Beast (12 page)

He found something to wrap his legs around, to steady himself—it was a toilet, for God’s sake, right here on the deck!—and he brought the camera’s viewfinder up to his mask, trying somehow to get it all in frame.

His world became a tiny square with a green light in one corner and some numbers on the bottom.

He felt a change in the rhythm of the water around him, but he didn’t turn to look: It had to be a blip in the current, or perhaps Susie arriving nearby.

He saw a vague, shadowy movement at the farthest left edge of the frame, but he assumed it was an illusion caused by the dappled light.

Something touched him. He jerked, turned, but all he could see was a blur of purple.

And then the something had him around the chest and was squeezing.

He dropped the camera, twisted around, but the something kept squeezing. Now there were stabbing things in it, like knives. He heard a crack—his ribs, breaking like sticks of kindling.

The last thing he saw, in his mask, was a bubble of blood.

Susie could see nothing above, nothing below. She was fighting to stay in control, not to panic. Why hadn’t Scott waited for her? They were supposed to go down together. Lucas had insisted; they had agreed. But no, Scott had gone off on his own. Impatient, selfish. As usual.

She checked her air gauge—1,500 pounds—and her depth gauge—110 feet. She’d never make it. She was gasping, and she could envision air disappearing with every breath. She felt surrounded, compressed, imprisoned. She couldn’t even make it to the surface. She was going to die!

Stop it! she told herself. Everything’s fine. You’re fine.

She clung to the anchor line and closed her eyes, willing herself to take slow, deep breaths. Oxygen nourished her, her brain cleared, panic subsided.

She opened her eyes and looked at her air gauge again: 1,450 pounds.

She decided to drop down the line another fifty feet. Maybe she could at least see the shipwreck from there. Then she’d start up.

Still clutching the rope, she let herself fall. A hundred and twenty feet, 130, 140, then … what was that? Something was moving below. Something was coming up at her.

It had to be Scott. He had seen the wreck and taken his pictures and was already on the way back.

She’d never get to see it. She’d have to settle for Scott’s description—endlessly repeated, inevitably embellished. She’d have to endure his sly asides about this being a “man’s dive, too tough for the girls.”

Too bad, but …

This moving thing, this purplish thing, it wasn’t Scott rising at her. It was huge, so huge it couldn’t possibly be alive. But what was it? What could it— Her last sensation was surprise.

Lucas looked at his watch: 10:59. They’d better be on their way up in the next sixty seconds. If not, he’d have to get on the radio and find out where the nearest decompression chamber was. Because these two were gonna be bent up like corkscrews.

That is, unless they never got there at all, chickened out, maybe hung at 150 feet or so, from where they could just see the shipwreck. It was common enough: Big ships underwater freak a lot of people.

That was it, had to be. They’d gotten halfway down and decided this was out of their league after all. They were at 125, 150. They could stay another five minutes.

11:02.

He lay on the bow and shaded his eyes and stared hard down the anchor line, looking for even a glimmer of one of those snazzy wetsuits.

He heard a noise down aft. Jesus! Stupid bastards had come up away from the anchor line, probably run out of air and shot for the surface. Be lucky if one of them didn’t have an embolism.

Or maybe they’d been decompressing at ten or twenty feet, then come up under the boat. Sure. Made sense.

But why hadn’t he seen them? The water was clear as gin.

He stood up and started aft. The noise was still going on, a weird noise, a wet, sucking kind of noise.

Now he smelled something.

Ammonia. Ammonia? Here?

As he edged along the side of the cabin, the boat suddenly heaved sharply to starboard.

Christ! What was that?

He heard wood crack and splinter.

The boat was listing badly now, he had to struggle to keep his footing. He jumped down into the cockpit. The gin pole was gone, snapped off three feet above the deck.

He looked over the transom, and what he saw froze him and drove the breath from him. It was an eye, an eye as big as the moon, bigger even, in a field of quivering slime the color of arterial blood.

He shouted—not words, just noise—and snapped upright, to flee the eye. He lurched to the right, took a step, but the boat heaved again, and he was thrown backward. His knees struck the transom, his arms flailed out and he tumbled overboard.

MARCUS SHARP CHECKED his fuel gauges and saw that in another fifteen or twenty minutes he’d have to turn back to the base.

