I wrote Sixty-Six Metres over the course of several years, initially stopping after 7 chapters and putting it down for eighteen months while I was working on something else. But it actually started back in 2011 when I had a short story called 'No Diving' published online. It takes place in a Welsh quarry called Dorothea, where the bottom is at just over a hundred metres. It's a dive site that has claimed a few lives, and the story was about a man who had lost his buddy there, and blames himself, so he goes there to commit suicide (to find out whether he does or does not, read the story). You can read it
.
A colleague at work happened to read it and then called me into his office. 'Do you need to talk about it?' he asked, evidently believing it was autobiographical. I laughed, saying it was just a story. 'Sure,' he said. 'Anyway, if you need to talk about it, my door is always open.' I left, thinking, okay, I may have something here.
I began the novel a year later after a back operation which meant I couldn't dive for about a year. I was really missing it. So I got out my laptop and started the novel. Seven chapters contain underwater scenes. Several of them may appear realistic, because they are based on some of my diving experiences, e.g.
Of course there are some things I haven't done, like being chased by Navy SEALs armed with spear guns, or trying to enter a ditched helicopter in the Thames while its blades are slowing down. Well, not yet, anyway. Some things are better left to fiction.
The story grew, and evolved from an adventure into a thriller. I got pretty involved with the characters, especially the bad ones. Danton was based on someone scary I used to know, and Lazarus came out of nowhere, but I knew he had to stay. The protagonist is Nadia, closely followed by Jake, the BSAC instructor from the original short story. But it is Nadia's book, and about her unwillingness to kill, even when she is being hunted by stone cold assassins above and below water.
The other reason I wrote it is that there are so few diving thrillers, and yet the underwater world is so exotic and dangerous. So I tried to capture it. Here's an early scene from the book (which you can pre-order
here), in which a night dive to fifty metres in a Norwegian fjord begins to go seriously wrong...
Excerpt from 66 Metres
The cold hit the
nape of Jake’s neck as he rolled backwards holding mask and regulator in place
with one hand, torch in the other. Chill water seeped into his hood and gloves.
A single droplet defeated his dry suit neck seal and ran down his spine as he
righted himself. Finning to the back of the boat, he shone his torch onto his
left hand to give Andreas the ‘OK’ signal. In that brief moment he caught the
concerned look on Andreas’ face while he lowered the green nightlight into the
water to help them find the boat later.
Jake
turned to the others, giving them time to get adjusted. Their torches, dangling
from lanyards attached to their wrists, shone downwards, cones illuminating the
depths below, sharp halogen light diffusing into shadows. A few silver fish
scurried away from the searchlight beams, unwilling to be lit up as tonight’s main
course for larger fish. Beneath them the abyss of the fjord sucked downwards.
Jake knew the lure of the deep only too well. He lifted his mouth out of the
water.
“Fin to the wall.
We need a frame of reference as we descend, it’ll help avoid narcosis setting
in.”
Jan Erik and
Bjorn turned and finned towards the shore. Jake put his head underwater again
and shone the beam down until it caught the green, orange and red fauna of the
underwater cliff face. He lifted up his head. “This’ll do.” He angled his torch upwards, still
underwater, just enough so he could see their faces clearly, the water
refracting the light through the thin layer of glacier run-off hovering near
the surface, turning their faces a ghostly green. He searched their eyes. Anticipation
had taken over concern. Good. Jan Erik grinned behind his mouthpiece, and
Bjorn’s eyes adopted the look usually reserved for sharking blondes at discos.
They were both
hungry for this, like he’d been ten years ago when he first dived this deep.
The adrenaline rush caught him, too. This
is why I dive. He replaced his regulator, gave them the ‘OK’, then the
thumb-down signal. They returned both signals, and the trio slipped below the
surface.
Jake
dumped air out of his stab jacket and sank backwards, breathing out a little
through his nose into his mask to prevent redeye, and watched them do the same.
He pinched his nose between forefinger and thumb and equalised the pressure his
ears. At six metres he gave them another OK signal, and they returned it. He
did his trademark reverse pirouette and dove down head first, arms folded in
front so he could see both dive computers, equalising his ears every five
metres. Like free-falling, like flying, like surfing, like – diving. All his
problems, petty concerns, worries, and unsatisfied desires, condensed into the
trail of bubbles behind him, cascading up to the real world where they
belonged. He didn’t fin, and every ten metres he jetted a little more air into
his stab jacket, compensating for the rising water pressure.
Bjorn shot down
in front of him, finning hard. In Jake’s headlight Bjorn looked like a
fireball. Clearly he wanted to be first. Jake turned to Jan Erik to stop him
from following suit, shaking a flat hand horizontally. Jan Erik rolled his eyes
inside his mask.
Jake looked down
again but could only see the glow of his light below in a stream of rising
bubbles growing larger as they ascended. Bjorn had disappeared. Dammit! Fatality scenarios swirled into his
mind. Blocking them off, he followed the stream of Bjorn’s bubbles, and checked
his computer. He dolphin-kicked once to arrive faster, but not so fast as to
trigger nitrogen narcosis. Out of the grey the cliff-face appeared again, now a
seventy degree slope, and there was Bjorn, propped on it with his fins, steady
as a rock. Jake sighed through his mouthpiece, and relaxed.
