“Your pumps handling it, Willie?” He flicked a glance at Billy, not knowing if Willie was all that concerned about pumps or not. Billy gave him back a harried look.
“No trouble, man. The pump, she do good, man. Real good. What do I do if that thing gets out of the nets?”
“Can you cut them loose from your boat?” Hooker asked him.
“Too messed up, man. Nobody here but me and young Jimbo and Jimbo so scared he can’t even spit.”
“Okay, then just hang tight. I have you spotted and ought to be right beside you in about twenty minutes. You got that?”
“I got that. Billy with you?”
Hooker grinned again. “Sure he is. He wants to see that eater thing. He wants to give it a name.” He hung the microphone back on the set and looked at Billy, who watched him, horrified at what he had said. Then Billy’s eyes went to the water frothing beside the boat, then back to Hooker.
“Mr. Mako is back again, sar.” There was no quaver in his voice at all. Just a quiet knowing dignity tinged with fear of the unknown.
Hooker didn’t even have to lean over the side of the boat at all. The great body of the mako shark arced up through the froth; he saw its eye and the eye was looking directly at him, then it slowly submerged out of sight. Hooker felt that chill again. “Mr. Mako Shark isn’t afraid of the eater,” he told Billy.
“Mr. Shark hasn’t got that long name of the eater shark,” he reminded him.
“Hey, I never said the eater was a Carcharodon megalodon.”
“He one big mister, though.”
“And he’s extinct, Billy.”
“What means that?”
“They don’t make them anymore. They’re all dead.”
“How come you know them, then?”
“Fossil remains. What they find after they die.”
“Dead sharks don’t leave anything.”
“Okay, smart guy.” Hooker laughed. “Everything’s cartilage except the teeth. They find these big choppers and can figure out how big the fish was.”
“Why did they die?”
“I don’t know,” Mako said exasperatedly.
“Then how do you know they all dead, sar?”
“I read it in a book,” Hooker told him. That Billy would believe. If it was written in a book it had to be true.
Up ahead the white mast light on Willie Pender’s launch was rocking against the black of the sky. Hooker looked at his watch, then up to the east. In a little while they’d see the first gray of the false dawn, a hardly perceptible lightening of the horizon. The light wouldn’t be enough to discern things by, but it would be a happy indication that soon it would be day again.
He reached for the night glasses on the instrument panel and adjusted them while he sighted on Willie’s boat. The launch came in clear. It was backing off from the tangle of netting that stretched out over the bow. He could make out little Jimbo at the wheel under the cabin lights, not caring if it spoiled his night vision or not. Up ahead Willie Pender was trying to cut his boat loose from the long, glistening strands of nylon that ensnared it, but he wasn’t having much luck with it at all.
The sea was flat, and with the little light that began to seep up from the horizon Hooker could follow the netting out from Willie’s boat. It wasn’t like he was fouled in a line at all. It looked more like he was fighting some great fish. The launch seemed to get pulled away from her course and dragged southward, and a couple hundred feet ahead the flat calm of the waters seemed to take on a new life of its own as something bubbled up out of it. Not high, simply a long, rounded form that twisted, and when it did the netting that had caught it snapped loose with an audible wet twang and Willie Pender fell back in his boat on the remains of the twisted nylonand from inside the wheelhouse little Jimbo let out a wail of his own.
Beside him Hooker heard Billy let out his breath in a very long sigh.
The eater had disappeared. It was down below again and there was no telling where it could be.
Gently, Hooker nuzzled the Clamdip against the side of the launch and Willie Pender and Billy rafted the boats together. There was no way little Jimbo was going to come out of the cabin, so Hooker had Billy go in with him and give him some calm talk. Under the lights of the oversize flashes they looked at the nets. They were of a fine gauge, but collectively they could hold a tremendous load. When they finally got the last of them pulled aboard they could see why they had broken loose. The net hadn’t snapped at all. It was cut as cleanly and neatly as if someone had taken shears to it.
“The eater bit it off,” Willie said simply. His voice had a new hoarseness to it.
Hooker wanted to tell him to forget that idea, but the signs were too clear. The netting had been cut through, not snapped. And he had seen that huge bulge that came up out of the sea, a huge mound of darkness. Now Willie was sniffing the air and Hooker caught it too. There was a smell, not an odor, a smell that said something terrible had been there and now that something terrible was back down there again.
There was no sense stowing the nets away neatly. They piled them on the deck, and when Hooker and Billy went back to the Clamdip they turned back toward Peolle Island, staying side by side for the feeling of mutual protection but knowing that there was no protection against that thing down there.
Twenty-two years ago the prime contact that the Company had set up in Paris had been compromised. It was Mako who had uncovered the foreign infiltration, and after he reported the details, the Company had left the structure in place, using it to pass false information to the governments who thought they were using it for their own devices.
A pair of new business sites were secretly bought out and thereafter used as places to transfer money or information, secure new identity papers or arrange for any details necessary to the covert operations.
Mako had bypassed the official drop, a faceless company buried in the heart of Washington, D.C. Foreign operatives were as sharp as any the U.S. government had and they were working in their own backyard. It had taken a while, but Mako Hooker had installed his own drop. Only two people worked there, but they were a special duo. They had a mail-order business where they did the catalog advertising, and they sent the orders to the proper manufacturing outlets, who filled the requests; and everybody made a lot of money and there was a fine, legitimate reason for the Imogene company to have all those new high-tech computers.
The twice-weekly mail boat would be arriving at Peolle just before noon tomorrow and Mako would be another in the crowd sending out letters to friends and family in more civilized places. Mako’s letter would be a semiyearly one requesting replacement parts for his Italian-made typewriter, an old manual model.
Included in his friendly letter was his order to get all details of the life and death of Marshall Podrey and of the Becker Bank and have the information inscribed on microdot that could be processed on Peolle.
When Mako gave the letter to the post office he knew it would be at least ten days before he had an answer. Any desire for a speedy transmission might alert somebody either nosy or smart.
Chapter Seven
The tide was a half hour away from being full and Willie Pender maneuvered his boat between the creosoted poles that marked the island’s homemade “floating” dry dock. Boats that needed repairs or their bottoms repainted simply pulled in over the supports framed by the scavenged telephone poles, waited for the tide to go out and dropped the hull on positioned planks so that the workers could get on with the repair work.
Ordinarily, this was such a mundane sight that it was rare to have an audience, but this day everybody was there, crowding for the best space to see what had happened to the launch’s bottom. Hooker tied up to the communal pier, grabbed a beer from the cooler and nodded toward Billy. “Want to see this?”