Something’s Down There

Chapter Six

The air had a sticky feel to it, and Mako switched on the old overhead fan. The draft cooled the sweat running down his spine and he leaned back against his chair to scratch the itch it caused, and cursed under his breath because a creepy feeling was all over him now, like a vast invisible cloud that seeped into the chinks of his armor, looking for soft places to spit poisonous darts.

He knew this was going to happen. He knew it when he took his walk out of the building that contained his whole life and he knew it when he bought his boat and when he settled into a routine that began to have some semblance of meaning other than killing or being killed.

Now he realized why some of the older guys had smiled knowingly, because it had happened to them too. They had tried to voluntarily exit a lifestyle they had voluntarily taken on and suddenly found out that nothing was voluntary anymore. You only thought it was voluntarily. You had a great aptitude for secrecy and stealth and violence, and some unseen force guided you to the right door, opened it and pushed you in, and there you were, right where you wanted to be. You were in with the killers, the secret brotherhood of legal, deadly killers, working against other secret brotherhoods almost as deadly as you were. Only you were better paid. Your government had heavier funding for this sort of thing. Their science and technology had made unbelievable things happen. All the spilled blood was blotted up and swept out of sight, and those who participated died as though they had never existed.

And although you were under contract, you could never really quit. Your contract never ran out as it was supposed to.

You only got out when you were dead.

So the other guys smiled. They knew.

And he wasn’t dead yet.

They simply had to let him leave, knowing when the time came for him to be useful again, he would come back. The small communications box and the plastic bag of weaponry he had taken as mementos weren’t trinkets to look at after all. They were there to be used.

Mako had concealed them well. He took the communications box out from its hiding place, making certain none of the telltale signs had been disturbed. The pretuned radio was an exquisite piece of miniaturization, powerful enough to reach any place on earth. He took four flashlight batteries out of their packs, shoved them into their clasps, and a tiny but mighty generator began turning noiselessly to power the unit. From a sealed plastic bag he took the receiver and stuck it in his ear.

Then he pushed the S button for send, heard slight little sounds as circuits were meshing together and a voice answered, “Base here.” It had a mechanical sound so it couldn’t leave an identifiable voiceprint.

“Catcher here,” Mako identified himself, then looked at his watch.

When fourteen seconds had passed he said, “Catcher on-line.”

Exactly five seconds had passed and the mechanical voice said, “Speak.”

Mako didn’t know how it worked, but now both ends were scrambled, and if anyone were tapped in they’d get beehive sounds because this technology was something they hadn’t quite figured out yet.

He said, “BT 13 A.”

They knew him now. The voice transmission broke down to CQ, and Morse code in an old cipher rapped out the message LIMITED USAGE BY RETIRED PERSONNEL ACCEPTED UNDER EMERGENCY CONDITIONS. PROCEED.

Base wasn’t taking any chances with him, he thought. He went to a secondary code so that they’d know he was wise to their actions. His forefinger tapped on the small CQ key and sent back, REQUIRE CURRENT INFORMATION ANTHONY PALLATZO, MARCUS GREY. CQ TRANSMISSION ONLY. 1400 HOURS 8 15.

The time for the return transmission wasn’t right, of course. There was always that possibility of the other side updating its technology, so the actual prearranged time would be an hour and a half later concealed inside a third code. He would have to review that one in his memory banks. Years had passed since he used it last.

Mako put the radio back in its box, touched the concealed self-destruct switch so that he wouldn’t have to worry about its being stolen. Any motion without turning off the arming switch would automatically destroy the ultra-high-tech circuitry. He put the box back where he had gotten it, concealed the site and stood up.

That ought to start some mouths working, Hooker thought. They were a curious bunch at Base, and when his request numbers reached a certain level everybody was going to want to know what was going on. Most likely Chana would put in a request of her own and want to know what the hell he was doing on the site, and she’d really be put out when she didn’t get an answer.

Nobody liked to believe in coincidences, especially when he was right on the spot where somebody was taking down ships. Hooker made a mental note to pick up some stateside newspapers and see what position was being taken by the pundits at the big desks.

Tomorrow at half past three he’d know. Base had great researchers and great connections. Right now he needed some sleep. He woke up twice. Each time, Judy had crept into his subconscious fantasies and jarred his eyes open. When he finally slept it was a welcome relief.

