Automatically Hooker glanced down at his instruments. His compass told him he was right on course and his loran confirmed his position. But something was still not right. There was a knot in his stomach and he could feel a prickly sensation in his skin, and he knew the little hairs on his forearms were sticking straight up.
Crazy, he thought. Mad. He was beginning to know what Billy Bright felt when he was out here at night, and Billy Bright was one smart cookie. He could sense things that couldn’t be seen and draw conclusions from events that had no meaning at all to anybody else. Like when there were no flying fish around when there should have been.
The surface of the ocean was unnaturally flat and Hooker eased the throttle back to dead slow, then cut the engines off completely. For a minute the only sound was that of the bow edging through the water until the momentum ceased, then there was the total stillness of the night. No slapping of the waves against the hull. No splash of the fish making runs on the surface. There was nothing at all, just a horrible stillness.
Hooker just stood there, fingers tight around the wheel, trying to hear, and he finally realized that there was nothing to listen to. He wanted to yell, not because he feared something, but just to break the unnatural silence. His eyes reached out into the blackness and he wondered just what he was doing, standing unmoving in the middle of a noiseless ocean.
Then he suddenly realized what he was doing. It was what the rest of the sea and its creatures were doing. He was waiting. And he knew that something had been waiting for him too.
Billy had been right. He should have taken his advice. Whatever it was, who could face it down? Hell, it ate ships. It owned the damn ocean and wasn’t accountable to anybody. No human hand ran it and no living thing chose its destination. Nor its dinner, he thought sarcastically.
Hooker let his hands slide off the wheel and he walked to the stern of the Clamdip. The soft gleam of the binnacle light made the polished transom glisten, and when he turned and scanned the blackness around him there was not a single other light to be seen. The field of death had been chosen. The combatants were here. They had been waiting for each other and there was going to be a mighty struggle, and only one would leave this place.
For a long moment Hooker thought about the foreign unreality of it all. It was almost mystic, as if he were in an alien world in which he had no control at all, and for a brief interval of time he almost let his mind go defenseless. Then his training took over and he responded to a noiseless alert signal because he sensed something had changed, and that there was a presence he could challenge, engage and possibly beat. Possibly.
He heard the breathing first, a steady, rumbling, bubbling breathing that couldn’t be located, seeming to come from all around him. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t distant. It was someplace near and it was watching him. Whatever it was, it moved and the hull of the Clamdip rolled very gently. Momentarily the breathing stopped, then started again, louder this time.
The eater was coming in closer.
Then Hooker got the smell of it. It had the odor of deep death: vile, disgusting, so nauseating you knew it could be only one thing, the gut wrenching smell of human decay.
It was closer now and he could hear it. The boat was moving closer to it, so IT was coming to get him, slowly, silently and invisibly. And for some reason he looked up at the sky and saw that the lower stars had been blanked out by some great shadow that kept rising until it would be crouching over him for the final bite that would wipe any trace of him and the Clamdip from existence, and there was nothing that he could do, nothing at all. And then, in that same glow of the binnacle light, he saw its eye, a pale, whitish semiround thing looking down on him, and he backed up, startled, his hand hitting the camera he had left on the seat. And with a blinding beam the flash went off for a fraction of a second and Hooker saw the eater. He saw the teeth. He had looked death right in the eye and laughed!
The weaponry was right beside him. He grabbed the rocket launcher, slammed it into firing mode, turned toward the stern and pulled the trigger. The projectile didn’t travel far at all before it slammed into the gigantic bulk of the enemy, tearing through its skin to erupt into an inferno in its guts.
Even before the screaming, wrenching sounds started, Hooker had the mini camera in his hand, its powerful light brightening up the area so the whole world would be able to see the eater dying, hear its wild, bubbling noise, an enormous death rattle, and see its slow roll as the ocean filled its cavernous insides. The eye agonized and twisted out of sight as the death rattle turned into a frightening bellow, and as it appeared, the eater slowly slid back into the depth of the ocean and the stars came back into view again. The Clamdip rolled in the water’s disturbance, then settled into a proud stance as Hooker looked at his loran, jotted down his position and switched on the engines.
The sea stayed flat until he was two miles from Peolle, then a soft chop began slapping at the sides of the Clamdip. Billy Bright was waiting at the dock when he berthed. He was happy and laughing, but there was still something on his face that said he had done a lot of worrying about his friend out there, alone with the eater. All his instincts, all his native intuition had told him that this night the eater would be hunting for prey, and all the signs said it would be in the area Hooker would be sailing across.
Billy had to ask. It wasn’t like him, but he had to. Quietly he said, “Sar... you see she at all?”
“Judy didn’t come with me,” he told him solemnly.
Annoyance at the flip remark made Billy shake his head. “I mean... the other she.”
Hooker let a slow grin crease his face. It was the kind of grin that was the last thing a lot of enemies had ever seen. Behind it was the memory of the battle and the outcome, and it only lasted a second. Hooker said, “I killed it, Billy.”
“Sar...!”
“It’s dead. I know where it is. We can recover the remains and show it to the world. It did its share of damage but now we’ll use it to keep these islands, where nobody can mess them up at all.”
“But sar... why we get... the remains? If you killed it...”
“Tonight you’ll know why, Billy.” Hooker let out a little laugh. “You ought to be waking your buddies up with the good news. They can go night fishing again.”
They processed the tape on the Lotusland with only the technician in the lab with Hooker. Two copies were made from the original and Mako kept all three. Despite the unprofessional circumstances, the photography was perfect, clear and sharply in focus, with nothing to distract the viewer from the vividly shocking scene he was watching. The utter blackness made an ideal background for the subject, which looked even blacker, yet the form and shape of that monstrous thing left no uncertainty as to what it was.
Very distinctly Hooker remembered the look on the technician’s face while he viewed the tape, the absolute look of horror, the throbbing of the vein in his neck as he saw what was happening and recognized the monstrosity for what it was; then his held-in breath escaped from his chest like a burst balloon and his shock-widened eyes had looked over at Hooker, filled with unbelieving amazement.
The natives believed. Billy Bright had told them, so they believed. Judy believed because Mako had told her and Mako was to be believed. She could see it in his face and knew it was true, even if she didn’t know all the facts yet. Alley believed because old firemen and old agents don’t lie to each other. Berger believed because Hooker scared the hell out of him somehow and he knew he could do it.