Something’s Down There

Chapter Eight

Mako watched the runabout disappear into the night, then turned and went to his house. While the coffee was perking on the stove he brought the transmitter out and made his contact; when the agency answered, he flipped the switch to scramble, identified himself and said, “Find out if Anthony Pallatzo operated inside the porn movie business. That would go back to at least twenty years ago.”

The operator on the other end replied, “Right, hold on.”

Only the faint hum of the generator was audible for a full ten minutes while a computer was busy scouring files, then the voice from the States said, “Got it. Tony Pell was active for six years, but nobody ever held him for anything. He was clean with Internal Revenue, none of the gals or guys they used ever laid a complaint on him and he just walked away from the business when it got too legal for him. There’s a reference here to his association with a legitimate California-based studio called Alberta Productions. Nothing further has been recorded. There is no death notice on him.”

“He’s not dead.”

“But he’s not active, either.”

Mako said, “That’s because he’s legitimate. He pays his taxes. His associates are reputable.”

“That doesn’t sound like Tony Pell.”

“Sure makes a great cover.”

“If it’s real.”

“Oh,” Mako told him, “it’s real, all right.”

“You think he’s staying clean?”

“I have my doubts,” Mako said, then added, “Now, one more thing. The naval vessel Sentilla is engaged in an operation south of here. Please notify the captain that I want to meet with him shortly and be given what information I need.”

“We can’t interfere with naval missions, you know...”

“Quit the crap,” Mako said abruptly. He wasn’t about to try a bluff with the operator, but he knew how the Company worked in these matters. “They’re operating hand in hand with our people and you damn well know it. You have my files there?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do I have the authority to make this request?”

“According to this you have unless...”

“Forget the unless. Just do it.”

“I’m going to clear this with my supervisor, you know.”

“Forget your supervisor. You clear it with Fennely and do it now.”

“Director Fennely is...”

“I know who he is,” Mako told him. “Just do it. Now.”

Mako signed off and put the equipment back in its stall. This contact was going to rattle a few cages. Before long he’d have to give a full report on his actions, but they couldn’t take any chances on trying to nudge him off to fit their plans. They had years of his activity in strange places and events that shook the world scene more than once, bringing down some pretty violent people and causing dangerous governments to change hands. At this point they didn’t know how much or how little he knew, and throwing in Anthony Pallatzo would really make somebody scramble.

No formal charge would be made, but the bug would go in somebody’s ear, new orders would go out to field agents and Tony Pell would be under scrutiny again. He’d know they were there, he’d smile and keep everything businesslike, and there would be nothing to report. Somehow he’d manage to do what he had to do, having a contingency plan for just this sort of thing. He’d keep it low-key and clean, but sooner or later some dirt would begin to show and the real Tony Pell would come out of his envelope.

Before he went to bed Mako retrieved his old .45 caliber Colt auto matic, cleaned it thoroughly, even though it didn’t need it, then oiled it, checked the mechanism until he was satisfied with its operation, and slammed in a fully loaded clip, slipping the rig into a niche between his bed and the wall.

He was getting that old feeling again. He didn’t like it at all.

Billy Bright had scooped the eyes out of the fish heads in the stew. Judy expressed mild displeasure when Billy told her it was Mako’s orders, but it was faked. Anyone who wanted fish stew for breakfast wouldn’t make much of a fuss about eyes anyway. The rest of the meal would have cost a fortune in one of Miami’s better restaurants, but here it was a simple island breakfast.

Judy made happy little sounds when she smelled the coffee aroma coming up from the galley. “Why is it your coffee smells so good, Mako?”

It wasn’t a new question for him. “Because I get it fresh-ground in bags from Miami and keep it refrigerated. On the island they buy the canned kind because the cans are as valuable to them as the coffee.”

“Mako!”

“They have nice tight plastic tops and the painted metal takes a long time to rust out. You’d be surprised what they keep in them.”

