Ghost River by Jon Coon (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

From his hospital bed, Nick did research on ways to detonate electric blasting caps underwater and found that while in theory it could be done, in practice neither the Navy nor the commercial divers ever used anything but one-hundred grain detonating cord, also called primacord, and number eight blasting caps underwater. According to Nick, the EOD dive team was safe to remove the shaped charges.

However, after his conversation with Charlie’s ghost, Gabe knew better. There was no way those charges could have gone off accidentally, and there was no way to explain how he knew what he knew without speaking the unspeakable.

When the briefing was over, Gabe suited up for the dive and paused to go over the dive plan with Lomis one more time.

“Randy, I know Nick doesn’t believe it’s possible, but I think we need to be really careful down there. I’ve got a bad feeling that Charlie set off one or more of those shaped charges. So watch yourself. Don’t get tangled up in that mess. And let’s double-check everything. Even after we’re sure the site is clear.”

“Roger that. I’ll feel better about it with just you and me making these dives. How about if I send the rest of the team to survey the scouring under the new bridge while we finish up here?”

“Good plan. Everyone goes home in one piece. When we’re done clearing the site, I’ll find Charlie and send up a buoy. Jim will call the guys in the inflatable boat. They’ll send down the stretcher and body bag.”

“Sure you don’t want my help bagging him?”

“It’s going to be a mess. He’s been there a while. I’ll do it.”

“Your call, but shout if you need me,” Randy answered and waited for Jim. Jim checked the gear, head to toe, tapped his shoulder, and Randy jumped from the deck of the thirty-foot Boston Whaler Outrage, one of the departments’ newest vessels. Gabe was quickly behind him, dropping into the swirling water. Darkness closed in around him as he went down the line to the bottom.

The river felt more oppressive. The current was still ripping, the water was still freezing, it was still black as a coal mine without a candle or a canary, but it felt different. It felt colder. It felt darker and more claustrophobic. It felt malevolent. It was as though the river had a spirit, angry and vengeful. Gabe shuddered and repeated his pre-dive prayer.

“Eternal Father, strong to save,

Have mercy on me,

A wretched sinner.

In the name of Your Son,

Who bound the wave and calmed the sea,

Please don’t add my name

To the list of those many brave divers who lie asleep

In the deep.

At least not today.

Amen.”

On his knees in the mud, holding onto the downline, Gabe paused to breathe and gather his thoughts before giving Jim the customary, “On bottom.” Jim acknowledged, and Gabe attached a search-line to a ring on the downline and moved up current until he was in the steel. Moving slowly, cautiously, stopping from time to time to grope in the darkness ahead, more than once he touched jagged angle iron and raw edged beams as he crisscrossed the bottom. As he moved he followed the web of wiring. He cut the wires and then removed the shaped charges, putting them in a mesh bag.

Moving along the small jump-reel line Gabe left on last night’s dive, Randy Lomis was soon upstream back in the twisted bridge wreckage. As he worked his way through the steel maze, he followed the beams and wind bracing, carefully finding and cutting the tangle of wires. As he moved, he memorized the patterns of the old bridge, making a map in his mind.

All the blasting cap wires were plastic coated and the same diameter, so when his hand hit a bare steel wire, bigger than the others, he remembered what Gabe had said and was immediately suspicious.

He tied a loop in a jump reel line around it and slid the loop along the wire. He was careful to stay above or outside the steel beams so as not to foul his umbilical, and after fifteen arm spans the wire terminated in an object Nick would not have recognized, even from his Navy days. Lomis pulled off a glove to get a better feel for the object and realized it could only be one thing: a spring tension detonator like the ones used on the M18A1 Claymore mines. Only this was much smaller and wired to a battery pack, never used underwater by military divers.

Randy reached into the leg pocket of his drysuit, grabbed a side cutter and cut the trip wire. He then carefully unwound the wire holding the detonator to the beam. He stuffed the detonator and the battery pack in his leg pocket and pulled his glove back on over frozen fingers.

“Gabe?” Randy said into the Aga mask com. “Heads up, you were right. I’ve got a trip wire and some kind of detonator. Watch yourself. Nick was wrong about not being able to detonate these charges underwater.”

No doubt about it now, Charlie was murdered. Cold and tired, Gabe collected the last of the shaped charges he could find then called to Jim to pick him up. After a short surface break and conversation with Randy about the next dive, he dropped back down the line after his usual pre-dive gear check and prayer and paused on the bottom to get reoriented. He and Randy covered the bottom a second time confirming the shaped charges and wiring web were removed. They surfaced, rested for a required surface interval, and then prepared for a final dive. Gabe had laid a line to Charlie using a jump-reel, so finding the body was straight-forward.

He crawled from the downline along the jump-reel line, into the current, and moved straight to the body. With turbulence and sediment so thick no light could have helped, he searched with his hands until he felt the softness