"Duck," Austin ordered. "Keep your head low. I'm going to stuff it. "
He bent and gunned the engines at full throttle; at the same time he set the trim tabs and ailerons. A stuff was usually some thing to be avoided. It happens when a boat comes off one wave and burrows into another. The worst type is called a submarine, because that's what the boat becomes when it goes into a stuff at high speed. Far from avoiding this result, Austin was counting on it happening. He held his breath as the race boat nosed down at a sharp angle, buried its bows in the water, and kept on going, burrowing into the sea like a badger. With the full power of the engines behind it, the Red Ink was transformed from a surface boat into a submersible.
The boat passed under the moving yacht, but not quite deep enough to prevent its canopies from being ripped off. There was a sickening watery crunch. The whirling propellers missed their heads by inches. Then the catamaran passed under the yacht and emerged on the other side. Exploding from the water like a very large and very red flying fish, it came to a halt as the burbling engines stalled out in a cloud of purple smoke.
The boat was built with an interior cage that could resist a herd of overweight elephants. The canopies were more vulnerable. Both Plexiglas covers had been completely ripped off. The cockpits were taking in seas as the boat rocked in the waves.
Zavala coughed out a mouthful of seawater. "You okay?" he asked, a stunned look on his dark, handsome face.
Austin pulled his helmet off to reveal the thick head of platinum, almost white hair. He surveyed the propeller scars on the deck and realized how close they had cut it. "Still among the living," Austin replied, "but I don't think the Red Ink was designed to be a convertible."
Zavala felt the water around his waist. "Time to abandon ship."
"Consider it an order," Austin said, loosening his harness. They piled out of the boat into the sea. As part of their certification, racers must pass a dunk test. A cabin cruiser came over and hauled them dripping from the water minutes before the Red Ink went to the bottom.
"What happened to the gold race boat?" Austin asked the cruiser's owner, a pipe-smoking middle-aged man who had come out of San Diego to watch the race and got more than he bar gained for. He pointed off in the distance with the stem of his pipe. "Over there. The guy plowed right through the fleet. Don't know how he missed hitting the other boats."
"Mind if we check them out?"
"No problem," the man said obligingly as he put the wheel over.
Moments later they pulled up alongside the F7~7ing Carpet. The canopies had been pushed back. Austin saw to his relief that the men inside were alive, although blood streamed down Ali's head where he'd bashed it, and Hank looked as if he were nursing a bad hangover.
Austin called out, "Are you injured?"
"No," Ali replied, although he didn't look quite convinced of his own well-being. "What happened?"
"You hit a whale."
"A what?" When he saw Austin's serious expression, Ali's face fell. "Guess we didn't win," he said glumly.
"Don't feel bad," Austin said. "At least your boat doesn't lie on the sea floor."
"Sorry," Ali said sadly. Then he brightened as a thought hit him. "Then you didn't win, either."
"Au contraire," Austin said. "All four of us won the prize for being the luckiest men alive."
Ali nodded. "Praise Allah," he said a second before he passed out.
Chapter 3
Venezuelan Rain Forest
The Thick Canopy of overhanging tree branches blotted out the sun's rays, making the black water in the still pool seem deeper than it was. Wishing that she hadn't read that the Venezuelan government was reintroducing man-eating Orinoco crocodiles into the wild, Gamay Morgan Trout jackknifed her lithe body in a surface dive and with strong kicks of her slender legs descended into the Stygian darkness. This must be how a prehistoric animal felt sinking into the ooze at the La Brea tar pits in California, Gamay thought. She flicked on the twin halogen lights attached to her Stingray video camera and swam down to the bottom. As she passed over the spinachy vegetation that rose and fell in the slight current as if dancing to music, something poked her in the buttocks.
She whirled around, almost more indignant than scared, her hand going for the sheath knife at her waist. Inches from her face mask was a long, narrow snout attached to a lumpish pink head with small black eyes. The snout waggled back and forth like a scolding finger. Gamay unclenched her hand from the knife hilt and pushed the snout aside.
"Watch it with that thing!" The sentence streamed out the regulator as a stream of noisy bubbles.
The thin beak opened in a friendly, sharp-toothed circus clown's grin. Then the river dolphin's face rotated so that it was looking at her upside down.
Gamay laughed, the sounds coming out like the gurgles Old Faithful makes before it erupts. Her thumb pressed the valve that allowed air to inflate her buoyancy compensator. Within seconds her head broke the pool's calm surface like a jack-in-the box. She leaned back into her inflated BC, whipped the plastic mouthpiece from between her teeth, and broke into a wide grin.
Paul Trout was sitting in his ten-foot Bombard semi-inflatable boat a few yards away. Doing his job as a dive tender, he had followed the foamy air bursts marking his wife's underwater trail. He was startled to see her emerge from the black water and nonplussed at her mirth. Lips pursed in puzzlement, he lowered his head in a characteristic pose, as if he were peering up over the tops of invisible spectacles.
"Are you all right?" he said, blinking his large hazel eyes.
"I'm fine," Gamay said, although clearly she wasn't. Her laughter was rekindled by the incredulous expression on Paul's face. She choked on a mouthful of water. The prospect of drowning from laughter made her laugh even more. She popped the mouthpiece back into her mouth. Paul paddled the inflatable closer, leaned over the side, and offered his hand.
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"Yes, I'm fine," she said. She regained her composure and spat out the regulator. After a fit of wet-dog coughs she said, "I'd better come aboard."
Clinging to the side of the boat, she handed her dive gear up to Paul, who then reached down and easily lifted her one hundred thirty-five pounds onto the raft. With his tan shorts, matching military-style shirt with epaulets on the shoulders, and floppy brimmed poplin hat, he looked like a Victorian fugitive from the Explorers' Club. The large tropical butterfly perched below his Adam's apple was actually one of the colorful bow ties he was addicted to. Trout saw no reason he couldn't be impeccably dressed anywhere, even in the depths of the Venezuelan rain forest where a loincloth is considered going formal. Paul's foppish attire belied a potent physical strength built up from his days as a fisherman on Cape Cod. The barnacle-hard calluses on his palms were gone, but the muscles from hoisting fish boxes lurked behind the razor-creased clothes, and he knew how to use the leverage of his six-foot-eight body.
"The depth finder says it's only thirty feet deep, so your giddiness is not caused by nitrogen narcosis," he said in his typical analytical way.
Gamay undid the tie holding back the shoulder-length hair whose dark red color had prompted her wine connoisseur father to name his daughter after the grape of Beaujolais.
"Insightful observation, my dear," she said, wringing the water from her tresses. "I was laughing because I thought I was the sneaker when I was really the sneakee."
Paul blinked. "What a relief. That certainly clears things know what a sneaker is. Sneakee, on the other hand . . ."
She flashed a dazzling smile. "Cyrano the dolphin sneaked up and goosed me with his nose."
"I don't blame him." He leered at her slim-hipped body with a Groucho Marx hike of his eyebrows.
"Mother warned me about men who wear bow ties and part their hair in the middle."