“Like what?”

“Like things you might keep in a medicine cabinet. Very personal items.”

She stared at him for a moment, then smiled gently. “Are you almost talking dirty?”

“I’m talking about coffee cans.”

Neither of them heard Billy come up behind them until he said, “Mr. Hooker, sar...”

Something was bothering his mate and Mako knew it at once. His eyes tightened and he said, “Yeah, Billy?”

“The barometer...”

“So?”

“She is going to start to fall soon.”

“You get a weather report on VHF?”

“No, sar. But she will fall, you betcha.” There was a very worried expression on Billy’s face.

“How would he know that?” Judy asked Mako.

Both of them scanned the sky for any indication of a weather change. It was cloudless and clear, a beautiful, hot day with waves running less than two feet, the wind gentle and from the southeast. There had been no notification of any change when they left the dock and from all indications it was no less than a perfect day to be going somewhere by boat. But still, Mako didn’t argue the point. To Judy he said, “It’s just something these islanders know.”

“But the Miami weather station...”

“We’re not in Miami.”

Judy could read the seriousness in his tone and a frown wrinkled her forehead. “Are you going to turn back?”

“No... we’re only two hours away from the Sentilla, and it’s three hours back to Peolle.”

Billy was watching him, quietly pleased that Mako had taken his warning seriously.

Mako said, “We won’t do any night sailing, Billy, so quit sweating.”

“Oh, I do not sweat, sar. We can make Reboka Island base before the glass she falls.”

“Then why all the worry talk, Billy?”

The mate’s eyes crinkled and Mako knew he was going to hear another of Billy’s odd opinions or unfathomable judgments.

When he had his thoughts together, Billy said, “Sar, it is like this when the eater, he gets hungry.”

“It’s daytime, Billy.”

“Yes, sar. If he is hungry, he will eat in the daytime.”

“Tell me something, did the barometer always fall the other times when the boats... got ‘et’?”

Very solemnly, Billy Bright nodded. “Every time. Yes, sar, every time.”

“Your friends, they all notice it?”

“We talk about it. Yes, sar.”

“They still went out in the daytimes, didn’t they?”

His eyes roved the horizon. “So they can eat, they have to go out. Some think they can see the eater in time and maybe get away.” He was remembering the Soucan with its bottom holed and Mako had seen the tooth marks himself. He was thinking about the eater being caught in Willie Pender’s net and the way that tough nylon was neatly cut as if by a single great tooth.

“You scared, Billy?” Mako asked him.

A strained grin twitched at Billy’s mouth and he shook his head. “If you and the missy are not scared, I’m not scared.” Then he grinned very broadly and went back to the wheelhouse.

Judy turned her head and looked up at Mako. “You know, I really don’t know just what’s going on here between you two, but somehow I feel scared. I don’t know what’s happening but I’m beginning to feel that this little outing is more like a heavy business trip.”

“You letting that ‘eater’ story bug you?”

“It’s too ridiculous to be true. Those giant great white sharks are all extinct and you know it...”

“I’ve never dived that deep,” he interrupted.

She knew he was making a joke of it, but she kept on anyway just to prove it to herself. “Never mind. If they were down there, and I said were, the enormous pressure change of coming to the surface would turn their bodies inside out.” She ended with an emphatic nod.

But he still gave her something to chew on. “Whales dive deeper than sonar can track them. They lose touch below six thousand feet, yet they come up well fed and covered with sucker scars from giant squid.”

Judy’s eyes widened at the thought of his description and she let her breath out, not conscious of the way she had been holding it in. “You’re just kidding about that... aren’t you?”

“Nope. Besides, you’re not scared.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“Can I put my arms around you and comfort you?”

She licked her lips and bobbed her head. “Sure.”

Mako slid an arm around her shoulders. “How’s that?”

“Big man,” she said, “I’m real scared.”

