Cradle (12 page)

The three whales remained in the same area where they had been before. Looking up
at them from below, Carol thought that they looked like sentinels guarding a particular
piece of ocean territory. Back and forth they swam, inscribing a total composite arc
of maybe two hundred yards. Whatever it had been that had caused one of the whales
to vary its swimming pattern and run into Nick was certainly unclear. But Carol did
not want to risk another encounter. She motioned for Nick to follow her and they swam
about thirty yards away, to a sandy trench between the reefs.

Carol planned to return to the surface as soon as it was clear that Nick was not seriously
hurt. But while Carol was thoroughly surveying his body to make certain that she had
not overlooked any serious lacerations in her hurried check, Nick discovered two parallel
indentations in the sand below him. He grabbed Carol’s arm to show her what he had
found. The indentations were grooved like tank tracks and were about three inches
deep. They appeared to be fresh. In one direction the tracks ran toward the reef fissure
underneath the three whales. In the other direction the parallel lines extended as
far as Nick and Carol could see, running along the sandy trench between the two major
reefs in the area.

Nick pointed up the trench and then swam away in that direction, following the tracks
with fascination. He did not turn around to see if Carol was following. Carol quickly
backtracked as close to the fissure as she dared (was she imagining again or were
the three whales watching her as she crept along the ocean floor?) to take some pictures
and to verify that the tracks did indeed emanate from the opening in the reef. She
thought she saw a network of similar indentations converging just in front of the
fissure, but she did not tarry long. She didn’t want to be separated from Nick in
this spooky place. When she turned around, he was just barely in sight. But he had
fortunately stopped when he realized that Carol was not behind him. Nick made an apologetic
gesture when she finally caught up with him.

At one point the parallel lines disappeared as the sandy trench turned to rock, but
Nick and Carol located the continuation of the tracks some fifty yards farther along.
The trench eventually became so narrow that they were forced to swim six feet or so
above it to keep from banging against the rocks and coral on either side. Soon thereafter
the tracks and the trench made a left turn and disappeared under an overhang. Carol
and Nick stopped and floated in the water facing each other. They carried on a conversation
with hand gestures. At length, they decided that Carol would go down first to see
if anything was under the overhang, since she wanted a close-up photograph of the
disappearance of the tracks anyway.

Carol swam carefully down to the floor of the trench, skilfully avoiding contact with
the edges of the reef on both sides. Where it disappeared under the overhang, the
trench was just wide enough for her to put one of her flippered feet down lengthwise.
The overhang was about eighteen inches above the floor, but there was no way she could
bend down and look underneath without scraping her face or hands against the reef.
Carol gingerly slid her hand under the overhang in the last direction of the tracks.
Nothing. She would have to brace herself against the rocks and coral and stick her
hand deeper into the area.

While Carol was trying to move herself into a better position, she momentarily lost
her balance and felt the sting of coral on the back of her left thigh.
Ouch
, she thought as she put her right hand back under the overhang,
that’s one for me. One physical reminder of an amazing day. Weird, even. Bizarre whales.
Tank tracks on the bottom of the ocean… what is this?
Carol’s hand closed around what felt like a metallic rod about an inch thick. It
was such a surprising touch that she immediately withdrew her hand; a shudder raced
down her spine. Her heart rate accelerated and she tried to breathe slowly to calm
herself. Then she purposefully put her hand back and found the thing again. Or was
it another object? This time she felt something metallic all right, but it seemed
to be wider and to have four tines like a fork. Carol slid her hand along the object
and refound the rod portion.

From his vantage point above her, Nick could tell that Carol had discovered something.
Now it was his turn to be excited. He swam down to her as she struggled unsuccessfully
to retrieve the object. They changed positions and Nick reached under the projecting
rock. He first touched something that felt like a smooth sphere about the size of
the palm of his hand. Nick could tell that the bottom of the sphere rested on the
sand and that the rod attached to it was elevated by several inches. Nick steadied
himself and jerked on the rod. It moved a little. He moved his grip sideways on the
rod and heaved again. Several more pulls and the object was out from under the overhang.

