Something’s Down There

Chapter Four

An hour before sunup Billy shook Hooker awake from a dream that had him clawing at an invisible something, and when his eyes opened there was a fine bead of sweat across his upper lip. This was another thing Billy found hard to understand: the mainlanders’ inability to sleep peacefully. All too often he had seen the movement in Hooker’s hands and he knew his boss was off in the night world, his fingers around a gun.

“Mr. Hooker, sar, it is time.”

Abruptly awake, Hooker said, “It’s still dark.”

“The sun, she will soon be seeing you.”

With a nod, Hooker sat up and rubbed his face. He could smell the coffee brewing and heard fat sizzling in the pan, so he knew he could shower and shave before breakfast. A good man, that Billy Bright, he thought. Each day he was bringing him closer into the native ways until there would come a time when he would almost be the equal of Billy himself. Hooker let a small grin crease his face. Wouldn’t be too bad at that, he reflected.

On the way down to the boat Hooker asked, “What did you pack for lunch, Billy?”

“I don’t think you’d be pleased to know, sar.”

“Then why did you make it?”

“Because, sar, you will be pleased with the taste.”

“Gonna be one of those days,” Hooker said under his breath.

“What was that, sar?”

“A nice day,” he told him.

“Yes, a very nice day.” There was that lilt in the Carib’s voice and Hooker knew that Billy had heard what he said.

Guy’s got ears like a deer, he mused, silently this time.

An hour after they left the dock the cooler box at the transom was packed with fish, carefully iced down. Their catch would hold them for a full week, including a few cookouts for the friends in the area.

Times like this Billy fully appreciated his boss. He was not one to waste a resource like some of the other city people did. No fish would be hung on nails to be photographed, then discarded to the crabs under the pier. It wasn’t just sport. What they caught, they would eat.

“How’d you know these fish would run today, Billy?”

“It is something they do the same day every year, sar.”

“Since when do you own a calendar?”

Billy simply shrugged. “I can tell,” he said.

“Native intuition,” Hooker said, smiling.

Somehow, Billy grasped the meaning and smiled back. “Something like that, sar.”

“Then how about the others? We’re out here all alone.” He saw the little scowl of consternation on Billy’s face and let out a laugh. “Okay,” he told him, “I get it. These are fish for us city types. You only eat them when you douse them in that crazy sauce.”

“But they make good bait too, sar.”

“For what?”

“The great bill fish.”

“And what would you do if you caught one?”

“We would have a mighty feast, sar. All the village would come. We could invite the lady from the other side of the island...”

“Billy...”

“Okay, sar, I knock it up.”

“Knock it off, Billy.”

“There is a difference?”

“Yes. A very big difference.”

For a full thirty seconds Billy had been scanning the horizon, now his eyes were fixed on one area. Hooker squinted, trying to see what he was looking at, then finally spotted a pinpoint of a dot where the ocean met the sky. He was reaching for the binoculars when Billy said, “She be the Tellig, Mr. Hooker, sar.”

When he had focused the glasses, Hooker nodded. “How’d you know that?”

“Her name is on the stern, sar,” Billy said jokingly.

Hooker didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

“Know where she’s heading?”

“Scara Island. Only place in that direction.” He walked to the wheel, made a twelve-degree correction to the east and locked it in place. “You want to go see,” he stated.

“Why?”

Billy shrugged again and simply said, “Lady on board. You know her.”

So, anything that went on in the bar was now public knowledge whether anyone was there or not. He wondered whether they had ESP or were all mind readers. He hoped it wasn’t the latter.

There were eight of them in all, four-foot-high spheres with equally spaced protrusions over their surfaces, completely covered with a coral formation from long years under the water. They nestled in soft beds of sand where the tides had deposited them, as far beachward as nature could move them. All around were pieces of wreckage and odd flotsam that had followed the sea drift to this one place. Palm trees, ripped from their islands by storms, lay like matchsticks the full length of the beach, and higher up wooden hatch covers from old sailing ships lay like white, feathery skeletons on the sand.