Before Mako could do anything about it, Billy’s head poked out the wheelhouse window. “Mr. Hooker, sar, the glass, she has fallen two points.”

“Call Miami and get a current report.”

“I did that, sar. They said our barometer may be...”

“Defective?”

“Yes. That is the word they used.”

“What do you think, Billy?”

“I can feel it, sar. The glass, she is good. Miami does not understand.”

Under his hand he felt Judy shudder gently. On the horizon, both of them could see the thin darkening line of clouds starting to form. There was something ominous about them.

Mako said, “Quit calling me ‘sar,’ Billy.”

“Yes, sar,” Billy called right back. He had seen the clouds too. His hand nudged the throttle a little and the Clamdip picked up a few extra knots of speed toward Reboka Island.

Mako poured the both of them a Miller Lite beer and they leaned on the starboard rail, enjoying the moment, the only sound that of the waves lashing tiny tongues along the hull of the boat.

But moments like that were never made to last. Billy Bright had heard the click of a sending key, flipped the switch to the speaker and picked up the tight, disciplined voice of Chana Sterling saying, “Drifter, this is the Tellig calling. Please give us your position.”

Almost immediately a heavy male voice responded with, “Tellig, this is Drifter. We are at B dash seven on your blue chart.”

Mako grunted in disgust. They weren’t using the regular nautical charts but had instituted one of their own so as not to give away their position.

“Roger, Drifter. We have located a disturbance. It may be what we are looking for. We will need your diver. How soon can you join us?”

A hurried calculation was made and the voice came back, “Forty-five minutes will do it.”

“Roger and out,” Chana said.

Hesitantly, Judy asked, “Diver?”

“That would be the robot,” Mako explained. “I’d sure like to know what kind of disturbance she was talking about.”

“Could that be some kind of... ruse?”

“Not with Chana. She’s all business.”

“Why would she put it on the air like that?”

“Two reasons,” Mako told her. “One is that she needs the robot. The other is that she wants everyone to know she nailed this sucker. In the area she works in, overt deeds of heroism make for rapid promotions.”

“How high does she want to go?”

“Far enough to control the world.”

“Or maybe just you,” she added mischievously.

This time Mako gave her a sour glance. “She’d just like to shoot me again. In a way I hope she gets the chance.”

“Why?”

“Then I can really kick her butt.”

“What do you think that disturbance was she mentioned?”

“Could be a pod of whales.”

Once again Billy’s voice came out of the wheelhouse. “We can go see, sar. That is, if you want.”

“I told you,” Mako said, “that guy’s got ears like a cat.”

“Sar...?”

“How would you know where they were, Billy?”

“The other day at the dock I see the big blue square on Tellig’s map. Others were in different colors. Blue part was over where Poca and Lule Malli catch the big marlin we all feast on.”

“That was in open water, Billy. Poca didn’t even have a map on board.”

“I know the place,” Billy said simply.

“But you don’t really want to go there, do you?”

Instead of answering, Billy just shook his head.

“Okay, we continue on course. If they find the eater, good. They can take it back with them. If they get in trouble we’ll go look for them.”

“Suppose the eater gets them?” Judy suggested.

“Then we’ll pour a cold beer over their watery grave. Or maybe half a beer.”

At the wheel, Billy started whistling. They were staying on course and he was happy for everybody on board the Clamdip. But he was concerned about the Tellig and the Drifter. The clouds on the horizon were a little heavier now and the barometer had gone down another full point. The lady boss on the Tellig had said they had sighted a disturbance and whatever it was, he was sure it was the eater. And right now he was heading away from it. He touched the throttles again and the needles on the tachometer showed another ten RPM increase.

Fear was an emotion Chana Sterling would never admit to. Fear was something that belonged to cowards who fled from a confrontation with danger rather than face it. Right now the hair on the back of her neck felt a little stiff, but fear hadn’t put a crimp in her actions.

