“A weight. I’m going down with it. It will pull me down a lot faster than I could swim. And forty-three feet is a lot of water.”
“I’ll say it is. You all ready?”
Li nodded his head. He had changed into brief, skin-tight swim trunks. He walked over to the starboard side of the yawl. He took some wooden matches and hurled them into the water.
“What’s that for?” Biff asked.
“I want to find out if there’s much flow here. If there’s any current. I have to judge my dive by the current.”
They watched the matches. They seemed to bob up and down in the same place. Li had tossed them about ten feet from the yawl. As they watched, they saw the distance between yawl and matches closing. It was closing, all right, but slowly.
“Know all I have to, Biff. Very slight current. Nothing to worry about; nothing I have to figure on particularly. Here I go.”
Before Biff could even call “good luck,” Li, the small anchor held in front of him, plunged into the water.
The wait for Li to surface began.