Mr. Kill

17

The quarter-ton truck rounded the last corner and the driver’s head, small in the distance, was square and dark, almost-black hair cut very short: Ronald T. Parkwood, the ranking NCO and the only other man besides Vance stationed at the Mount Halla commo site. When he saw the taxicab blocking half the road, a moment of surprise suffused his features, but then hairy forearms took over, jerking the steering wheel to the right, rolling the quarter-ton into a skid. Expertly, he twisted the steering wheel back to the left, turning into the skid, straightening out the truck and slamming, with a horrific crash, into the rear of the little Hyundai sedan. Behind me, Mr. Won groaned.

Ernie and I erupted from our hiding places and sprinted toward the truck, but Parkwood was still in control, rolling forward, shifting gears, finally gunning the engine and making the wheels spin. Laughing, he sped off down the road. An arm reached out of the left cab window, raised in the air, flipping us the bird.

“Dammit!” Ernie shouted.

He jumped into the driver’s side of the cab and tried to start the engine. It only whined in protest; no matter how hard he tried, it wouldn’t turn over.

“Specialist Vance,” I said. “He’s still up there. And there’s a phone. We can call. Come on.”

Ernie and I started up the mountain, running when we could, leaning forward and striding when the incline became too steep. Reluctantly, Mr. Won followed.

We’d chased the Blue Train rapist from Seoul, down the Korean peninsula to its southernmost tip, and then beyond, to this island deep in the heart of the cold Yellow Sea. Now we were truly as far south as it was possible to go and still fall under the purview of the United States Forces Korea. The gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the Mount Halla Communications Center squeaked on its hinges.

“He left it open,” Ernie said, perspiration pouring off his forehead.

“Apparently,” I replied, “he doesn’t plan on coming back.”

The door to the main building had been propped open with an old combat boot.

“He wanted us to enter,” Ernie said.

I nodded.

Behind us, Mr. Won, the cab driver, stood nervously outside the gate, wringing his hands, still staring back down the mountain toward his damaged cab. On the way up, he’d harangued me about how he was a poor man and he couldn’t afford to have the cab repaired-if, in fact, it even could be repaired. I told him to contact the 8th Army Claims Office. He might have to hire an attorney but eventually, they’d make good his loss, not only for repair of the cab but also for lost wages. That’s what I told him. Whether that would come to pass, I couldn’t guarantee.

Unconsciously, Ernie touched the inner pocket of his jacket. Nothing was there. No. 45. But I didn’t think we’d need one. The Blue Train rapist was long gone. What I had to do was find a telephone, contact the Korean National Police, and make sure that Sergeant Ronald T. Parkwood didn’t get off the Island of Cheju.

The communications room was shattered. Metal boxes had huge dents in them, keyboards and control panels had been smashed, wires-some of them still sparking-stuck out in every direction. Clipboards with maintenance checklists on them had been smashed in two.

“Christ,” Ernie said. “He must’ve taken a sledgehammer to this stuff.”

I checked the phones. Dead. So much for calling ahead to the KNPs.

“Where’s Vance?” I said.

Ernie hurried toward the back room. I followed. The living quarters had been similarly smashed. Glassware, metal utensils, pots and pans, chunks of roast beef, and sprays of broccoli were splattered everywhere. An expensive stereo set with microphone lay on its side atop a smashed electric guitar. The single cowboy boot I’d seen before lay beneath a pile of dirty clothes that, incongruously, included a red lace bra.

“Somebody threw a tantrum,” Ernie said.

“Vance!” I shouted. “You in here?”

When no one answered, Ernie and I tiptoed through the mess until we reached the small outdoor exercise area. That’s when we saw him. His arms were tied behind him with a sturdy rope. Somehow, Parkwood had managed to hang him over the pull-up bar, about eight feet off the ground. His knees had been hooked over the bar and then his ankles tied by electric cords securely to his thighs.

“God,” Ernie said. “Must’ve hurt like a bastard.”

Still, that much torture wasn’t enough for Sergeant Ronald T. Parkwood. He’d then tied a twenty-five-pound barbell to an electric circuit wire and attached the other end of the wire in a loop around Specialist Vance’s neck.

Slowly, Vance had been strangled to death.