At sunup all the village fishermen were on the Clamdip. It was Billy’s day to make the communal coffee and he threw in his own homemade biscuits to go with it. For a half hour Mako joined the morning festivities, then with a ceremonial crushing and tossing of the paper coffee cups in the metal trash can, everybody got off the Clamdip, went to their own boats and started up the engines.

Hooker let them all leave before he pulled away from the dock. They had serious fishing to do and every minute in their selected areas meant money. He was only going on an exploration trip to Scara Island.

This morning the wind and tide were in their favor and the tip of Scara showed on the horizon in forty minutes. No other boats were anchored off the shore and that was as he expected it to be. As the Clamdip closed in Billy and Hooker could see the trunks of trees newly washed up on the sand and the wreckage of an old dinghy. Through his glasses Mako spotted the blast area where Chana had blown up the mine, but in front of the hole was another spherical shape covered with barnacle encrustation, but clearly identifiable by the studlike trigger mechanisms protruding from its body.

“You see she, sar?”

“When are you going to quit with that ‘sar’ business, Billy?”

“Right away, sar.”

“Great,” Hooker muttered. “And yes, I see she. That’s a new baby up there.”

“You think she could wreck a boat, sar?”

“Billy, that old ordnance can still be pretty hot. It may not do what it was supposed to do, but it sure could put a hole in anything around here.”

“And now you want for me to put in the inflatable?”

“Would you rather swim?” Mako put to him. “That old shark he might still be around.”

“He be your brother, sar, not mine.” He didn’t wait for any more talking. They dropped and set the anchor. Then Billy wrestled the inflatable over the side, lowered the small Johnson outboard down, got in and fitted it on the bracket and waved to Hooker. He came down the boarding ladder carrying a bag of tools, pulled the starter cord and headed for the beach.

At first glance there wasn’t much to see on Scara. The windblown sand had laid a blanket over the rubble, but here and there protuberances jutted through the silicon cover, some identifiable, others not. There were old hatch covers and broken spars from ancient sailing ships, and as if they were dropped haphazardly from the skies above, there were cut timbers from a wrecked cargo of home-building supplies. Now they were fuzzy and warped and of no use except for burning.

Mako and Billy dug around the base of three of the mines, and occasionally they chipped at the coral encasing the metal. Finally Mako found what he wanted. A metal plate was attached to the casing, giving identification numbers and place of origin. Hooker scrutinized it carefully and nodded. “It’s American, all right. The U.S.A. is heading right into a big international garbage pit.”

“Sar... this I do not understand. There is no garbage pit...”

“It’s political, Billy.”

“Bad?”

“Very bad.”

“We can’t blow them like the sailor lady did?”

“There will only be more, Billy.”

Billy thought about it a moment, then said, “You think, sar, she sink those boats?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But sar... how does she make the teeth marks?”

“Beats me, Billy, but somehow I have the feeling that when we know that we’ll know the answer to all of this.”

“For sure, sar?”

“For sure, Billy.”

“Peter-from-the-market, he say you don’t have to see the shark who bite you to know who he is. The marks from his teeth, they tell you.”

“He’s got that right, pal.”

“We both see the marks from the teeth on the Soucan. You remember she?”

“I remember.”

“They were very big, sar.”

“Huge.”

“In mainland books is picture of shark mouth. Four men are standing there and they do not touch the jaws. That mouth could swallow one whole automobile.”

“When do you read these books, Billy?” Mako looked at him incredulously.

The Carib made a noncommittal face. “Sometimes when I clean stateside people’s big boats. They have books on shelves.”

“That was a prehistoric great white shark that could grow to a hundred feet. The smart men refer to it as Carcharodon megalodon.”

“What do you call him, sar?”

“I may call him by your front name if you don’t quit giving me the ‘sar’ stuff.”

Horrified, Billy drew back, stiffening. “Oh, no, sar, please don’t do that! I do not want Mr. Shark to have my name.”

“Billy...,” Mako said, “sharks don’t speak our language.”

Very solemnly Billy replied, “But Mr. Shark... he know. Just like big mako shark down there know you steal his front name too. He know, sar.”

Mako grinned back. It was almost useless to argue with his friend on matters like these.