Chana finished photographing the last of the relics and put the camera back in the case. Talbot had carefully chipped away the coral in an area Lee Colbert had indicated until the identifying numbers were exposed. “They’re ours,” he said.

“I wonder how long they’ve been here,” Chana said.

“Considering how they’re sitting on top of other wreckage, they seem to be the latest stuff to arrive. There’s not much sand buildup around them at all.” He paused, thought a moment, then, “There was a full moon two weeks ago. If they came in on a flood tide, then it would account for their position. They were just set down nice and gently.”

“Not hard enough to jar those fuses?”

“That coral formation was heavy enough to stop that. Besides, there’s probably a good rust seizure around the base of those spurs where they enter the main body.”

“Maybe,” Chana said.

“Yes. Maybe.”

“You think they’re capable of detonation?”

“I wouldn’t want to be sitting on one if you hit it with a sledgehammer.”

“What about Berger’s theory of blast attrition?”

Lee gave her a curious stare and got right to the point. “If you want to set one off, let’s do it. We haven’t got the equipment to fire at one from the ship, but we do have the makings for our own detonator.”

Chana tapped the large camera bag she was carrying. “I’ve already brought the plastic and fuses.”

“I thought you would,” Lee said. “C-4?”

“A low-intensity variant. The activator is on the ship. We can blow it from there.”

“Then let’s get on with it. That one at the south end is the farthest away, so there shouldn’t be a concussion effect on the others.”

“Suppose a hunk of shrapnel hits one?” Talbot asked.

“That would answer the other question. Do the fuses still work.”

It was a full hour before they were satisfied with the placement of the plastic explosive. Sand had been carefully piled up around the aged mine to constrict any outward force, and all debris pulled as far back from the charge as they could get it. When the fuse was finally set and the tiny antenna checked, the three of them got back on the dinghy, started up the fifteen-horsepower Johnson outboard and headed back to the Tellig.

From a mile offshore they watched the beach while Chana went up to the bow, held out the electronic activator and flicked the switch to on.

All they saw was a small puff of sand onshore as the mine reacted with a miniature explosion whose noise, coming seconds later, was little more than a dull plop.

“Looks like Berger was right,” Chana told them.

Lee Colbert switched off the power to the long-lensed video camera and pulled out the tape. “Want to see it close-up?” He slid the tape into the viewer and turned it on.

Distance meant nothing to modern technology. The camera put the viewer directly in front of the sand-packed mine so that every detail was visible. They could see the plastic with its fuse and antenna plastered to the coral, the scattered wreckage around the area and a lone fiddler crab that had wandered too far from its shoreline burrow.

And then it went off. There was no startling explosion, just a silent eruption of sand and metal, with the big steel ball seeming to break apart into dozens of chunks in the middle of a rain of sand. It all settled down quickly, lay there a moment, then the screen went blank.

“I guess Berger was right,” Lee said. “It’ll make an interesting report.”

“Run it again,” Chana told him.

“What’s to see?”

“Maybe that fiddler crab escaped,” Talbot snickered.

“Just do it,” Chana stated.

With a shrug Lee rewound the tape, pushed the button and the scene came alive again. When it got to the end Lee asked quizzically, “So?”

“Once more,” Chana stated.

Lee went through the procedure again. This time Chana held up her hand right after the detonation and just as the picture cleared she said, “Stop.”

Lee hit the pause button.

The mine lay there like something long dead, ugly hunks of metal in a blown-out sand hole. “What do you see?” Chana asked.

After a few seconds Talbot said, “Beats me.”

“You, Lee?”

He shook his head.

“Don’t look at the mine.”

Again they started, but saw nothing at all. Chana picked up a pencil and pointed to a dot in the background at the crest of a sand hill. Lee and Talbot looked at each other, perplexed.