I could’ve saved him if I’d managed to put it together earlier. On the Blue Train, Runnels the courier had said that the rapist was making his first checkmark on a list of corrective actions. Here at the Mount Halla commo site, Specialist Vance told me they’d failed their IG inspection. The list of deficiencies hanging on clipboards was massive and had to be corrected. If they weren’t corrected-and corrected in a timely fashion-Parkwood would be denied reenlistment.

To civilians, especially civilians with gainful employment, that may not sound like much. But if you have little or no education, and you’ve been trained by the army to do a job that only the military has a need for, and you only have a few more years until you reach your twenty-year retirement, a bar from reenlistment can seem like death. Parkwood had a choice: correct the long list of deficiencies from the IG inspection, or get out of the army. He decided to get out. But before he left, he set about, for some reason known only to himself, to correct his own list of deficiencies in his life, and in so doing he’d murdered innocent people and destroyed the lives of those who had loved them.

A red tongue lolled out of Vance’s open mouth. His upside-down face was purple, wearing an expression as if screaming in horror. Ernie found a butcher knife among the jumbled kitchen utensils and was about to cut Vance down when Mr. Won pushed through the open door behind us.

I swiveled in time to see his face: wide-eyed with terror. Then he turned, grabbed his stomach, and barfed up what must’ve been his breakfast: a half-pound of partially digested cabbage kimchee, a little rice.

Ernie managed to get the cab rolling. Not started, but rolling. When it began gliding downhill, gradually picking up speed, he tried the ignition again. This time it turned over. Still, he kept it in low because the brakes, by now, were totally worthless. I sat up front next to Ernie. A pale-looking Mr. Won sat in back.

We screeched around corners, taking a couple of them on two wheels. When the road leveled even temporarily, Ernie slowed as much as he could, bouncing the side of the cab against boulders, scraping the bumper against bushes, purposely running the tires through mud or thick gravel. Each time Ernie completed such a maneuver, Mr. Won looked as if he was going to be sick again.

Finally, we made it in one piece to the base of the mountain and a few minutes later we pulled up in front of the main gate of the Mount Halla Training Facility. When we hopped out of the cab, Mr. Won held on to my sleeve, a pleading look on his face. I reached in my wallet and handed him one of my business cards; when that wasn’t enough, I pulled the small wad of military payment certificates out of the wallet and handed them to him. About forty bucks.

He held the money with both hands, staring at it forlornly.

“The Eighth Army Claims Office,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

And then I was off.

Ernie was already arguing with the gate guards; shoving one of them, one of them shoving back. After about two minutes of that, Staff Sergeant Warnocki appeared. He listened to our story, scratching his nearly bald head beneath his beret.

Finally, he asked, “So, where did this guy go?”

“That’s what we don’t know,” I replied. “But I have to call the KNPs to make sure that they don’t let him off the island.”

“Okay,” he said. “Come on.”

The three of us trotted over to the orderly room. There I placed an AUTOVON call to Pusan. Inspector Kill picked up immediately. I explained what I knew. He reassured me that he would contact the Korean National Police on Cheju and this man known as Sergeant Ronald T. Parkwood would never leave the island.

I hung up the phone.

“So, did anybody see a quarter-ton truck around here?”

Warnocki shook his head. Then he said, “Wait a minute. This guy, Parkwood, he works at the commo site, right?”

Ernie and I both nodded.

“Works out a lot,” he continued. “Sort of buff, for a rear-echelon puke.”

“That’s him,” I replied.

“He was into diving.” Ernie and I both stared at him blankly. Warnocki continued. “Between cycles, Colonel Laurel gives water survival courses to anybody who’s interested, using the techniques he’s learned from the haenyo.”

“Did you go?” Ernie asked.

“Of course. All the SF personnel did. He’s our commander.”

“And Parkwood went too?”

“Yeah. Held back, though. Didn’t mingle with the rest of us.”

“So if you were trying to get off this island,” Ernie asked, “and you figured that even if you managed to get on the ferry, you’d probably be picked up by the time you landed in Pusan, where would you go?”

“I’d steal a chopper,” Warnocki said.

“And if that wasn’t available?”

“A boat.”

We started to run, but Warnocki shouted for us to wait. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. Inside a padlocked filing cabinet, he lifted out a pistol belt with a holster and strapped a. 45 automatic pistol around his waist. Outside, he slid back the bolt to make sure a round was chambered. The three of us climbed in Warnocki’s jeep.