He had been aloft for a couple of hours, ostensibly on a routine training patrol, in fact trying to spot shipwrecks. He had circled the island, flown low over the reefs in the north and northwest, looking for ballast piles. He had spotted the known wrecks, the Cristobal Colon and the Caraquet, but nothing new.

He had hoped to find a virgin wreck for Whip, preferably a late-sixteenth-century Spanish ship laden with ingots and gold chains and perhaps some uncut emeralds. But he’d settle for anything old and untouched, to replenish Whip’s rapidly depleting reserves of enthusiasm, hope and money.

Sharp was feeling guilty, because he’d all but promised Whip he could keep that raft, and he’d heard that the police had confiscated it, on the orders of that self-important little shit, St. John.

And it was Sharp’s fault, at least partly, because—as Captain Wallingford had pointed out in his most patronizing way—Sharp had had no authority to deputize Whip Darling to do anything, let alone to give Darling what amounted to evidence. The logic of Sharp’s defense had failed to move Wallingford, who had subjected him to a half-hour lecture on the proper behavior for American servicemen stationed in foreign countries.

Now Sharp was cruising along the South Shore, off Elbow Beach. He could see scores of people frolicking in the surf, and a few snorkelers offshore exploring the wreck of the Pollockshields.

Shark bait, Sharp thought… if there are any sharks left.

The Pollockshields had been a menace for generations. An iron steamer loaded with World War I ammunition, she had sunk on the shallow reefs in 1915. Though much of the ammunition was still live, that wasn’t the problem. The iron was. Snorkelers came out from Elbow Beach and poked around the wreck and got caught in the waves that broke over it, and sometimes they were slammed up against the sharp shards of iron. They’d be cut and bleeding and forced to swim hundreds of yards back to shore, through the calm, murky shallows that were the hunting grounds of reef sharks— or, rather, had been.

At five hundred feet, Sharp made a slow circle over the snorkelers, reassuring himself that no dark shadows were lurking nearby, and then he banked off to the west.

Whip had said a friend of a friend had been poring through the Archives of the Indies in Seville, looking for details of a Spanish fleet that had sunk off Dominica in 1567, when he had seen a reference—almost a parenthesis—about one of the ships being separated from the others early in the voyage and running up on the south side of Bermuda.

Looking for that lost lamb was a shot in the dark, but what the hell … he had nothing better to do.

Sharp’s copilot, a lieutenant junior grade named Forester, finished the copy of People he’d been reading and said, “I gotta take a fearsome leak.”

“Almost home,” Sharp said.

He was about to give up, to gain altitude and turn back to the northeast, when his radio came alive.

“Huey One … Kindley …”

“Go ahead, Kindley… .”

“Feel like a little flake patrol, Lieutenant?”

“If it doesn’t take more’n ten minutes. Otherwise Forester busts a gut and we all swim home. What’s up?”

“A woman called the cops, said she saw a boat go to pieces a mile south of Sou’west Breaker.”

“Go to pieces? What did she mean, blow up?”

“No, that’s the strange part. She said she was looking through her telescope for humpback whales—sometimes she can see ‘em from her house—and she saw this fishing boat, thirty-five or forty feet she says, just… go to pieces. No flame, no smoke, no nothing. It came apart.”

“Sure … fat chance. Okay, I’ll have a look,” Sharp said. “It’s on the way home anyway.”

He pressed his stick to the left, and the helicopter banked off to the south.

Forester said, “Make it fast, or I’m gonna pee in my pants.”

“Grab it and strangle it,” Sharp said. “That’s an order.”

Sharp left Southwest Breaker to his right, so that the sun was almost directly overhead and slightly behind him, and there was no glare on the water. He could see perfectly.

But there was nothing to see.

He flew south for two minutes, then turned southeast. Nothing. Nothing floated, nothing bobbed, nothing broke the endless roll of the blue swells.

“Kindley … Huey One …” Sharp said into his radio. “I gotta break off. Nothing down there.”

“Come on home, Huey One. Probably nothing to it.”

Sharp turned east.

“Hey!” Forester said, and he tapped the Plexiglas beside him and pointed downward.

Sharp banked to the left and looked. He saw two white rubber fenders, then some planks, then, half-submerged, looking like a white blanket covered with blue haze, the entire roof of a boat’s cabin.

