He picked a box and went through the routine of finding the right key. Ben crept closer along the rolling deck. The lock clanked. Ben put his hand on the lid but hesitated.
Ellis got impatient. “This is no time for speeches.”
Ben looked at Ellis and said, “Not to contradict, I think this’ll make you view the world very differently.” Then he opened the watertight lid.
Disappointment mixed with confusion. It showed on their faces as they looked down into the metal box. It was not filled with gold. There was some kind of control panel with buttons, gauges, and a small depression as big around as a quarter.
At first it was a complete mystery to the tired men. The device appeared simple enough. Ben noticed the writing. Delicate swirls beneath the gauges, labeling the buttons. Not English. From his time in the Gulf, he knew it to be Arabic. He had no idea what it said.
The box beeped three times, loud enough to make them look around for a passing waterman who might overhear. A digital readout lit up, with 24:00:00 showing on a screen no bigger than a travel alarm clock. The numbers quickly changed to 23:59:59 and counted backwards second by second.
Ben muttered, “Whoops.”
Knocker Ellis shook his head. “What in God’s name have you done?”
Ben examined one of the box’s internal hinges. “Trigger. Open the box and it starts. Maybe it shuts down when you close it.”
Ellis said, “Like a heavy metal music box? Doubt it. I don’t want to be in the neighborhood when that timer reaches zero. Let’s toss that fish back.”
Ben wished it were so simple. “So it blows underwater? This isn’t a conventional bomb. Look at the shielding in the box. Lead, to help smuggle it across a border. The writing is in Arabic, but that gauge there is an American made Geiger counter. You don’t need that for C-4 or TNT. This box can kill every living thing for miles. Then what? There's plenty I have to live with. I won't have that on my conscience.”
“Run it out to the Atlantic, then dump.”
“Same problem. Everything we catch in summer and fall spends the winter out there in the ocean. In twenty-four hours, we could never get it far enough away to be safe.”
“So we bury it.” Knocker Ellis was clutching at straws.
“On top of our freshwater aquifer. No. For now, we have to keep this thing, and figure out how to stop it. Do, or die trying.”
Ben closed the box, and pushed his annoyance with Ellis aside. It was the thin edge of a wedge between the two men. He could not afford to let resentment and stress mix with a greedy sense of entitlement. That would destroy the already fragile trust they needed for this venture.
Just as Ben was mentally factoring a bomb into the day’s equation, an unholy thump thundered from Miss Dotsy’s keel. The deck shook and heeled beneath them with a loud scrape and bang as if Vulcan’s forge had relocated to Davy Jones’ Locker. Ben and Ellis gaped wide-eyed, grabbing for handholds as the Nantucket Lance reared bow-first out of the water like a breeching nuclear sub in a Navy recruiting film. The body on the bow flopped halfway out of the tarp.
Ben pegged it. “Damn! We’re idiots.”
Ellis confirmed it. “We can’t kill nothing, and won’t nothing die. Either it’s haints, or we took all the ballast out of her. She pulled out of the mud. Damn thing’s come back on us like herpes.”
Ben thought for a moment. He reached out with the boat hook to pull the spectral wreck alongside Miss Dotsy. “We’ll never be able to hide it. Not from anyone who really wants it. We absolutely have to cover our tracks.”
There was only one thing to do. They tied the speedboat to Miss Dotsy.
They rewound the body in the tarp, and secured it.
Ben said, “We have to substitute the weight of the gold with rocks.”
Ellis said, “Who’s we?”
Ben knew what Ellis meant. Ben would have to dive to find the rocks. There was no other air rig aboard for Ellis to use to help. It was the least evil of two terrible choices. Ben could dive, search the bottom for rocks, and then he and Ellis could haul them up to the surface to place in the Nantucket Lance. Or they could sink the boat, and Ben could dive and find the necessary rocks, and place them directly in the Lance on the bottom, eliminating the need to haul the rocks topside. Time dictated taking the second course of action. The low fuel supply for the air compressor made it a necessity.
There was only one way to sink that unsinkable boat. The same way it had gone down the first time. With all the zeal of death-camp slaves, they transferred the gold back into the Nantucket Lance. Box by ponderous box. Then they used their combined bodyweights to hold one gunwale down before the mounting waves. Finally the boat swamped and sank from sight. For the second time. Now, if any boater should happen by in the middle of the night, the Lance, the body, and the gold would already be back on the bottom out of sight, and Ben and Ellis would have much less explaining to do.
Ellis said, “Maybe we should leave it there.”
Ben glared at his culler. “Maybe you should ease off the crack.”
“If I had some crack I wouldn’t feel so damn tired.”
Knocker Ellis bent a safety line to Ben’s weight belt. For the third time in a day, Ben pulled on his wetsuit and rolled over the side into the frigid water. The Nantucket Lance settled upright, but without the tarp and straps, the boxes had shifted into a heap on the way down.
In order to safely remove the gold without the speedboat resurfacing, Ben shunted rocks, boulders, and even oyster shells into the Lance, filling the cockpit in around the cargo. It took over an hour and a half of trudging and hauling through bottom mud that gripped at his legs like deep molasses.
When Ben thought he had loaded in enough rock ballast, they worked like automatons to bring up the gold again. Their backs screamed. Shoulders ached. Their hands cramped into frozen talons.
Two boxes before ending the final dive, Ben thought he felt the wreck shift beneath him. Was it still too light? If the boat rose again, their double shift to hide it would be for nothing. Somebody would trace it, and then come looking; come hunting.
He scavenged more rocks; was running out of them. Soon he had to trudge farther from the wreck to locate stones and somehow find his way back. The silt he was kicking up made him lose the wreck more than once, so he tethered himself to it with extra line, leaving enough scope to hunt ever more rocks. When had he not been hauling rocks in the dark cold water? When had he ever been warm and dry? These were not memories, not fantasies, but delusions he could not trust in his exhaustion.
Suddenly, Ben felt three tugs on the safety line. The signal. The compressor was about to run out of its oil and gas mix. Ben carried on. He had to be sure this time. He lunged for more rocks.
Ben sucked a half-gulp of air, then nothing. His cheeks, and the skin at the base of his throat drew in with every unrealized breath. The compressor had quit. Its hum was fuel-starved into silence. Ben wrenched the next to last box into a milk crate. The rope to the final crate was the old original cordage, not the new. It had served many weeks of hauling oysters, and was frayed from rubbing over Miss Dotsy’s shell-embedded washboards. With the stubbed blade of his knife, Ben slashed out the ruined rope, and retied the ends with two half-hitches. His lungs burned. His vision tunneled and dimmed to dusky gray in the black water. He grabbed the last heavy box with both hands.
And the world went dark.
Ben woke on the deck of Miss Dotsy, more dead mackerel than living man. Ellis puffed from the exertion of reeling Ben in. After a moment, he rose and hauled up the last crate by himself. By some miracle of dogged willpower, Ben had heaved the final gold box into the milk crate before completely blacking out.