Surface Interval

Everybody comes home. That’s the only rule.

Twelve days aboard the Aziza on the remote reefs of Sudan’s Red Sea: hammerheads at dawn, a sunken World War II bomb ship, and coral gardens few people have ever seen. For Jonathan and Maggie Henderson, married thirty-three years, it is a chance to leave Houston—and everyone who might need them—far behind.

Then the engines fail in the desolate south. On a perfect morning, at the end of a perfect dive, two fast skiffs come out of the glare.

Within minutes, the captain is bleeding on the salon floor and sixteen Texans are hostages worth millions. Ransom demands go out to Houston. Two divers who never returned to the boat are declared dead.

But the man who counts every diver into and out of the sea has reported a number that is not true.

The gunmen are not all after the same thing. Something dangerous has come aboard in six green crates. And as the deadline closes in, an engineer, a heart surgeon, a disgraced professor, and a quiet grandmother begin to understand that the ransom they are praying for may be the one thing that kills them.

For two divers presumed lost in the current, survival means staying dead. For everyone else, survival will depend on the skills they brought aboard—and the people they are willing to become when there is nowhere left to run.

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