“Can’t stop now,” Sharp said, “or we’ll be down there with it.” He set his course at 040, straight for the base.

He had crossed the reef line and was about to be over land when he looked to his right and saw the Privateer chugging slowly westward along the shore.

Go home, he told himself, don’t do this. You don’t need to give Wallingford an excuse to chew your ass a second time.

Then he thought, Screw Wallingford. Sharp had been chewed out by some of the greats, and Wallingford was decidedly junior varsity. What else could they do to him, bring him up for a Captain’s Mast? So what? He was formulating new priorities, and the navy was slipping down the list fast.

He pressed the “talk” button on his microphone and said, “Privateer … Privateer … Privateer … This is Huey One… .”

*

Darling was in the wheelhouse, drinking a cup of tea and wondering how much he could get if he sold his Masonic bottle—it was a good bottle, rare, 170 years old—when the call came over Channel 16.

He picked up the microphone from its hook. “Privateer … go to twenty-seven, Marcus.”

“Going to twenty-seven …”

“More bullshit?” Mike said.

“Wasn’t his fault about the raft,” said Darling. “He tried to do us a good turn.”

“Privateer … Huey One …” said Sharp. “Whip, there’s a boat wrecked about two miles dead ahead of you, call it two-three-zero from where you are. Mile and a half off the beach.”

“Wrecked how?”

“Don’t know. There’s wreckage on and under the surface. I haven’t got fuel left to look for survivors. Police boat’s probably on the way, but you’re closest.”

“Roger that, Marcus. I’ll go check it out.” Darling started to hang up, but then a kindness occurred to him, and he pushed the button again and said, “Hey, Marcus … probably be going out this weekend, if you’re interested.”

There was relief in Sharp’s voice as he replied, “I’ll say … that is, if they don’t have me swabbing latrines.”

Darling replaced the microphone on its hook, dialed the radio back to Channel 16 and said to Mike, “See? Do a good turn for a friend and they give you a reaming. Hell of a note.” He pushed his throttle forward and watched the tachometer needle rise from 1,500 rpms to 2,000.

“Why’d the navy get on Marcus’s case?” asked Mike.

“Why d’you think? ‘Cause the earl of fucking St. John got on theirs.”

Darling was finding himself so angry so often these days that he was beginning to wonder about himself. He’d have to be careful not to let himself slip over the edge into paranoia.

He and Mike had returned the damaged gear to the aquarium and had explained what little they knew about what had happened to it. Darling had begun to outline how he thought new gear might be improved, when the deputy director—a slight, nervous black man whose Vandyke beard, Darling had always believed, was a disguise for his mousy personality—had said, “I’m afraid not.”

“Afraid not what?”

“We’ll be … ah … terminating our agreement with you.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, this was … ah …” He wouldn’t look at Darling. “Expensive equipment … after all.”

“Sharks are big animals … after all… . Jesus, Milton, if you want me to hang the gear at ten feet, sure, nothing’ll touch it. But you want me to hang it down where the action is, maybe actually catch something interesting, there are risks. That’s the whole point.”

“Yes, but … I’m afraid that’s that.”

“Who’s gonna catch your critters for you?”

“Well … that’s yet to be decided.”

Darling had taken a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to suppress the rage—and the fear, he had to admit—at the thought of eight hundred dollars a month vanishing into the ether.

“It’s St. John, isn’t it? …”

Milton had looked away, at the telephone, as if praying for it to ring. “I don’t—”

“Wildlife management. He’s decided wildlife management takes in the aquarium, too … right?”

“You’re jumping to—”

“He’s gonna take my eight hundred a month and go out with a dip net and a case of Budweiser, and when he doesn’t come back with shit, he can blame it on the oil spills off California.” Darling was right, he knew it.

Milton was sweating; his eyes darted from side to side. “For heaven’s sake, Whip …”

“You’re right, Milton, I’m overreacting.” He had walked to the door and opened it. He could see Mike outside, talking to a tortoise so old it was said to have been a gift to Bermuda from Queen Victoria. “But you know what? I feel sorrier for you. I may not make much of a living, but at least I don’t have to earn my pay by kissing the ass of that Irish lizard.”