To the left of all this was the orderly supply center for the Sentilla, crates and barrels of supplies, with two loading barges, their ramps down, ready to transport equipment out to the ship.
In the rear, under the trees, out of the glaring sunlight, were the nearly camouflaged outlines of the hutches the local workers occupied. Well away from the high tide line a dozen small craft sat ready, sails tied down, another two with those almost-antique Johnson outboards that still ran smoothly, and another upside down where several boys were busy repairing the bottom.
The Sentilla was anchored a mile and a half offshore, three smaller boats in its lee. Tenders moved back and forth to the mother ship periodically, then there would be a cessation of activity, a dull boom could be heard, and a geyser of water erupted at the surface of the ocean. Immediately, the activity would resume and sailors with earphones and mouthpieces relayed information and instructions to others out of sight.
On board the Clamdip the three scanned the action while they cruised past the island. When the Sentilla didn’t block their view they saw the sleek hull of Lotusland, her decks lined with avid studio hands waving to the small boats pulling away from the mother ship. The boats were all motorized and shot away rapidly, going around the naval vessel, heading northward. The first two had camera crews aboard, communicating with each other.
Hooker said, “They’re using plain old CB radio there, Billy. See if you can pick them up.”
“Yes, sar,” Billy agreed.
“Damn it, Billy, quit with that ‘sar’ business, will you?”
“Your shark name is trouble, sar.”
“Billy... do you eat mako sharks?”
“Only when I can catch him, sar.”
“Then why are you afraid of them?”
“So I don’t get ‘et’ first, sar.”
Judy grinned at Hooker. “Good thinking. Maybe I should call you something else too.”
“Like what?”
“Oh... good-looking, big boy...,” she teased.
Billy held his hand up and they stopped talking. Billy had nailed the CB frequency and the chatter told them that they were ready to cover anything that could be photographed around the Drifter. Divers were on board with underwater cameras while another crew would film any surface action that happened.
Mako realized that neither ship could try to order anybody away without revealing their identity, and that the only information that would be let out was that Drifter had sustained an accident, probably hitting a submerged object, and Tellig was assisting her to a safe place.
Judy took her glasses from her eyes and pointed toward the southeast. “Mako... check the horizon about one-thirty degrees.”
He raised his binoculars and focused on the area she was pointing to. She was coming up fast, the big, proud hull of the main ship of the Midnight Cruise line. “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight,” he said.
“You can bet on it.” Judy grimaced. “They’re going to give the tourists just what they’re paying for.”
“And what’s that?”
“Real action. Something to tell their friends about. Stuff from the Devil’s Triangle, an eater tearing boats apart.”
“You think that’s going to impress them?”
For the first time she gave him a deep, serious look, her expression tinged with some hidden sadness. “There are a lot of jaded people on board, Mako. They’re so damn rich they can buy anything they want. Now they’re being given something they can’t buy. Nothing better for them than the blood smell. It’s impending danger. It sends their pulses sky-high and their feet back to the bar again to get back to normal.”
“Judy... you are a part owner of Midnight Cruises.”
“I didn’t start it. Daddy did.”
“You think this is what he planned?” Mako asked her.
She shook her head and stared out at the water. “No, it was to be something different. Daddy got... well, overwhelmed in business.” She paused momentarily, then added, “It’s tough when heavy money gets to be the big prize in life.”
Hooker reached out and put his arm around her shoulder. With a childlike gesture she came against him, feeling the hardness of his arms and the taut musculature that pressed against her side. His fingers were wrapped very softly around her upper arm and she wondered briefly what power they could exert if he had wanted them to.
It only lasted a few moments when the radio came alive again with the Drifter and Sentilla both warning the small boats to stand off and saying that they were taking no responsibility for accidents. Divers were being told that they would be in a danger zone under the ships, but apparently nobody paid any attention. This was a once-in-a-lifetime situation and committed photographers would never pass up an opportunity like it at any cost. If they got nipped by a prop their names would go down in the record books of great underwater stunt-men. The occasion would never warn off other divers at all. They’d just want to make sure they stayed well away from ships’ propellers.
Nobody seemed to care about the eater at all.
Commander Sullivan’s face was set in a tight mask of anger. Whatever had slashed through the bottom hull had taken a small gouge out of the inner one and cut right through the main cable that powered the TV receiver on the deck above. Whatever the robot had picked up was lost forever. Disgustedly, he and his mate went back up the ladder, hooked the receiver into a secondary power circuit and flipped it on for a rerun.
And there was the robot’s eye, peering into the green of the Atlantic, watching the flow of sea life slip around its contoured form. For thirty seconds the field of vision was good to seventy-five feet and in its lateral movements it picked up broken streamers of sargassum and a pair of unidentifiable fish darting out of range. Sullivan glanced at his watch. At any second the robot should be in the oval area he had pointed it at.
And suddenly there was something there. The visibility just as suddenly was shadowed into deep gloom, and before the automatic floodlight could cut in, the robot was hit with a wall of bubbles and for a single fraction of a second Sullivan thought he saw a set of the wildest, most formidable teeth he could ever imagine; then the set went blank.
The commander held a breath a moment before letting it hiss out. “You see that?”
“I saw something,” the mate told him.
“Describe it.”
“Beats me. It went by so fast...”
“Damn it, let’s show it again until we know what it is.”
“That’s no guess.”
“Well,” the mate thought, “it was kind of angular.”
“How big?”
“Who knows, Sully? We have nothing to reference it with. It was just there and gone. Hell, it could have been a piece of flotsam or a hunk of that sargassum that floats around out here.” He stopped and squinted at the commander. “Why? What did you think it was?”
Very quietly and deliberately, Sullivan asked, “You think it could have been... teeth?”
“Come on, Sully, quit dreaming, will you?”
“Something hit us, pal.”
“Sure, and there’s a lot of somethings along the bottom here. Yesterday we fouled the prop twice on some old netting if you remember.”
“And I remember whacking that rotted-out old boat that was floating just beneath the surface, but it sure didn’t hole our bottom.”