“Tap it up a half second further, Lee.”

He hit the start and off buttons quickly and they looked back at the screen. There was another dot beside the first one.

“Do it once more,” Chana told Lee.

A half second later the two dots were still there, but farther to the right this time. Another time increment and the dots were almost off the screen.

“We had visitors,” Chana said.

“Could have been animals,” Lee added. “Or birds.”

“Let’s keep it as a worst-scenario viewpoint,” Chana said quietly. “They were people.”

“Supposedly, this island is deserted,” Talbot said. “If anyone came here, it would be by boat. In that case, they would have had to land on the far side to keep us from seeing them.” He looked at his watch and frowned. “It would be an hour by the time we sailed around there, so they could be long gone.”

“Why don’t we check while we still have some light?” Chana suggested.

They all agreed, even though they weren’t hopeful about results. As Talbot had said, it was an hour before they made their way around the island and by then the tide was almost full again. They beached the dinghy and looked for signs of other boats having landed, but there were none. The incoming water had totally blocked out any traces of evidence, so they motored back to the Tellig, put the dinghy in the chocks on deck and headed back to their base.

Overhead the stars were beginning to show and there was a dull, ominous rumble of thunder in the west. All around them, the sea was empty of boats. Lee Colbert said wryly, “I wonder if that thing has had its supper tonight.”

Talbot grunted and glanced at the scope on the side scanner. “Well, if modern electronics can pick it up, we’ll see it before it takes a bite out of us.”

“What if one of those mines is floating on the surface directly ahead of us?” Lee said.

“That would make someone I know real happy,” Chana told him.

Hooker had outguessed the crew of the Tellig. It was only by accident that he had picked up the flash of light from the lens of the TV camera and realized that the detonation was being photographed. He knew that they were in a partially exposed position and started to scurry out of sight after the blast; and taking no chances, he boarded the Clamdip, ran for the other end of Scara Island and was out of sight when the Tellig dropped anchor.

The pair was sitting on the side of the inflatable, watching the night close in around them, Billy’s eyes darting toward Hooker every so often. Finally, the big man stood up, stretched, grinned at his buddy and said, “Billy, me boy, don’t get all bent out of shape. We’ll spend the night here on the beach.”

“Oh, mon, I do thank you, sar!”

“Come on, I couldn’t stand your moaning and groaning all the way home. How come you act like some superstitious old lady?”

Billy grinned good-naturedly, now that he knew they could be safe on the sand that night. “That’s why that lady got so old, sar.”

“Okay. Now, tell me something. How long do you think those mines were on Scara?”

“Not long.”

“How many days?”

“Sar, I do not know that, but two months ago I was here and there was nothing on the shore.”

Hooker stretched his legs out and dug holes in the sand with his heels. Seven mines left. The tide brought them in, all bearing signs of deepwater submergence for a long time, most likely since the wartime years of the forties. There were no known minefields in this area that anyone remembered, but here they were, and, most likely, all from the same source.

“Billy... your people tell stories about the old days?”

“That they do, Mr. Hooker, sar.”

“Any that tell about mines like these around here before?”

For a few minutes, Billy let himself get lost in thought. “A very long time ago, yes. Two fishing boats from Ara caught one in a net. One boat wanted to tow it in. The other said it was a bad thing and wouldn’t touch it. They watched while that first boat went very close and saw it touch, then there was a great explosion and the boat was no more.”

“How old were you then, Billy?”

“Maybe eight, maybe ten.” He paused, made a grimace and added, “There was a sinking. Many life jackets floated by. Tins of food.”

“Whose ship was it?”

“I remember... American flag on the jackets. Small, up here on the collar part.”

“Any attempt at recovery?”

“No divers, no cranes. The water is deep there.” He looked at Hooker, a frown crease between his eyes. “What is it you are thinking, sar?”