“Something’s wrong,” Warnocki said.

The three of us were lying on a sand dune, looking down on the boulder-strewn beach next to the ancient wooden quay where the haenyo launch their craft. Lieutenant Colonel Ambrose Q. Laurel was sitting on a flat rock with his back to us, staring out to sea. Two haenyo, clad in full-body wet suits, were working listlessly on repairing nets.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Colonel Laurel never sits still: he’s always on the go. And he wouldn’t ignore the haenyo like that. He has great respect for them.”

Behind us, boots crunched on sand.

I turned to look to see who it was, but by then Warnocki was rolling down the sand dune like a mad dervish. As he rolled, he reached in his holster and somehow pulled out the. 45. He raised it and a shot rang out. I blinked in surprise and struggled to stand up. Ernie was already on his feet, hands held to his side, strangely immobile.

And then I realized why he was immobile.

The death end of an M-16 semiautomatic rifle was pointing right at him.

Sergeant Ronald T. Parkwood held the rifle, pointing it directly at us as he climbed the sand dune. His face was unshaven, his eyes squinting in rage, glaring at us over a nose that wasn’t as huge as portrayed in the witnesses’ sketches, but pretty good-sized anyway.

“Drag him up here,” Parkwood shouted.

And then I realized what he meant. Warnocki sat on the far side of the dune, clutching his right thigh, cursing, trying to stop the bleeding. His. 45 lay a few feet from him in the sand.

“If you try for it,” Parkwood told Warnocki, “you’ll be dead.” Then he turned to us. “Now drag him up and get him down to the beach!”

Ernie and I did what we’d been told. Once we were on the far side of the dune, Warnocki was able to hop, with our help, down the ten yards to the beach. The haenyo had stopped working, and were staring at Parkwood. Colonel Laurel stood up.

“You’ve shot one of my men!” he roared.

“Shut the hell up!” Parkwood replied. “Any more mouth and I’ll shoot you. And these haenyo while I’m at it.”

Colonel Laurel clamped his mangled jaw shut.

“In the boat,” Parkwood said. “Everybody.”

We walked toward the pier.

“Leave him here,” Parkwood said, pointing the rifle at Warnocki, “on the beach where I can see him.”

We sat Staff Sergeant Warnocki down on moist sand.

“Now everybody, up on the quay. Into the boat. And don’t launch until I give the order.”

It was a fairly large boat, with no sail, only two oars on either side. Seating planks crossed it with enough space for about ten people, about the size of a normal fishing party of haenyo. There was an outboard motor at the stern. Colonel Laurel sat farthest forward, then the two haenyo, and finally me and Ernie.

Warnocki stared after us angrily. With that leg, even if he managed to crawl back to the jeep, he wouldn’t get far. He was losing blood at such a rate that he’d probably pass out soon. Still, Parkwood wasn’t taking any chances. Just as the rest of us sat down in the boat, Parkwood, still on the beach, aimed the M-16 rifle at Warnocki and fired.

Warnocki scrambled backward like a crab. The first round missed. The second came closer, grazing Warnocki, I think, on the shoulder. But by then, Warnocki was at the top of another sand dune and rolled down to safety on the other side.

Colonel Laurel had risen to his feet and started moving toward Parkwood. Parkwood swiveled the rifle, pointed it at Laurel, and growled, “Sit down!”

Colonel Laurel sat.

The haenyo stared at the bottom of the boat, as if in complete defeat.

Parkwood braced himself against a wooden stanchion and took a bead on Warnocki’s jeep parked on the edge of the highway some quarter-mile distant. He fired a single round, apparently hitting the radiator because a puff of steam rose into the cold blue sky.

Satisfied, Parkwood sloshed through shallow water and climbed in the boat, sitting with his back to the outboard motor, grinning at us. Keeping the rifle in his lap, he jerked on the lanyard and the engine started up. He unhooked a line and putt-putted the boat away from the quay. After crossing a few small swells, we were at sea, heading I wasn’t sure where.

At first we all just stared at one another and at the still-smoking rifle in Parkwood’s lap. As the ocean rose and fell, it seemed to calm us, and the hopelessness of the situation started to sink in. We were being taken out to sea by a madman, by the Blue Train rapist, by a man who’d already proven his disregard for human life. As long as he held that rifle, we were defenseless against him. And as we floated on this cold, dreary sea, there was no help in sight.

