Shaking the growing wetness from his leg, Bryce Babcock hustled belowdecks on squishy shoes.
BY ORDER of the interior secretary, the Earthpeace flag was lowered. It was folded reverently and placed in a simple cardboard box in the hold. At the same time, the last white lapel pins were collected.
Jerry Glover had the honor of bringing the shoebox containing the insignias down below. He hid it behind the former President's cage. Sneaking a peek at the prisoner, he found that the ex-chief executive was still snoring, oblivious to all that was going on around him.
"You're gonna be in for one mother of a shock when you wake up," Jerry whispered. "This ain't no bourgeois National Review cruise."
Leaving the old man in the darkness of the damp hold, he hurried back up on deck.
The catwalk door closed with resounding finality. The noise echoed through the shadowy hold.
For several long seconds, intense silence filled the rusty belly of the ship. The only sounds were those that filtered through the Grappler's thick hull. Waves crashing. Creaking metal. Muffled shouts. Muted, distant.
Another sound. Closer. This one originating within the hold itself. So soft was it that it could have been mistaken for background noise.
A soft, urgent scratching noise. Very faint.
And this new sound issued from out of the dark cage interior.
AT THE PUERTO RICO TRENCH, the Grappler made an unexpected course alteration. Instead of turning south for the run to the southernmost tip of Africa, the ship veered northeast, aiming for the wide expanse of the Atlantic.
Scaffolding was lowered over the sides. Paint strokes removed the last of the Grappler's identifying marks. New identification numbers were stenciled in large white letters on the gunmetal-gray hull.
The men in the stern were given word to begin the task that had caused them such grief.
Nets were lowered from heavy steel arms into the churning ocean water.
Sonar in the helm was quick to locate a school of fish. In a matter of minutes, the dripping nets were hauled back up to the deck, laden with bluefin tuna. The fish were dumped unceremoniously onto the deck.
Men who had held themselves together until now broke into tears at the sight of the hundreds of fish slopping out around their ankles.
"The carnage!" Sunshiny cried. "The viciousness! Oh, the humanity!"
"Humanity is right," another Earthpeacer blubbered, wiping at his runny nose. "Fish would never kill one another for food. They don't have it in them."
Sunshiny Ralph steeled himself. "We're supposed to be a fishing boat now. We need to have something in the hold if we're stopped."
Jerry Glover sniffled, nodding agreement. "This is necessary. For the greater good."
The men waded into the pile of live fish and began to load them, as gently as possible, into a special metal sluice. The tuna disappeared down the chute, flopping moments later into the hold of the big ship.
The work went on for only a few minutes. The cries of the men, which had died down after a time, grew frenzied once more when the last of the dumped nets revealed the familiar shape of a large dolphin. The creature was dead.
Gasps went up all around.
"Oh, my God!" Sunshiny shrieked. He hopped up and down in front of the dead mammal.
"This is awful!" Jerry echoed, clutching his own throat.
Another man dropped to his rear end on the deck, knees pulled to his chin.
"Greater good ...greater good ...greater good..." he muttered over and over as he rocked back and forth.
As Sunshiny attempted mouth-to-blowhole resuscitation, buckets of ocean water were hastily brought up in a futile attempt to revive the animal. To no avail.
The mood went from frantic to funereal. No one seemed to know what to do with the dead creature. A burial at sea seemed the most fitting, but someone argued that this was just a fancy term for dumping the poor creature overboard.
"These are the geniuses of the deep," Jerry wept. "We can't just chuck it out like garbage."
"If they're so smart, why do they keep getting caught in nets?" one timid Earthpeacer asked. The rest joined Sunshiny and Jerry in pelting the blasphemer with a dozen flapping, undersize tropical fish.
Afterward, they wrapped the dolphin's corpse in a spare Earthpeace flag and lowered it gently into the sea.
There was no joy aboard the transformed Radiant Grappler II after this incident. The dark mood remained with the crew like a stubborn black cloud on the remainder of their uneventful trip across the Atlantic.
Chapter 16
The summer sun was dying long and slow across the reddening New York sky. As the afternoon blurred into dusk, a palpable sense of loss seemed to rise with the gloaming-the sort of wistful malaise that began to set in on the last full month before the start of autumn and the winter it presaged.
A soft breeze off Long Island Sound touched the shadow-smeared leaves of ancient oak and maple. Alone in the drab confines of his Folcroft office, Harold W. Smith noticed neither the sigh of leaf nor the encroaching darkness.
Fingers moved with perfect efficiency of motion, striking silent keys. Smith was lost in his element. As he surfed the Net, page after electronic page reflected in his owlish glasses.
For the moment, he had put aside his greater concerns. Even so, while it was not yet an actual crisis, it remained a far worse potential crisis than any he'd ever faced.
The situation as it was playing out was clearly an unfortunate quirk of fate, rather than part of some deliberate scheme.
The former President hit his head and regained his memory of CURE. An ecoterrorist group saw the opportunity his hospitalization presented and abducted him. The group ruthlessly seized the moment, oblivious to the damning potential of the information that had surfaced in the ex-President's mind.
A series of unfortunate coincidences. Nothing more.
Under other circumstances, Smith might have hesitated to use Remo and Chiun against Earthpeace. After all, other agencies would certainly be involved in the search. They would find him eventually. And even if they did not, well, the truth was that, lamentably, ex-Presidents were expendable.
But the CURE information this President possessed made this situation unique. In having the President, Earthpeace had CURE. Whether they realized it now or not.
A potentially disastrous situation. Smith had tried for several hours to put it from his mind as he worked, with varying degrees of success. At the moment, as he studied his monitor, concern had been eclipsed by confusion.
At his keyboard, Smith paused.
"Odd," he said quietly. So engrossed was he with the information on the computer screen he did not realize he had spoken the word aloud.
On the monitor buried below the dark surface of the desk was a photograph. Taken from a satellite, it showed the area of the Atlantic where the Earthpeace flagship should now be, given its reported course and likely speed.
But the Grappler wasn't there.
At best, the Radiant Grappler II wasn't due in Cape Town for another twenty-nine hours. Remo would arrive before that. All any of them could do in the meantime was wait.
To fill the idle time, Smith had been doing research on the Earthpeace organization. At the same time, he had logged on to a military satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic. Efficient to a fault, Smith wanted to be certain the ship was on schedule. He farmed out the task of actually locating the Grappler to the CIA.
It was a procedure he had used in the past. Analysts at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, were assigned the job of finding the Earthpeace ship by some unknown superior. Taking a break from his own work, Smith had just checked the satellite images to see if the CIA had made any progress.
They had not.
Smith's gray eyes were hooded by his frowning brow as he studied the latest real-time image. There were red circles on the map. Tiny boatslike miniature bathtub toys-threw up frothy wakes of white within the small circles. Some of the vessels were labeled. None was the Grappler.