For almost a minute Nick and Carol hovered over the gold-metallic object lying beneath
them on the sand. Its surface was smooth to the eye as well as to the touch and altogether
it was about eighteen inches long. Nothing but the polished, reflecting surface could
be seen, suggesting that the object was indeed made from some kind of metal. The long
axis of the object was an inch-thick rod that was tapered and worked at one end into
a kind of hook. Four inches back from the hook was the centre of a small sphere, symmetrically
constructed around the rod, whose radius was a little over two inches. The larger
sphere that Nick had felt when he first put his hand under the overhang had a radius
of four inches or so and it was right in the middle of the rod. This sphere was also
perfectly symmetrical around the rod’s axis. Beyond the two spheres the object was
unadorned until the rod broke into four smaller branches, the tines that Carol had
felt, at its other end.

Carol carefully took photographs of the object as it lay exposed in front of the overhang.
Before she was finished, Nick pointed at his watch. They had been underwater almost
an hour. Carol checked her air gauge and found that she was almost into the red. She
waved a sign at Nick and he swam down to pick up the object. It was extremely heavy,
weighing an astonishing twenty pounds or so in Nick’s estimation.
Then it wasn’t caught on anything when I was trying to pull it out, Nick thought,
it’s just that heavy
.

The weight of the object only increased Nick’s excitement, which had begun when he
had first seen the gold colour. Although he had never seen anything quite like this
hook and fork with spheres, he remembered that the heaviest pieces from the wreck
of the
Santa Rosa
had all been made of gold. And this piece was far heavier than anything he had ever
touched.
Jesus
, he thought to himself as he discarded some of the lead weights in his belt to make
it easier for him to carry the object up to the boat,
if there’s even ten pounds of pure gold here, at current market value of a thousand
dollars an ounce, that’s $160,000. And this may just be the beginning. Wherever this
thing came from, there must be more. All right, Williams. This may be your lucky day
.

Carol’s thoughts raced at a mile a minute as she swam in tandem with Nick toward the
anchor rope. She was busy trying to integrate everything she had seen in the last
hour. She was already convinced that everything was somehow associated with the errant
Navy missile—the behaviour of the whales, the golden fork with the hook, the tank
tracks on the bottom of the ocean. But at first Carol had no clue about what the connections
were.

During the swim back Carol suddenly remembered reading some years before a story about
Russian submarine tracks being found on the ocean floor outside a Swedish naval yard.
In her journalistic mind she began to concoct a wild but plausible scenario to explain
everything that she had seen.
Maybe the missile crashed near here and continued to send out data even when it was
underwater
, she thought to herself.
Its electronic signals somehow confused the whales. And maybe those same signals were
picked up by Russian submarines. And American
. Her thoughts came to a temporary dead end for a moment.
So there are at least two choices
, Carol thought again after swimming a few more strokes and watching Nick approach
the anchor rope with the golden object still firmly in his hand.
Either I’ve found a Russian plot to locate and steal an American missile. Or the tracks
and golden fork are somehow part of an American effort to find the missile without
alerting the public. It doesn’t matter. Either way it’s a big story. But I must take
that golden thing to Dale and MOI to analyse
.

Both Nick and Carol were dangerously low on air by the time they reached the surface
beside the
Florida Queen
. They called Troy to give them a hand with their prize from the deep. Carol and Nick
were exhausted when they finally crawled into the boat. But they were also both exhilarated
with the discoveries of the afternoon. Everyone started talking at once. Troy had
a story to tell too, for he had seen something unusual on the monitor while Nick and
Carol were following the tracks in the trench. Nick pulled some beer and sandwiches
out of the refrigerator and Carol tended her coral cuts. The laughing trio sat down
on the deck chairs together as the sun was setting. They had much to talk about during
the ninety-minute trip back to Key West.

