Tanaka's heart rate was up, mainly because of the shock of close-to-freezing water, but also because he realized getting back up onto the ship wasn't going to be easy if he couldn't attract someone's attention. He could be stuck out here, but not for long. The cold would soon cramp his muscles and then he'd drown. He knew he had around three minutes, max, before his muscles stopped working and he sank beneath the water. There was no convenient ladder anywhere on the hull — it wasn't that kind of dive vessel. His jeans and sweatshirt were weighing him down, making swimming difficult. He stripped down to his underwear, and noted that the phosphorescence illuminated his legs, accentuating their whiteness. He felt naked, exposed, freezing. His skin was already numb. The realization that there were nearly 30,000 feet of water beneath his feet added to his feeling of exposure. Nearby, he heard the vibration of a thruster automatically keeping the Natusima in position. The ship must be starting to drift, he thought. It turned slowly on its axis, as if moved by a giant and invisible hand, its stern swinging toward him. He swam away to prevent being struck by the hull.
“Hey!” he called out again. “Anybody…!”
The lights on top of the crane that launched and retrieved the Shinkai also lit the water behind the stern. Tanaka swam into the light. He'd be seen for sure now. He yelled out several more times and loaded on the expletives as his frustration grew.
Suddenly Dr. Tanaka felt the pressure wave behind him. And then he swirled into an eddy, which spun him around a couple of times. His mind froze, incapable of grappling with the nightmare finale to his forty-two years on the planet.
The impact of the shark's 2200 pounds drove the breath from his lungs. Its serrated teeth ripped through the flesh of his back, buttocks, and legs, and severed a number of major arteries and veins along with his spinal cord. He screamed and thrashed his upper body, fighting for a life that was already lost.
Bloody seawater streamed through the shark's gills. Its ancient brain had registered the torn, thrashing remains of the wounded animal above it, framed by a spreading pool of blood.
Tanaka felt no pain. In fact, he felt nothing. Everything had shut down, even consciousness. His eyes were open, but unseeing. His mouth was also open but no sound came out. Everything that was Dr. Tanaka was in hiding way down deep, 30,000 feet below the surface. For all he knew, his broken, crushed, and bleeding body was someone else's.
The shark was unintentionally merciful on the second pass. It hit hard and took nearly everything in a single bite, leaving only the doctor's head to roll, eyes hooded in death, bobbing in its wake.
Seconds later, up on the ship, a hatch opened and a shadow stepped inside. The music blared momentarily and then the hatchway clanged shut.
ONE
I'd been sent on a mission. Apparently I was the only man for the job. The going was tough, but I made it through. The cab driver was from Senegal or Swaziland, or maybe from somewhere else entirely. Whatever, he had absolutely no idea where he was going in D.C. Eventually, he did find the place, the address of which was written on the slip of paper I'd given him, now clamped between his lips: a shop in the ‘burbs called Sea Breeze Aquarium that specialized in tropical fish. I bought the ones the Navy captain, my current commanding officer, had ordered for his tank, and composed an elegant resignation in my head on the return trip to the Pentagon.
“Your fish, Captain,” I said, holding up the plastic bag with Nemo and an identical twin swimming round in crazed circles.
“Ahh, you're back.” Captain Chip Schaeffer lifted his head and pulled his nose out of a file. He got up from behind his desk like he was starving and I was a delivery guy from Pizza Hut, and raced over to take the little orange fish into custody. “Good man,” he said, relieving me of the plastic water-filled bag. “I trust you got receipts for these, and the cab fares. You don't want to get the Government Accounting Office ticked off.”
“Sir, I quit,” I said eloquently.
He poured the live cartoon characters into the tank, where they immediately and wisely sought the darkest place they could find: beneath a sunken plastic sub being strangled by a giant plastic octopus. His back to me, Schaeffer said, “There you go, fellers, your new home. Your orders are in the folder on the table. You leave this afternoon.”
Who? Me, or the fish? I wasn't sure. Maybe the octopus was going somewhere. The captain couldn't have been speaking to me, could he? I'd done nothing for months except polish the vinyl of my chair with my butt. In between errands, that is. I was fed up with my “recovery.” In darker moments I wondered whether it was just Uncle Sam paying me back for all the waves I caused during the investigation into the death of General Abraham Scott, my last case. Maybe they were making sure I played nice and predictable by keeping me on the sidelines indefinitely.
Arlen Wayne, my ex-drinking partner, and Anna Masters, my current love interest and coinvestigator on the Scott case, both agreed that the relaxed pace of my new assignment was for my own good and there was nothing sinister about it. My country was just going easy on me. After all, they said, the Scott case had nearly killed me several times. And had indeed killed Anna, at least according to the newspapers. But, as usual, they'd gotten it wrong. Instead, Anna was in a coma. Once she'd pulled through, her recovery had been fast. Her age and fitness had had a lot to do with that, the doctors claimed, though she later said that it was because she wanted to have sex with me. I preferred her theory to the doctors'.
I, on the other hand, recovered slow. The bullet wounds and the broken ribs took their own sweet time to heal. I only started to get better once I began helping Anna through her recovery a couple of times a day. Within a couple of months, I was ready to reassume active duty of the more military kind.
That, as I said, was quite a few months ago. Major Anna Masters had long since returned to Ramstein Air Base, Germany. I'd moved, too, out of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and across the Potomac to a suite at the Pentagon. My orders said I'd been transferred to the DoD's investigation arm, into the exclusive ranks of those supersecret sleuths who handle the cases too sensitive for ordinary mortals. I had, apparently, made The Team. Months later, what these people did was still a secret, at least to me.
Captain Chip Schaeffer, my boss these days, was Navy and getting near retirement. When I first heard that my new immediate superior was a captin, I thought maybe I'd been demoted, a captain being inferior to a major — my rank. But, in fact, a Navy captain is equal to an Air Force colonel. Confusing, I know, but the military likes it that way. It keeps the real enemy — civilians — guessing. Rumor had it that Schaeffer headed up some extra-special investigation arm. The Team within The Team. But, from what I could see, his job entailed reading volumes of DoD documents and picking out procedural errors. He told me that I was his backup, only I had no idea what correct DoD procedure was and so had absolutely no idea what I was backing up. The captain understood this, which was why he never gave me anything to check.