“If those mines broke loose from a U.S. vessel, the publicity can be pretty bad and right now that wouldn’t be good at all.”

“That one they blew up, sar, it hardly even made a hole in the sand.”

Hooker nodded, toying with an idea. “If a real one, a big fat live one, blew under some important foreign ship, who would know the difference? What a beautiful terrorist operation and all the heat would go right on the U.S. of A.”

“Who would do a thing like that, sar?”

“Nobody you would know, pal, but it’s something to think about.”

“I think about all the work on Corin Island, Mr. Hooker, sar. Many of our people will make more money there than by fishing.”

Hooker shook his head in amazement. “How long have you known about that project, Billy?”

“Six months, maybe, when the lumber ship put in for water. They asked how many men would move there.”

“And...?”

“None of the old men would leave. The young men, they want the money, see new things. They like the new ways.” Billy saw Hooker’s expression and smiled sadly. “Our people, they don’t talk much.”

“You mean to outsiders like me.”

“Yes.”

“Why not?”

“If I say, you will not get mad?”

“No, I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Because to outsiders we are not really people. We only live here. Our language is like for children. Do you know we have words for everything you have?”

A laugh started deep in Hooker’s throat. “Billy, you amaze me. Your insight and intuition are absolutely phenomenal. Can I tell you something now?”

“But certainly, sar.”

“You will not get mad?”

“Never.”

“Okay, buddy.” He let the grin get bigger and said, “You think the same way about us, don’t you?”

“How did you know, sar?”

“Hell, it just figures. Good thing we like each other, though, isn’t it?”

“A very good thing, that, sar.”

“Quit calling me ‘sar.’ My front name is Mako.”

“I do not wish to make Mr. Shark mad, sar.”

“Come on, Billy, he’ll only be mad at me, not at you.”

Billy thought about it for a moment, letting the logic of it sink in. “That may be so. I will give it a try, sar.”

“Let’s forget it, buddy.”

Chana had wanted the meeting held on board the Tellig, but Berger was insistent upon not going aboard any ship at any time, regardless of the consequences. Finally Chana relented and they met again in the same setting as before.

When Berger absorbed the information the team gave him, he nodded solemnly and folded his hands together. “Could be you solved the big mystery.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” Chana stated.

“I don’t like answers that come real fast, lady.”

“Then give us your objections.”

“Look, you people are the brains. I just sit here and watch the world go by. Maybe I’ve been here too long, but I’m thinking more like these islanders do than the crowd in D.C. or Langley.”

“That’s not an objection.”

Berger’s interlaced fingers did a little dance, then he looked at them, each in turn. “If those mines all came from the same source and wound up on Scara, then why didn’t the rest of them do the same?”

Quickly Chana answered, “Because they weren’t all released at the same time. Different tidal effects got them and swept them in another direction. Not everything winds up on Scara.”

“True. If these mines were floating, then why weren’t they spotted? I can see a ship like the Arico Queen missing them, but the fishermen in the small boats see anything—and I mean anything—on the surface when they’re working their lines.”

Lee Colbert broke in with, “We discussed that and came up with a probability. Those mines had minimal flotation. At best, the tops would barely crack the surface, and any wave action at all could make them submerge, then reappear at great intervals. If they were below waterline levels they could make contact without being seen.”

“There was never any blast noise heard.”

“What little noise there was got muffled by the water.”

Berger said, “Ummm,” and twiddled his fingers again. “There was a sighting. Two natives, Poca and Lule Malli, brothers, you know... they saw something enormous. Everyone on the islands knows about that.”

“And everybody in the United States knows about Santa Claus too, only they don’t necessarily believe it. Except for the children, of course.”

Berger pulled his fingers apart and took a deep breath. He was starting to get annoyed again. At one time he thought a life in the States had given him all the answers, and here in the island he would be a man of supreme intelligence and wisdom among a population of inferiors. It didn’t take long for that idea to change. Now, he realized, he was simply tolerated with a good-natured humor, and sometimes pitied because he was deathly afraid of the sea around him. Yet, with all that, he realized how lucky he was and how much he liked it here.

