When he hit the emergency channel he felt the icy-cold chill of sudden dread blow down his back again, because the voice he was listening to was cool and professional, but so quietly urgent he knew it was happening again. The Arico Queen was giving its position at fourteen miles off Peolle Island and was going down fast. Something had reached up out of the sea with a terrible vengeance and shook the ship like a dog does a bone, ripping the bottom right out of it. The crew was taking to the boats and the operator was signing off.
On the ship-to-ship channel he caught the interchange between the nearest vessels. Both would be at the site within thirty minutes. The United States Coast Guard ship Ponteroy was an hour away, heading toward the scene at flank speed.
Hooker closed the set down and went outside and stared toward the darkness of the ocean. The waters were so calm he could hear no surf sounds at all. The rescue should be routine, he thought. For a change nature was on the side of the stricken.
Momentarily, he wondered what it would be like sitting out there in a small boat, knowing that you weren’t really alone at all, that you were just on top and underneath you was a vast wildness... and something was down there.
He didn’t realize he was holding his breath and let it hiss out between his clenched teeth. He was getting more like Billy every day. Almost silently he whispered something unintelligible again, and shook his head.
Chapter Two
From the bridge of the converted minesweeper, Chana Sterling scanned the shoreline of Ara Island through the 7 X 35 sporting binoculars. She panned down the dockside with its rickety slips until she came to the southern end where the Tellig would moor.
It was the deepwater area, the only place a ship drawing eight-plus feet could tie up, and even though the Company had a ninety-nine-year lease on the spot, it wasn’t unusual for the islanders to stick some old hulk in there just to get it out of the way. The last two times they had worked in this section they had had to drag out sunken ketches before they could berth.
“All clear for a change,” she said.
At the wheel, Lee Colbert squinted across the water and nodded. The sun had cracked his lips again and he fished in his pocket for the tube of Chap Stick and wetted them down. Many months on the ocean had tanned him deeply, but an exposure after a week away tinged him with a new, subtle redness, a color that shadowed well on his taut frame. The past three days he hadn’t said much to anyone, not that his long silences were unusual, but this was one trip he never had expected to take. The Company had promised him retirement the end of last month, then Monroe had come down with pneumonia, this damn trip had come up and the Company exercised their recall clause in his contract, and here he was back in the Caribbean instead of on his new farm in Vermont.
“Take another look at the channel,” he said. “They had one wild blow here two weeks ago.”
Once again, Chana searched the deep water marked out by the buoys, following the cut all the way to dockside. “Nothing sticking out this time.” She leaned over and checked the depth recorder. There was thirty feet under them and it would diminish to twelve feet at low tide when they were at the dock. Eight years ago the Company had blasted this entry out of the solid coral and hoped the Ara natives would think enough of it to keep it clear, but to them it was just another sign of mainland intrusion and they used the cut as a dumping ground for anything that could sink.
Colbert eased the Tellig into the channel and brought her against the pier so gently that the pelican on the piling didn’t even stir. Chana was first off, fastening the bowline around the iron cleat, then going to the stern to help the crew off-load some of the equipment.
This time it wasn’t much. Their assignment was to make an information contact with the Sentilla and complete an undercover search-and-report analysis of the latest missing boats and ships in the sector IV area. The strange stories that the islanders were telling about the destruction of the vessels in that area had been a bonus for the media when everything had gone quiet on the political scene. Everything that had ever happened in the Devil’s Triangle had been rehashed, two TV networks had flown camera ships over the area and one taped a wild account from a survivor of a charter boat.
Ordinarily, little would have been done about the situation, but the president of a cruise ship line and the captains of some of the longer-ranging charter boats out of Miami had feared a sudden loss of revenue and made their feelings known in political circles where it counted, and Washington began to move in its usual mysterious ways.
For the past three months the government scientific research ship Sentilla had been doing an intricate study of the ocean bottom for reasons not disclosed, but it would be natural for another ship to be sent in to make contact and resupply her; the Tellig drew the assignment.
What nobody realized, however, was that the Tellig was only camouflage for the highly sophisticated scientific machinery on the Sentilla, run by a bunch of Ph.D.‘s equipped to do maritime detection work of almost any nature.
When everything was secure, Colbert left Joe and Billy Haines in charge of the ship and joined Chana on the pier. He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed it toward the shoreline. “Berger gets fatter every year. Look at him.”
They watched a rotund middle-aged man scan the boats from the safety of the pier.
“He doesn’t have to pass any physicals,” Chana said. “They told me he looked like that when they recruited him.” She waved and the fat man waved back. “I wonder why he doesn’t come down to meet us?”
Colbert grinned and shook his head. “He gets seasick, that’s why. No way he’s going to come down those steps to dockside. Let’s go get a drink.”
Charlie Berger greeted them with a handshake and his famous smile. As hot as it was, he wore a seersucker suit and a stained necktie because he thought it made him look like Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca. “Hope you had a good trip,” he said.
“No trouble,” Chana told him, “the usual dull journey.”
Berger glanced toward the horizon and gave a small shudder. “You heard about the Arico Queen?”
Chana nodded. “The Ponteroy had just reached them. They picked up all hands out of the lifeboats. Anything new on it?”
“Nothing came in here. They’ll probably interrogate them in Miami and we’ll read all about it in the papers. That flash the radio operator put out about something grabbing them from the bottom had to be a lot of garbage. They were in water five thousand feet deep.”
“Something sunk them,” Colbert said sourly.
“Sure,” Berger admitted, “but it was more likely something that blew up in their hold. The Queen has been making regular trips down to all those hot spots in South America, and if they were carrying munitions that went off suddenly, that could be your answer.”
“You know something the Company doesn’t?” Chana asked.
Berger felt a sudden chill and wiped the sweat from his face. The crazy tide of politics had squeezed a lot of the lifeblood out of the Company, but it still was a powerful force that could be felt anywhere in the world. And Chana was his immediate superior. “I guess I’ve been in the tropics too damned long,” he said. “I’m getting the Sydney Greenstreet feeling again.” He grimaced at the thought and harrumphed the way the actor did when he played in The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart. It was a damn good imitation, he thought.