He watched Billy’s eyes taking in his expression. “What’re you thinking about, mate?”

Billy turned his head and stared at the old relics nestling in the sand. “These have to come up on the big tide, sar. Unless a great wind she blow, only when the moon is full does the tide come high enough to push them to here.”

“What are you getting at, Billy?”

“Big month tide was three days ago.”

Mako saw what he was getting at. The drop-off at the edge of the beach was sharp and deep now, and those mines with so little buoyancy couldn’t float up that slop at all. They would need the flood tide on the full moon to lift them up here.

“Then there has got to be a lot of them out there somewhere,” Mako said.

“Yes.” His word was clear, but there was a question in it.

“Nobody heard any explosions, did they?” Mako put to him.

“Nobody he say nothing,” Billy confirmed. “They hear something, they tell. Make big story out of it.”

“But if they were too far away...”

A spark of interest brought a crease to Billy’s mouth. “You want to make one pop like Tellig lady did?” Hooker nodded. “We got no big gun,” Billy added.

“Got matches?”

“Got that,” Billy told him, with a frown.

“Then get a piece of lumber or something and scrape away those barnacles and that coral. I’ll pick up some timbers and we’ll blaze that baby apart.”

Neither one had far to look. The beach was covered with old, dry lumber, some well tarred, some smelling of turpentine, but all ready enough to turn the cast-iron shell of a mine into a red-hot bubble of destruction.

While Billy was ripping into the white hulls of oversize barnacles, Mako gathered up the kindling, then went back for the heavier pieces that jutted out of the sand. They all came free easily enough, but the last one needed some hard prying to break loose. The end that had been exposed to the sun was weathered into gray fuzziness, but the other end had been well secured from the ravages of sunlight and salt spray, and what he had pulled loose was a hand-crafted beam from an ancient sailing ship. Carved into it by the knife blade of a seaman who had a lot of idle watch time was a beautiful image of an albatross in flight, wings fully outstretched, clutching in its feet a skull-and-crossbones emblem typical of those old pirate vessels. Beneath the carving was the date 1782.

The Albatross. Someplace in Mako’s memory it rang a bell. But hell, it was a common name for a lot of ships. Even the carving could be the fantasy of a bored seaman with nothing to do. But he didn’t put it in his woodpile. He dropped it back on the sand and turned it carving-side down so that he could find it again if he wanted to. Anyway, he had enough for what he wanted to do.

The two of them laid the fire up well, bedded down in the sand below the ball-shaped metal. When everything was ready and Billy had the Johnson outboard started up, Mako lit his match and touched it to the wood. He didn’t need a second match at all. The kindling caught immediately and whatever chemicals had seeped into the wood still held their potency; the flames licked out like huge, snaky fingers and Mako got out of there. Billy backed the inflatable off while Mako was still climbing in and shoved the gear into forward, steering away from the beach.

A quarter mile offshore they watched while a roaring fire churned up a thick streamer of black smoke, pulling it skyward and to the east. They didn’t have to wait long. The gigantic blast wasn’t a bit like the one Chana had set off. This one threw sand and debris soaring into the sky and pieces of it spun uncontrollably in the sun, splashing down in water, one landing so close to them they heard it hissing as it sank.

Mako said, “Damn!”

“That one,” Billy remarked, “she could sink a boat.”

All Mako could do was nod. There was no way of telling how much force was left in those out-of-date explosives unless you blew them, and doing that in less than completely controlled situations would be dangerous.

One thing was for sure... they couldn’t just stay there. Whether the government liked it or not, this was going to become a naval exercise in recovery or demolition.

Chana hit the off switch on the radio so hard that she hurt her finger. Charlie Berger and Lee Colbert sat across the room in quiet contemplation, seemingly placid, but with edges of a smile touching their mouths. Too often they had seen Chana lose her cool when something didn’t live up to her expectations, and now she was going through a wild display of mental pyrotechnics at the Company because they had reaffirmed Hooker’s statement about the ownership of Scara Island. It did, indeed, belong to a native government who had the power to keep anyone off it if they so chose.

“They wouldn’t dare try to stop us,” she stated harshly. “It’s a damned collect-all and the next thing you know they’ll be asking us to sweep it off for them. “

“I doubt it,” Lee told her quietly.