About a mile out, still in sight of the coastline, Parkwood ordered the haenyo off the boat.

Colonel Laurel protested. “We’re too far out,” he said. “They’ll never make it.”

“Bull,” Parkwood replied. “These women can swim for miles.”

The haenyo apparently agreed with him. They glanced back at Colonel Laurel, as if in apology. He nodded back, granting them permission. After all, on Cheju Island women are the breadwinners-or seafood winners, if you will-and these women had families to support. As sleekly as a pair of seals, the two women rolled off the edge of the boat and started paddling their way toward shore. Once they were about a hundred yards away, they stopped and stared back, as if saying good-bye. Then they turned toward shore and started seriously stroking toward home.

Parkwood ordered Ernie and me farther toward the front of the boat. Now the three of us were on one end, Parkwood on the other. He kept his finger in the trigger housing of the M-16, the barrel lying loosely on his lap. With the other hand he steered the boat away from Cheju Island.

“Where are we going, Parkwood?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up.”

I shut up.

After a few minutes of glaring at the endless sea, he spoke again, this time directing his comment to Ernie.

“So, how’s Marnie?” he asked.

“Marnie?” Ernie was as surprised as I was.

“You know who I’m talking about,” Parkwood replied. “Is she still screwing Freddy Ray?”

The original complaints by the Country Western All Stars regarding various missing items-a microphone, a pair of panties, and finally a single cowboy boot-we had assumed were the results of carelessness or the booty of the occasional souvenir-hunting thief. They had seen a pattern in it; Ernie and I hadn’t. Now I realized that those were precisely the items that I’d seen earlier in the living quarters at the commo site atop Mount Halla, all jumbled in with a ton of other items, but there nevertheless. Most recently I’d also seen a red lace bra and panties. Originally, I’d written it off to G.I. bravado. There’s not a barracks in the US Army where a set of female panties isn’t prominently displayed somewhere, as a trophy of conquest.

“How long have you been stalking the Country Western All Stars?” I asked.

Parkwood grinned at me. “Ever since I saw the USO flyer in our weekly distribution. I haven’t missed a performance. Except for maybe the one tonight.” He grinned more broadly.

“Where are they playing tonight?” I asked.

“I thought you two were supposed to be watching them. At least I know Ernie here was staying as close to Marnie as he possibly could.”

It’s a crawly type of feeling to know that someone has been watching you, especially when we were the ones who were supposed to be providing security. But Parkwood was a nondescript kind of G.I.-a little under six feet tall, not heavy, not skinny, Caucasian with brown eyes and brown hair; probably the most prevalent description possible in the United States Army. All he had to do was sit quietly and he’d blend into any crowd. We’d never see him. And we never had.

The only thing unusual about him was his nose, round-tipped and slightly longer than normal.

“Did you pay Vance,” I asked, “to cover for you while you traveled around the country?”

“Hell, no. I wouldn’t pay that wimp nothing. He did what I told him and he was glad to do it.”

“Glad?” Ernie asked.

“Yeah, glad. So I wouldn’t beat the shit out of him.”

Parkwood guffawed at this, finding himself enormously funny.

Behind me, molars ground in the remnants of Colonel Laurel’s jaw. He wanted to try something, but it would be suicide and he knew it. Still, our odds might not get better, no matter how the scenario played out. Was Parkwood just going to force Ernie and me off the boat, so we could die out here, without wet suits, in the middle of the cold Yellow Sea? Or would he shoot us first? I decided to ask.

“Why did you bring us along, Parkwood? Why not just waste us back on the beach?”

Ernie flinched. Parkwood noticed it and grinned.

“Good thinking,” he told me. “Why not just waste you? I thought of that. But there’s always somebody who puts two and two together, and the ROK Navy patrols these waters like crazy, so I figured I’d better take a little insurance with me.”

“We’re hostages,” Ernie said.

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

I wanted to ask him about the rapes, but I decided not to ask directly. Parkwood was a guy who liked clever conversation, at least when he was the one holding an M-16.

“Those fences,” I said, “at the Anyang Railroad Station must’ve been quite a climb.”

“Not when you’re in good shape.” He took his hand off the rudder and stared at his palm. “I did cut myself, though.”