The camaraderie lasted most of the way back to the marina. Nick was no longer taciturn.
Excited by what he believed was the initial find of a major sunken treasure, he was
a positive chatterbox. He retold twice his version of the whale encounter. Nick was
certain that the collision was accidental, that the whale simply happened to be moving
in that direction for some other reason and just paid no attention to the fact that
Nick was there.

‘Impossible.’ Nick had scoffed when Carol had initially suggested that the whale might
have hit him deliberately because he was heading for the fissure in the reef. ‘Whoever
heard of whales guarding a spot in the ocean. Besides, if your theory’s right, then
why didn’t the whale
really
smack me, and finish me off? You’re asking me to accept that the whales were protecting
an underground cave? And then that they were warning me to stay away with that gentle
push?’ He laughed good-naturedly. ‘Let me ask you something, Miss Dawson,’ he said.
‘Do you believe in elves and fairies?’

‘From where I was watching,’ Carol replied, ‘it sure looked as if the whole thing
was planned.’ She did not pursue the subject further. In fact, after her initial outbursts,
Carol did not talk very much about anything on the trip back to Key West. She too
was excited and she was worried that if she talked too much she might inadvertently
give away her thoughts about the possible connection between what they had seen and
the lost Navy missile. So she didn’t mention either her eerie fear just before the
whale hit Nick or the network of tracks she thought she saw converging just under
the base of the fissure.

As far as Nick was concerned, the object they had retrieved was definitely part of
a treasure. It didn’t bother him that it was hidden under an overhang at the end of
some strange tracks. He shrugged it off by suggesting that maybe somebody had found
the sunken treasure several years earlier and then tried to hide a few of the better
pieces. (But why were the tracks fresh? And what had made them? Carol wanted to ask
these questions but realized it was in her best interests for Nick to remain convinced
that he had found treasure.) Nick was blind to all arguments and even facts that didn’t
support his treasure theory. It was emotionally vital to him for the gold fork thing
to be the first piece of a great discovery. And like many people, Nick was capable
of suspending his normally sharp critical faculties when he had a vested emotional
involvement in an issue.

When Nick and Carol finally quieted down enough to listen, Troy had a chance to tell
his own story. ‘After you guys left the area underneath the boat, I guess to follow
your trench, I became worried about you and started watching the screen more often.
Now, angel, by this time those three whales had been swimming about in that same dumb
pattern for over an hour. So I wasn’t checking them real close.’

Troy was up out of his deck chair, walking back and forth in front of Carol and Nick.
It was a dark night; low clouds had rolled in from the north to block the moon and
obscure most of the stars. The spotlight from the top of the canopy occasionally caught
Troy’s chiselled features as he moved in and out of the shadows. ‘Because I wanted
to find you guys, I lifted the alarm suppression the way you showed me and was regularly
serenaded by the
ding-dong-ding
from the three whales. Now listen to this. After a couple of minutes, I heard a fourth
alarm. I looked down at the monitor, expecting to see one of you, and I saw another
whale, same species, swimming underneath the other three and in the opposite direction.
Within ten seconds the original whales turned, breaking their long pattern, and followed
the new whale off the monitor to the left. They never returned.’

Troy wound up the story with a dramatic inflection and Nick laughed out loud, ‘Jesus,
Jefferson, you do have a way of telling a story. I suppose you’re going to tell me
now that these whales were stationed there and the new guy came along with different
orders. Or something like that. Christ, between you and Carol, you’ll have me believe
that the whales are organized into covens or whatever.’ Nick stopped for a moment.
Troy was disappointed that Carol didn’t say anything.

‘Now,’ Nick continued, dismissing Troy’s story and getting to the subject he had been
thinking about for almost an hour, ‘we have an important issue to discuss. We have
brought back something from the ocean that could conceivably be worth a lot of money.
If nobody else can prove conclusively that it is theirs, then it will belong to the
finders.’ Nick looked first at Carol and then at Troy. ‘Even though I’m captain and
owner of this boat and I carried the thing up from the ocean floor, I’m prepared to
offer that we split the proceeds in thirds. Does that sound fair enough to the two
of you?’