“What?”
“Something’s down there.”
He didn’t answer her. Instead he pointed to the boat a few miles away coming up behind them. “There’s the Drifter. Maybe now you’ll know.”
The bearded young man at the helm of the Drifter never would have been taken as an Annapolis graduate. His blue jeans were unwashed and cut off halfway between his knees and his bare feet, scraggly threads hanging down from the mock hems. His T-shirt advertised a suntan lotion and no hat covered his obviously home-cut hair.
But Commander Sullivan was among other things an underwater archaeologist, a trained diver, an expert in many things naval, and a Ph.D. in physics. His crew of six were equally disheveled and almost as well qualified in academic training. It was all a great cover. Being assigned to this present duty was like a paid vacation for all of them, because no way would there ever be a “ship eater” other than those in the stories you hear when happy hour is nearly over.
Sullivan recognized Chana’s voice when she radioed, “Drifter from Tellig.”
“Go ahead, Tellig.”
“Can you see that flat spot on our port side?”
Through his glasses Sullivan surveyed the area. “There’s a difference in the wave action, I think. You see anything?”
There seemed to be an anxious hesitancy in her voice when she said, “There seemed to be something there.”
“Anybody else verify?”
“No. There was nothing to see. It was really a... condition.”
“Hard to drop a depth charge on one of those things.”
Chana’s annoyance was clear. “There was something there, dammit!”
Sullivan tried not to chuckle in the microphone. He pushed the throttles to full forward and told her, “We’re coming up fast. Tell it to stick around.”
She muttered something nasty and slipped her mike back in the holder hard. Lee tapped her arm and pointed off to the port. “It’s back again, but this time it’s leaving us.”
Chana ran to the rail with the glasses to her eyes. A hump seemed to form on the surface, letting the small waves roll away to make a great oval again. She was holding her breath because it seemed almost likely that the “eater” would show itself, then the calmness quit and the oval grew smaller, and as Lee had said, it was beginning to flow past them.
Lee entered the time and sighting in the logbook, then tucked his pen in his pocket. He reached for the mike. To Chana he said, “Do we follow it or notify Drifter?”
“We’ll stay clear, Lee. Tell him to get the robot out and pick it up underwater.”
Lee pressed the mike button and said, “Drifter, you should be able to pick that disturbance up right about now. It’s smaller, but it’s heading back toward you. If you can release the robot you should be able to get some decent pictures.”
“We have the area in sight, Tellig. The robot’s going over the side now. Keep the area clear.”
“Roger, Drifter. Out.”
The engines on the Tellig lowered to one-quarter speed and the ship began a slow turn to the right. They could watch the activity on board the Drifter, saw the fat body of the eight-foot-long submersible being lowered into the water, then watched the team in the bow direct its movements from a handheld box.
The robot was one of the developments Sullivan had pioneered in the last five years. With miniaturization had come simplification, and handling the robot was much like flying a model airplane. The RV in the nose immediately sent back pictures that were taped and made you wonder why this wasn’t done when they were diving on the Titanic or looking for the Bismarck. Everybody just wanted to make things bigger and more complicated, Sullivan thought. Maybe now he could prove something to them.
But his thoughts had interfered with his actions. What should have been immediate was delayed two seconds, and he didn’t hit the lever fast enough to steer the robot where it should have gone. The ocean top suddenly changed as though huge hands just below its surface had waved upward, forming a huge wet hump, and out of the corner of his eye he caught something on the TV screen, but it wasn’t something he was bothered about, because he would see it later on tape. But then the screen suddenly flashed and went white; the indicator on the box in his hand went dead and he knew he had lost the robot. The eater had gotten his equipment.
Then the flat spot on the water quietly disappeared. Whitey, his mate, said, “Something’s coming this way, sir.”
Barely discernible, the oval formed again, coming closer to the Drifter before seeming to go right under the ship itself.
The bite came with a shattering crunch and Drifter lurched in the water as though a dog had hold of their bottom, then she was tossed loose like a discarded bone and a hoarse voice from the cabin yelled, “We’re taking on water!”
Drifter stopped rolling but listed five degrees off center.
Sullivan yelled, “Damage control... see what happened.” He reached for the mike and called Tellig. What he said made the film of sweat on Chana’s back suddenly go icy. “Something hit the robot, now it’s hit us.”
“What’s your damage, Drifter?”
“We’re holed, that’s for sure. We’re listing, but we have a double bottom under us and I think our pumps will hold. You’d better come alongside and we’ll head for the Sentilla.”
“You going to radio ahead?” Chana asked him.
In case anyone was monitoring the VHF, he said noncommittally, “You know our orders.”
Which meant that anything like this was for secret communication only at this point.
But someone was listening. Hooker flipped the switch off and turned on his hi-fi. Judy saw him grinning and squinted at him. “What was that all about?”
Billy Bright stuck his head out to see what he had to say. “Looks like Billy’s called the shots again. He knew something was going to happen.”
A finger pointed toward the west. “Sar, those clouds that were rising... they are near gone now.”
“What’s the barometer reading now, Billy?”
After a quick glance, Billy told him, “She much better now, sar. I think the eater will not be back.”
Judy said, “You believe that?”
The grin on Mako’s mouth twisted into a puzzled scowl. “I like it better than what those guys on Drifter are thinking of right now.”
She thought about what she was going to say for a moment, then looked at Hooker. “They’re going to have more to think about next.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, oh. Lotusland is filming Sentilla and the naval exercise and the main ship of the Midnight Cruise lines are putting in to give the customers a show.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Hooker said, annoyed.
“Because it shouldn’t have made any difference. Nobody expected this to happen.”
Hooker grinned again. “Well,” he said jokingly, “we’ll blame it all on the Bermuda Triangle.”
At the wheel Billy Bright let out a loud grunt of disdain.
Chapter Nine
The island was banana-shaped, a two-mile-long rising of green, fertile land, edged with a beach of blazingly white sand and populated with hordes of wheeling, screaming birds. The concave side faced the east, the bottom falling away quickly so larger boats could come in almost to the shore. The concrete blocks and support pilings still stood where they had once protected long-ranging German submarines during the First World War, and the rusting ruin of the single large machine shop still contained the aging remnants of forges and tooling to repair their charges.