The boat swerved against the choppy sea. Quickly, Parkwood grabbed the rudder again and steered the little boat toward the north, or at least what I thought was the north. By now, we were out of sight of Cheju Island. How could Parkwood be so confident that he was heading in the right direction? Probably just counting on blind luck. Most people don’t realize that the Republic of Korea, besides the main land mass of the Korean peninsula, is composed of about 5,000 islands, Cheju being merely the largest among many. The Koreans are an ancient seafaring people. If Parkwood kept steering us in the general direction of north, he’d hit something eventually.

The air was growing increasingly frigid, and the steady sea spray battering my face and body didn’t help much. Ernie, so angry he could hardly talk, was turning blue. After more than an hour, Parkwood spotted something ahead of us.

“There it is,” he said. “Chujagun Island. We pass through the channel there and then it’s only a couple of more hours to the mainland.”

Parkwood was heading directly to the mainland, rather than traveling the much longer northeasterly route to Pusan.

“You’ve traveled by boat before?” I asked.

“Beats the ferry.”

Which is one of the reasons why we never saw his name on the Pusan-to-Cheju manifests.

“How’d you know,” I asked, “that day in Anyang, that the Blue Train was going to stop to let another train pass?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I knew about the assassination, but I had no idea when the funeral train would come by.”

“So how did you plan to escape once you arrived at the Seoul Station?”

He shrugged. “Just winged it.”

“You have a lot of confidence in your abilities,” Ernie said.

“I’ve been at this a long time,” he said.

“‘At this’?”

“Yeah. Since I was a kid.”

Parkwood told us about his first train ride. It was back in the early fifties: ’54 or ’55, he thought, although he was too young at the time to be sure. Back then, the Super Chief of the Santa Fe Railroad was still a major mode of transportation to and from the West Coast.

“We boarded the train at Union Station in Los Angeles,” Parkwood told us. “Me, my mom, and my younger sister. The three of us, all dressed up like people did in those days. Me wearing a little suit with short pants and a bow tie, my sister with a new dress and a straw hat with a red ribbon on it. My mom, of course, looked like a blonde version of Barbara Stanwyck with a tight black skirt and net stockings and a tight vest to show off her figure. She even wore a pillbox hat with a half-veil on it, all the rage in those days.”

“Other than the clothes,” I said, “she looked like Marnie.”

“Oh, a pop psychologist.” He gazed out at sea and then back at me. “I guess she did, a little. We were quite a trio, and my mom said my dad hadn’t seen us off because he was busy working, but we all knew the truth. They’d fought, he’d left, and, for what seemed a long time to me at the time, he hadn’t been back. Other guys started showing up in our apartment. ‘Uncles,’ my mom called them. And then we boarded the train to go back east, to her parents’ house in Denver.”

Colonel Laurel turned his head as discreetly as he could, using his peripheral vision to scan the horizon.

“At each stop,” Parkwood continued, “my mom would tell us to wait and she’d get off the train to buy some Life Savers, and some cigarettes for herself. My sister and I were very well behaved compared to other kids: we didn’t complain and whine, and we didn’t make noise when the lights were lowered at night and people pushed their seats back to get some sleep. But I did worry when my mother left the train. I worried that she’d have to wait in line too long, that a cashier would be slow in making change. I worried that she might not return to the train in time. But she always did, just before the conductor yelled, ‘All Aboard!’ and the train pulled out of the station. The stops were mostly desert stations made of adobe and brick, with Indian women in bowler hats and blankets squatting in front of handmade pottery.”

Ernie interrupted. “Can you get to the point, Parkwood, while we’re still young?”

Parkwood grinned. “While I’m holding the rifle,” he said, “you have to listen.”

Ernie grunted.

Parkwood continued. “Finally, we reached the Rocky Mountains. At night, rain squalls and thunder and lightning reached out from jagged peaks like hands trying to grab us. And always the clickety-clack of the train’s metal wheels.

“I’m not sure exactly where it was,” Parkwood continued. “Somewhere before we reached Raton Pass, I remember that. My mom told us to wait and be good and she handed me a half-eaten roll of Life Savers. This time she didn’t say why she was getting off. She just did. I waited. So did my sister, although she was younger and therefore less concerned. Finally, I heard the conductor yell, ‘All aboard!’ I stared at the door, the door my mother usually returned through, but she didn’t appear. The engines started and then the train began to roll.