“You doubt everything,” she snapped back. “Whenever they ask anything from the U.S. they get it. Who knows what they’ll want next?”

“Maybe they’ll want us to get out of here,” Charlie Berger pointed out. “Every time foreigners come in here they bring trouble. We dropped a war on them, our economy grabbed their output at rock-bottom prices and now we’re salting their islands with mines from another age.”

“Maybe they’ll get to understand progress.”

“Maybe they’ll get to hate it too,” Charlie said. “You heard about the explosion on Scara early today!”

Chana’s jaw clamped tight. “Only what the kid said. Nobody else heard anything. The kid wasn’t about to go looking to see what happened.”

“What did they say at the naval operation?”

“Nothing. They had blown five underwater obstacles about the same time and weren’t listening for anything out of their area.”

Lee Colbert said, “Do you believe the kid, Chana?”

That muscle moved in her jawline again, but she didn’t say anything.

“Those mines,” Lee said, “can be as hot as when they were being delivered. They were made to be watertight and time may not have had as much erosion factor going for it as we might expect. Me... I’d just as soon keep away from them. But, if one did get washed up and turned when the tide went out from under it, the weight of the mine coming down on one of the spurs, it’s conceivable that the crust of coral could have broken away and the plunger went in igniting the mechanism.”

“Then we’d better see about it,” Chana told him.

“Why?”

“It could happen again.”

“So it would blow sand all over the place,” Lee parried.

“If there are any U.S. markings on the wreckage the Company will want to know about it.” Chana looked at him for confirmation and he nodded. Before she could answer, the incoming message light on the radio flashed and she flicked the switch, easy this time.

The message came out of the printer in less than ten seconds. They all read it together. Very simply, it stated, COORDINATE ACTIONS WITH HOOKER. END.

This time Chana almost broke her forefinger hitting the off switch. It did break her fingernail and it hung like a tiny crescent moon from her fingertip, and the “Damn!” she spit out had the hatred of a dozen cobras in it.

Both the men hid their grins and got started readying the boat to leave the dock.

“That louse contacted the Company,” she hissed.

“So he wasn’t retired,” Lee said. “He was on a leave of absence.”

Chana’s mood suddenly changed. Some degree of admiration shone in her eyes. “They’re smarter than we think. They saw this situation coming on a long time ago and set it up.”

Colbert and Berger looked at each other quickly. In a very small way it could make sense, but the logic wasn’t there. “This wasn’t planned, Chana,” Colbert said.

“No, but it was anticipated,” she said. “They had a contingency plan.”

“Baloney. This was sheer coincidence. You don’t plan for happenstances.”

“The Company did, Lee. While everybody thought all those fiascoes in the nineties meant the end of us, the Company was working far ahead. Damn, they are smart!”

Hooker looked at his watch, and when he had two minutes to go he switched on the radio, flicked his ball point pen and let the point hover above his pad. Right on time the CQ message started to tick in his ears and he copied the letters down as he got them. When the end came he tapped in his own signing-off code and turned off the set. He decoded the message into English and read: PALLATZO LEGITIMATE WITH LOTUSLAND PRODUCTIONS. NO OUTSTANDING WARRANTS. NO CONNECTIONS WITH FORMER ASSOCIATES. STILL UNDER SURVEILLANCE BY FBI. ONE PARKING VIOLATION IN NEW YORK CITY. MARCUS GREY ARRANGED FINANCING FOR MIDNIGHT CRUISE LINES THROUGH THE BECKER BANK. BECKER SAID TO HAVE EUROPEAN CONNECTIONS. FIRST BECKER PARTNER, MARSHALL PODREY, MURDERED IN STREET MUGGING IN LONDON, MAY 3, 1992. MIDNIGHT CRUISE LINES LEGITIMATE OPERATION UNDER U.S. REGISTRATION. CHANA STERLING IS TO COORDINATE WITH YOU. END.

For a full two minutes Mako read and reread the message. The casual tone seemed strange, the wording different from what he had experienced in the old days. Maybe they had a new kid on the keyboard, he thought, who hadn’t looked at the full picture?