With a deep sigh for their ignorance, Berger said, “I believe it.”

Chana’s eyes narrowed as she starred at him. “You know, Berger, it’s very possible that you’ve outlived your usefulness here. A reorientation program at Langley might be what you need.”

There was a hint of laughter behind Berger’s eyes. He knew it and realized that it was something he had held back too long. He let the smile show on his mouth, and what was in his expression made Colbert and Chana frown somewhat. Softly, Berger said, “Don’t hand me that crap, lady. I may be nothing much as a field hand out here, but I don’t take kindly to threats from you or the president of the U.S.A. or Castro or whoever’s running Russia at this point either. To keep you up to date, my paycheck’s gone into buying this place out along with several other pieces of property in the neighborhood. When Uncle Sam’s lease ran out the owners decided to sell to me rather than renew. I guess that piece of paperwork hasn’t caught up with your department yet. So, if you want an instant resignation from the spook work, just try that reorientation bit on me again.”

The quiet outburst was something neither of them had expected from Berger and they exchanged a quick look. “You surprise me,” Lee Colbert said. “Does the Company know about your attitude?”

“I don’t give a damn if they do or not. Now, do you want to get back to the business at hand?”

Lee Colbert saw the anger rising in Chana’s face and spoke before she could. “All right, forget the islanders. What other proof have we?”

“Mr. Hooker saw tooth marks on the bottom of the Soucan...”

“He thought he saw what looked like teeth marks,” Lee corrected. “That is hardly proof. There were other witnesses and they saw nothing.”

“Only Hooker was watching at the moment.”

“That’s not enough.”

Berger looked at Chana curiously. “Do you believe him?”

Right then she was almost furious enough to call Hooker a bloody liar and an idiot to boot, but she knew she would be wrong and that was one thing she hated most of all to be. She said, “I believe he saw something. How accurate his statement was, I don’t know.”

“What do you believe?” Berger asked her.

“That there was a hole in the bottom. It was big enough to be the result of a low-yield explosive. I don’t believe in teeth marks.”

Berger chuckled again. “That doesn’t leave you much of an option, does it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Until you find the source of those mines and learn how many are floating around, you are going to be on one hell of a fishing expedition. There’s a lot of water out there.”

Rather than answer him, Chana shut the miniature tape recorder off and stood up. Berger’s security clearance was at a level that didn’t require him to know certain facts, and she’d be hanged if she would give him any unnecessary information at all. “We’ll meet again later,” she said.

“I’m sure we will,” Berger told her.

“I trust this place hasn’t gotten into you too far. You did sign certain documents at Langley.”

“Of course, Chana, of course. I really don’t enjoy the thought of being targeted for extermination on account of a silly indiscretion. Such a waste of a bullet.”

“Regulations call for a minimum of two,” she said nastily.

As they left Berger called to her, “I hope they’re head shots. Or large-caliber to penetrate all my fat.”

“Oh, they’ll be both,” Chana told him over her shoulder.

When the door closed Lee shook his head. “You’re a pisser, Chana, a real pisser.” When she looked at him with a smirk he added, “You never mentioned the blast tape to him.”

“No need to know. Why alert anybody? We should be able to learn which boats were out and where they were working.”

“It was a good day. They all were out and working. And nobody is going to tell us anything that isn’t vague and uncertain, so get with it. Look in a different direction.”

Over at the main dock the Clamdip was tied to a piling fore and aft while Billy Bright filled the main tanks with the new unleaded gas. Hooker was seated on the transom, one leg up on the footrest of the fighting chair. He had a can of Miller Lite beer in his hand and when he saw her watching him, he raised it in a mock toast.

“Maybe I will,” Chana told Lee. “Later.”