Beside her Lee Colbert stood, one leg propped on the rail, the sporting rifle loaded with armor piercing explosive bullets held casually in his hand. It was that “masculine attitude” that annoyed Chana, that demeanor that didn’t reek of fear at all but held the calmly interested expression she had seen on lab technicians peering into a microscope.

On their port side, ten miles out, the low cloud bank had a slow rolling motion. Every minute or so a yellow burst of light was visible along the line. “Lee,” Chana asked, “did you ever see a weather front like that one?”

“Yeah, several times.”

She knew he was deliberately making her wait, not finishing the explanation. Finally, exasperated, she said as quietly as she could, “Where?”

“Off the coast of Alaska during World War Two. They’d build up, then burst just as suddenly. Scared the hell out of the rookies.” He gave her a meaningful glance and suppressed a smile.

Chana passed off this remark and kept staring at the ocean. The light chop that gave life to the water’s surface suddenly flattened in a wild circle; the gulls that had been following the Tellig abruptly let out a series of raucous screams and wheeled off into disturbed flight. “There it is again,” she said.

Lee Colbert’s eyes were on her, but she wouldn’t acknowledge his unspoken question. She reached for the binoculars, focused them in and scanned the area. It hadn’t changed in shape and seemed to be travelling in the same direction they were.

The big oval area seemed calm until it reached the rolling edges of its perimeter, where the waves chewed at it. The coloration was deeper, and blue in contrast to the green of the ocean itself. She stared even harder, analyzing what she was looking at. “There’s a pressure under the surface,” she said.

“Could it be a vent hole in the bottom spewing up magma?” He was grinning at her again.

“Lee, quit being an ass. This is the Atlantic,” she spit at him, very annoyed now.

With the suddenness that it had appeared with, the flat calm gave way to the ocean’s wave action again. She didn’t put the glasses down. Here and there the surface would flatten again in a small area, then just as suddenly disappear.

When she took the binoculars away from her face, she said, “Lee...”

“What?”

“Something’s down there.”

He didn’t answer her. Instead he pointed to the boat a few miles away coming up behind them. “There’s the Drifter. Maybe now you’ll know.”

The bearded young man at the helm of the Drifter never would have been taken as an Annapolis graduate. His blue jeans were unwashed and cut off halfway between his knees and his bare feet, scraggly threads hanging down from the mock hems. His T-shirt advertised a suntan lotion and no hat covered his obviously home-cut hair.

But Commander Sullivan was among other things an underwater archaeologist, a trained diver, an expert in many things naval, and a Ph.D. in physics. His crew of six were equally disheveled and almost as well qualified in academic training. It was all a great cover. Being assigned to this present duty was like a paid vacation for all of them, because no way would there ever be a “ship eater” other than those in the stories you hear when happy hour is nearly over.

Sullivan recognized Chana’s voice when she radioed, “Drifter from Tellig.”

“Go ahead, Tellig.”

“Can you see that flat spot on our port side?”

Through his glasses Sullivan surveyed the area. “There’s a difference in the wave action, I think. You see anything?”

There seemed to be an anxious hesitancy in her voice when she said, “There seemed to be something there.”

“Anybody else verify?”

“No. There was nothing to see. It was really a... condition.”

“Hard to drop a depth charge on one of those things.”

Chana’s annoyance was clear. “There was something there, dammit!”

Sullivan tried not to chuckle in the microphone. He pushed the throttles to full forward and told her, “We’re coming up fast. Tell it to stick around.”

She muttered something nasty and slipped her mike back in the holder hard. Lee tapped her arm and pointed off to the port. “It’s back again, but this time it’s leaving us.”

Chana ran to the rail with the glasses to her eyes. A hump seemed to form on the surface, letting the small waves roll away to make a great oval again. She was holding her breath because it seemed almost likely that the “eater” would show itself, then the calmness quit and the oval grew smaller, and as Lee had said, it was beginning to flow past them.