Marshall Podrey, a European banker, the kind who would always have assistants, who would drive in chauffeured limousines, who would never wander on streets where he would be a target, gets hit by a mugger. And Arthur Durant got hit by a mugger too. But in Arthur’s case, he wasn’t doing anything he never did before. Miami was like a front porch to him.

A little feeling of uneasiness tightened the muscles in his shoulder. Two coincidental muggings in the same overall situation would make you think twice. Like Tony Pell being a born-again businessman. He just wasn’t the type to take to legitimacy when there was a dirty way out. Oh, it was possible, all right, but the probability just wasn’t there. Then again, Tony Pell had seen plenty of his old buddies wind up doing big time in federal or state pens, and he could have had smart thoughts and gone straight, or at least straight enough to survive in Hollywood.

One thing that did hit him was the name Becker Bank. It was a name that was familiar, one that he had run across in years past, but not with enough import to make him remember the details of what he had heard. But he had heard of the Becker Bank, and in his business even hearing of something gave reason to be suspicious of it.

Hooker grunted and very deliberately tore his pages into strips, laid them in the bottom of the galvanized pail he used for a trash basket and held a match to them. When they were all ash he stirred them up into a blackened powder and grinned at this handiwork. You’d think I was tied into some international criminal action, he said to himself.

Beside the hand-built house the metal windmill stirred in the constant breeze, pumping water when it was necessary or generating power for the electrical components. Hooker closed a knife switch and turned on his normal shortwave radio. The foreign station it was tuned to brought in the final act of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Mako leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, enjoying the driving tempo of the music.

When the piece ended he opened his eyes and turned the dial on the set. Nothing seemed to please him, so he went to American FM stations, wasn’t satisfied there and switched to CQ. The code that came in was simple Morse, a position check from a craft named Drifter who was taking up station about twenty miles from Peolle for the night, off the course from normal sea traffic and reporting in on regular intervals.

There was no reply.

But to whom was Drifter sending? That area was well out of the shipping lanes. Unless they counted the comings and goings of the islanders’ beat-up boats.

Hooker squinted and shook his head. This was another name that should have meant something to him, but it had been a long time since he had exercised those facilities he had been trained to use. He was annoyed enough to put his mind to it, then remembered Drifter and her robot photographing two sunken ships off the Atlantic coastline, bringing back evidence of a collision that had long been forgotten.

Drifter was another research vessel, and with the Tellig the Company had a pair of them fishing for the eater of ships. Somebody or something in Washington, D.C., had a lot of power going for him, and all they had to go on was the old Bermuda Triangle theory.

At twenty-five minutes past four Hooker’s eyes snapped open and with the same motion he rolled to one side of the bed, his hand folding around the grip of the .45 he kept hung on the bed frame. The Colt was loaded with a full clip and there was a round in the chamber; his thumb pulled the hammer back in a motion so fluid that he surprised himself, and when Billy Bright burst into the room after a quick rap on the door he was surprised again that he recognized him in time to keep from shooting him.

In the dim light from the moon that angled in the window Billy saw the empty bed, then the outline of Mako’s head and the ugly snout of the .45 pointing at a spot right between his eyes.

Hooker eased the hammer down on the gun and stood up. “Damn, Billy...” He reached behind him and switched on the overhead light.

In one brief moment Billy realized just what had happened. He had thought he would have to awaken his friend, rouse him out of a deep sleep to give him the information that made his hands shake and gave his eyes a wide look. But his friend had heard him. He had the ears of a cat too and the reactions of a wild one. He had awakened to full and complete activity so finely honed he was able to stop firing his gun with just a fraction of a second to identify his target. “Sar...!” was all he could get out.

With a grin, Hooker shook his head and stood up. “Sorry, pal. I sure didn’t mean to scare you like that.” Billy nodded and gulped. “Kind of a hangover from the old days, you know?” Billy didn’t know and his expression asked for an answer.

Hooker said, “Military training. When I hear footsteps at night I react.”

All Billy could do was stare at him for a second, then he began to understand.

“Now,” Hooker went on, “what’s happening?”

“It’s Willie Pender.”

“So?”

“His launch... he sets drift nets. He... he’s caught the eater!”

“What?”

“Yes, he’s out there!” Billy pointed wildly toward the beach outside the house.

“Come on, Billy, how do you know this?”