Jake realised he
hadn’t been breathing much, and took three slow breaths. As he neared Bjorn he
checked his own air gauge: two hundred bar, which was plenty. He and Jan Erik
touched the silt with their fins, a couple of metres from Bjorn. Jake checked
both his computers. Fifty metres. Exactly. He took a few more measured breaths.
He didn’t bother to look around – it seemed to be mainly silt anyway – he just
wanted to get them back up to safer depth. He signalled to Jan Erik ‘OK’, then
‘Up’. Jan Erik pretended to wipe a tear from his mask with a gloved finger – he
wanted to stay longer. Jake shook his head, and Jan Erik nodded, returning the
‘Up’ signal. Jake turned to Bjorn, who was still balanced on the tail edge of
his fins, staring down into the abyss. Jake gave him the ‘OK’ signal, then Jan
Erik’s torchlight lit up Bjorn’s eyes. They were bloodshot, glazed,
half-closed, as if he was drunk. Nitrogen narcosis. Shit. At the same time that Jake reached out for him, Bjorn gave
the ‘Down’ signal, and did a pretty good impression of Jake’s reverse
pirouette, and dove deeper into the fjord.
Jake’s fingers
just missed Bjorn’s trailing fin and he watched, unbelieving, as Bjorn spirited
downwards. In the two seconds that followed, he calculated the odds of catching
Bjorn before they went too deep, and whether he should focus on stopping a
single fatality turning into a three-diver fatality, then traded that risk
against trying to explain to Vibeke and the authorities how he’d stood by and
done nothing while watching Bjorn plunge to his death. He flicked his wrist to
Jan Erik, gave the ‘Down’ signal and dolphin-kicked hard after Bjorn.
Jake finned fast
down the escarpment, exhaling steadily. Depth and time were their enemies. The
faster he caught Bjorn, the better. One of his computers, the Aladdin, beeped
an alarm. Sixty metres. The rising partial pressure of oxygen would begin
killing them soon. Breathing hard, with Jan Erik close behind, Jake raced for
Bjorn’s red fins. The second computer, the Suunto, beeped. At last he grabbed
one fin and then a leg, and yanked Bjorn around to face him. Both of them were still
sinking. They bumped into the sludge-covered escarpment like two drunken men
falling down a hill in slow motion. Jake had to let go of his torch. It spun
around wildly, strobing like a disco light as he gripped Bjorn’s harness with
one hand and inflated his stab jacket full of air with the other. Bjorn’s eyes
were nearly closed. Nitrogen narcosis had taken him elsewhere. Jake checked his
second computer, the Suunto – the Aladdin had stopped working – sixty-eight metres.
His fins found purchase on the slope. He flexed his knees and with both hands
shoved Bjorn’s body upwards.
Jan Erik
arrived.
Jake could hear
his own heart pounding. But there was another, stranger, pulsing white noise,
getting louder. The beginnings of oxygen poisoning. He pointed to his inflate button,
and he and Jan Erik both pumped air into their jackets. Jake had just given the
‘Up’ signal when Jan Erik’s eyes went wide, seeing something behind Jake. He
turned just in time to see a snowstorm of descending silt they must have kicked
up whilst chasing Bjorn. The next second it enveloped them like thick soup, and
suddenly he couldn’t even see his outstretched hand. He reached out for Jan
Erik but he was already gone, hopefully upwards. The white noise was now a din
in Jake’s head. He knew what it meant. He was about to black-out. Then he would
sink, and then it would all be over.
He finned hard, worked
his thighs almost into cramp. He had to get up above fifty. Once he was moving
upwards, the air in his jacket would carry on expanding and propel him to the
surface. If he blacked out and didn’t wake up till he reached the surface, it
would be a nasty decompression incident, but that was preferable to the
alternative. It grew more difficult to concentrate. The porridge-like silt
meant he could barely read the Suunto, even when he held it right in front of
his mask.
He suddenly
didn’t know which way was up, or where his torch was. All around him, a sea of
clay and bubbling blackness. White noise roared in his ears. Then he remembered
– follow the bubbles. Watching their
direction in front of his face, he righted himself, kicking hard. Jake felt
himself lifting. He dared to hope, and read the Suunto, counting down the
metres. Fifty-nine, fifty-eight… He was going to make it. His eyes watered
inside his mask. The crushing noise pressed inside his skull. Concentrate! Fifty-three … fifty-two …
fifty-one … fifty-two … fifty-three… No!
That wasn’t possible! How the hell could he be going down? Numbness crept over
him. Unable to fin anymore. His legs not responding. Fuck. Not like this! Seconds, seconds… Then he remembered. He
reached down to his right side and cracked open his emergency cylinder. It blasted
air into his jacket, squeezed it around his chest and shoulders like an airbag.
The white noise whirled like a tornado in his head.
He lost
consciousness.