Lee entered the time and sighting in the logbook, then tucked his pen in his pocket. He reached for the mike. To Chana he said, “Do we follow it or notify Drifter?”

“We’ll stay clear, Lee. Tell him to get the robot out and pick it up underwater.”

Lee pressed the mike button and said, “Drifter, you should be able to pick that disturbance up right about now. It’s smaller, but it’s heading back toward you. If you can release the robot you should be able to get some decent pictures.”

“We have the area in sight, Tellig. The robot’s going over the side now. Keep the area clear.”

“Roger, Drifter. Out.”

The engines on the Tellig lowered to one-quarter speed and the ship began a slow turn to the right. They could watch the activity on board the Drifter, saw the fat body of the eight-foot-long submersible being lowered into the water, then watched the team in the bow direct its movements from a handheld box.

The robot was one of the developments Sullivan had pioneered in the last five years. With miniaturization had come simplification, and handling the robot was much like flying a model airplane. The RV in the nose immediately sent back pictures that were taped and made you wonder why this wasn’t done when they were diving on the Titanic or looking for the Bismarck. Everybody just wanted to make things bigger and more complicated, Sullivan thought. Maybe now he could prove something to them.

But his thoughts had interfered with his actions. What should have been immediate was delayed two seconds, and he didn’t hit the lever fast enough to steer the robot where it should have gone. The ocean top suddenly changed as though huge hands just below its surface had waved upward, forming a huge wet hump, and out of the corner of his eye he caught something on the TV screen, but it wasn’t something he was bothered about, because he would see it later on tape. But then the screen suddenly flashed and went white; the indicator on the box in his hand went dead and he knew he had lost the robot. The eater had gotten his equipment.

Then the flat spot on the water quietly disappeared. Whitey, his mate, said, “Something’s coming this way, sir.”

Barely discernible, the oval formed again, coming closer to the Drifter before seeming to go right under the ship itself.

The bite came with a shattering crunch and Drifter lurched in the water as though a dog had hold of their bottom, then she was tossed loose like a discarded bone and a hoarse voice from the cabin yelled, “We’re taking on water!”

Drifter stopped rolling but listed five degrees off center.

Sullivan yelled, “Damage control... see what happened.” He reached for the mike and called Tellig. What he said made the film of sweat on Chana’s back suddenly go icy. “Something hit the robot, now it’s hit us.”

“What’s your damage, Drifter?”

“We’re holed, that’s for sure. We’re listing, but we have a double bottom under us and I think our pumps will hold. You’d better come alongside and we’ll head for the Sentilla.”

“You going to radio ahead?” Chana asked him.

In case anyone was monitoring the VHF, he said noncommittally, “You know our orders.”

Which meant that anything like this was for secret communication only at this point.

But someone was listening. Hooker flipped the switch off and turned on his hi-fi. Judy saw him grinning and squinted at him. “What was that all about?”

Billy Bright stuck his head out to see what he had to say. “Looks like Billy’s called the shots again. He knew something was going to happen.”

A finger pointed toward the west. “Sar, those clouds that were rising... they are near gone now.”

“What’s the barometer reading now, Billy?”

After a quick glance, Billy told him, “She much better now, sar. I think the eater will not be back.”

Judy said, “You believe that?”

The grin on Mako’s mouth twisted into a puzzled scowl. “I like it better than what those guys on Drifter are thinking of right now.”

She thought about what she was going to say for a moment, then looked at Hooker. “They’re going to have more to think about next.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, oh. Lotusland is filming Sentilla and the naval exercise and the main ship of the Midnight Cruise lines are putting in to give the customers a show.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Hooker said, annoyed.

“Because it shouldn’t have made any difference. Nobody expected this to happen.”

Hooker grinned again. “Well,” he said jokingly, “we’ll blame it all on the Bermuda Triangle.”

At the wheel Billy Bright let out a loud grunt of disdain.