HOLD PRESSURE

Nineteen sailed from Ambergris Caye. Fourteen went into the water.

Ruel Marín is floating face down at the surface of the Great Blue Hole, doing the count he has done on every trip for nine years. Three passes. Four minutes each. Watching for the bubbles that belong to his husband, forty metres below him. He has never once found anything with it. He has never expected to.

At six minutes past nine, the sea underneath him makes a sound.

When the wall comes down, four of them are still alive — sealed into an air pocket under twelve metres of rock, in a room nobody knew existed until it flooded. Getting them out will take a barge, a borrowed pipe, a decompression chamber, and a long chain of people willing to sign their names to numbers they did not see with their own eyes.

The park receipt says fourteen. The dive log says fourteen. The boat’s manifest says fourteen. They are not the same fourteen, and no document made in Belize that morning counted the people who actually entered the water.
Four days. A tide window. A gas supply nobody has weighed.

Somebody is going to have to write down a figure they cannot verify.

One man won’t.

HOLD PRESSURE is a survival thriller with no villain in it — only rock, water, arithmetic, and the ordinary institutional courage and cowardice of people doing a job that has never been done here before. For readers who want the procedure to be real, the danger to be earned, and the count to matter.

From the author of THE FIFTH PIT and WITNESS MARK.