point in switching on her camera and her torch, she would have to do it all by feel.
    She checked the luminous depth gauge on her wrist, struggling to read the dial. It indicated sixty-seven feet. Her lapsed time since she had entered the sea was two minutes. She signalled to the surface by speaking on her voice comms: ‘Diver made bottom. Starting work.’ Then she felt for the underwater jackstay line.
    Yesterday, when the scanner had picked up the two anomalies on the seabed, they had gridded them with anchored marker buoys and jackstay lines–ropes on the seabed held down by leaded weights.
    What she now had to do, with the body bag tucked under her left arm, was swim across the seabed, skimming the surface, holding the jackstay line with her left hand and sweeping with her right. She would move her right hand away from her body, then back to it, in a continual arc, until she struck the object she was looking for. If she reached the weight at the far end, she would shift it a couple of feet to the right and then work her way back along it. When she arrived at her starting point, she would move that weight a couple of feet to the right and repeat the process.
    The scanner was not sophisticated enough to tell herwhat the anomalies on the seabed were, giving only shape and approximate size. Each one was approximately six feet long and a couple of feet wide. Consistent with a human body. But not necessarily bodies. They could have been pieces of equipment or discarded rubbish from a ship, or unexploded torpedoes from the war or the wreckage of a crashed plane, or plenty of other things. The worst thing, when underwater in darkness, was striking a sharp object.
    Something bumped into her mask, then was gone. A bottom-feeder fish, a sole or a plaice or a flounder, or maybe an eel, she assumed.
    Slowly, holding the jackstay line with her left hand, she started swimming through the inky blackness. She swept her right arm backwards and forwards, in a continual arc, like a windscreen wiper.
    Every time she searched like this, her mind wanted to play games with her. It wanted to remind her of every horror film she had ever seen. Of every kind of monster or demon that might be lurking on the seabed, waiting for her.
    But she had dived in plenty worse places than open sea. She had dived to recover the body of a ten-year-old boy in a canal. She had dived in reservoirs, in ditches and in potholes. In her view, there was nothing that would hurt her here. There was just an anomaly .
    Suddenly her hand struck something.
    It felt like a human face inside plastic.
    And, despite herself, her heart burst clean out of her chest. And she damn nearly spat her face mask off in shock.
    A bolus of iced water exploded through her veins.
    Shit-shit-shit.
    Her husband, the BA pilot, didn’t dive. She had tried to explain the excitement, the rush, to him many times. He got all the excitement he needed in the cockpit of a 747, hetold her. It was dry and warm there, with plenty of hot drinks and food from the first-class galley. And now, for a moment, she understood his point.
    She ran her hand over the face. The head. Feeling through the heavy-dutyplastic sheeting. Shoulders. Back. Buttocks. Thighs. Legs. Feet.

34
    ‘Nice dog!’ thewoman said. ‘What breed is he?’ She spoke with a foreign accent.
    It was a dumb question. Only a visitor to Bucharest would ever ask such a question. Romeo, kneeling in the weeds beside the dirt road, was giving