The Reef

been searching for for nearly eight years. I want to show it to you. When I do, I hope you’ll share my excitement. Matthew, I’m going back for the Isabella. I need you and Buck with me. Please, come to Hatteras and take a look at what I’ve put together before you reject the idea.
    She’s ours, Matthew. She’s always been ours. It’s time for us to claim her.
    Fondly,
    Ray
    Jesus. Matthew skipped back to the beginning of the page and read it a second time. Ray Beaumont didn’t believe in dropping his bombshells lightly. In a couple of quick paragraphs he had set off charges that exploded from Tate to VanDyke to the Isabella.
    Go back? Suddenly, fiercely angry, Matthew slapped the letter down on the table. Damned if he’d go back and dredge up his most complete and horrendous failure. He was making his life, wasn’t he? Such as it was. He didn’t need old ghosts tempting him back toward that glint of gold.
    He wasn’t a hunter anymore, he thought as he lunged out of the chair to pace the small cabin. He neither wanted nor needed to be. Some men could live on dreams. He had once—and didn’t intend to do so again.
    It was money he needed, he fumed, money and time. When both were in his pocket, he would finish what wasbegun half a lifetime ago over his father’s body. He would find VanDyke, and he would kill him.
    And as for Tate, she wasn’t his problem. He’d done her a good turn once, Matthew remembered, and scowled down at the letter on the table. The best turn of her life. If she’d screwed it up by getting hooked into one of VanDyke’s schemes, it was on her head. She was a grown woman now, wasn’t she? With a potload of education and fancy degrees. Goddamn it, she owed him every bit of it, and no one had the right to make him feel responsible for her now.
    But he could see her, as she’d been then, awed by a simple silver coin, glowing in his arms, courageously attacking a shark with a diver’s knife.
    He swore again, viciously. Then again, quietly. Leaving the letter and the mug where they were, he headed out to the radio room. He needed to make some calls.
     
    Tate entered the room the crew had dubbed “Ground Zero.” It was crammed with computers, keyboards, monitors. The sonar dial glowed green as the needle swept. Remotes for the cameras that took stereophotos were easily at hand.
    At the moment, however, the area was more of a rec room for adolescents than a scientific lab.
    Dart was in a corner with Bowers, relieving tedium by trouncing the computer at a game of Mortal Combat.
    It was late, nearly midnight, and she’d have been better off in her cabin, getting a good night’s sleep or working on her dissertation. But she was restless, and Lorraine had been edgy. The cabin had seemed too small for both of them.
    Taking a handful of Dart’s candy, she settled down to watch the monitor that showed the sweep of the seafloor.
    It was so dark, she mused. Cold. Tiny luminescent fish hunted food. They moved slowly, surrounded by points of phosphorescence that resembled stars. The soft, even sediments of the sea plane were featureless. Yet there was life. She saw a sea worm, hardly more than a primitivestomach, glide by the camera’s range. The huge eyes of a cystosoma made her smile.
    It was, in its own way, a kind of fairy land, she thought. Hardly the wasteland a number of oceanographers had once thought. And certainly not the dumping ground certain industries chose to regard it as. It was colorless, true, but those magically transparent, pulsing fish and animals turned it into an eerie wonder.
    Tate was comforted by it, the continuity, the antiquity. The monitor lulled her like an old late-night movie until she was nearly dozing in the chair.
    Then she was blinking, her subconscious struggling to transmit to her eyes what she was viewing.
    Coral crabs. They would colonize any handy structure. And they were busily doing so. It was wood, she realized, leaning forward. It was the hull of a ship, encrusted with life of the deep sea.
    “Bowers.”
    “Just a minute, Tate, I gotta finish ragging on this boy.”
    “Bowers, now!”
    “What’s the hurry?” Forehead furrowed, he swiveled back to her. “Nobody’s going anywhere. Holy hell.” Staring at the monitor, he slipped his chair forward, hitting the necessary controls to stop the camera’s sweep.
    But for the beep of the equipment, the room was silent as the three of them stared at the screen.
    “It could be her.” Tate’s