“I considered getting out of my seat to look for her, to tell the conductor to stop, but I did neither. My mother had told me repeatedly not to get out of my seat, and I always listened to her. She was my goddess and I worshiped her. I always did as she ordered.”

Parkwood gave a half laugh and looked around, as if just remembering that he was floating in the middle of the Yellow Sea.

“She never returned, of course,” he said. “My sister and I rode on, alone, wondering what to do, until a nice young man in a neatly pressed suit and a snap-brim hat sat down in the seat my mother had left. He talked to us. Nicely. I told him that my mother hadn’t gotten back on at the last stop. He nodded kindly and told me that she would almost surely catch up with us, maybe at the next stop, maybe at our destination, but there was nothing to worry about. I felt so grateful to him for saying that.

“My sister had to go to the bathroom. She’d been waiting for my mom to return because Mom always told her not to go by herself. The nice young man offered to take her. Together, they walked off hand in hand. They were gone a long time.”

Parkwood stared at us.

“It all seems obvious now, doesn’t it? A woman who’s lost her husband no longer wants the responsibility of raising two brats, so she takes off. A man riding on a train sees an opportunity and takes advantage of it and gets himself a little four-year-old stuff in the rolling bathroom of a train.”

Ernie stared at Parkwood with unalloyed disgust.

“So you’ve had a tough time, Parkwood. Welcome to the club. But that doesn’t justify the rape of two women, the murder of one, and certainly not the torture and murder of a fellow soldier, Specialist Vance.”

Parkwood grinned at him, happy at being the center of attention. Ernie decided to pop his bubble.

“Later, the nice-looking man on the Super Chief took you into the bathroom too, didn’t he, Parkwood?”

Parkwood’s fist tightened around the trigger housing. “No! He didn’t!”

“Sure he did,” Ernie said. “That’s why you added Vance to your ‘checklist.’ Probably reminded you of him. You probably don’t even have a sister. And when the dapper young man took you into the men’s room, you sort of liked it. You liked the stink and the degradation of it, and the rough sex. Maybe you liked it a little too much.”

The sea was choppier now. We were entering an isthmus about a half mile in width between two islands. Parkwood raised the rifle; but instead of pointing it at Ernie, he pointed it at me.

“You keep it up,” Parkwood told Ernie, “and I’ll add him to my checklist. I’ll force him off the boat. You can watch him drown.”

Ernie shrugged. “He’s a good swimmer.”

“Not with a bullet in his thigh, he’s not.”

Colonel Laurel seemed to have spotted something. I wasn’t sure what, but I expected him to make a move. I braced myself.

“Parkwood!” Laurel shouted. “You put that goddamn weapon down. Now! And quit pointing it at your fellow soldiers.”

Parkwood gazed at him curiously. “Are you serious?”

The colonel’s mangled jaw tightened. He sat up as straight as he could in the rocking boat. “You’re damn right, I’m serious. You’ve done enough damage.” He started to rise. “Now give me that goddamn weapon!”

With his right hand, Parkwood kept the rifle pointed straight ahead, his left hand steering the outboard motor. He continued to stare at Colonel Laurel, flabbergasted at his temerity to demand, in this little boat, that the M-16 rifle be turned over to him. Colonel Laurel rose to his full height.

Behind Parkwood, and all around the boat, black orbs rose out of the water. Startled, Parkwood turned to see what they were, and as he did so, I leaped toward him. Ernie yelled, and before Parkwood could turn and re-aim the weapon, we were on him. Scratching, clawing, in a frantic lust to turn the barrel of the M-16 away from us and up toward the sky. Ernie hit the rifle, and it pointed into the sea. I plowed into Parkwood’s chest just as the rifle fired. He reeled backward, letting go of the outboard motor, which immediately sputtered and died. Somehow he kept his balance and shoved me back slightly, but there was no stopping me. I bulled forward. Parkwood tilted backward and, with me following, we both fell into the sea.

The cold sucked every ounce of breath out of my lungs. I was underwater. I couldn’t breathe. Above, in the murky green, the boat rolled slowly by and all around me black silhouettes glided by. Seals, I thought. Or sharks.

And then one of them bit me.