“Willie, he’s got the CB radio. Not the VHF like we have. He call anybody. He wake up Poca and Lule Malli who leave radio on all the time. Something she hit Willie’s boat then get caught in his net. He still out there, sar!”

Sourly, Hooker said, “And you want us to go out there too?”

The sudden horror of it stiffened Billy. It was dark and they would be walking right into the eater’s mouth. They had no armament to tackle such a monster, no way of escaping its fury if they antagonized it, yet Billy’s friend needed help.

He couldn’t get the words out, so he simply nodded furiously so that his intent was clear.

“I don’t suppose you asked anybody else, did you?”

“No, sar. Nobody.”

“They’d go, you know?” Hooker reminded him.

“But first they would think. Then they would talk.”

And by then it would be light, Hooker thought, and the venture wouldn’t be quite so frightening.

“Let’s go,” he said.

When they boarded the Clamdip Hooker noticed the twinkle of lights on the other end of the island. There were others awake too, but the lights were moving between the houses, not on the dock. He flipped the blowers on, waited until any fumes were vented out of the bilge, then fired the engines, switched on the CB and VHF radios, and flicked on the running lights. Everyone on the island would know the sound of his motors and would damn well know where they were going. For a minute while Billy was throwing off the mooring lines he debated calling the Tellig, but they could be shut down for the night. He hit the throttle and slipped into the groove that took him past the coral heads and out to deeper water. Somehow Billy had gotten the coffee ready and brought him a cup. The dull light from the binnacle threw a glow over his face and Hooker saw the way it was set. Billy was scared silly, but he hadn’t backed off a bit.

Hooker didn’t plot a course. He simply followed Billy’s finger, heading in a general southeast direction. They were running under full power, and although the old Matthews was a displacement-type boat, those classic old lines and newly renovated engines insured a speed faster than most supposed.

The Malli brothers had a fifty-foot mast from an old racing sloop attached to their house, topping it with another ten feet of antennas. They could bring in a radio signal long before anybody else, but now Hooker was inside the range of Willie Pender’s transmitter and he set the indicator on the channel the islanders used.

He called three times before Willie’s excited voice came back to him and he said, “Easy, Willie, this is the Clamdip. I think I see your running lights. Are you all right?”

“Man, we got that thing! He a big one, he is. He tangled in my nets. He even bite at my boat!”

“You taking on water, Willie?” Mako kept his voice as calm as he could.

“Sure, we got water. Man, he didn’t get time for a big bite.”

“Your pumps handling it, Willie?” He flicked a glance at Billy, not knowing if Willie was all that concerned about pumps or not. Billy gave him back a harried look.

“No trouble, man. The pump, she do good, man. Real good. What do I do if that thing gets out of the nets?”

“Can you cut them loose from your boat?” Hooker asked him.

“Too messed up, man. Nobody here but me and young Jimbo and Jimbo so scared he can’t even spit.”

“Okay, then just hang tight. I have you spotted and ought to be right beside you in about twenty minutes. You got that?”

“I got that. Billy with you?”

Hooker grinned again. “Sure he is. He wants to see that eater thing. He wants to give it a name.” He hung the microphone back on the set and looked at Billy, who watched him, horrified at what he had said. Then Billy’s eyes went to the water frothing beside the boat, then back to Hooker.

“Mr. Mako is back again, sar.” There was no quaver in his voice at all. Just a quiet knowing dignity tinged with fear of the unknown.

Hooker didn’t even have to lean over the side of the boat at all. The great body of the mako shark arced up through the froth; he saw its eye and the eye was looking directly at him, then it slowly submerged out of sight. Hooker felt that chill again. “Mr. Mako Shark isn’t afraid of the eater,” he told Billy.

“Mr. Shark hasn’t got that long name of the eater shark,” he reminded him.

“Hey, I never said the eater was a Carcharodon megalodon.”

“He one big mister, though.”

“And he’s extinct, Billy.”

“What means that?”

“They don’t make them anymore. They’re all dead.”

“How come you know them, then?”

“Fossil remains. What they find after they die.”

“Dead sharks don’t leave anything.”

“Okay, smart guy.” Hooker laughed. “Everything’s cartilage except the teeth. They find these big choppers and can figure out how big the fish was.”

