“Don’t tell me they’ve got you convinced about their kaffir bogeyman.” He’d dealt with enough shamanistic beliefs in his boyhood on the veldt that he was unimpressed by the men’s fear that the objects might be fetishes. Besides, when he’d first been told of the local superstitions, the anthropologist he’d talked to had said that this particular myth predated the arrival of the Africans and their Obeah worship. It was probably, in fact, as old as the first Arawaks to cross the gulf from Venezuela on their migration northward.
Frik got up abruptly and strode over to the drill assembly. The bit looked like a giant apple corer, almost twenty inches in diameter. Hand on the side of the drill, he glanced through the base of the derrick to the water fifty feet below.
“I’m sending the camera down. I want to see the bottom of the bore hole.”
He set up the feedback equipment, attached the underwater video camera to a cable, and lowered the assemblage down the well. As it descended, he focused on the small screen that would show what the camera found. Despite the sophistication of the equipment, the image was grainy and cloudy with silt from the drilling process. It got even worse when, about seventy feet below the seabed, the camera passed through the hole in the roof of the cavern.
The light from the camera rig vanished into the cavern, which was apparently too large for the illumination to reach the walls. A large, indistinct fish swam in front of the lens, and the floating debris drifting away from the drill hole made it look as if he had suddenly picked upWhite Christmas on the monitor.
Frik’s frustration mounted. There was little chance on this monitor that he’d be able to distinguish any turquoiselike fragments which might have remained in the undersea cavern. The only way to be sure was for someone to dive down and enter the cave. Fortunately, the presence of the fish assured him that there was an entrance other than the hole his men had drilled.
“I’m not going down there,” Blaine said, anticipating what Frik had in mind.
“You’ll go where I tell you to go,” Frik said, “but you’re right. I need you around to fly me off this rig.” He yelled out the names of the few workers he knew. “You want to be paid?” he shouted when no one appeared.
One by one, the men returned. They clustered in small, silent groups, far from the strange objects.
“All right now. Who’s going down?”
Nobody moved. “You. Charles.” Frik stared into the man’s eyes. “You just volunteered. You, too, Abdul. Get your gear. Find the opening to that cavern. If there are any more pieces down there, bring them up. There’s a bonus for each one you find.”
The men did as they were told. When they had been lowered into the water, Frik said, “The rest of you bastards, no pay today. Tomorrow you work like men or—”
“They don’t want to work here anymore,” Blaine said.
“The hell they don’t.” Frik took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed the lab.
“Trujold? Frik. Listen carefully. I want you to get the speedboat and bring your ass over here.”
“I’m not going anywhere near your boats,” Trujold said. “Your dogs’ll eat me alive.”
Frik thought for a moment. “All right. I’ll send Blaine for you. It’ll only take him a few minutes in the chopper, so don’t mess around.”
“What’s the emergency?” Trujold asked.
“None yet.” Frik looked at the indistinct image on the screen. “But I smell one coming on.”
2
The helicopter carrying Paul Trujold moved quickly toward the Oilstar drilling platform where Frik’s men had been testing drill sites in the Dragon’s Mouth. The passage earned its name from the toothy spears of rock that pierced the surface of the water and connected the dots between Trinidad’s Chaguara Peninsula and the coastal range of the Venezuelan mainland. Many a ship’s hull had been chewed by those teeth when her captain didn’t know the waters, or he was caught by a storm. Given that history, why would Frik think it surprising that some parts of the Dragon’s Mouth were also believed by the locals to be haunted or cursed?
“Sorry to pull you out of the lab,” Frik shouted over the slowing thump of the blades as he reached up and helped Paul out of the chopper.
Such courtesy, Paul thought. Must be something mighty important. “What’s going on?”
“I sent a couple of divers down. Only one of them came back, and he died kicking and screaming on the deck before he could tell us a thing.”
“Sounds like a bad case of the bends.” Must have shot straight to the surface without a decompression stop. What could spook a diver enough to do that? Paul winced at the thought of nitrogen bubbles fizzing through his bloodstream, ending in an air embolism to the brain. “No sign of the other?”
Frik shot him a look. “I told you. Only one came back. And the other’s tank would have run out long ago.”
Paul always felt an uncomfortable sense of obligation around Frikkie, to whom he owed a great deal of money, borrowed for his daughter’s long years of schooling. The debt forced him to stick around, but it didn’t change the fact that he neither liked nor trusted his boss. What’s more, Frik always made Paul, younger by a decade, feel like the older of the two. Somehow the older man had maintained the toned body of a man twenty years younger. Piercing blue eyes and even white teeth gleaming from a perpetually tanned face, dark hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Paul was shorter, darker, heavier, and, in the looks department, somewhat further down the evolutionary tree. All the way back to Amphibia class, he thought. A newt—no, a frog…waiting in vain for the princess’s kiss that would turn him into a Frik. Tough. Single-minded. An expert manipulator.
Like now.
Paul was sorry about the men, but that was hardly a reason for Frik to demand his immediate presence. “You brought me down here because of the missing diver?”
“Not exactly. I need your help with these lazy bastards who are refusing to go on working.”
“Why?”
“You’rea damn Trini. You tell me. They were bringing up a core sample and found some strange fragments,” Frik said. “That seems to be what spooked the hell out of them. Blaine here thinks the men may believe they are fetishes—Obeah—and that if we mess with them the Obeahman will hurt us.”
“What is it you think I can do?”
“Get someone to dive down and see if he can find Abdul.” Frik pointed at four objects lying atop a pile of silt. “Then take those back to the lab and examine them.”
Paul walked over to the objects and hunkered down to take a closer look. Though he was far more educated than his average countryman, he was born and bred a Trini. He knew the power of local superstitions. There was nothing he could do about the workers or about Abdul. As a scientist, a chemist, he dealt in atoms and molecules and exchanges of electrons—an unseen realm, but vastly predictable.
Most of the time.
But not this time.
There was something different about the objects. He wouldn’t go so far as to say “wrong,” because that was a moral or ethical judgment, and in his world, morals or ethics didn’t apply to lumps of matter. But he had to admit, if lumps of matter could be “wrong,” these four were pretty damn close. In the eyes of many of the Trinidadians working for Frikkie, these trinkets would be a sure sign of wrongness. The Trinis—whose heritage embraced both Africa and India—were an innately superstitious group.
He, on the other hand, was not. As far as he was concerned, what he sawwas…what he saw.
To him, the pieces looked like the stones he’d seen embedded in Native American jewelry in the States…asymmetrical matchbox-size lumps of bicolored turquoise from the Kingman Mine in Arizona, or something very much like it.