“Why did they die?”

“I don’t know,” Mako said exasperatedly.

“Then how do you know they all dead, sar?”

“I read it in a book,” Hooker told him. That Billy would believe. If it was written in a book it had to be true.

Up ahead the white mast light on Willie Pender’s launch was rocking against the black of the sky. Hooker looked at his watch, then up to the east. In a little while they’d see the first gray of the false dawn, a hardly perceptible lightening of the horizon. The light wouldn’t be enough to discern things by, but it would be a happy indication that soon it would be day again.

He reached for the night glasses on the instrument panel and adjusted them while he sighted on Willie’s boat. The launch came in clear. It was backing off from the tangle of netting that stretched out over the bow. He could make out little Jimbo at the wheel under the cabin lights, not caring if it spoiled his night vision or not. Up ahead Willie Pender was trying to cut his boat loose from the long, glistening strands of nylon that ensnared it, but he wasn’t having much luck with it at all.

The sea was flat, and with the little light that began to seep up from the horizon Hooker could follow the netting out from Willie’s boat. It wasn’t like he was fouled in a line at all. It looked more like he was fighting some great fish. The launch seemed to get pulled away from her course and dragged southward, and a couple hundred feet ahead the flat calm of the waters seemed to take on a new life of its own as something bubbled up out of it. Not high, simply a long, rounded form that twisted, and when it did the netting that had caught it snapped loose with an audible wet twang and Willie Pender fell back in his boat on the remains of the twisted nylon—and from inside the wheelhouse little Jimbo let out a wail of his own.

Beside him Hooker heard Billy let out his breath in a very long sigh.

The eater had disappeared. It was down below again and there was no telling where it could be.

Gently, Hooker nuzzled the Clamdip against the side of the launch and Willie Pender and Billy rafted the boats together. There was no way little Jimbo was going to come out of the cabin, so Hooker had Billy go in with him and give him some calm talk. Under the lights of the oversize flashes they looked at the nets. They were of a fine gauge, but collectively they could hold a tremendous load. When they finally got the last of them pulled aboard they could see why they had broken loose. The net hadn’t snapped at all. It was cut as cleanly and neatly as if someone had taken shears to it.

“The eater bit it off,” Willie said simply. His voice had a new hoarseness to it.

Hooker wanted to tell him to forget that idea, but the signs were too clear. The netting had been cut through, not snapped. And he had seen that huge bulge that came up out of the sea, a huge mound of darkness. Now Willie was sniffing the air and Hooker caught it too. There was a smell, not an odor, a smell that said something terrible had been there and now that something terrible was back down there again.

There was no sense stowing the nets away neatly. They piled them on the deck, and when Hooker and Billy went back to the Clamdip they turned back toward Peolle Island, staying side by side for the feeling of mutual protection but knowing that there was no protection against that thing down there.

Twenty-two years ago the prime contact that the Company had set up in Paris had been compromised. It was Mako who had uncovered the foreign infiltration, and after he reported the details, the Company had left the structure in place, using it to pass false information to the governments who thought they were using it for their own devices.

A pair of new business sites were secretly bought out and thereafter used as places to transfer money or information, secure new identity papers or arrange for any details necessary to the covert operations.

Mako had bypassed the official drop, a faceless company buried in the heart of Washington, D.C. Foreign operatives were as sharp as any the U.S. government had and they were working in their own backyard. It had taken a while, but Mako Hooker had installed his own drop. Only two people worked there, but they were a special duo. They had a mail-order business where they did the catalog advertising, and they sent the orders to the proper manufacturing outlets, who filled the requests; and everybody made a lot of money and there was a fine, legitimate reason for the Imogene company to have all those new high-tech computers.

The twice-weekly mail boat would be arriving at Peolle just before noon tomorrow and Mako would be another in the crowd sending out letters to friends and family in more civilized places. Mako’s letter would be a semiyearly one requesting replacement parts for his Italian-made typewriter, an old manual model.

Included in his friendly letter was his order to get all details of the life and death of Marshall Podrey and of the Becker Bank and have the information inscribed on microdot that could be processed on Peolle.

When Mako gave the letter to the post office he knew it would be at least ten days before he had an answer. Any desire for a speedy transmission might alert somebody either nosy or smart.